Sermons
April 28, 2024 (5th Sunday of Easter)
Has Christ been divided?
Acts 18:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
It seems like just about every church has a personality. In some churches everyone dresses very formally, and in others people are quite casual—even to the point, now and then, of elders getting up to pray at the communion table in shorts. In some churches all ideas are supposed to come from the pastor, and in others most of the best ones come from members of the congregation.
In some churches mistakes are not acceptable; anyone who makes one is pretty much drummed out of leadership for all eternity, and folks are afraid to do anything for fear that will happen to them. In others, a mistake is something anyone could make, and everybody is invited to learn from their mistakes and keep going.
Some churches make a person feel like they have to have their act together before they can come in the doors, and other churches show by their actions that they’re a place where people can go for help getting their act together.
There are churches where all the members are good friends; you see them out socializing, eating together, playing cards, you name it, during the week—but a newcomer on Sunday morning can feel like they’re standing in a cold, empty room. And then there are churches where all the members are good friends, and they welcome a newcomer in—like a good friend they just met.
In some churches, all of the church property is tightly controlled, and heaven help you if you touch anything without permission or leave anything out of place. In others, the people in charge of the property have the attitude that, as it was expressed more than once in my previous church, “We’d rather have it wear out than rust out.”
The personality of the Corinthian church was similar to what we see in some churches even today. They were contentious, always arguing among themselves over something, finding new ways all the time to divide themselves up. In our reading today, we hear about just one of these; if we were to read both of the letters we have from Paul to this church, we would see plenty more.
Today the issue has to do with leaders and personalities. Some of it is baptism—and I don’t mean they’re arguing about the age when a person should get baptized, or whether to sprinkle or immerse, or even whether a person who has been baptized in another tradition needs to be baptized again when they join a new congregation. No, they’re dividing themselves up based on who baptized them—although that’s not the whole story, because there’s no evidence Cephas, or Peter, baptized anybody in Corinth. It could be about baptism, but it could also be about which teacher’s point of view most resonates with them, or which preacher has more engaging sermons, or which leader is of the social class or ethnicity a given person prefers.
“I belong to Paul!” one says.
“I belong to Apollos!” shouts another.
“I belong to Peter!” insists still another, possibly a Jewish Christian, maybe one who came to Corinth from Judea.
“I belong to Christ!” another might say, and we might think that’s a good thing, except that the implication could be, “I belong to Christ, but I’m not too sure about the rest of you.”
Paul says, “Wait!” Into whose name were you baptized? Mine, or Christ’s? Apollos’, or Christ’s? Peter’s, or Christ’s? We are not Paulines, or Petrines, or Apollonians—today we might say Wesleyans, Calvinists, or Campbellites—we are Christians.
He says, “Has Christ been divided?” It’s sort of a funny image if you carry it out to its logical end, but not really that funny at all.
A little later in the letter, as he deals with issues relating to spiritual gifts, Paul develops a metaphor he has introduced in passing a little bit earlier. “You are the body of Christ…” he says.[1] A body, he reminds the church, is made up of many parts, but it’s still just one body. You can’t divide up the body of Christ without doing damage to its ability to function.
It’s not entirely out of line for us to hear what Paul says in our reading today in the same way. “Has Christ been divided?” Has Christ’s body been divided? Why?
Over economics? The Corinthians did that, and it affected how they were in fellowship with one another at the Lord’s Table.[2]
Over spiritual maturity? They went there, too: the newer Christians who still worried about what it might do to their eternal souls if they ate meat that had been offered to idols were looked down on by more experienced ones who thought they had outgrown such superstition.[3]
Over personality? That’s what we see today. “I belong to Paul, not Apollos or Peter.”
Yes, there were even a few who said what Paul would have said: “I belong to Christ.” That’s who we’re supposed to be following; the teachers and preachers and apostles point us toward him. But in Corinth, the ones who proclaimed they belonged to Christ became just another splinter group—and as I just said a moment ago, they could well have been casting doubt on whether others in the congregation truly did belong to Christ.
If Corinth were a community in the United States today, they’d probably be dividing over politics. “I belong to Trump!” “I belong to Biden!” “I belong to Kennedy!” “I belong to the elephants!” “I belong to the donkeys!” “I refuse to belong to either the elephants or the donkeys; they both stink!”
We could go on and on, proclaiming that we support one side or the other of any given issue and refusing to deal with people who are on the other side.
Honestly, I think this Corinthian church would find itself right at home here. We’re a culture that has gotten into the habit of dividing. We don’t listen to or watch programs or commentators we don’t agree with. We get to where we really don’t even want to socialize with folks who don’t think as we do on the various issues we think are important.
And it’s not just about political or social issues, things that actually matter in shaping the direction our country moves in the future. In Iowa I used to see yard decorations, flags, and the like that had both the Iowa and the Iowa State logos on them, “A house divided.” There may be some of those here—Mizzou versus KU, maybe—but I don’t know that I’ve seen them. Those are sort of silly, but some people take that kind of thing deadly seriously, and forget that while college sports have become big business, we’re not personally making or losing any money (unless we’re betting on the games, but I can personally think of lots better ways to spend my money), so for most of us it really is just a game we enjoy watching.
The country we live in is pretty badly divided, maybe even splintered. It was the same in Paul’s time and place.
In Corinth there were major divides between social classes, between rich and poor, between the people who worshiped the various gods. Those divisions spilled over into the church, and Paul didn’t think it was right.
“Has Christ been divided?” If not, then why is his body dividing itself up over things that don’t, in an eternal sense, matter?
If Paul were talking to us today, I think he would say something similar to us. “Has Christ been divided?” No; and his body, the church—his hands and feet, his heart and voice, alive in the world today—should not be divided, either. We are meant to be united, gathered together in one body, with one Lord, Jesus Christ.
But “unity” isn’t the same as “uniformity.” We need all parts of the body—those who seem spectacularly talented and those whose gifts are quieter, behind-the-scenes, often not noticed at all…until they’re not there. And we need to listen to and respect those with whom we disagree, something that is becoming a lost art in the world around us.
We are the body of Christ. We have many differences: some of us are liberal, some conservative, and quite a few in between; we don’t all interpret the Bible the same way; if we were to have a conversation about any social issue, we would find we don’t see totally eye-to-eye. And that’s okay.
We don’t have to let our differences turn into divisions. We just have to listen to Paul, because Paul never wades into arguments and settle them; he simply refocuses everyone on something bigger than whatever it is we are letting ourselves be divided over.
What he refocuses our attention onto is the message we profess as the heart and soul of our faith, our “Good Confession”: I believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God; and I accept him as my Lord and Savior.
We are united in Christ Jesus, who lived and died for us, and we belong to him. Nothing else, when all is said and done, matters.
[1] 1 Corinthians 12:17; see also 6:19-20; 10:16-17.
[2] 1 Corinthians 11:17-34
[3] 1 Corinthians 8:1—11:1. The amount of space Paul devotes to this issue might indicate how much of a problem it was in the Corinthian church.