Who's in Charge?

(Note: Long time readers may get a sense of deja vu with this sermon. The fact is, with surgery and a visit from the bishop on my schedule this week, I  didn't have time to do a fully original sermon. So I reached back into my archive and rewrote and updated an older homily. It still has a lot to say, even many years later.)

The scriptures referred to are 1 Corinthians 1:10-18.

Want to see a church's growth explode? Put a charismatic preacher in the pulpit and give him a lot of power in running the church. Want to see that church die? Watch him die or retire or get into a huge scandal. And we have seen that over and over again. Many evangelical leaders—Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart, among others—have had to step down and their churches and ministries suffered because they were built around their personalities. Sometimes a church tries to replace a charismatic preacher with someone else, as the Crystal Cathedral did when Robert Schuller retired and was succeeded briefly by his oldest son. He wasn't as popular as his father and was removed. The TV ministry and megachurch tried using a series of preachers and eventually elevated Schuller's daughter to senior pastor. The church went into bankruptcy and is now a Roman Catholic church. The point is that we should heed what Isaiah said: “Stop trusting in human beings, whose life's breath in in their nostrils. For why should they be given special consideration?” (Isaiah 2:22)

The impulse to give a single person special consideration, especially a religious leader, is a very old human trait. And unfortunately it leads to cults. There are many signs of a cult but they all coalesce around a charismatic leader. His personal impact upon people is so great that they cease to question him no matter how outrageous his ideas or his actions get. He can even start to contradict what Christ said, because, after all, if you are a cult leader Jesus is your ultimate rival. You have to depose him because Jesus closes off so many unethical avenues that make it really inconvenient if you wish to sleep with followers or become wealthy off of them. And so the word of God becomes whatever the cult leader says, not what the Bible clearly states. In the worst case scenario the followers of a David Koresh or a Jim Jones let them get away with more and more until they precipitate a disaster. If they are lucky, it will only split the church and not end up in a massacre.

In today's passage from First Corinthians Paul is dealing with a problem that is in danger of splitting that church. Personality cults are developing. Some people are identifying themselves as belonging to Paul or to Cephas or to Apollos or to Christ. They haven't yet broken away from the church but they are pulling it apart. The Greek word that Paul uses for divisions, schismata, literally refers to tears in a garment. The church at Corinth is starting to look like a shredded shirt.

Who were the leaders who were the foci of these divisions? One was Cephas. That's the Aramaic word for “rock,” the nickname Jesus gave Simon. He was the foremost of the original 12 apostles, so it is natural that some Christians would feel that Peter had primacy. However, Paul had founded the church in Corinth and so many felt loyal to him. Apollos, as we learn in Acts 18, was a gifted preacher with a vast knowledge of scripture. He had visited Corinth after Paul and because of his eloquence, some preferred him.

And then there was the group who claimed they were the true followers of Christ. Why does Paul include them among the schismatics? Perhaps, like so many who say they belong to Christ, they had undergone that subtle shift where what they really meant was that Christ belonged to them. In other words, instead of seeking to be on God's side, they were actually insisting that God had chosen their side. It's a common fallacy that first we decide the issues and then God signs on. It may not occur to us that God disagrees with us or even that some issue we have elevated to supreme importance is of no interest whatsoever to God.

Through his entire missionary career, Paul preached unity. Usually, the problem was between those who came to Christ from Judaism and those who came from Gentile backgrounds. But here the situation is more complicated. People are not clinging to what they were before they became Christians; they are fighting about what form of Christianity is best.

Now how do we know that this was about more than just a preference for the preaching styles of these leaders? For one thing, we have no evidence that Peter ever visited Corinth, nor, of course, had Jesus. Those parties who said they belonged to Cephas or to Christ had not experienced them in the flesh and so their allegiance, like the others, must be to what they perceived was their take on the gospel. We still see that today. What distinguishes the preachers people follow is not just their personal charisma but also what they tend to emphasize.

I don't watch much religious TV but you only have to to catch a few minutes while channel surfing to know that one preacher always seems to be talking about the End Times; another concentrates on people's feelings; one pushes hot button issues on sexuality; another can't stop talking about creationism. Each has a following as witnessed by the millions of dollars they raise to keep their shows on the air. All would say they believe the Bible and I bet each would be able to subscribe to that basic summary of Biblical truths, the Apostle's Creed. But that core gets lost in the trappings of their personal styles and all the other issues they flog.

Paul gets right to the point. He doesn't criticize his rivals. He uses himself as the example. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” Drop the word “Paul” and insert any Christian leader—Joel Olsteen, T.D. Jakes, Kirk Cameron, N. T. Wright, or even C.S. Lewis—and the sentence becomes a good way to see if we are usurping Christ and replacing him with one of his servants. No matter how holy they are, they didn't die on the cross for us. We must always be careful lest we fall into idolatry. When we say “Jesus is Lord,” it means nobody else can be. We must always be aware of and respect this vital distinction.

It is also an interesting exercise to insert an issue in place of Paul's name in those two questions and ask if we are enthroning it above our Lord. Were you baptized into the name of the pro-life movement or the pro-choice movement or family values or gay marriage or a particular stance on war? Of course not. It's not that these aren't important issues but they are not essential to being a Christian. Anyone who thinks differently is buying into the heresy C. S. Lewis calls “Christianity and _____.” If your pet cause is as important as your loyalty to Christ, be careful that it doesn't eventually come to supplant your faith or that your faith doesn't become merely an extension of your cause. We should derive our ethics from following Jesus Christ, our incarnate, crucified and risen Lord. Our following Jesus should not be dependent on whether he endorses our causes. Otherwise a, say, vegan may discover that the Passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples involved eating lamb and then have to choose between his deity and his diet.

The problem even occurs when the issues are matters of theology. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches split over the use of icons. Other divisions in the church have taken place over whether baptism should be by immersion or pouring, whether the bread and wine used in communion physically become Jesus' body and blood or not, whether Jesus had two natures, divine and human, or just one, whether we have free will or not, who could interpret the Bible and how a church should be organized. All of these were important issues in their day. Some are still important issues. But we should not let them get between us and God, nor between us and our fellow Christians.

When I was actively working as a nurse, I didn't bring up religion unless my patient did and I didn't argue religious issues with them. Yet there was this woman I had been treating for years and we liked each other. She had a church which met in her house. And this one time, she started denouncing my denomination because it had a national headquarters. Aside the fact that all national churches, as well as nationwide organizations and companies, do as well, it's hard to understand how they could coordinate things otherwise. Anyway, it really bugged her. And finally I said, “My salvation doesn't depend on my church or anything other than Jesus: who he is, what he did for me on the cross and how I respond.” The issue never came up again.

I like to think that she knew her scripture well enough to recognize in what I said an echo of what Paul says here: that we should be wary of nullifying the power of the cross. On the cross Jesus took upon himself the full impact of the evil we have unleashed on the world by our sin, like our arrogant insistence that we are always right and to hell with anyone who doesn't agree with us.

What put Jesus on the cross was people worried about everything other than the crucial question of who he is. The leaders of his day didn't think twice about whether he might be the Messiah. Despite having no right under Roman law to execute Jesus, the religious authorities didn't let that stop them from finding a way to silence him for speaking inconvenient truths to power. Pilate could find no fault with Jesus but was too much a politician to stand up to the crowd or even to his own emperor to spare an innocent man. The soldiers who nailed him to the cross were just following orders. The crowds were just piling on a man already condemned by the authorities and for whom they were not willing to stick out their necks. Jesus was crucified because everyone thought that something else was more important than he was. How often do we recrucify him over our own fiercely held, terribly important agendas?

Jesus didn't say that the world will know we are his disciples in that we agree with one another on everything but rather by how we love one another. And we are to love each other as he loves us, with real self-sacrifice. What we do to the least of his siblings we do to Jesus. Should we snub each other, vilify each other, judge each other because we like this person or that, or hold to this opinion or another? Because Christians who happen to be Nazarenes and Pentecostals and Southern Baptists and Lutherans and Methodists and Episcopalians and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Messianic Jews and Presbyterians and fundamentalists and United Church of Christ and Moravians and Amish and Evangelicals disagree on a lot of issues. Do you think God's going to give us a pop quiz on all these things at the pearly gates? Do you think he will only admit those who are 100% in agreement with him on absolutely everything? If so, get out your handbaskets; we're all of us in for a hot time.

By the way, are you taken aback by the range of groups on that list? Are you offended by the inclusion of some of them? Tough. They are all part of the family. You don't have to agree with them; you don't have to vote like them; but you do have to love them. And let us be more concerned about our following Jesus than about how others are doing it. A sure way to stumble is to take your eyes off the leader's path. Peter forgot that once and asked the risen Christ what would ultimately happen to the one called the beloved disciple. To which Jesus replied, “What is that to you? You follow me.”