(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 4, 2017, Pentecost Sunday)
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The Spirit of a Game
Imagine with me a crowd of children. It’s summer break. They’re outside. They have nothing to do. And they’re getting more restless by the minute. There are shoves and pushes, as some of the children try to assert their dominance. There are a few children running around aimlessly, screaming for no observable reason. More than anything else, there’s a growing tide of chatter. It gets louder and louder as everyone tries to speak over her neighbor.
The book of Judges has a great expression for this kind of scene: “Everyone is doing what is right in his own eyes.” Or in our own idiom, it’s every person for himself.
Now imagine that you are responsible for keeping this surge of youthful energy in check. You need to ensure that this exuberance does not erupt into total chaos. What do you do?
No two situations are the same. And I have relatively little experience to draw from. But I know what I would do.
I would throw a ball into their midst.
A ball is like magic. It transforms the crowd. You can almost see with your bare eyes a spirit swooping over them. Individuals become teams. Shouts and screams become purposeful communication—“Pass! Shoot!” Wild movements—running, jumping, sliding—become meaningful. Loose energy is focused into the joyful spirit of a game.
An Aside:
Are Adults Immune to the Spirit?
As an aside: I share this scenario as though the wild energy of youth is a problem that must be solved. But I wonder, in fact, if scenes like this do not show how much closer children are to the kingdom of God than adults. Because if the world that we live in has shown us anything, it’s that a crowd of adults can become restless and chaotic too, each one speaking past the other, shouting over the other, every person for himself. And sadly, a ball will not do the trick anymore. It has lost its magic. We adults seem almost immune to whatever spirit it is that sweeps over children.
Chaos in Corinth
In today’s scripture, Paul faces a church that looks much like our imaginary scenario. Confusion and chaos reign at the church in Corinth. There is pushing and shoving as some people try to assert their authority. There is meaningless noise as some people babble on and on in tongues with no one to interpret. There is an every-person-for-himself attitude at the Lord’s Table; the rich eat well and the poor eat nothing.[1]
Paul’s response to this chaos? It’s the last response I’d expect.
A Mad response:
The Spirit instead of Order
The kneejerk reaction, I would think, would be to enforce some order. Pick a leader, set up some rules and committees, and get to voting. Establish a game plan. When in the late 19th century the mechanical engineer and businessman Frederick Taylor confronted a world of industry that lacked uniform structure and standards, he issued a call for order: “In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”[2] Over a century later, and his words have become reality. McDonaldization—where everything is prescribed, from the radius of your burger to the smile on your cashier’s face—has become the rule for much of our world, businesses as well as churches.
The natural response to disorder is order. But Paul does not respond this way. Instead he talks about the Spirit. Instead of giving the Corinthians a game plan, he invites them to rediscover the game. He doesn’t throw a literal ball among them, but he does his best to remind them of the spirit that sweeps over the faithful just as surely as the spirit of play sweeps over children with a ball.
If this sounds silly to you, you’re not alone. I think it’s madness. To respond to chaos with talk of the Spirit is like playing with fire. Spirit is the last thing you’d want to talk about. Spirit is indefinable, unruly, uncontrollable. Like the wind, it comes and goes where it pleases. Any reasonable business—McDonalds or otherwise—does not trust the spirit. They do their best to keep it on a leash, to channel it into their own interests.
The Risky Spirit and the Common Good
In a world that prefers order to disorder, the Spirit is a risk. When you throw a ball among the crowd of children, you do not know the result. You don’t know what game will follow. The spirit makes its own rules. My brother and I invented all sorts of games growing up, depending on what we had around us—trees, trashcans, sticks, steps.
Why does Paul take the risk? Why does he effectively throw a ball among the chaotic Corinthians rather than raise his voice and impose order top-down? I suspect that he does this because he ultimately trusts God more than he trusts anything we humans can organize on our own. I suspect that when Paul talks about everyone having a “gift,” he’s not just talking the talk. He actually means it. If he or the Corinthians write the rules themselves rather than play the game, then there is a danger that they will cancel out someone’s gift.
When Paul throws a ball among the Corinthians—and the ball, to be clear, is Christ—he trusts that the game will bring out everyone’s special gift. He has this confidence because the Spirit of Christ is a spirit of love that looks not to its own interest but to the interests of others; such a spirit would bring our gifts not into conflict but into concert. Just as a ball joins together a diversity of desires and abilities into a common joy, so too Paul believes that the Spirit of Christ joins together our special gifts into a common good (cf. 12:7). As Paul will say in the next chapter, our individual desires and abilities are but a “noisy gong or a clanging symbol” by themselves (cf. 13:1). But joined together in the Spirit of Christ, they become a symphony to God’s love.
Moving from the Game Plan to the Game
If Paul had less faith, he may have responded to the chaos in Corinth with programs and rules and a McDonalds-like blueprint for the church. Thank God he doesn’t. Perhaps such standardization would have resulted in a successful business or club. But it wouldn’t have resulted in a church.
A church, Paul knows, lives by the Spirit of Christ. That’s why he responds to the chaos in Corinth by inviting the Corinthians to get caught up in the one Spirit of Christ, that Spirit of selfless love that gives itself for the life of others.
As our church prepares for conversation about our plans for the next year, we would do well to take a page from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Rather than fret over the game plan, let’s get caught up in the game. Which is to say: let’s not worry about satisfying our own anxieties for order, but rather get caught up in the one Spirit of Christ’s love, a Spirit that meets around tables, a Spirit that shares the concerns of others and celebrates the gifts of everyone. When we get caught up in the Spirit, we may find ourselves playing by different rules than we ever did before, but if we’re playing in the Spirit of Christ’s love, then we can trust that the Spirit will lead us to a common good. The good news according to Paul is that when we share the Spirit of Christ with one another, we leave behind the old order—and disorder—for an adventure that is richer and more abundant, an adventure where every one of us becomes a gift to the other, and our many differences are transformed from clash and clamor into a beautiful symphony.
Prayer
Spirit of Christ,
Who lives beyond
Our disorder and our order;
Whose unruly rule of love
Joins us in a symphony
Far greater than our own;
Inspire our trust
In your way
Of sharing and selflessness,
That our special gifts
Might bear together
The common fruit of your goodness. Amen.
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[1] For reference to these problems, see 1 Cor 11:17-22; 14.
[2] C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014), 131.
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