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Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
January 29, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

What A Mess!

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:1–8
1 Corinthians 3:1–9

My goodness this congregation is a mess. People are constantly complaining about almost everything. But it is no wonder why. You have people in the pews who are getting ready to go out on the spring gala circuit, as well as people in the pews who are living check to check. You have people of all ages, different racial/ethnic identities, different family structures, different political perspectives. Some think the congregation is too woke while others think it is fast asleep.

Some members of the church have tons of advanced degrees while others graduated from high school and went straight to work. People come to the church from all over the city and surrounding areas. Some members resonate more with one pastor than another, and when they get frustrated, they start to try and divide the pastoral staff against each other. This congregation in Corinth is a huge mess. No wonder Paul was frustrated! (You did not think I was talking about Fourth Church, did you?)

Scholars tell us that this biblical book that we call 1 Corinthians is actually just one piece of a dialogue between Paul and this church in Corinth that he helped to found. It might even be several snippets of correspondence tied together in this one letter. Regardless of where we are in their conversation, though, because of this letter we know that the church in Corinth was having a really rough time being who God was calling it to be.

As Chuck Campbell has written, “Things are a mess in the Corinthian church. The community of faith is divided: high and low, superior and inferior, honored and shamed, strong and weak. The Corinthians had been blessed with spiritual gifts and knowledge, but those blessings had contributed to divisions. Sides had formed. Different groups claimed their own superior certainties and securities. … [Furthermore], the groups had begun to cluster around different leaders (Paul, Apollos, Cephas).” From this letter, this one snippet of dialogue, we can deduce that “members of the church remain[ed] captive to the hierarchies and status of the old age, clinging to their own securities, rather than trusting the disruptive faithfulness of God” (Charles Campbell, Belief Series: 1 Corinthians, p. 27).

The disruptive faithfulness of God. I love that statement. And part of the reason I love it is because we church people still often do all we can to cling to our own securities. We church people still often have a difficult time trusting the disruptive faithfulness of God. I see it all the time in my own life, and I imagine many of you do too.

For example, nine years ago, I remember struggling to make sense of why I felt God was calling me to be your pastor. “Are you sure, God?” I kept praying. “I am not what they probably expect. I have never even been on the staff of a large church, let alone led one. I say ‘Jesus’ with a Southern accent, which will make some folks nervous. Are you sure, God, that you are calling me and my family to disrupt our lives?” And obviously we decided yes and began this journey with all of you.

Perhaps some of you have had those same conversations in prayer: “God, are you sure? Are you sure it is time to move, or to look for a new job, or to say yes to serving as an elder, a deacon, or a trustee?” “God, are you sure that you want me to be open to these kinds of disruptions? Life feels manageable at this moment, just as it is. But is this change what being faithful looks like for me here and now?” Have you ever asked those kinds of questions or wondered just what on earth God was up to in your life?

In Corinth, it was not just a matter of individual lives being disrupted by the faithfulness and call of God. Rather, it was about the entire congregation’s life being disrupted. Again, Campbell:

The identity of the Corinthian Christians is … grounded in God’s disruptive call. … As will be evident throughout the letter, that call invites the church to be interrupted by an unsettling God whose power and wisdom are other than they imagine. [God’s disruptive] call invites members of the [Corinthian] church to be interrupted by others who are different from themselves and may in fact change their understanding of what it means to be faithful. As with Paul, God’s call to the Corinthians invites an unsettled openness to change and the vulnerable humility required for relationship. (Campbell, p. 23)

Goodness. Perhaps this letter could have been written to us. For in these last few years, we have been regularly interrupted and unsettled by all kinds of change, haven’t we? Our Sunday morning schedule has changed. We often have as many worshipers gathered in the virtual pews as we do in the Sanctuary pews. The way we do ministry has changed. We still have a myriad of ministry and programming going on, but some of it is hybrid, whole other programs are in-person only, and still other offerings are only online.

The ways we are a community together have changed. We are having to constantly learn about how to reknit ourselves back together after being apart for so long. Some folks still feel very disconnected in a way they never did before. Others have moved on and found new routines. And still others in places all over the country have found us in these last few years and now consider Fourth Church their spiritual home even though they will never live in Chicagoland.

Even some of the ways we serve our neighbors have changed. Our Chicago Lights Social Service Center staff is having to now balance caring for those who regularly come for services and case management while also caring for a whole slew of new neighbors whose needs are often quite different. And those are just some of our “technical” interruptions, the myriad of ways the pandemic accelerated our change.

For in the midst of all that, God has been changing us too. For example, we have also been appropriately unsettled by the findings of our racial equity audit and the uprisings in our city. The events of the past several years have pushed us to try and find our way forward into becoming a faith community of deeper faithfulness, fuller inclusivity, and a truer justice for all God’s people. And yet even though that kind of faithful covenant work is hard for us to do, as it was for the church in Corinth, according to Paul we are to live our collective life in such a way that we are open to being unsettled, to being changed, to being interrupted and disrupted by the faithful call of God.

So, given all that, it would not surprise me at all if a little quarreling did break out in this congregation, as it did in Corinth, as we enter into a long-range planning process, for it is a huge challenge to let go of security, to loosen our collective grip on who we have always been and how we have always done things, even when we know deeply in our hearts that is what God is calling on us to do.

For I firmly believe that in this moment of our life together God is calling us to prayerfully discern which of our traditions we carry forward with us and which of our traditions we let go of, as we, ourselves, pray our way into living with an unsettled openness to change and the vulnerable humility required for strengthening our relationships with one another as well as our relationship with God.

So, then, what wisdom did Paul offer this quarreling, not-wanting-to-be-disrupted, clinging-to-the-status-quo-of-security congregation? He reminded them who had brought them into being in the first place. “What then is Apollos?” Paul wrote. “What is Paul?” he asked them. “Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. … For we are God’s coworkers, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.”

In this snippet of their ongoing dialogue, Paul is desperate to remind them that they are who they are not due to anything they have done or not done. They are who they are only because of the gracious, disrupting call of God. God is the one who created them into a community. God is the one who helps them grow deeper in their faith and service. God is the one who gives them the courage to be family together even if they don’t like each other all the time. God is the one who pries open their hearts to learning from each other about what faithfulness looks like. God is the one who calls them out of that church building time and time again to live out their baptisms in their everyday lives.

They are only who they are, as a congregation, as a faith community, because of what God hopes for them, what God dreams for them. They are only who they are, as a congregation, as a faith community, because God decided to give them birth in the first place. Therefore, all of the quarreling, all of the drama, all of the fear over what is next, all of the concerns over losing control, all of the desire to cling to what is known—all of that, Paul cajoles, needs to be laid down. For only when they lay it down will they be able to blossom and bloom and grow into the kind of church community God desires for them to be.

I don’t know how that sounds to you, but to me that sounds like good news. It sounds like good news because it reminds us that no church, including this one, runs on its own power and strength. No church, including this one, dreams and plans for the future relying solely on its own imagination and willpower. No church, including this one, can blossom and bloom and grow unless it is plugged into the source of its life that is God alone. For we are called to be God’s coworkers, working together; God’s field; God’s building. And as the Corinthians would eventually learn in their life together as a congregation, with God, all things are possible—even developing a collective spirit that is open to the unsettling and disrupting call of our faithful God.

That church in Corinth had no idea what their future held. It was scary, I am sure. It was stressful, no doubt. It was challenging, absolutely. And yet Paul kept reminding them time and time again, just as Paul reminds us, that while they did not know what their future held, they did know who held their future. Their task, their collective work, was to do whatever they could to stay open and to say yes. And that is our collective work to do too. So happy 152nd birthday, Fourth Church. May we continue to be open to all the unsettling, disrupting Spirit-empowered work that our faithful God has in store for us in these years ahead. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church