Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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SERMON
Those naughty Corinthians.
Paul isn’t going to let them get away with anything,
is he?!
One could almost feel sorry for them.
Not quite, but almost.
Last week,
we overheard him chewing on them
for getting into disagreements over things that don’t matter,
and for demonizing their opponents
rather than listening seriously to
any truth there might have been in what they said.
You’d think maybe that was enough?
Apparently not yet.
This week, in these thirteen or fourteen verses,
with his usual rhetorical flourish,
Paul is after them for something entirely different.
Again, to a certain extent we have to read between the lines
to figure out what it is that’s going on in Corinth
that has elicited this response from Paul.
It appears that perhaps
the Corinthians had suddenly decided,
in the light of their new-found faith,
that they were now wiser, and maybe even stronger,
than the unenlightened neighbors all around them.
It seems that perhaps they must have been
doing a little boasting about how special they were now,
now that they had “found Jesus” …
unlike all those “other people.”
For whatever reason,
it appears that the church at Corinth
had rapidly grown pretty impressed with itself.
They were different from the people around them,
and they were proud of it!
Paul will have none of that.
He wastes no time –
remember, we’re still in the first few paragraphs of the letter –
he wastes no time in taking them down a few pegs.
“Consider your own call,” he says to them.
And he rubs it in: You all weren’t anything special.
No one would have considered you wise by human standards,
you weren’t among the powerful,
you weren’t born in Highland Park – oops, sorry –
you weren’t “of noble birth,” that is, among the privileged.
But God chose you anyway.
Even though you weren’t powerful or influential or wealthy;
even though some of you are a few bricks shy of a full load.
God chose you to put to shame
those who think they are wise,
or maybe even are wise by human standards …
God chose you to put to shame
those who think they are strong,
those who think that being born to wealth and privilege
means they are somehow closer to God.
But, Corinthians, look at what you’re doing!
Now you’re acting like those other people!
All of a sudden, you think you’re smarter than everyone else around you.
Now, you think you’re strong because God must be on your side.
Now, you think you’re privileged because somehow God has chosen you
and not those “other people.”
Get over yourselves.
If you have to boast about something,
boast about God, and God only.
Otherwise … don’t want to hear it.
It is, unfortunately, a very human characteristic –
even among Christian humans –
to compare ourselves to others
with the sole purpose of finding something wrong with them.
Because it makes us feel better about ourselves:
we know we’re not great,
but at least we’re better than those!
It’s a very human tendency
to see clearly the ways in which we are sinned against,
and to be unable to see the ways in which we sin.
There’s a reason Jesus talked about
seeing the speck in our brother or sister’s eye,
and not being able to see the log in our own;
that’s nothing new!
And what’s both ironic and sad is that often,
the sins which we “do unto” others
are the very same sins which were “done unto” us.
Many people who do family therapy will tell you that
the people who abuse their children
are the ones who were abused themselves.
Somehow, we pass it on.
Let me start with an example from somewhere else,
because it’s always easier to see when someone else
isn’t behaving properly,
even if it doesn’t involve us,
even if we’re not the ones being sinned against.
This is a story about the community where I was born: New Braunfels, Texas.
When I was a child and would visit my grandparents there,
one of our favorite things to do was visit Landa Park.
During the week,
my grandmother would take us there in the afternoons
and we would go swimming, and ride the miniature train,
and once she even got brave and let us go on the paddleboats by ourselves.
On the weekends, when my grandfather wasn’t working,
often we would pack a lunch
and go out and have a picnic in the park,
and swing on the swings, and all that other kid stuff
that your grandparents will do with you.
But about the time I was nine or ten years old,
we stopped going for those weekend picnics.
My grandparents absolutely refused to take us any longer.
And when we begged and pleaded and, I’m sure,
were as annoying as any kids can be,
the only response we got was
“There are too many Mexicans there.”
In my nine-year-old head,
I understood that to mean,
too many people are in the park on the weekends,
so we can’t find a place to park the car, or a picnic table that’s free.
Okay, I didn’t like that,
but eventually, I forgot all about it.
Fast-forward twenty-five years.
I’m having lunch with four sisters from the
First Presbyterian Church of New Braunfels,
the small Hispanic congregation where I preached for three years.
And they are sharing memories about the community from their persepctive,
and about that wonderful time in the late 1960s,
when they finally were allowed to go to Landa Park.
It was an interesting story –
apparently, a fairly large group of both Hispanics and Anglos
decided that it was not just for a public, city park
to exclude a certain percentage of the citizens.
What a concept.
So they simply went,
they went into the park,
they sat on the picnic tables
and were all arrested.
The New Braunfels jail was too small to hold them all,
so some actually got carted off to San Antonio,
and it got into the newspapers.
And the you-know-what hit the fan.
From that point on, no one was excluded from Landa Park.
Except that people like my grandparents
would no longer go,
when “those people” were going to be there.
I listened to my friends’ story,
and celebrated with them the end of a very unfortunate practice,
but when they were done,
I said to them, with a very deep sense of shame,
“My God … you all are the reason
my grandmother wouldn’t take me to Landa Park.”
And we all laughed about it,
but it was a sad laughter.
To me, what makes it even sadder, and more ironic,
is that within their own lifetimes
the German community of New Braunfels
had been on the receiving end of similar prejudices.
It happened to some extent during the first World War—
which was my grandparents’ lifetime –
but especially during the Second:
you were automatically under suspicion
if you spoke German,
or, spoke English with a German accent,
or had a German-sounding last name.
It was in the mid-1940s
that the German language finally pretty well died out
in communities like New Braunfels, and Fredericksburg, and Boerne.
My mother spoke no English
until she was about four years old.
But more than a hundred years after those first immigrants arrived,
finally, it was simply too dangerous to be different.
And how sad it is,
that their own experience of being the “outsiders”
didn’t appear to have taught most of them anything about
not doing the same thing to other people who were “different” somehow.
Which is the same kind of thing
that Paul is giving the Corinthians hell about.
He reminds them: they have had the experience of being looked down upon.
They weren’t and aren’t the elite of the community.
You Corinthians know what it’s like to have people look down their noses at you.
Why on earth would you want to turn around now,
and do the same thing to somebody else?
You have no call to be thinking of yourself
as somehow better, or more worthy, than your neighbors.
You have no grounds on which to boast,
unless you boast of what God has done for you.
Thus, saith Paul to the Corinthians.
Thus saith Paul to the good German folks of New Braunfels.
And thus saith Paul to the congregation of the saints that is called Trinity.
My dear friends: I have seen, and I have heard
some very unchristian behaviors here the last four weeks,
and like the Corinthians, we need to be confronted about it.
It seems to me something of divine providence
that today is “Race Relations Sunday” –
check your Presbyterian Planning Calendar,
if you think I’m making that up!
There has been some very unpleasant racism expressed in these four walls the last month,
and it seems to me that we had better
step back a moment and consider our calling.
I’m not talking about those who have simply asked the question,
“Why are you reading the scriptures in Spanish?”
I’ll be glad to talk to you about that;
the Session talked about it this past Monday night.
I’m talking about those who insist on
referring to our neighbors around the church as “those people.”
I’m talking about remarks from people saying outright
that African-American people and Hispanics are not their neighbors,
even if they live next door.
I’m talking about comments that all the “nice people”
have moved out of this neighborhood.
I’m talking about a sense of fear of our unknown neighbors that is so great
that people actually threaten to leave the church
if they are forced to listen to the scriptures read
in both their own language, and the language of their neighbors.
Consider your own calling.
Most of us are not among the highly privileged of our society.
We’re not rocket scientists,
though some of us are smart and some of us are wise.
We’re not particularly powerful,
either in terms of physical strength or political clout.
Last I checked, none of us were of noble birth.
(Except for Noble Fiase!)
And yet somehow, when we get inside this building,
we feel it’s okay to express unlovely opinions
about others who are not of noble birth, or not wise, or not powerful.
God has chosen what is weak in the world
in order to shame the strong;
and God has chosen what is foolish
in order to shame the wise.
God has chosen what is low and despised in the world,
to bring to nothing those who think they are something.
When it comes to the issue of using Spanish in our worship service –
that we’ve been so exercised about the last four weeks:
Congratulations. You’ve won that battle.
Please take the next month
to consider what it is you may have lost.
And, to consider your own calling:
Who you are, who we are; in this place, at this time.
Are we really called to be one of the last holdouts
of upper-middle-class, Anglo, heterosexual, privilege
in north Oak Cliff?
Or are we called to be the church?
Paul would tell us we can’t be both …
I’m inclined to agree.
Amen.
© 2002 Julie
Adkins (e-mail: Drjadkins@aol.com)