Christ or Mascot?
Psalm 100 and 1Corinthians 3:1-8
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/2/24
1Make a joyful noise to the Lord,
all the earth.
2Serve the Lord with gladness;
come into his presence with singing.
3Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.
4Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise.
Give thanks to him; bless his name.
5For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever
and his faithfulness to all generations. (NRSV)
After all the introductory niceties, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians cuts right to the point: Y’all aren’t getting along, he says, because you’re fussing over loyalties to people who are not Jesus.
I wonder if the Corinthians, as ancient Greeks, were so used to having a smorgasbord of gods to choose from, that every time things got difficult, they went looking for something more satisfying on the buffet. And now, their faith community is fraying because some of them recognize only the authority of Paul, The Apostlewho planted the church. Others recognize only Apollos, who was smart and a great speaker, and whom Paul left to lead the congregation. Some lean toward Peter, who was intense and a direct link to Jesus. And apparently, some say they follow Jesus, who, it seems, was just one more item on the menu.
Lovingly distressed, Paul calls out the Corinthians for having grown so divided that they no longer experience Christ, much less represent his body. The Apostle challenges the Corinthians to understand that the gospel may sound a bit ridiculous at first. Remember, Paul tells them, that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…[and] what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” And Jesus had said that to find one’s live, lose it. How does all that work?
Paul wants the people to understand that, the longer one follows Jesus and his topsy-turvy gospel, the more one needs a well-practiced and mature spirituality—a spirituality balanced by contemplation and humble service. Then, in the thirteenth chapter of this same letter, Paul writes one of his most memorable passages, the passage that concludes, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love.” (1Cor. 13:13)
Love is the origin and the goal of faith and hope because, as Richard Rohr says, We can never truly know God. We can only love God. And that’s all God asks.1 Paul urges the Corinthians to recognize that while they may be on the way to beginning to understand that truth, they need to grow up. They need to mature into agape love before it can become their truth.
With that context in mind, let’s listen for God’s Word.
And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, 3for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? 4For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?
5What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. (NRSV)
You folks are messed up, says Paul, because your sippy cups are empty and your diapers are full. The church is not about you, or me, or Apollos. We’re all servants, co-workers on God’s farm. I planted and Apollos watered because a crop needs people to do both of those things. And when seeds go into the earth, and die, the new life they receive and the growth they experience is a miracle only God can do.
Jealousy and quarreling, says Paul, are signs of a community made up of individuals who live in constant fear that their own, comfortable ways of thinking and being in the world will be questioned and found lacking. That fear launches a series of wrong turns. We turn away from love. We turns energies of cooperation and trust into suspicion, judgment, and even aggression toward those who represent new or different perspectives. And these reactions turn communities from havens of harmony into nurseries of resentment and conflict.
Let’s remember that Paul used to persecute Christians. He turned his Pharisaic fears into judgment, anger, and violent aggression toward followers of Jesus. Now he nurtures and leads them as a brother, and as a servant. To make that transformation, Paul himself, like a seed, died with Christ, and was raised, by God, to new life in Christ. So, he has unique authority to say that when followers of Jesus look for hope and redemption in anything besides Christ, they’re seeking comfort in what we might call mascots.
Human cultures offer mascots by the thousands. Whether it’s a celebrity, a political affiliation, a theological absolute, a ball team, a pixeled distraction, a substance, or some means by which to dominate others, there’s a pantheon of mascots and idols just waiting to be bought, sold, and coddled. We can claim to love them, but they cannot love us back. They can only seduce us. Love for a mascot is nothing more than an addiction.
As immeasurably different as the first and twenty-first centuries are, much about human relationships remains the same. The Corinthians’ competing loyalties to Paul and Apollos mirror the divisions we experience in our contemporary jealousies and quarrels. Human beings have always been driven by our obsessions with power and security. And through the eons our cultures have relied on brutality and intimidation to achieve those ends.
Since the fourth century, when Constantine legalized Christianity and Theodosius I made Christianity Rome’s official religion, the Church has fully participated in devotion to worldly mascots. And since misappropriated love is just another name for fear, the history of the Church has always included not only division, but destruction of things God creates and loves. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are marquee examples of our corporate sin.
As members of that Church, we must confess that we have participated in and benefited from the Church’s state-sanctioned, fear-driven jealousies, quarrels, and power-grabs.
“Power is of two kinds,” said Gandhi. “One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective than [power] derived from fear of punishment.”2
While Gandhi wasn’t Christian, there’s an unmistakable harmony between him and Paul on the matter of all-embracing, all-redeeming, fear-defying love.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to be boldly different from the world around us while remaining lovingly engaged with it, as well. We’re called to be servants who have a “common purpose” even when we get sideways with each other. Our common purpose, as workers in God’s garden, is to receive and share the eternal love of the One who creates and redeems us.
We’re called to be a community of yeast, a ferment in the world according to Jesus’ ways of mercy, justice, and peace.
We experience unity not by coalescing around the same, rigid doctrines, but by holding the inevitable tensions of living in community with love, because love is “patient [and] kind…[it’s] not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…[love] does not insist on its own way…[it’s] not irritable or resentful…[and love] bears…believes…hopes…and endures all things.” (1Cor. 13:4-7)
God, grant us the strength and the maturity of faith to live in love. To live humbly, honestly, and compassionately with one another, so that our lives and our life together witnesses to our shared conviction that we do, in all things and at all times, belong to and serve only You.
Thanks be to God.
1https://cac.org/know-god-love-god-2018-01-19/
2https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78373-power-is-of-two-kinds-one-is-obtained-by-the
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