A sermon on 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Today we live in a fractured culture. Everyone got radicalized by their chosen news source during the isolation of the pandemic, and we all came out of our bunkers either mad at everybody or just tired and confused. Most of us are looking back on that time with a bit of embarrassment, particularly if we are trying in any way to rebuild some sense of community. A lot of us have severely limited our news consumption, have unplugged our computers or gone off of social media. All very healthy choices I think.
How do we find community again? How do we connect with our neighbors again? How do we rebuild our churches?
In today’s passages in the lectionary, the theme in all but the one we read center on the image of a wedding feast as a metaphor for God’s appearance in Jesus Christ. In Isaiah 62, we read:
For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.
And then in the appoint psalm 36, we read:
How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
Finally, the gospel lesson comes from John 2. John doesn’t have the many parables of Jesus that were based on the wedding image, but he does have the story of the Wedding at Cana, where he changed water into wine.
The New Testament in many and various ways teaches us that Jesus represented the marriage of the divine and the human. This union is offered to all who follow Jesus Christ. First, those who wish to become disciples must confess their sins, repent, and be baptized. This is similar to the old wedding vow of “renouncing all others.” Another image we sometimes use for this phase is of housecleaning. All the other spirits who have sway within us must be exorcised to make room for the Holy Spirit. We talked about this last week in my sermon on baptism.
In today’s lesson, we hear that Paul didn’t want his Corinthian church to be ignorant. Ignorance puts us in spiritual danger. If we are ignorant of spiritual things, we will not know the good spirits from the bad ones.
There may be some among who believe that there are indeed personal spirits, angels, demons, that are at work in the world. But biblically, the relationship between God and angels and the demonic is pretty messy and vague. Theologians have read far more into it than is actually there in the text, and this is easy to do.
Angels in the Old Testament are terrifying creatures of destruction and death. Then, in Job, God takes an awful wager from the devil. Also, there is virtually no mention of demons in the Old Testament. Demons first appear in Jewish thought when the Greeks were running the world. Jews began to believe that evil spirits were sent by God to torment the sinful. Israel, it was said, had sinned, and foreign occupation was God’s punishment. By Jesus’ day, every ordinary Jew knew that the devil was the lord of Caesar, even if the devil worked for God.
The ignorant Gentiles, Paul reminds them, were led astray to worship things that could not speak, but now they worshiped a God who speaks. And God spoke through the gift of the holy spirit.
In common usage “epiphany” describes a sudden brilliant insight. But the original meaning was “a manifestation of the divine”. This is the season of Epiphany, as we celebrate Jesus Christ, whom most Christians believe was the decisive manifestation of God for all time.
Here’s how I think of it, and I hope it helps. What the scripture tells me is that Jesus received the holy spirit when he came up from the waters of baptism. That spirit led him into the wilderness with nothing to eat, no tent, no bed. A vision quest, like those practiced by cultures all over the world, far into prehistory. And when he came back, he and that spirit were one, enabling him to embark on his mission as prophet, priest and king, to the cross and glory, and to endure all the emotions, desires and temptations that every human being must experience, including the unendurable and terribly unfair experience of dying, along the way. In the marriage of the divine and the human that was Jesus Christ, God was made manifest to a host of human witnesses.
By the power of his union with the the Holy Spirit, he made no mistake, he committed no sin. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he went to the cross a lamb without blemish, an essential part of his mission, so that he could conquer death by rising from the dead, sharing his Holy Spirit with all who followed him.
Paul’s most urgent mission was to get this message beyond the bounds of Judaism.
The God of infinite grace had thrown the doors wide open to all, but the time was short. As the empire continued to collapse, the proclamation that Jesus was Lord was bringing believers before people in charge, and this became their opportunity to join Jesus in giving their lives in testimony to God’s superior rule. Early Christians strove to reach the spiritual maturity necessary, and it was achieved by giving oneself over to the holy spirit, striving to bring your will in accord with it, just as Jesus did.
So Paul starts out as Captain Obvious, when it comes to multiple evangelists or apostles or varieties of spiritual gifts, no one who has the spirit is going to say anything truly out-of-line with Jesus. And if they are praising Jesus, they are by definition in the spirit.
If you are not telling anyone about your faith or about your church, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the holy spirit, but it does mean that it might be pretty hard to tell. If you are not bad-mouthing Jesus or his church, it doesn’t mean you have the spirit; you may, it’ll just be hard to tell. But if you do ever talk to anyone about your faith, you are certainly speaking in the spirit, because the spirit’s mission is to spread to the ends of the earth. And if you are out-and-out dissing Jesus, well, it’s pretty much certain the spirit has left the building, if he was ever there at all.
Martin Luther, the German guy who started the Reformation, said the Holy Spirit flies on the wings of the word. The disciples who are the flesh and blood of this church are united in its spirit, because they have saturated their lives with God’s word, and that word bore God’s spirit, and God’s Spirit worked within them over time to crucify their sin and raise them new children of God. That may not be the story they would tell about themselves, but from God’s point of view, that’s what happened.
Sounds heavy. But here’s the thing. The church of the twenty-first century needs to stop trying to be spa or a restaurant or a vaguely spiritual refuge, and start becoming a spiritual gymnasium. The disciples of Philippi, for the most part, did not come out of the waters of baptism perfect angels, and they probably would deny perfection today. Change for them was like the change you get from disciplined exercise, that is, the kind you do faithfully every day. Everyone who exercises knows you’ll just frustrate yourself if you keep running to the scale. If you keep up the work, though, one day you’ll notice you have to tighten you belt another notch.
It’s no different with spiritual growth. Regular practice is the key. We grow as we come more and more in line with God’s will, and the power of the Spirit within us grows along with it. Often we don’t notice the growth until we find ourselves doing some good we never used to do, or having compassion for people we used to judge, or rising to an occasion when doing the right thing really costs us.
The good news is, it’s not a race, unless you feel you are called to a more intense witness, one that would require an accelerated formation. But if you simply want to live you life as a follower of Jesus Christ, God smiles as soon you get on the road to him. He runs to you, the moment you do.
Paul lists a bunch of spiritual gifts. One senses this not exhaustive. He has another very similar one in Galatians. By wisdom, Paul probably meant the Jewish sense: philosophy or theology, spirit-inspired insights. By knowledge, Paul probably meant visionary knowledge of distant or future events. He talks about prophecy, about speaking in tongues, about interpretation of tongues. In chapter 13, he talks about speaking in the tongues of angels, and I suppose that would require an interpreter.
So we begin to see where he’s headed with this. The spirit manifested in these many diverse ways. Every gift, whatever it was, was activated by the same spirit, but it seems, as one might expect of a living God, the spirit gives uniquely to each unique person, not only for that person but especially for the rest of the community of believers. The gifts could vary infinitely, depending on the infinite directions humans choose to go. This, as we will see next week when Paul continues his argument, is how God creates unity, not by making everyone the same, or by establishing a hierarchy with one human ruling over the rest. He offers his Spirit to those who have rejected all others, and the Spirit fits us into the body of Christ.
Now is the time to let go of any negativity about other people that is blocking the light of the spirit. And the best place to start is right in your church community.
The Book of Revelation is addressed to the spirits of seven churches. And just like any person, a church can have a holy spirit, but it can have the other kind too. You will remember that the first demon Jesus encounters is at a worship service!
The Spirit of Philippi is the genuine hope that God’s word can reach anyone who comes to listen for it. Those who are listening, will hear it. And as they hear it, the Spirit will enter. And as the Spirit enters, and as they align their wills with God’s, that same holy marriage between the divine and the human will take place in them. This is the path to unity.
I’ll close with Jesus’ teaching from Luke 11:9-13:
“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Amen.
