“Belonging”
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/23/14
Frustration does seem to be getting the best of Paul. He is trying to speak to his embattled
brothers and sisters in the Corinthian church, and listen to all the different
images he reaches for in just nine verses: babies nursing, milk, meat,
seeds, planting, watering, a field under cultivation, and a house under
construction. Paul is doing more
than mixing metaphors. He is serving up
a complete-meal casserole!
How are these poor folks supposed to understand themselves
and their Christian calling with all of those different images rattling around
in their minds?
This is just me talking, but I do wonder if Paul doesn’t
actually intend to overwhelm his “brothers and sisters” a little bit – maybe as
one of those “hair of the dog that bit you” things. I say that because there is at least one
clear division in the house – a division that has caused the young congregation
a double helping of painful confusion.
“Jealousy and squabbling,” Paul calls it.
Paul has planted the church, but he has turned much
of the watering, the nurture, over to a man named Apollos. Apollos is an Alexandrian Jew who, on a visit
to Ephesus, had been introduced to Jesus through the teaching ministry of
Priscilla and Aquilla. (Acts
18:24-28) Paul, then, entrusts this
gifted new disciple with leading the Corinthian church. And now, based on diverging loyalties to
charismatic personalities, a rift develops in the church. One side prefers Paul, and the other side
prefers Apollos. I know that this is a
rare and astonishing thing, but we are watching a group of Christians
struggling to get along with one another.
Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Some things never change, do they? Too often we decide who we are based on who
we like and who we don’t, who we will follow and who we will oppose, who we
will love and who we will fear. Then we
ferret out like-minded individuals with whom to feel comfortable and right
in our dualistic little kingdoms of us and them.
Paul’s message to the Corinthians boils down to a rather
terse, Get over it. Neither he
nor Apollos can claim the authority that the toxic little cliques are assigning
to their respective patron saints. So
even if Paul doesn’t intend it this way, all those different metaphors do
emphasize how easy, and how “spiritless” it is to create fault lines of
loyalties based on the messengers rather than the message.
Indeed, what is going on in Corinth? Well, it is just the next chapter in an old,
old story. It is the same thing that is
going on between the Pharisees and the Sadducees; the same thing that is going
on between the followers of David and the followers of Saul; the same thing
going on between the families of Jacob and Esau; and the same thing going on
between Cain and Abel. It may look like
the proverbial power struggle, but all these struggles reveal the same thing, a
much deeper, much more ancient, and very common injury.
Roger Gench, pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in
Washington, D.C., begins his short essay on this passage by asking us to
consider what he calls the “loneliness…[which] is so much a part of our human
condition that we cannot escape it.”1
The abyss of loneliness, says Dr. Gench, becomes the locus
within the human heart for an acute craving for belonging. From deep within, we all cry out to
belong. The most readily available way
for us to meet that profound need is to join communities: churches, clubs,
societies, fraternities, sororities, political parties, nations, militaries,
teams, and causes. Such things can help,
says Gench, but eventually all of them disappoint us to some degree.2 No organization can fully accommodate what is
really a mystical need for belonging.
The most crucial thing to realize about this loneliness is
that it bears witness to profound spiritual wound, a wound that all of us carry
from infancy and childhood.3
That’s why we tend to make our claims of belonging with such passion:
Belonging is about our lifelong search for restoration. We seek belonging in order to heal from the
wound of separation from God, from our pre-existent identity, our deepest and
truest self, the Self we were, are, and will always be in God.
There is a fascinating story, supposedly true, of a couple
who had just put their newborn child down to sleep for the night. As soon as the baby was asleep, the couple’s
four-year-old asked if he could go into the room by himself and speak to his
baby brother alone. The parents were a
bit surprised, but they agreed. After
the four-year-old went into the room, the curious parents leaned into the thin
bedroom door and listened. They heard
their elder child say to the younger, “‘Quick, tell me where you came from…tell
me who made you. I am beginning to
forget!’”4
If this story is not simply true in its details, but if it
is truth, then it speaks of an eternal identity within each of us, a
fathomless mystery which tends to slip into the mists of our unconscious – a
place touched only by things like love and forgiveness, by dreams and prayer,
by ecstasy and art, and yes, even by our deepest pain and fear. If this story reveals a sacred truth,
our forgotten but authentic self remains, and it drives our desire for
belonging, for wholeness, for home.
Jesus calls it a great treasure hidden a field. This forgotten but authentic self IS
who we ARE, and it is worth everything.5
Who we ARE at the core of our human-being is rooted
not just firmly, or even inextricably in God.
Who we ARE at the core of our human-being is rooted perfectly
in God. We are rooted in God the way in
which a field is rooted in the earth itself.
Think about that image.
Paul and Jesus have the same field in mind. We are not simply some crop; we are the field
that God clears and cultivates.
How does a field lose connection with the earth? It doesn’t; but as people we do lose
awareness of our connection with Earth – with Heart, and Soul, and Breath. And when we do lose our awareness of
connection, then the Earth, along with Sky, and Water, and Air, and Neighbor
all tend to become one of two things: They become either commodities to be
exploited, or enemies to be defeated.
We become separate fields when we live entirely above
ground, entirely in and of the world, to use Paul’s word. Above ground, we belong, then, only to what
we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste – only to that which can be
physically experienced and proven. Above
ground, belonging, and that is to say, of course, salvation, becomes
something defined by a person’s loyalty not to the Earth, but to the fencerows
of things like creeds and laws, of skin color and relative wealth, and, as the
Corinthians discover, to the fencerows of
personalities.
“I may have done the planting and Apollos the watering,”
writes Paul in a prophetic snit, “but…God…made the seed grow!”
We are fields of the same earth. No amount of division will ever change the
fundamental reality of our belonging in God.
And no other group or loyalty can replace that belonging.
Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist. Democrat, Republican, Green Party, Tea
Party. North, South, East, West. Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim. Volunteer, Bulldog, Tarheel, Blue Devil. On and on go the fencerows. Beneath them all lies one thing as firm and
sure, and as perfectly identifying as the earth beneath the fields. That one thing is the inalienable gift of our
common humanity: the Image of God
within us. And just as fields as
far from each other as Tennessee and Timbuktu are connected by the same earth,
every human begin is connected to the same Giver of Growth, the same Ground of
Being.
I return to a quotation that I’ve used before. It’s a line that Wendell Berry places on the
lips of one of his most colorful, and grounded, and deeply rooted characters,
Burley Coulter. In deliberations in a
lawyer’s office, deliberations about the disposition of a farm, a field, Burley
lays out Jesus’ theology of belonging with all the demanding simplicity and
gracious beauty of Jesus himself: “The way we are,” says Burley, “we’re members of each other. All of us.
Everything. The difference ain’t
in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”6
The heart of the matter is this: There is no real belonging
for anyone until there is belonging for all.
And according to Paul, it is only when we recognize that truth,
and when we begin to live it, that we begin to live as “spiritual” beings –
beings who experience the Image of God within us, who see and embrace it in
others, and who dig deep beneath all fencerows to share the healing miracles of
belonging, the miracles of membership, with those brothers and sisters who
stand beside us.
1Roger Gench, Feasting on the Word (Year A, Vol.
1), Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010, pp. 350ff.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our
True Self, 2013, p. 10.
5Ibid. (Without quoting Rohr directly, I am using ideas
that he develops in his discussion of the True Self throughout his book,
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self.
6Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the
Port William Membership, North Point Press, 1985, pp. 136-137.
No comments:
Post a Comment