Sermon by the Rev. Dr A. K. M. Adam

For as long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?

In the Name of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — Amen.

I am given to understand that somewhere down south, a General Synod has been taking place, hot on the heels of a meeting of the Primates of Anglican churches. I confess that I have generally neglected these goings-on in Dublin and London; so many other events crowded onto my attention that it was easy to focus on Egypt, the Celtic-Rangers game, and many such things other than ecclesiastical politics. Indeed, St Paul might advise us that the present state of church controversy makes us healthier, wiser Christians if we simply opt out of the never-ending stream of conflict that sweeps over us in noxious waves every few months.

The problem isn’t that Christians disagree about particular points. We have always disagreed about things. The apostles disagreed about things; the first deacons were appointed to settle disagreements about which widows got what share of the pension fund; and practically from the beginning, the church has disagreed with people who taught too idiosyncratic a version of the gospel. Sometimes we conduct our disagreements honourably and faithfully. All too often, we respond to disagreement with attacks and insults. All too often we choose our parties, cheer our partisan heroes, mock the other partisans, and thank God that we are on the right side, unlike those publicans over there.

We don’t know whether the situation in Corinth had gotten to that bitter a stage, but St Paul intervenes in the lessons we’ve been hearing to remind the Corinthians not to travel down that familiar but dangerous pathway. The Corinthians have fallen out with one another. The rich Corinthians don’t care for their labouring sisters and brothers; the congregation seems to be splitting apart over questions of who baptised whom; and even back then, people were arguing about sex and liturgy and the role of women in church leadership. Paul understands that these issues matter, just as the conflicts at the Primates’ Meeting and the English General Synod matter. Paul sees the Corinthians, and sees us, bickering with one another over profound topics — but we’re using the topics as pretexts for making much of ourselves, for getting our way, for exercising our power over others. And when Paul sees people squabbling over weighty theological problems, he wants the Corinthians, and he wants us, to remember that the reason these important questions matter is for the health of the Body of Christ.

When we get so very angry that we lose our temper and assault our sisters and brothers, that doesn’t strengthen the Body of Christ. When we employ tongues that should be set to singing God’s praise, and instead use them to belittle, to abuse others, that doesn’t strengthen the Body of Christ. When we scheme and manipulate to make sure that the outcome of church policy-making turns out in our favour, that doesn’t strengthen the Body of Christ (even if we’re sure that we represent God’s own truth). If we’re behaving unworthily of Christ, we aren’t advancing the cause of Christ. “As long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?” And if we are acting out of merely human motivations, we betray the divine truth we imagine ourselves to be representing; we discountenance God’s grace, and try to make things happen by our own devices.

Paul has a simple answer for human quarrelsome tendencies. Quite simply — as we’ll hear in the lesson a few Sundays from now — Paul suggests that we’re better off to lose, to suffer wrong, than to use manipulation or coercion to force the will of God upon others. However uncomfortable that sounds, it resonates with the example of Jesus himself, who did not deceive, did not fight back, did not wriggle out of the trumped-up charges against him. Jesus lost, by human reckoning; but he stayed faithful to his calling, he bore witness to a gospel of grace and peace and beauty in the face of scheming, falsehood, and brutality.

The partisan heroes who posture for our allegiance — are they willing to lose? Are they willing to treat their opponents with respect — as Paul says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves”? Is their faith in God so strong that they can actually rely on God to bring about a good end from our present turmoils, or do they need to do whatever it might take to prevail over their opposition?

Jesus and Paul aren’t out to make anyone miserable; they don’t endorse losing for its own sake, remember. Their point is that humans tend to desire to win so very strongly that we lose perspective on what we’re doing. We forget that God does not at any point require us to win out over others, but at all times, in all situations, to keep faith, to walk in the way of Christ. God will take care of the winning department; indeed, God already has won. We celebrate God’s victory every Sunday, and especially on Easter Day, as a reminder that we did not raise Christ from death. The power for good at work in this world is God’s power, the unwavering power of grace — and although we can align ourselves with grace, and we can allow grace to work freely through us, we cannot bring about God’s victory through our machinations. “Paul plants, Apollos waters, but only God gives the growth.”

Paul’s point sounds like foolishness to the wise in this world, today as it did in Greece in the first century. The Corinthians were status-conscious in many of the same ways we are, and in other ways even more so. They had not yet invented Premier League football, but their lives were suffused with innumerable daily contests. And they did not want to lose, they couldn’t afford to lose, because so much was at stake. So we can understand that when important disagreements challenge the church’s unity, perhaps even its truthful proclamation of the gospel, we can understand the urgency of setting matters straight.

Our warranted concern for the health of the church, though, gets too easily mixed in with the vanity that mingles God’s victory with ours — and when our vanity enters the picture, we can no longer see clearly the extent to which we all are God’s servants, working together to make known the gospel. This gospel that God has entrusted to us, the grace by which the Spirit works among us, will not fit in to a heart that is full of self-congratulation. When we are most sure that we are right, we should be most ready to entrust the victory of our cause to God; and if we sense the desperate necessity of winning at the cost of deception, slander, coercion, or fraud, we need all the more to step back and allow Paul to ask us, “Why not be wronged instead? Why not be defrauded?”

God has called us to thrive together as the Body of Christ. We don’t always do that successfully, but when we give up even trying to reconcile ourselves to our sisters and brothers, we fall afoul of St Paul's warning, immersing ourselves more stubbornly in the world of human weakness. But it is our vocation as the Body of Christ to rise, always to rise. And in order to grow into all the fullness of Christ, we will have to give up our childish inclinations to fuss and squall until we have things our own way. Growing in grace, we allow the Spirit's power for patient forbearance, for gentle respect, and for the peace that passes human understanding to shape our relationships even with our enemies. Patiently loving one another, we can let go of the fixation on winning — and in charitable love, we open our hearts to receive from God the victory won for us once for all in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.