We have a baptism here today, and Nathalie will be
brought up as a Christian and taught the Christian faith. In fact we are all of us still learning, so I
invite the baptism party here to eavesdrop on an introduction to our new
learning series. We are going to spend seven Sundays, starting in June,
learning what the apostle Paul said in his letter to the Christians of
Paul wrote a huge amount of the New Testament. But
he was not one of the original twelve disciples who went around with Jesus. His
crucial contact with Christians came later was when he was persecuting them. He
watched a young man giving a good impression of the behaviour you might expect
of Jesus, and it had an effect on him.
The man he saw was called Stephen, and like Jesus he
had annoyed the authorities by speaking the truth---often a dangerous thing to
do. So Stephen was taken outside the city walls and executed by stoning. It was
a way of intimidating Stephen’s friends.
Like Jesus, Stephen prayed aloud for his killers to
be forgiven. Even as the stones were
crashing on his head. Paul was not used to this kind of behaviour, and he was
so impressed that he became a disciple himself.
Paul had a good view of the killing because he had
been holding the coats of the chief witnesses to this sorry event. He was
therefore implicated in the killing.
God often chooses people with blood on their hands, like the well-known
murderers Moses and David, to lead his people. We should never write anyone
off.
Because if even murderers can reform, what excuse
have we to write off that awful person next door? And how can we justify
maintaining that the dark parts of our past lives rule us out from getting
involved with God’s people?
Some people say that Paul was just a dry theology
lecturer. Yet the book of Acts, chapter 20, shows light on a different side of
him. It describes an emotional parting scene after a brief meeting he had had
with a group of Christian disciples from
“When he had spoken, he knelt down with all of them
and prayed. They all wept as they
embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they
would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.” I know
from personal experience, people don’t behave like that to university teachers.
We are going to concentrate today on Paul’s first
letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3. But ask yourself this: - why does anybody
bother with deep thinkers like Paul? After all, we are moved by emotion (that’s
why it’s called emotion; e-motion); by
joy, love, and fun, not by theology.
But imagine when we were children; do you remember
being taken by car or coach for an outing, perhaps to the beach for the day?
When we got there, we all had a joyful time and there were happy memories
afterwards, and we’ve still got some of the more embarrassing snapshots locked
away where our own kids can’t find them.
For that day out to be successful, somebody had first to do some serious
thinking.
A safe car must have been designed and built. The road itself had to be a safe highway with
well-designed junctions, signposts and traffic lights. The driver must have passed his test, bought
the car, got it serviced, filled the tank, learned the highway code, and looked
at a map. So it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Get any of this stuff wrong, and
the children could be in tears before the end of the day.
Yes, emotion is the driving force that moves the
human spirit. But if we are to experience the full joy of the Christian life,
we’ll find it easier with a simple framework of beliefs. Paul’s teaching made sure that his hearers’
faith wouldn’t wobble when the going got tough. Which it soon did.
At first glance, one bit of today’s passage (verses
18 and 19) do not seem to support what I have just said at all. Paul seems at
first sight to be against thinking, on principle. He says this:
“ Do not
deceive yourselves. If any of you thinks
he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a fool, so that he
may become wise. For the wisdom of this
world is foolishness in God’s sight.” This passage has been used to say it is a
waste of time even to TRY to think about our faith.
Yet nobody who examines Paul’s letters--- any of
them--- can accuse him of avoiding rational argument. His purpose in talking
about human wisdom was only to stress that we cannot get right with God in the
first place by our own cleverness; we need to ask for God’s help.
Our brains are not powerful enough to understand the
mind of God. It’s the same reason why
the average dog ---yours may be different---the average dog never reads the
Financial Times. Their brains simply aren’t up to it. It’s not just that they
prefer the Sun.
And God does not give privileged access to the
brainy. The gospel is for everyone. The genius, the bright, the dim, the
brain-damaged at birth.
Look at Paul’s letters; notice he relies a lot on
the word “Therefore”. This word makes no sense whatever, in any sentence,
except when used to link together two stages of a reasoned argument. It means,
“Because of what I have explained in the previous chapter, we can go on to
say….”.
Looking at Paul’s epistle to the Romans, “Therefore”
is the first word in chapter 5, the first word in chapter 8, and the first word
in chapter 12. It occurs in lots of
other places too.
The whole book is a reasoned argument. Religion does
not banish reason; it complements reason.
Now let’s go to the main part of today’s passage in
1 Corinthians. There had been a little local disagreement among the Christians
in
“I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it
grow”. Just like Paul Swann and Ashley here, isn’t it? God likes teams. We
needn’t shoot either of them.
Paul compares building up a church congregation to
putting up an ordinary building. Verse 10, “By the grace God has given
me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder”.
Anyone coming to Paul’s letters for the first time
should know that when he talks about a church, he means the people, the
congregation, the community; and NOT the stonework; and when he talks about
laying foundations, he means the teaching the congregation receives, not the
concrete.
Why? Because the teaching determines whether the
church is one you or I might want to belong to. Have you ever had an awful
experience at a strange church?
One where nobody welcomes you, where all eleven
people are as old as me, nobody makes eye contact, there are no midweek
meetings, nobody stays for coffee, they dash straight out for their real
enthusiasm, the Sunday Times, instead? It’s the teaching that’s gone wrong; and
by teaching I mean not just the sermons, but the conversation too, insofar as
there is any.
Hold on, someone here may say, “Frankly we don’t
really fancy a whole load of boring teaching. What we want is joy and fun.
Isn’t teaching the same as doctrine? And isn’t doctrine really just DOGMA? I
don’t want to be known as a dogmatic type”.
What matters of course is whether the teaching is
true.
Paul never insists that we all follow some weird
kind of heavenly National Curriculum. He
never sets exams, he never writes a creed. He simply wants us to have the right
priorities in life.
This room is sometimes so full ---not at Bank
Holiday perhaps---so full that we have to queue a long time for coffee and
someone spills it down our socks. We feel we are doing fine. That’s surely how
it’s meant to be. Whereas if we reach for a calculator, we find we need five
buildings this big to accommodate even 1% of the population of this city. Can
God be content with that?
Paul lost sleep over all those people in
Mediterranean cities like Ephesus and Corinth and Rome and Philippi and
Colossae and Thessalonica, who had never heard of Jesus.
Verse 12: 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.
Here, the gold and silver and hay and straw refer to
the kind of teaching, and the meaning of fire is less certain, but it could
mean the stiff tests that the congregation’s members may one day have to
undergo. In
Despite all that stuff about foundations, the New
Testament never encourages the idea that church buildings are important, even
if they seem to us sensitive people to have a special atmosphere because they
have been hallowed by centuries of prayer. It is people who are important. We
must never forget it.
You must have met people who are natural worriers.
They say, if we all have the same
teaching, we all read Paul, won’t
we all come out of the sausage machine the same? Won’t we all be clones?
Fortunately God has given us different personalities
and backgrounds and gifts. The Christian life as demonstrated by one person
will be very different from that lived by another. Sadly, I shall never end up
being mistaken for Wendy Taylor.
Paul’s letters aren’t JUST about doctrine anyway. In
his letter to the Romans, the first eleven chapters are solid doctrine; the
remainder are about the behaviour that should follow.
Once when I was a student there was a union debate.
The atheists and agnostics said, “Our generation is going to dump Christian
doctrine, but don’t worry, we will keep the Christian morality”.
The Christian students replied, “It just won’t
work. If the Christian doctrine goes,
the morality will go out the window a generation later, and we will have
chaos”. Fifty years later it has happened. Broken
The Christian who has learned some doctrine has
something to hold onto. Because sometimes life is tough, mornings are
grey. The bills come in faster than
usual, that vital relationship we depend on is frayed, the doctor tells us
things we don’t want to know, a loved one has just died, or we are given a
P45.
Yet the same God who made the sea and sky and keeps
the meteorites rushing around, (we wouldn’t be here at all without
meterorites), he is the same God gave us his only Son, so that all who believe
in Him might have eternal life.
I have talked about emotion, because it is the
driving force of the human spirit. But
Jesus does not want us to come to him simply and solely in order to get a bit
of a high. Nor should we tempt others that way.
Millions get their feel-good feeling already in
their own way, through sport, heavy rock, job satisfaction, pep pills. Jeremy Clarkson gets it from fast cars. I’ve
known people get it from cataloguing dead beetles.
But such activities are for this life only. They
bring no hope to those standing at the graveside on a cold January day. The
best some people’s friends will ever say at the funeral is “he had a good
innings, you know, he was 84”.
To conclude, Paul laid the groundwork in his letters
to enable Christians to recognise what should come first in their lives. As a
result a universal symbol of the Christian faith has emerged. And it is not a smiley face.
Nor is it a mountain, as it might have been if the
moral teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had been the crux of
Christian teaching. The universally recognised symbol of Christianity is a
cross; no matter whether it’s a bare Protestant one showing that Christ is
risen, or an elaborate Catholic one evoking thoughts of His suffering.
Handel’s Messiah brings to mind the phrase “He was despised and rejected, a man of
sorrows, and acquainted with grief”.
Jesus did what he had to, unpleasant though it was,
for our sakes, that we might have life and joy.
Paul’s role was much easier---to tell others what Jesus had done, and
explain why; explain how it fitted in with all that had happened before. In the coming weeks, starting in June, we
shall be looking at what he said to his friends in
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