SERMON 23 January 2005

Readings:    Isaiah 9: 1-4        Psalm 27: 1-10        1 Corinthians 1: 10-18        Matthew 4: 12-25

In the name of God who calls us to unity. 

Every January I am reminded how difficult it is to keep resolutions. Each year huge numbers of people start with new resolve to change ingrained habits. Many of us reflect on our lives and on the things we wish to modify and then set out to do so. But how long does it last? How many of our new behaviours survive even to the end of January?  

Deep-seated habits are very hard to break – whether they are habits of thought or ways we go about doing things. It is not easy to reach for the fruit bowl instead of the birthday cake – as well as, yes. Instead of, no. It is perhaps even harder to respond gently to someone who is irritating you, if you have developed a habit of snapping. Or to hold your tongue if you have developed a habit of gossiping. Even if we know that there is a yawning chasm, a disjunction, between the outcome we want and the way we go about our lives, it is still hard to change our behaviour to bring it in line with the outcomes we want.  

The members of the church in Corinth to whom Paul was writing were clearly having trouble ridding themselves of some of their old habits. His exasperation with them leaps off the page all these centuries down the track. Today’s New Testament reading is the beginning of the meat of the letter. After the standard warm and affectionate greetings, Paul gets down to what he really wants to say to them. And it is a strong and passionate appeal to them to get their act together.  

Alistair Mant in his book ‘Intelligent Leadership’ talks about the capacity of good leaders to get people to focus on the main game. He talks about binary and ternary approaches, a distinction he attributes to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. A binary approach focuses on the management of relationships, a ternary approach on something beyond the relationships.

A good leader has a ternary approach and encourages a group to focus on the reason for its existence, rather than on the relationships within the group. This applies to all sorts of tasks: workers building a car focus on building excellent vehicles, voters make a decision about whether to vote according to their own vested interests (a binary decision) or for the good of the country (a ternary decision). The response of so many around the world to the recent tsunami crisis is an excellent example of ternary focus where normal obstacles and divisions were overridden in order to deliver vital aid to survivors. Mant argues that a good leader will encourage people to look beyond themselves and their own concerns to the particular task in hand – to take a ternary approach. 

This is exactly what Paul is doing in this passage. The Corinthians seem to have become hopelessly factionalised, losing sight of the main game as they argued about the particular leaders who had passed through their community. Paul has the wisdom and humility to remind them that their community is built around something other than the particular human leaders, whether it be Paul himself, or Apollos or Cephas.  

Paul pulls the Corinthians up short, reminding them that he didn’t establish the community for his own glory. It is all about something much greater. And what is the main game? The gospel: ‘For Christ did not send me to baptise but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.’ (1 Cor 1:17). 

Paul is in no doubt about his task. This seems at first blush to be in conflict with Jesus’ command to go forth and baptise all nations, recorded at the end of Matthew’s gospel (Mtt 28:19) and known as the Great Commission. And, indeed, it also seems to give the lie to Paul’s own actions in creating Christian communities throughout Asia Minor and even further afield. If anyone went around making disciples it was Paul. 

But there are two things I would like to say in response. The first is that we each have our own calling. For some, as for Paul, it is to be a preacher and teacher; for others it is to encourage and nurture, as Barnabas encouraged and nurtured. Later in this letter Paul offers the image of the members of the body of Christ as a powerful illustration of a community working together according to their own particular gifts and strengths. Paul clearly felt his calling as a preacher and teacher. It is for others in the community to attend to other matters, such as ritual and the day to day running.  

The second point is that baptism flows from hearing, truly hearing, the gospel. This was particularly the case during the first century when people were coming to Christianity as adult converts from other faiths or from no faith at all. The only reason to be baptised was as a response to the good news. In that sense, proclamation of the gospel is both theologically and chronologically prior to baptism. Even now, 2000 years on, this is a reminder to us that the main game for the church is to teach the good news. 

Paul was emphatic about this and about the importance of preaching an uncluttered message. He says ‘For Christ did not send me to baptise but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.’ (1 Cor 1:17). 

We could be a little sceptical of Paul’s motivation here. In the Second Letter to the Corinthians he makes it clear that he wasn’t seen as a good public speaker. He reports that other people say about him that ‘his letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’ (2 Cor 10:10). Clearly ‘eloquent wisdom’ was not his strong point at any time. 

But even if we are a little suspicious about Paul’s motives, there is a valid point here. The thing that matters in all this is the gospel and people’s response to it. If people are swayed by rhetoric, won over by fine phrases, caught up in the emotion of their response to a powerful and charismatic orator, how authentic is their response to the gospel itself? 

At the heart of our faith is the conviction that God has shared our humanity and, in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, shown us what God’s presence means. The kingdom of Heaven is not distant, it is near. Jesus’ death shows us both humanity’s inability to deal with the reality of the presence of God, and God’s willingness to shoulder the weight of our sinfulness. The resurrection shows us that, despite it all, love wins. This is the heart of the good news – we are deeply loved, we are offered wholeness in the face of our brokenness.  

The effects of this knowledge in our lives should be endless and shown forth in the way we live. But so often we humans don’t completely understand the implications, nor do we find it easy to operate in a different way. It is easy to fall back into our old ways of being. It is easy to allow our thoughts to run in their old pathways and our actions to reflect our brokenness rather than our wholeness. 

Paul’s call to unity and to a ternary focus is as applicable to Christian communities today as it was 2000 years ago. We may not be divided in the way the Corinthians were, nor practising some of their wilder lifestyles, but we can be sure of one thing. We are still struggling to live in a godly way, to embrace wholeheartedly the knowledge of the love of God and to allow that knowledge to transform the way we live our lives. 

My father used to say ‘if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly’. This was an unusual approach for someone who tended to be a perfectionist, but it contained a profound truth. There always are some things that are worth doing even though  we will never be able to do them perfectly. We will fall short of living godly lives, we will forget, we will make mistakes. But our task as a community is to keep on trying and through what we say and what we do, however imperfect, to make the gospel known. 

Amen.