A sermon on 1 Corinthian 12:12-31A.
We’ve been doing one reading a week from our lectionary, rather than all four. We’ve done this because some have said that hearing all four is confusing, because the passages don’t seem to come together in any clear way.
Today would have been an example. The Old Testament passage from Nehemiah was about Ezra’s reading the Book of Deuteronomy aloud for the first time to the reassembled Jewish people in Jerusalem following the return from exile. The Gospel passage is about Jesus reading from Isaiah in a synagogue at the beginning of his ministry, then dramatically announcing, “Today the scripture has been fulfilled in your presence.”
But the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians doesn’t say anything about reading. It’s about how the diversity of spiritual gifts is like the diversity of the human body, in which all different parts work together for the whole.
The theme underlying them is the unifying will of God for the common good. As Ezra read Deuteronomy, the reassembled people of God were reunited in their identity and purpose. As Jesus announced his mission in his first sermon in Luke’s Gospel, he announced the same thing. As Messiah, he was not only announcing his own individual identity and purpose, but that of all Jews as his subjects.
When Jesus came, the people were unified ethnically as Jewish. They were unified nationally as Judea. They had their own Judean government comprised of both royal and religious authorities. They had their own temple with its hierarchy of priests. But they were owned as a nation by the great Roman Empire that spanned southern Europe, western Asia and northern Africa. This generated tremendous conflict among the Jews, most of whom despised the Romans, while a minority took advantage of the situation to gain wealth and power.
Jesus sought to liberate his people from all of that, and to unify them, not in these worldly markers, but in the mark of God’s Holy Spirit. Instead of God dwelling in a temple in a particular nation, God in the Spirit would now dwell in the people wherever they might be, for their common good, that is, the good of all, and not just the good of the few. But in the course of his ministry, he found that, for all the crowds that followed him in Galilee, only a minority of Jews finally believed in him. In the resurrection, Jesus broadened his ministry beyond Judaism to the non-Jewish world.
As Luke’s Book of Acts demonstrates, the spread of the Holy Spirit was an organic process, kind of like a virus that, instead of making people sick, made them well. Corinth, the city to whom Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was addressed, was the Sin City of the Roman Empire, where just about every kind of sick desire was accommodated. Paul mentions that many in the Corinthian church had formerly worked in the sex trade there, and the intense and constant temptations of Corinth was a concern of Paul’s in the letter. One of the church’s member was reported to be having an affair with his own mother-in-law, and Paul has no trouble in demanding he be turned out of the church. One might imagine that the disciples in Corinth were discovering their own human dignity and rising above the nasty ugliness of Roman immorality.
What they struggled to rise above, however, was the Roman status system. Roman culture was about the pursuit of status, for with status came power and wealth. The Corinthian church had become too preoccupied with the question, just as Jesus’ own disciples did. Who is the greatest? Who will have a privileged position in the kingdom of God? Who is worthy of the greatest honor?
It was a zero-sum game as well, because the question was also, who is the lowest? Whose privileges must be taken from them? Who is worthy of shame?
Anyone here who doesn’t know what the “like” button is? The icon is a hand with thumb up, a gesture we get from the Romans. Thumb up meant someone was granted mercy. Thumb down meant they had to die. Thumb up, life; thumb down, death. Thumb up, honor; thumb down, shame.
Lots of research has shown that “getting likes” causes a jolt of pleasure in the human body, a pleasure that can become addictive. We read about the phenomenon of “virtue signaling.” Something happens in the news and someone goes on line and takes a stand on it, with the clear intention of marking oneself virtuous in the midst of whatever is happening. They hope for lots of likes, every one of them increasing that warm feeling of social affirmation.
But then we have the phenomenon of trolling. The online troll seeks to publicly shame those who are seeking honor, to sting them with mockery, contempt or derision. It’s like spiking heroin with fentanyl. Just as the addict rushes to feel better by taking his drug, a hidden enemy rises from within it to kill him.
If the troll is good at it, the feeling he inspires is shame. Instead of a jolt of pleasure, a wave of embarrassment. Blood rushes to the face, and all one wants to do is hide.
This led to the phenomenon of “unfriending” or “blocking.” Arranging one’s online presence in such a way that the shaming trolls are gone and only the honoring friends remain. This has bled into the real world. Young people won’t date people who don’t share their ideology. Friends cut off friends. Children stop speaking to parents. Liberal seminarians don’t want to serve congregations because they’re too conservative.
Conservative Christians drive out liberal Christians from their churches. Liberals drive out conservatives from their churches. Everyone says the enemy is shameful and only we are honorable.
The American marketplace has commodified the situation, creating convenient social bubbles we can plug ourselves into, where we are always honored and the enemy is constantly shamed.
Honor and shame remain in human affairs as the emotional center of culture. Going along to get along is about seeking honor and avoiding shame. Believing in something one’s fellows reject is terribly difficult, because every human is weakened in isolation. Human strength comes from shared purpose and identity.
Which brings us to the concept of spirit. Biblically, spirit refers to three invisible powers: the power of breath (the invisible power of life), the power of speech (communication of invisible ideas), and the power of wind (an invisible force that can power a ship or knock down a city).
A spirit then could be understood as a shared purpose and identity. The greater the number of living people who share one purpose and identity, the more that spirit manifests in the world. The more divided a people are regarding purpose or identity, the weaker the manifestation.
But the bible, from the very beginning, rejects the unity of conformity, which we see in the primal tale of the city of Babel, that grew almost to heaven because they all spoke the same language, until God confused their languages, diversifying them, thereby delimiting their power to usurp his rule. He then turned his attention to one single human family, and chose them for his purpose, to reveal him to the rest of the world, and so to save it.
And when God sent his Spirit on the day of Pentecost, no one was preaching in Greek, the common language of the empire, but everyone was speaking in the native languages of the many diverse nations the Empire had conquered. There was a new empire in town, the empire of God, under a new emperor, the Lord Jesus Christ, who did not impose one culture on all the others, but celebrated the diversity of cultures, even as he called them to a new unity of identity and purpose, the body of Christ for the revealing of God to the unknowing world.
And so while some gifts require more spiritual development than others, and while striving to grow in the Spirit of God is a good thing, spiritual gifts are not honors bestowed for the sake of status over others. Instead, as Paul points out, the realm of God is upside down. The parts of our body that are shameful we clothe in layers. The lowest members of our body, the feet, we shod and protect carefully. But the parts we are proud of, the ones that are high up, we leave naked. Jesus told his disciples that if they want to serve a lord, make it a child, the person with the least status in his society, and serve that child as they would their king. Paul is saying that one of the unifying purposes of the kingdom is for the last to be first and the first to be last, so that all might have the care they actually need.
To be infused with God’s Holy Spirit is to be knit into a manifestation of God in the world, to become an integral part of an organic whole. It is to identify with Christ’s story as the defining story of our communal life and to embrace his purpose, the purpose he announced in his first sermon in the gospel of Luke. He read from Isaiah the following passage:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The Spirit of God gives us an identity, and anoints us for a purpose.
Amen.
