Thursday 7 May 2020

The Personal Touch


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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