The Center

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

A man was walking across a bridge when he saw another man standing on the edge about to jump. The first man runs over and says, “Don't do it!”

The other man says, “Why not?”

The first man says, “You have so much to live for!”

“Like what?”

“Well, uh, are you religious?

“Yes.”

“Me, too. Are you a Christian or maybe a Buddhist?”

“I'm a Christian.”

“Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Protestant.”

“Me, too. Are you a Lutheran or a Baptist?”

“Baptist.”

“Me, too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”

“Baptist Church of God.”

“Hey, me, too! Are you original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?”

“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“Me, too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”

“Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.”

“Well, then—die, heretic!”

I once had a person ask me, “What is the difference between Catholics and Christians?” And of course I had to explain that Catholics are Christians. The person may have meant “What is the difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism?” But from what I've seen there are a lot of people who were brought up to think that the Roman Catholic Church is actually some type of pagan religion. They have no clue that Catholics and Protestants have much more in common than they have differences. We both recite the Apostles Creed as a summary of our faith. We both believe the Bible is the Word of God. We both practice baptism and celebrate communion. We both believe that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. More to the point we both believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died to save us from our sins and who rose again from the dead.

The differences tend to be things like which doctrines we emphasize and how we interpret the things we both believe. Yes, there are some important differences in other beliefs and practices which I don't want to downplay but when we make too much of them, to people outside the church, and even to some within, we sound like the first man in that joke. Christians have tended to treat other Christians who don't believe or practice in exactly the same way that they do as if they were not really Christians. And, unfortunately, this goes way back.

We see it in our passage from Paul's first letter to the Christians in Corinth. People in the church were joining factions based on which preacher they liked. Some followed Paul; some followed Apollos; some followed Cephas, better known to us as Peter. Peter and Paul we know a lot about. Apollos we first meet in the book of Acts. It says, “Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, arrived in Ephesus. He was an eloquent speaker, well-versed in the scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and with great enthusiasm he spoke and taught accurately the facts about Jesus, although he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak out fearlessly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the way of God to him more accurately.” (Acts 18:24-26) After the married ministry team of Priscilla and Aquila set him straight on baptism, the church sends Apollos to Greece where he turns out to be a real asset in debates about Jesus being the Messiah. Eventually he ends up in Corinth. (Acts 19:1)

So Apollos was a really great preacher. Paul was the “apostle to the Gentiles.” (Romans 11:13) And Peter was one of the twelve disciples who lived with and was taught by Jesus for 3½ years. Each had their appeal. And no doubt each was better at some things than others. But Paul is, well, appalled to find that cliques are developing in the church, depending on people's personal preferences and possibly, their ultimate allegiances to certain leaders. This he wants to nip in the bud.

How does he do it? By pointing out that Jesus is their savior, not various church leaders. It was Jesus who was crucified for us, not Paul or the others. They all had a part to play in the life of the church but as Paul puts it, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused it to grow.” (1 Corinthians 3:6) Our faith is about what God has done in Christ and is doing through his Spirit. When Christians get too far from God, they go off course.

You have probably heard me use this analogy before but please indulge me. Our beliefs and behaviors are like a bicycle wheel. It consists of a hub, the spokes and the tire.

The hub is essential. Without that, you are not going anywhere. And not only is the hub essential, it has to be in the center of the wheel. If not, your ride will be eccentric and you'll wobble and even fall a lot.

The spokes are important but not actually essential. You can lose one or two of them and the bike will still operate fairly well. Spokes don't often break or need to be replaced but it can happen. What's important is that they are connected to the hub. They in turn are connected to the rest of the wheel.

The tire is where the wheel makes contact with the earth. The tire's purpose is to make the trip smooth. Tires not only can be replaced they inevitably have to be from time to time because they get worn out.

So it is with what we believe and what we do. Some things are essential and need to be kept central. Some things are important but not, strictly speaking, essential. They can be changed but rarely. And some things are neither. They have to be changed periodically.

For example, the Eucharist is an essential practice of the church. Jesus tells us to do it in remembrance of him. The Presbyterian church I grew up in did it 4 times a year. We do it every Sunday. But I understand that until the 1970s Lutherans and Episcopalians usually did it only once a month. Everyone agrees it is essential to do it. But not how often to do it. It is an important part of worship but it is not essential we do it every time we worship. As to how we do it...well, the Presbyterians used grape juice. We offer grape juice as an option. I can't use wine in the jail, so I use grape juice. We also give gluten-free wafers to those who are allergic. And during the pandemic we had to make some changes in how we distributed the elements. Some things, which are neither essential nor important, we can and do change because of circumstances.

So what is the hub, the essential center of Christianity? Jesus—who he is, what he has done for us and is doing in us and how we should respond. You can't remove Jesus Christ from the center of our faith and get very far. He is God's son, who became a human, died to save us and rose from the dead to give us his eternal life. Through his Spirit he is restoring the image of God in which we were created but which has been distorted and buried under our sins, our destructive and self-destructive habits of thinking, speaking and acting. On the cross he saved us from the penalty of sin. Through the Spirit's action we are being saved from the power of sin in our lives. When Jesus returns we will be saved from the very presence of sin and the suffering it causes.

What should be our response be to what God has done and is doing out of his great love for us? Love him back. And because he loves everyone, we are to love them too. How we express that love can vary from person to person and from situation to situation but we must always do everything in love, to help and not to harm.

Those are the essentials in a nutshell.

This is not to say there aren't other very important issues we need to deal with but we must not confuse them with the essentials. Nor must we separate them from the essentials. Everything radiates from the hub.

To switch the metaphor, think about triage, the process by which doctors in the ER decide whom to treat first when they are dealing with mass casualties. This idea came from battlefield medicine. Basically your first priority is those whose injuries are a matter of life or death. If you don't treat them now, they will die. Your next priority is those where the issue is not whether they will live but whether timely care will improve the quality of that life. Lastly you deal with those whose injuries or illnesses do not threaten their life or their future quality of life. That's why when there's a major accident on US-1, the ER treats those victims ahead of you and your sniffles.

Sadly there are a lot of people who do not think in terms of what's essential, what's important and what is neither. And so some people take issues that are rarely or never mentioned in scripture and make them deal-breakers when it comes to whether someone is a Christian of not. And we have people who confuse certain political issues with theological ones. “If you don't vote my way on these issues, then, die, heretic!”

Part of the problem is one my college professor Don Lake made me aware of. For a lot of people, the elements of their faith and practice are not like a wheel but like links in a chain. And of course a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So they defend everything fiercely. They cannot concede a single thing or compromise on anything. Unfortunately, when they do discover a fatal flaw in one of the links, their whole faith is in danger of being shattered.

Sadly I know gays who grew up in churches where they were told that what they were was irredeemably evil and who finally left all belief in Christ behind. This is an important issue but seeing as neither the Ten Commandments nor Jesus say anything about it, and out of 31,000 verses in the Bible it is only mentioned 7 times, it can hardly be considered essential. And gays are not the only casualties of confusing this issue with the essentials. Westboro Baptist Church made it so central that when spokesperson Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of founder Fred Phelps, came to have serious doubts, she not only left that church but lost her faith in God. She lost it because she was taught to elevate an non-essential issue over the core belief in a God who commands us to love everyone.

Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35) This is so essential that Jesus says it 3 times in these two verses alone and 2 more times in this long speech given the night he was betrayed. In fact the words “love one another” appear 14 times in the New Testament alone. (John 13:34-35; 15:12, 17; Romans 12:10; 13:8; 1 Thessalonians 3:12; 4:9-10; 1 Peter 1:22; 4:8; 1 John 3:11, 23; 4:7, 11-12; 2 John 1:5) In addition we are told to honor one another, welcome one another, have fellowship with one another, live in harmony with one another, be kind to one another, forgive one another, bear one another's burdens, comfort one another, care for one another, pray for one another, build one another up, sing with one another, stir one another up to love and good works, serve one another, submit to one another, not to speak against one another, nor are we to judge one another. And lest we think this only applies to fellow Christians, Jesus tells us that we are even to love our enemies. (Matthew 5:44-45; Luke 6:27-28)

Which makes sense because God is love. (1 John 4:8) God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is the love relationship at the center of reality. We are most like God—we most fully reflect his image—when we act in love towards one another.

And we have an illustration of how we should treat other Christians who are different from us. In Mark we read, “John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.' But Jesus said, 'Do not stop him, because no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to say anything bad about me. For whoever is not against us is for us.'” (Mark 9:38-40) This is Jesus speaking. And he says not to stop someone working in parallel with him and in Jesus' name. And apparently the guy was effective at healing, which means he believed in Jesus. In Acts 19 we learn what happens when people who don't believe in Jesus try this. It not only doesn't work; it ends disastrously. (Acts 19:13-16)

So Jesus doesn't want us trying to stop other Christians from preaching the gospel and displaying God's love through helping others. Because he didn't say that people would know we are his followers by the fact that we agreed with one another on everything; he said that the world would recognize his followers by their love for one another.

Today society feels that being a member of a church is no longer considered an essential part of being a good person or citizen. So we have lost a lot of people who were never that committed to the faith in the first place. The real scandal is that we lose people who were committed but who just gave up on the church because it was focusing on things that were not essential and not really putting Jesus at the center of what we believe and do. Jesus criticized the Pharisees for so concentrating on minutiae in the Bible that they were neglecting things like justice and the love of God. (Luke 11:42) Have we been guilty of that?

22 years ago when I was only Lay Pastoral Leader of St. Francis, Carl Kaltreider who was Interim Pastor of Lord of the Seas approached me and proposed that our two churches start working together. It began with doing mid-week Lenten services and the Easter Sunrise service together. 11 years ago I was asked to become Interim Pastor at Lord of the Seas in addition to being Priest in Charge at St. Francis. Around 5 years ago people like Jayne and Chuck McCormick, Arnie Steinmetz, Steve and Bobbie Wanta and others brought up the idea of doing combined services during the off-season. Now because of my health this arrangement has been extended till my retirement. Pastor Kaltreider died in 2019 and Chuck and Arnie just last year. I really hope that what they achieved in bringing these two parts of the body of Christ together doesn't die. I know it is not in my hands. It is in God's. But I'm grateful to have been a part of this display of the love that Jesus commanded us to have for one another and I hope it somehow continues.