Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly - mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe - as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple. (1 Corinthians 3:1-17)
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We renovated our upstairs bathroom a few months ago. It was a big job, but the decision was that it had to be done. We were tired of the never ending pink tiles on the floor and on the walls; they reminded me a bit of what you might call refugees from the 60’s who’ve never escaped the flower child phase, but that’s a whole other story! The renovations took several days and they were rather messy. The hallway outside the bathroom got cluttered, we had no bathtub for a bit, the dragging of work equipment in and out of the bathroom left some scratches on our hallway floor. It wasn’t convenient, but it was done because the time had come to do it - it was necessary. The end result was a new look bathroom that in many ways looked very much like the old look bathroom. The sink and vanity and bathtub and toilet (can you say “toilet” in church?) are all in the same places, but it looks different - different tiles, different sink, different vanity, different bathtub, different toilet - but all in the context of the same basic bathroom. If you’re interested, there are before and after pictures posted on my Facebook page.
Here’s the truth - if you live in a home that needs some changes, you can do one of two things: you can renovate it, or you can tear it down completely and start from scratch. There are advantages to doing the latter. If you just tear everything down, then when you rebuild it you can make your home exactly what you want it to be. Had we torn down our entire house and rebuilt it then nothing would have looked the same and we could have had every corner of every room exactly the way we wanted it, but that would have been a silly and unnecessary thing to do. We were already happy with the house, we just wanted a new look bathroom - which is the other option. If you take the renovation route, you work with what you already have.
We live in uncertain times, and in the uncertainties of the 21st century, as we sometimes reel while the world and society around us change at astonishing and head-spinning speeds, the church faces very similar choices. There are a lot of people out there who want to tear everything down and start over - they want everything on the table; everything open to debate. That way, we can create the Christianity we're comfortable with. More music, less music; more preaching, less preaching; contemporary worship, traditional worship; sometimes even more Jesus, less Jesus - all in the hope that in some way we’re going to find some magical balance that’s suddenly going to fill both the pews and the collection plates and thereby solve all our problems. It's a tempting thought. Surely if we just tear it all down and start over with no foundation and no absolutes then we’ll be free to just give people what they want - but the problem is that it's not faithful. That type of work is all based on our preferences and wishes and desires; it’s based on the idea that we need to create something new; it’s based on the belief that what the church already has to offer in abundance isn’t good enough. I’m all in favour of contextual Christianity - a Christianity that has to speak to our culture, but I’m also realistic enough to understand that we can't simply tear down Christianity and start from scratch. We renovate and we don’t rebuild that which God has already built - and so we renovate always on the basis of Jesus Christ - divine love and divine grace revealed to us.
We do that because when we focus too much on the “worldly” all we end up doing is dividing ourselves into likes and dislikes - the group who believes this and the group who believes that; the group that wants this and the group that wants that; the group that thinks this way and the group that thinks that way. Of course, all the different groups think they’re right and everyone else is wrong. It’s what was happening in Corinth. They had issues way beyond the “I follow Paul”, “I follow Apollos” issue. If you read 1 Corinthians you find out that they had questions about marriage and incest and whether they should be suing each other over grievances and various social customs like eating food sacrificed to idols and the proper place of women in the church and all sorts of other things. And Paul talks briefly about each of those issues - but then just as suddenly he comes right back to his central point - Christ crucified; divine love; divine grace. I find these words of Paul interesting - “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly.” After years of wondering what Paul meant (was he criticizing the Corinthians for spiritual immaturity) the Holy Spirit gave me some insight - perhaps we’re no different in that respect from the Corinthians, because perhaps we’re no more ready for the “solid food” than they were. I’ve come to the conclusion that Paul didn’t mean that judgmentally (as in, you’re really a bunch of immature people) and neither do I mean it judgmentally. I’m more and more convinced that perhaps what we actually need is the milk - the stuff that nourishes us best - and that is Jesus, divine love, divine grace; the “foundation ... already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” Jesus tells us to become like little children. Think about it - we keep little children out of harm’s way. We teach them the basics. We don’t get complicated with them. We comfort them. We tell them not to be afraid because we love them. Isn’t that what God does. That’s what the church has to be about.
Over the centuries, I fear that we've gone off track; that the church has lost its sense of purpose and call. Today, the church is often seen as either an arbiter of public ethics, a judge of personal morality, or a commentator on social issues and policy. The problem is that all of those seem far removed from what Jesus wanted. It’s interesting, just to mention one example, that Jesus never commented on or offered a solution to the problem of poverty. He simply fed and loved the poor. Maybe there’s a lesson there. When we lose sight of what we’re called to do and wade knee deep into things we’re really not equipped or called to be into we end up being a source of division rather than a force for unity. If we lean in one direction we end up being dismissed (as some have dismissed the United Church) as “the NDP at prayer,” and if we lean in the other direction we become the Tea Party movement that’s so active in Republican politics in the United States. Neither are faithful positions for the church to adopt. We can talk about “issues” until we’re blue in the face and we can judge and criticize those who we feel don’t live up to the standards and all we do when we do that is sow the seeds of division and further marginalize the church. So what are we called to? We recognize that “no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And then we do what Jesus did - we celebrate, proclaim, live out and encourage each other with the love and grace of God. It’s pretty simple stuff. It’s just really hard to do.
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