(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Jan 17, 2016, Epiphany II)
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Worshiping Ourselves
Today we are transported by scripture to a colorful moment in history: the city of Corinth, just years after Jesus walked the earth. If Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is anything to go by, the community of Christ-followers there was a motley crew: rich, poor, slave, free, man, woman, Greek, Jew. And they were all bound together by a single tie: the simplest and probably the oldest confession of any follower of Christ, “Jesus is Lord.”
But apparently this tie that had bound them together had frayed to its last fiber. Paul’s letter indicates that when the Corinthians gathered together—for a meal, for worship—they congregated in cliques. The wealthy would eat well, while those in want nibbled at what little they had. The Greeks and Jews eyed one another warily, reading condescension and arrogance in each other’s expressions.
So, wanting to return the Corinthians to the heart of their faith, to the Spirit that bound them together in the first place, Paul opens with a little Spirituality 101.
“Now concerning the spiritual,”[1] Paul begins. In the everyday Greek of Paul’s world, the word for “spirit” usually meant something much more literal: “wind” or “breath”—that flow of air that you cannot see with your eyes. Paul then reminds the Corinthians that before the Spirit had brought them together, they had been enticed and led astray by speechless “idols”—which in everyday Greek meant simply “images,” what you can see with your eyes.
“Idols,” as our Bibles translate it, or “images”—it might seem like there’s a big difference between the two translations. But actually the two are closer than they might first appear: both have to do with how we see the world. An idol is just a special kind of image. It is an image that defines how we see the world. If money is our idol, then we see the world in dollar signs. If power is our idol, then we see the world in muscle and machinery and other means of control. If lust is our idol, then we see the world in terms of gratification. So in a way, an idol is nothing more than a reflection of ourselves, a mirror image of our values. Which means that when we worship our idols, whatever they may be, we are actually worshiping ourselves. We are actually worshiping a world where we are the center of gravity, where everything aligns itself according to our priorities.
To summarize, then, Paul tells the Corinthians, “You used to care only about images, idols. You used to care only about yourselves, how you saw the world. But now that you’re Christ-followers, you know that there is more to life than just what you see: you know that what really matters is the invisible wind and breath that animates the life of the world, that gives life not only to you but to others.” It is a gentle reprimand: “While your lips have been confessing, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ your lives have been professing that you are lord. So, look outside yourselves. Look for the Spirit of Christ in each other, especially in those who are different from you, be they Greek or Jew, rich or poor.”
Predictable Guest Lists
And Endless Reruns
In truth, the Corinthians were just living the way that most of us do. Look at any community around you: local theater gatherings, book clubs, fitness groups, quilting circles…any one of these tends “to attract like-minded people”—“the same way most churches do.”[2] In other words, for most communities, there is an unspoken rule: you can trust folks who look like you do, who think like you do, who will reciprocate your thoughts. They see the same images as you. We might even say, they worship the same idols.
Who among us hasn’t attended a new group and felt a wave of relief upon meeting someone else who sees things like we do?
And yet…if life is restricted to a guest list of people who look, talk, and think like us, then life would be little more than an endless rerun of the same old show. And as much as we might enjoy a good rerun, what we ultimately desire is a newness that will tease us out of the shells into which we so often retreat at the slightest whiff of difference. What we ultimately desire is that the Spirit that catches hold of us in unique and passionate ways, will also show itself in others and draw us out of our personal reruns into a beautiful new story.
The Spirit “Works” in Different Ways
Which is exactly what happens to a group of mice in one of my favorite childhood stories, Frederick, by Leo Lionni. The story begins with a family of five field mice who are preparing for the winter. They go out into the meadow and gather “corn and nuts and wheat and straw.”[3] And yet, on each page, there is one mouse who is not working: Frederick. He sits off in the corner pensively, his eyelids only half-raised. The rest of his family notice this difference and ask, “Frederick, why don’t you work?”[4] He responds, “I do work. I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days. … I gather colors…[f]or winter is gray. … I am gathering words. For the winter days are long and many, and we’ll run out of things to say.”[5] And true enough, winter comes, and after the mice have finished off their reserve of food and their gossip, they are cold and despondent. So Frederick steps forward, tells them to close their eyes, and then begins poetically to weave words together: “Now I send you the rays of the sun,” he says. “Do you feel their golden glow?” And sure enough, the other mice begin to feel warmer. Is it magic? Then Frederick offers a vivid description of the meadow on a summer’s day. And by this wonderful vision, the other mice are transported into a much more enjoyable place than their cold, wintry den.[6]
The one mouse who does not see the world the way the others do, in whom the Spirit “work[s]” in a different way, with whom the others could not really relate in an easy, straightforward manner—this different mouse is not the problem. If anything, he is the one through whom the others encounter the Spirit, which gives them new life when their rerun lives had run out.
“The Same Second Wind”
The temptation in church, as in life, is to restrict the guest list to mice who work like we do—excuse me, to people who see the way that we do, who make sense of things using the same images and idols. It becomes a paradox: we seek safety and certainty for our lives, but in the process we lose life itself because we shut out newness and difference and growth. But the word of Paul to the Corinthians is the good news that, ultimately, we do not determine the guest list. God does. The one Spirit—the one holy breath and wind—sweeps over the face of our world and invites everyone into life.[7] The one Spirit animates us all, each with different gifts, different callings, different ways of living. And the gospel of this Spirit is that it makes life better for everyone, or as Paul says, it works to the “common good” (1 Cor 12:7).
Perhaps it’s comparable to a brass quintet. Ultimately, what makes the sound is one and the same thing: human breath. And yet that one thing sounds differently in different instruments, resulting in an incomparable blend of tones, the harmony of which is unlike anything we would hear from one single instrument alone. Or perhaps it could be compared to a sports team playing at the height of its game. On the team, you’ve got the artist, the player who works with the tightest of angles and completes impossible passes. You’ve got the workhorse, the player who covers every inch of grass and keeps things ticking. You’ve got the charismatic captain, whose enthusiasm saturates the entire team, who can grab the game by the scruff of its neck. But what makes each of these players who they are, and what unites the team, is the one and the same passion for the game. They breathe the same desire. They’re all gasping for the same second wind.
We too today are all gasping for the same second wind, the one holy breath, the Spirit of God. And that, according to Paul, is more than enough to unite and bless us across all our differences.
Prayer
Holy God, Spirit of life that swept over the earth at creation, breathing new life into the world—thank you for moving among us all in unique ways, breaking us out of our shells, pulling us out of our rerun lives, and building us up into a common good we could never imagine on our own. Unfold us this morning from the sameness in which we seek security, and draw us more deeply into the diverse and surprising Spirit that animates the blessed body of Christ. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
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[1] The word here is pneumitakos, used as a substantive adjective. It is commonly translated “spiritual gifts,” presumably because Paul goes on to discuss the gifts of the Spirit.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 93.
[3] Leo Lionni, Frederick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), ebook loc. 27.
[4] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 31.
[5] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 33-41.
[6] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 57-65.
[7] Paul’s discourse in 1 Cor 12 is limited to the Christ-follower community in Corinth, so it is difficult to determine in the context of this passage the scope of the Spirit’s activity. Judging, however, from other Pauline passages that set the Spirit’s activity in a cosmic context, I read the message of 1 Cor 12:6 in a universal sense: God activates the divinely inspired activities of “everyone.”
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