Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation
Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
10 May 2020
‘The personal touch'
Acts 18.1-4
1 Corinthians 1.10-18
As a way into our reflection on scripture for this morning,
I’d like to
invite you to take a moment
to think of
those people who have been particularly important to you
in the story of your life.
They might be teachers, friends, family,
parents or
grandparents, people from church or work;
take a moment and hold their names in your mind,
and give
thanks for them, and for the influence they’ve had you.
We all of us have people we can give thanks for,
individuals
who have mattered to us and influenced our lives.
And of course there will be those who we would rather forget,
people who
have made life difficult for us,
who we have
struggled to relate to and possibly struggled to forgive.
Individuals are complex, we all are, but individuals matter.
And what struck me quite forcefully as I was reading through
the passages
in
preparation for this morning,
was the number of personal names mentioned
in these
two sort passages.
Here they are now:
·
Paul
·
Aquila
·
Priscilla
·
Claudius
·
Chloe
·
Apollos
·
Cephas
·
Crispus
·
Gaius
·
Stephanas
Ten names, two of them women;
all of them
individuals who, for better or worse,
played
their role in the drama of the early years of the church in Corinth.
There can be a tendency for us to de-personalise
the various
characters we meet in the New Testament.
Some of them we just ignore:
I mean,
when did you last hear someone talking about Cripus, Gaius and Stephanus?
But others we mythologise:
‘big’ characters
such as Peter and Paul can become kind of stock characters,
archetypes of idealised
discipleship.
We’ve heard it in a hundred sermons:
Peter is
the comedically inept failure who comes good in the end,
and Paul is the classic villain-turned-hero
who
exercises superhuman strength of character
in the face
of overwhelming threat and opposition.
And if we’re not careful, we lose sight of the individuals,
the people,
the personalities that lie behind the names on the page.
So this morning, I want us to keep alert for the personal
touch,
for the way
in which the people that these names speak of
featured in
the life of the early church,
because in their significance we will discover
something
of the significance of our own lives
and the
people that have played their part in our stories.
So, to Corinth.
I went through Corinth when I was about fourteen,
in a car
driving from Athens where my uncle lived,
to the
southern tip of the Peloponnese where the family village was located.
We only stopped for a few minutes, to have a look at the
Corinth Canal,
a four mile
cut through the isthmus, linking the Aegean and Ionian seas.
Plans for a canal here date back to before the time of
Jesus,
but it wasn’t
actually constructed until 1893.
So when Paul was staying in Corinth,
goods
needing to be taken from one side to the other
had to be taken off the ships, hauled
across,
and loaded onto other ships on the
other side.
There were even some ships that were designed
so the
whole ship could be hauled across without needing to be unloaded at all.
This made the city of Corinth incredibly wealthy,
as it could
charge a tax for all the goods passing through;
and at the time of Paul and the others mentioned in our
readings this morning,
Corinth was
a bustling, multicultural, and vibrant city,
with two
ports and thriving industry.
When Paul gets there, he quickly teams up with a married
couple,
two Jewish
Christians named Priscilla and Aquila.
Between them, they exercised the original tent-making
ministry
by, quite
literally, making tents.
These days we often use this phrase to describe people
who have a
self-supporting ministry,
where they work a normal job for their money,
and then
volunteer their time in the service of their church.
As churches are struggling financially, particularly in
rural areas,
this kind
of ministry is becoming more and more common.
Anyway, it has strong precedent,
and Paul,
Priscilla, and Aquila founded the Christian congregation in Corinth.
Then, after a while, Paul moved on and eventually ended up
in Ephesus
in what is now western Turkey,
and from Ephesus he had a series of correspondences with the
church in Corinth,
writing possibly
as many as five letters to them,
although only two of these seem to have survived
and made
their way into our Bibles.
We pick up the Corinthian correspondence this morning in
chapter 1,
straight after
the initial greetings with which all ancient letters started.
And it seems that what has prompted Paul to write
is that
there are problems in Corinth with division in the church.
The issue seems to be about which strong character
in the
leadership of the early church
people were
following.
Some were following Paul, some Apollos,
some Cephas
(or Peter as he was better known),
and some were just being annoyingly super-spiritual
and saying
they followed Christ and not any human being!
We’ve all met Christians like that…
Anyway, Paul tells them not to be so obsessed with who
baptised them;
as if it
matters who did the dunking!
The important thing was whether they were living out
the truth
of their baptism in their daily lives.
I’m sure we can all relate to this issue of hanging our faith
on a
particular person’s ministry.
After all, most of us have a soft spot in our memories
for the
minister who baptised us, or nurtured us in our faith.
Maybe you even gave thanks for them a few minutes ago.
And most of us prefer the preaching of one person over
another.
Are you a
Rob Bell person or a Brian McLaren Person,
a Tom Wright person or a John Piper
person?
A Simon
person or a Dawn person,
or a Luke, or Martyn, or Nigel
person?
Or are you
a Ruth person or a Brian person,
a Barrie person or a Howard Williams
person?
Can those who have come after ever measure up
against the
idealised and mythologised preachers of days gone by?
We all do this, and Paul points to a great danger
in this
factionalising and idolising of preachers:
The danger is that of confusing the messenger with the
message.
So Paul says, in v.18,
that it is
the message of the cross itself which is most important,
not the
words that different preachers use to frame or communicate it.
And there is an ambiguity in the Greek here
which may,
or may not, be deliberate.
When Paul says that the message of the cross
is ‘foolishness
to those who are perishing,
but to us
who are being saved it is the power of God’,
it is not clear whether he is referring to the message ‘about’
the cross,
in other
words, the story of Jesus’
crucifixion;
or whether he is referring to the message ‘of’ the cross,
what the
cross itself says to us
about who God
is and how God is made known.
I tend to think that it is this second option that makes
most sense,
because the
message of the cross to each of us
is that God speaks salvation not
through the words of humans,
but through decisive action in
history in the death of Jesus.
If salvation is found in the message about the cross,
that makes
us mere spectators or consumers of the message.
But if it is found in the message of the cross,
then we are
invited into that story
as participants in what God is doing to turn the world
upside down
by
realigning our understandings of power, authority, suffering, and death.
The first century world was very familiar with the
techniques of rhetoric,
and public speaking
was regarded as an art form.
They knew what it was to be consumers of messages;
you could
go to the forum in any Roman town,
the equivalent of Speakers’ Corner
in London,
and hear
people talking eloquently about any kind of subject you desired.
But Paul wants to differentiate the word of salvation
spoken by God
in the event of the cross,
from the words of those
who would merely
speak about the cross.
The crucifixion is not just another subject
for public
debate and rhetorical excellence.
For Paul, it is the cross itself which speaks
through the
brute fact of its existence in history.
And when it speaks,
the cross
cuts through the babbling words of well-intentioned preachers,
proclaiming
its own message of Christ crucified,
of God-on-the-cross,
of the
all-powerful becoming the utterly powerless.
The message of the
cross is an ugly message of suffering,
a controversial message of cosmic
disruption,
and a dangerous message of political
and social revolution.
And there is nothing
that can, or should, be done by preachers
to sanitise or beautify the shock,
the horror,
the ‘scandal’ as Paul puts it,
of the word of the
cross.
The communication of the power of divine love
through the
murderous and barbaric act of execution by crucifixion,
speaks directly to us of the radical lengths to which God is
prepared to go
to make God’s
own love for humans known.
The cross speaks a message of the extent of God’s love,
and this
cuts through human words
to send a message of forgiveness, acceptance and welcome,
direct from
God’s broken heart to ours.
This is the message of salvation,
and it
comes from God to me, and from God to you.
And so we’re back at the personal touch,
with the
valuing of each created person by the one who made them.
God loves us, and forgives us,
and
welcomes us into the new and radically constituted kingdom of God.
And as we take our place in God's kingdom
alongside
all those others who hear and respond to the word of the cross,
we play our part in the transformation of the world
as the
kingdom of God is made known on earth,
as it is in
heaven.
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