Being One with An Other
January 14, 2007
Texts: John 2:1-11, Isaiah 62:1-5, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
I was watching the Weather Channel yesterday, and they were advertising a story about Hawaii, titled “The 50th State”. But I realized later, that’s only partially correct. In an informal count, yes, there are 50 states in the United States. But actually, there are 46. While Wisconsin, Hawaii, and 44 others are states, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and the one where I was born and raised: Pennsylvanaia, are actually commonwealths. The word commonwealth dates from the 15th century, and describes a political association created for the good of all its members – as opposed to a nation or state which only protects the interests of a portion of its citizens. A commonwealth is an “all for one and one for all” kind of place.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is largely about Christian community, which is arguably also an “all for one and one for all” kind of enterprise – that is, each person is important, and the gathered persons, the community, is recognized also as having a life and importance. The city of Corinth was known for its cosmopolitan culture, its decadence, wealth, sexuality and violence. Aside from the issue of size, New York and LA might be modern day equivalents. Paul was writing to the Corinthians, teaching them how to create and maintain a distinctively Christian culture within a city whose values were otherwise. The church at Corinth included a diverse group – Gentiles and Jews, rich and poor, former slaves and society leaders. And then, as now, diversity was a challenge. And then, as now, figuring out what makes Christian community distinctive from the surrounding culture was a challenge.
Starting with the diversity issue – it seems to be a natural human trait to gather with folks who are like ourselves. And so a fair amount of human energy goes into sorting ourselves out – gathering with those like us to distinguish ourselves from those whom we understand as being unlike us: red state vs. blue states, sheep ranchers vs. cattle ranchers, union vs. management, loggers vs. environmentalists, us vs. them. People seem to like to be with people like themselves.
And yet, the Bible idealizes diversity. The disciples of Jesus included Simon the Zealot, deeply committed to the overthrow of Rome, and Matthew the tax-collector, probably a collaborator with Rome. Paul writes: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The old differences don’t matter. Lutheran scholar David Rhoads argues that the Bible goes beyond accepting diversity, but in fact canonizes it – by including different accounts of the life of Jesus, by including different perspectives, Rhoads claims that diversity is part of the canon, and it seems to me that it is clearly an important component of the communities we are called to form as Christians. It’s not enough to tolerate our differences with each other – we are called to delight in them.
In fact, we are called to create communities of delight – where we receive each other, in our differences, as gifts and blessings. Today’s readings all underscore that theme, although they do it in different ways. The Corinthians reading discusses the diversity of gifts – many gifts, yet one God who gives them.
God gives us gifts, but we often take them for granted, or fail to understand how we can use them for others. Presbyterian author Annie Lamott, who wrote Traveling Mercies, tells in her most recent book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, about a time when she went to the supermarket to buy food for her birthday dinner. As she was checking out at the register, the cashier looked at her receipt and joyfully announced, “Hey! You’ve won a ham!” Although the cashier was excited that Lamott had won, Lamott was anything but enthused. But so as not to disappoint the cashier, Lamott pretended to be excited about her good fortune. As she wheeled her cart out to her car, Lamott debated what to do with that ham, giving serious thought “about chucking the parcel out the window near a field.” In fact, she was so distracted thinking about that ham that she ended up banging her shopping cart into the back of a parked car. As it turned out, the driver of that car was a woman that she knew. Soon they got to talking with each other, and the woman in the car explained, “I don’t have money for gas, or food. I’ve never asked for help from a friend since I got sober, but I’m asking you to help me.”
Right away Lamott reached into her purse and handed the woman a wad of bills. Then she reached into her shopping cart and held up the ham. “Do you and your kids like ham?” she asked. “We love it,” the woman replied. “We love it for every meal.” The ham, which at first seemed to Lamott to be an annoyance and a burden, turned out to be a wonderful gift that blessed both Lamott and her friend, when she gave it away.
Our gifts are not just for our own benefit. But they are also for our benefit. As long as Lamott was thinking about the ham for herself, it was a burden. But as she gave it away, it brought her joy. Some people think that Christian values are just the commonsense values of getting along with other people: being nice, helping others. But if the way of Jesus was such a commonsense, or nice, way, it wouldn’t have gotten him killed. The way of Jesus is not a way that blends unnoticed into the rest of the culture. It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now – Jesus wasn’t nice. He was brilliant, he was assertive, and he made people incredibly uncomfortable in his clarity. He said things that challenged the status quo. And he was assertively non-violent – not passive, but indeed, non-violent. He wasn’t about being nice. On the other hand, he was about joy, and connections, and that which is most real in life. And he touched people where they most needed his care or his challenge. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is tomorrow, he challenged people by forcing them to face the impact of their assumptions and actions. He challenged people to accept the “other in their midst” -- the persons whose conditions or choices left them on the margins.
Jesus lived zestfully, and in the delight of God. We heard last week about his own experience of God’s delight in him, and throughout the Gospels, it is made clear that he not only loved people abstractly, but delighted in them as well.
How perfect that his first miracle should have taken place at a wedding! Because we really miss the point about both gifts and community if we just receive the teaching on gifts as some kind of moralizing lecture on thinking of others before yourself.
Two passages this morning allude to weddings, and it’s fitting that they do, because the love of God for God’s people is one of delight and joy. And the community that God calls us to is one of mutuality, delight and joy, and it’s not described by a model of duty, but by the model of married love at its best, which is a chosen community – it is making ourselves one with someone who is different than ourselves, and different in ways that both challenge and delight us. By the way, as I discuss differences here, I am not making some subtle case for heterosexuality. The differences between us as persons are much more varied and substantive than gender.
When we join together in a marriage relationship, we are choosing to make a strength of our differences with someone else. I remember when Carl and I were in premarital counseling, we were told that the things that most attracted us to each other would become the things that most frustrate us with one another. I have spoken with many couples in the 25 years since we first heard that, and again and again it has been validated. The differences between us can lead to both delight and challenge. And it is how we choose to live with each other and those differences on a day-to-day basis that makes our marriage either the deepest joy or deepest frustration in our human relationships.
And that is true in Christian community as well. In the community of the Church, we are choosing to make common cause with people we might be very different from, and with whom we might disagree strongly about many things. But we are choosing to delight in those differences, and let them challenge us to growth. And yet, it can be difficult, because the culture has always tended to polarize around differences, and we are choosing to build unity where there is not uniformity or unanimity. We are choosing to recognize in people with whom we might disagree that they are made in the image of the God we worship. We are choosing to find in our differences not something that challenges our unity, but something that undergirds it. Like the best marriages who find in the differences between two people a way to support and accommodate one another.
Don’t get me wrong – I like agreement as much as the next person, and I, too, find conflict difficult. But I have learned that conflict is a natural, normal and inevitable part of church life, just like in family life, and that what makes a church healthy is not the absence of conflict, but how we deal with conflict. When we pretend it doesn’t exist, we miss an opportunity to grow. When we deny conflict, we are choosing not to be authentic with one another. When we avoid the intimacy of authentic difference to avoid conflict, we avoid the richness of life in community.
As Presbyterians, our polity – that is, the way we do things and the theological reasons for the way we do things – our polity teaches us that we need each other in order to discern how God is leading us. We have to assume that God’s voice doesn’t only come in the voices that agree with ours, but in the voices that disagree with ours, too. And so if we find ourselves in a meeting, and we’re the only one who seems to feel a certain way, but we feel strongly – then the faithful thing to do is to speak in love, and speak honestly, and to share from our hearts. Maybe we are bearing a word from God that needs to be in the discussion. Maybe our insight will change the outcome. Or maybe the process will prove to be important.
The point is, we shouldn’t regard our differences or disagreements as harmful things, but as part of the work and deep joy of being community with one another. And we shouldn’t seek only to be on committees or in groups with people who see things our way – the way God enlarges our views is often by bringing someone to us who brings a different perspective.
And the best marriages, like the best Christian communities, find that the love which they have for one another naturally multiplies into love for others. Real love always ends up reaching out. So the strength of our inner relationship, and our relationship with God, is always shown not only in our own private relationships, but in the way we reach outside of ourselves to others. Strong families reach out to others and extend hospitality. Strong churches reach outside of themselves in mission. And strong nations find ways to live at peace with other nations, reaching out to help them grow healthy and strong, and listening to their perspective in the world community because we know that ours is not the only voice that counts. Life is connected -- the center of what it means to live in Christian community is that we are connected to other people in God, and that life is connected to both our most private relationships, such as our marriage & family, and our most public relationships – the relationship among our nation and other nations in the world.
This is of the essence of Christian community – that we become together something that we could never be on our own, and by becoming one with people who are profoundly other than ourselves, we become ourselves. And by being real with each other, we form bonds that are stronger than our natural affinities and can reach beyond ourselves, our church and our country, to build bonds of peace that can last forever. But we don’t have forever. Let me close with something Dr. King said about that which he wrote before we had developed the habit of inclusive language. He said: We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. Amen.
I was watching the Weather Channel yesterday, and they were advertising a story about Hawaii, titled “The 50th State”. But I realized later, that’s only partially correct. In an informal count, yes, there are 50 states in the United States. But actually, there are 46. While Wisconsin, Hawaii, and 44 others are states, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and the one where I was born and raised: Pennsylvanaia, are actually commonwealths. The word commonwealth dates from the 15th century, and describes a political association created for the good of all its members – as opposed to a nation or state which only protects the interests of a portion of its citizens. A commonwealth is an “all for one and one for all” kind of place.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is largely about Christian community, which is arguably also an “all for one and one for all” kind of enterprise – that is, each person is important, and the gathered persons, the community, is recognized also as having a life and importance. The city of Corinth was known for its cosmopolitan culture, its decadence, wealth, sexuality and violence. Aside from the issue of size, New York and LA might be modern day equivalents. Paul was writing to the Corinthians, teaching them how to create and maintain a distinctively Christian culture within a city whose values were otherwise. The church at Corinth included a diverse group – Gentiles and Jews, rich and poor, former slaves and society leaders. And then, as now, diversity was a challenge. And then, as now, figuring out what makes Christian community distinctive from the surrounding culture was a challenge.
Starting with the diversity issue – it seems to be a natural human trait to gather with folks who are like ourselves. And so a fair amount of human energy goes into sorting ourselves out – gathering with those like us to distinguish ourselves from those whom we understand as being unlike us: red state vs. blue states, sheep ranchers vs. cattle ranchers, union vs. management, loggers vs. environmentalists, us vs. them. People seem to like to be with people like themselves.
And yet, the Bible idealizes diversity. The disciples of Jesus included Simon the Zealot, deeply committed to the overthrow of Rome, and Matthew the tax-collector, probably a collaborator with Rome. Paul writes: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The old differences don’t matter. Lutheran scholar David Rhoads argues that the Bible goes beyond accepting diversity, but in fact canonizes it – by including different accounts of the life of Jesus, by including different perspectives, Rhoads claims that diversity is part of the canon, and it seems to me that it is clearly an important component of the communities we are called to form as Christians. It’s not enough to tolerate our differences with each other – we are called to delight in them.
In fact, we are called to create communities of delight – where we receive each other, in our differences, as gifts and blessings. Today’s readings all underscore that theme, although they do it in different ways. The Corinthians reading discusses the diversity of gifts – many gifts, yet one God who gives them.
God gives us gifts, but we often take them for granted, or fail to understand how we can use them for others. Presbyterian author Annie Lamott, who wrote Traveling Mercies, tells in her most recent book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, about a time when she went to the supermarket to buy food for her birthday dinner. As she was checking out at the register, the cashier looked at her receipt and joyfully announced, “Hey! You’ve won a ham!” Although the cashier was excited that Lamott had won, Lamott was anything but enthused. But so as not to disappoint the cashier, Lamott pretended to be excited about her good fortune. As she wheeled her cart out to her car, Lamott debated what to do with that ham, giving serious thought “about chucking the parcel out the window near a field.” In fact, she was so distracted thinking about that ham that she ended up banging her shopping cart into the back of a parked car. As it turned out, the driver of that car was a woman that she knew. Soon they got to talking with each other, and the woman in the car explained, “I don’t have money for gas, or food. I’ve never asked for help from a friend since I got sober, but I’m asking you to help me.”
Right away Lamott reached into her purse and handed the woman a wad of bills. Then she reached into her shopping cart and held up the ham. “Do you and your kids like ham?” she asked. “We love it,” the woman replied. “We love it for every meal.” The ham, which at first seemed to Lamott to be an annoyance and a burden, turned out to be a wonderful gift that blessed both Lamott and her friend, when she gave it away.
Our gifts are not just for our own benefit. But they are also for our benefit. As long as Lamott was thinking about the ham for herself, it was a burden. But as she gave it away, it brought her joy. Some people think that Christian values are just the commonsense values of getting along with other people: being nice, helping others. But if the way of Jesus was such a commonsense, or nice, way, it wouldn’t have gotten him killed. The way of Jesus is not a way that blends unnoticed into the rest of the culture. It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now – Jesus wasn’t nice. He was brilliant, he was assertive, and he made people incredibly uncomfortable in his clarity. He said things that challenged the status quo. And he was assertively non-violent – not passive, but indeed, non-violent. He wasn’t about being nice. On the other hand, he was about joy, and connections, and that which is most real in life. And he touched people where they most needed his care or his challenge. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is tomorrow, he challenged people by forcing them to face the impact of their assumptions and actions. He challenged people to accept the “other in their midst” -- the persons whose conditions or choices left them on the margins.
Jesus lived zestfully, and in the delight of God. We heard last week about his own experience of God’s delight in him, and throughout the Gospels, it is made clear that he not only loved people abstractly, but delighted in them as well.
How perfect that his first miracle should have taken place at a wedding! Because we really miss the point about both gifts and community if we just receive the teaching on gifts as some kind of moralizing lecture on thinking of others before yourself.
Two passages this morning allude to weddings, and it’s fitting that they do, because the love of God for God’s people is one of delight and joy. And the community that God calls us to is one of mutuality, delight and joy, and it’s not described by a model of duty, but by the model of married love at its best, which is a chosen community – it is making ourselves one with someone who is different than ourselves, and different in ways that both challenge and delight us. By the way, as I discuss differences here, I am not making some subtle case for heterosexuality. The differences between us as persons are much more varied and substantive than gender.
When we join together in a marriage relationship, we are choosing to make a strength of our differences with someone else. I remember when Carl and I were in premarital counseling, we were told that the things that most attracted us to each other would become the things that most frustrate us with one another. I have spoken with many couples in the 25 years since we first heard that, and again and again it has been validated. The differences between us can lead to both delight and challenge. And it is how we choose to live with each other and those differences on a day-to-day basis that makes our marriage either the deepest joy or deepest frustration in our human relationships.
And that is true in Christian community as well. In the community of the Church, we are choosing to make common cause with people we might be very different from, and with whom we might disagree strongly about many things. But we are choosing to delight in those differences, and let them challenge us to growth. And yet, it can be difficult, because the culture has always tended to polarize around differences, and we are choosing to build unity where there is not uniformity or unanimity. We are choosing to recognize in people with whom we might disagree that they are made in the image of the God we worship. We are choosing to find in our differences not something that challenges our unity, but something that undergirds it. Like the best marriages who find in the differences between two people a way to support and accommodate one another.
Don’t get me wrong – I like agreement as much as the next person, and I, too, find conflict difficult. But I have learned that conflict is a natural, normal and inevitable part of church life, just like in family life, and that what makes a church healthy is not the absence of conflict, but how we deal with conflict. When we pretend it doesn’t exist, we miss an opportunity to grow. When we deny conflict, we are choosing not to be authentic with one another. When we avoid the intimacy of authentic difference to avoid conflict, we avoid the richness of life in community.
As Presbyterians, our polity – that is, the way we do things and the theological reasons for the way we do things – our polity teaches us that we need each other in order to discern how God is leading us. We have to assume that God’s voice doesn’t only come in the voices that agree with ours, but in the voices that disagree with ours, too. And so if we find ourselves in a meeting, and we’re the only one who seems to feel a certain way, but we feel strongly – then the faithful thing to do is to speak in love, and speak honestly, and to share from our hearts. Maybe we are bearing a word from God that needs to be in the discussion. Maybe our insight will change the outcome. Or maybe the process will prove to be important.
The point is, we shouldn’t regard our differences or disagreements as harmful things, but as part of the work and deep joy of being community with one another. And we shouldn’t seek only to be on committees or in groups with people who see things our way – the way God enlarges our views is often by bringing someone to us who brings a different perspective.
And the best marriages, like the best Christian communities, find that the love which they have for one another naturally multiplies into love for others. Real love always ends up reaching out. So the strength of our inner relationship, and our relationship with God, is always shown not only in our own private relationships, but in the way we reach outside of ourselves to others. Strong families reach out to others and extend hospitality. Strong churches reach outside of themselves in mission. And strong nations find ways to live at peace with other nations, reaching out to help them grow healthy and strong, and listening to their perspective in the world community because we know that ours is not the only voice that counts. Life is connected -- the center of what it means to live in Christian community is that we are connected to other people in God, and that life is connected to both our most private relationships, such as our marriage & family, and our most public relationships – the relationship among our nation and other nations in the world.
This is of the essence of Christian community – that we become together something that we could never be on our own, and by becoming one with people who are profoundly other than ourselves, we become ourselves. And by being real with each other, we form bonds that are stronger than our natural affinities and can reach beyond ourselves, our church and our country, to build bonds of peace that can last forever. But we don’t have forever. Let me close with something Dr. King said about that which he wrote before we had developed the habit of inclusive language. He said: We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. Amen.