Over these several weeks since the end of the Christmas season, we’ve been exploring the first part of what Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth.  That was an exciting place to live and a dangerous place to live.  People came into the church out of Corinth, but getting Corinth out of the believers was not so easy.  That was an ongoing task, the work of a lifetime, and it was oh, so easy to take a break from that work and just let the weeds grow.  A farmer friend in Illinois shared one of those delightful farm sayings: a year of seeds, seven years of weeds.  Be diligent in weeding your garden: the work and time you invest now will have its dividend.

Every believer comes to belief from the world, the ways and wisdom of the world still very much rooted in heart and mind.  And something in what he or she hears in church is beginning to make sense, to glow, to draw heart and mind, but there remains much that resists and rejects, that wants this but not that: faith on my terms, but the only offer God is making is life on His terms—take it or leave it.  Here we are.

Paul is definitely chiding the church in Corinth, which leaves us a little resentful on their behalf—just who does he think he is?  It’s clear from how he was writing that the apostle understood he’d get that response.  The encouragement, such as it is, is that Paul would not have wasted time, effort, and prayer on those believers if he didn’t believe they were worth it.  We’d love to make great, leaping strides in the faith: victory to victory, hilltop to hilltop.  I hope we’ve figured out by now, though, that most of our journey is by baby steps—tottering, stumbling, yet excited and smiling, too.

But can’t we make those big leaps?  Not long after we arrived at the church in Wisconsin, they built a sturdy wooden play structure about six or seven feet high.  It looked like a pirate ship with three decks.  The kids loved it!  They could climb, swing, hide, run, and jump all over it.  One four-year-old boy took the notion to jump off it, though, and broke his ankle.  “Oh, he’s always breaking things,” his mother said.  We want to make big leaps in faith, feel the glory, the strength, the thrill.  But we are still worldly.  Baby steps—that’s the right way for us.

But wait—worldly, us?  Still?  Really?  Yeah, Paul writes to those Corinthian Christians, just starting to figure out what it even meant to be a Jesus follower in a sin-soaked world.  Still worldly.  It’s not such an easy thing to come out of the world.  Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not such an easy thing to follow Christ: take up your cross, and follow me, he said.  Cross?  What?  No, thanks.  We want change, sure, but the last thing we want is change.  We want the change we want, according to our wishes—where’s the harm in it?

Just look at our messed-up relationships, our messed-up society, our messed-up culture, this messed-up world.  But it isn’t that bad, is it?  The headlines don’t tell the whole story, true enough.  But the story the headlines do tell is bad enough.  Just look, and it isn’t so difficult to see the harm in wanting change on our terms, according to our wisdom—our desires, that is.  Such change is change that suits Me, but God would have us changed to suit Him.  “You are still worldly,” Paul writes (3:3).  I can see that finger pointing right here, just under these ribs.  “For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly?  Are you not acting like mere humans?” (3:3).  God’s Word calls to us to behave like something—someone—other than mere humans.

Paul had begun by pleading for unity in the congregation—not uniformity, but unity: a shared purpose, a shared life, a shared faith.  It is probably—well, certainly—the case that the church as an institution never will have entire unity, but Paul is focused, properly, on the local congregation.  What the brass up at HQ does is very remote from our day to day living for Jesus out here; they know they aren’t accountable to us.  Let us, however, live for Jesus day by day, right where we are, and not for ourselves.  Our “selves” we have from the institutions of this world, but we have life from God in Jesus Christ.  Until you conform to its institutions, the world tells you you’re nobody.  Christ makes us somebody.

Christ came so that we need no longer be slaves to self.  He transfixed our sin to himself to set us free.  The Spirit calls us into that freedom.  It doesn’t look like freedom as the world promises in exchange for our loyalty, our vote: freedom from restraint, freedom from shame.

Disunity in the church should come as no surprise, by now.  Our Methodist brothers and sisters are the latest victims of disunity.  Their big Bible study right now, as I understand, is about love—of course it is!  It has to be!  And love must let itself be shaped by faith, and faith must be shaped by God’s Word.  When love and faith are allowed to shape God’s Word, the result is merely, and sadly, human.  We went through all that some twelve years ago, so for us the memory of the big breakup is becoming dim.  What we want to commit continually to overcoming is disagreement that fractures the congregation.  I don’t say that we have that here.  I do say let us be alert to its warning signs.  Let us be proactive.  Let us submit ourselves continually to God’s Word; and let us be loath to submit God’s Word to ourselves, our wisdom, our wishes.  I think that was a problem in Corinth, and the outcome was inevitable.

In Corinth, jealousy and quarreling were taking their toll.  What was needed was a reminder of what it means to have Christ, to have the Spirit; the Corinthians were convinced they had the Spirit because just look at all the amazing signs!  No, no, they had the Spirt, definitely!  And Paul tells them that, while they do indeed have the Spirit, the Spirit is not among them according to their measure.  He tells them their increasingly frequent, increasingly severe disagreements were the sure sign that the Spirit was not being permitted its place among them, in them.  The fracturing disagreements were signs of pride, signs that the ways and wisdom of this world remained in them, at work among them, insistent, imperious.

Every Sunday, the call is renewed to be disciples of the Lord.  That means we are called to be followers of the weak fool.  He is the light, the air, the water, the soil in which we grow, in which God blesses the seed.  Now, Jesus also told us what happens to the seed as it is blessed: it changes.  Change is the blessing.  In Christ, we become what we are in him.  The seed does not remain a seed.  The hard husk breaks open—how, from outside, from inside?  Yes.  What makes the seed grow?  Wrong question.  Who.  Who makes the seed grow?  God makes the seed grow.  By the institutional standards of this world, I’m a very minor somebody.  I disagree—I’m nothing, and I’m so glad, because that means God can make me something.  The power and wisdom of God, “who makes things grow” (3:7) is in us.

Paul writes that those little believers in big Corinth are “God’s field, God’s building” (3:9).  Oh, he’s mixing metaphors, but blessedly so.  God is cultivating us, in this place in this time.  God is upbuilding us.  We come here wanting to be uplifted, which means we have a hard time doing that for ourselves: lift me up, help me up, cheer me up!  I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!  How true.  How true.  The Good News is that God does uplift us, does upbuild us.  It takes a strong, sure foundation: the foundation is Jesus Christ, the love of God, the Word of God.  God isn’t building a rigid, brittle structure here, among us, in us.  He is making a strong, flexible, resilient structure.  His design has a purpose.  He is upbuilding a Temple for Himself.  His Temple makes a statement.  We are God’s statement to the world.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.