B. Maurice Ritchie - Sermon Untitled (June 25, 2000)
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Transcript
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- | Let us bow for prayer. | 0:05 |
Oh Lord, your word is a light unto our path. | 0:10 | |
A light unto our feet. | 0:14 | |
Open our hearts and minds that we may perceive you, | 0:18 | |
and greet you in and beyond | 0:23 | |
thy sacred page. | 0:26 | |
Amen. | 0:28 | |
It is difficult for me to resist an opportunity | 0:32 | |
to preach from one of the letters of St. Paul. | 0:34 | |
And particularly, the letter to the Corinthians. | 0:38 | |
I could give you a succinct, scholarly reason for that, | 0:42 | |
something like this: | 0:46 | |
in no other New Testament writing do we get the extensive | 0:48 | |
and rich insight into relations within a | 0:51 | |
primitive Christian community of the mid-first century | 0:53 | |
as in Corinthians. | 0:58 | |
But I will be more honest and tell you | 1:01 | |
that it was a former Sunday school pupil of mine | 1:03 | |
who piqued my interest in this correspondence. | 1:06 | |
Her name is Rina Parks, | 1:10 | |
one of the most articulate students | 1:13 | |
of Scripture I have ever met. | 1:15 | |
And certainly a woman endowed with incredible wisdom. | 1:17 | |
And she was in her 70s when we first came | 1:21 | |
to know each other. | 1:24 | |
One Sunday as we launched into the study | 1:26 | |
of the Corinthian correspondence, | 1:29 | |
Mrs. Parks said, "I like to think of Corinthians | 1:31 | |
"as the 'Dear Abby' of the New Testament. | 1:35 | |
"You know, it's just full of everything you find in life. | 1:38 | |
"Fornication, adultery, | 1:42 | |
"innuendo, intrigue, | 1:45 | |
"incest, people at each others throats. | 1:47 | |
"Bickering. | 1:49 | |
"You name it, you can find it in Corinthians." | 1:51 | |
I never forgot that. | 1:55 | |
And so it became a habit of mine as I counseled | 1:57 | |
young Divinity School students in their struggles | 2:00 | |
with their congregations | 2:03 | |
to invite them to turn again to Paul's correspondence | 2:05 | |
with the church at Corinth. | 2:09 | |
Because whatever it was they might be facing | 2:11 | |
in their congregations, | 2:13 | |
they were sure to find echoes of it | 2:15 | |
in the pages of Paul's letters. | 2:18 | |
It is precisely in this correspondence that we get some | 2:22 | |
of Paul's most sublime recapitulations of his apostleship | 2:25 | |
as well as rich insight into the price that he paid | 2:30 | |
to become the founding father of more than | 2:34 | |
one Mediterranean area congregation. | 2:37 | |
Paul writes in today's sixth chapter that he has lived | 2:42 | |
in the hopes of commending his ministry | 2:45 | |
to those he would serve. | 2:46 | |
Do you suppose he is merely lapsing into some occasional | 2:50 | |
hyperbole when he records that he has suffered endurance, | 2:53 | |
affliction, hardship, | 2:57 | |
calamity, beatings, | 2:58 | |
imprisonment, riots, labors, | 3:00 | |
sleepless nights, hunger? | 3:03 | |
Paul is fully capable of embellishing a record, | 3:07 | |
an account, | 3:11 | |
particularly when it came to a solid defense | 3:12 | |
of his apostolic office and his apostolic authority. | 3:16 | |
And in this letter, both were on the line | 3:20 | |
and certainly in his larger history | 3:23 | |
with these cantankerous Corinthians. | 3:25 | |
Yes, he's fully capable of fattening a list | 3:28 | |
and extending it. | 3:31 | |
But the corpus of Paul's letters and the accounts | 3:33 | |
of his ministry by Luke and Acts, | 3:36 | |
indicate that, if anything, he may have been a bit modest | 3:39 | |
on this occasion. | 3:43 | |
We can only imagine that hunger or sleepless nights | 3:45 | |
and labors were nothing compared | 3:47 | |
to calamity, beatings, imprisonment and riots. | 3:49 | |
Later he could add shipwreck to the list. | 3:53 | |
More than once, Paul was barely able to get out of town | 3:57 | |
with his life. | 4:00 | |
He suffered at the hands of local city authorities. | 4:02 | |
The local religious authorities, | 4:05 | |
both pagan and Jewish. | 4:07 | |
As well as on occasion | 4:10 | |
from some local Christian authorities. | 4:11 | |
Yes, we may be sure there is a personal history behind | 4:15 | |
each of these references in these few verses. | 4:19 | |
If Paul is feeling defensive, then who wouldn't? | 4:22 | |
One marvels that he was still in the fray | 4:25 | |
as he wrote his letter. | 4:28 | |
When we look at the consequences of Paul's ministry | 4:32 | |
as he sketches them here, | 4:35 | |
we would naturally conclude he must've | 4:37 | |
been quite a hell raiser. | 4:39 | |
You certainly wouldn't think of him as a | 4:42 | |
Caspar Milquetoast. | 4:43 | |
That kind of person who not engender this kind | 4:45 | |
of hostility and anger from crowds and authorities. | 4:47 | |
Today, just one beating, one calamity, | 4:51 | |
one imprisonment or riot is enough to undo any preacher | 4:55 | |
with his congregation and his denomination. | 4:57 | |
Today's church is not looking for these rabble-rousers. | 5:01 | |
It's hard on membership and it's hard | 5:05 | |
on financial development as well. | 5:07 | |
Paul has told us the results of his personal commendation | 5:11 | |
of the Gospel in these verses. | 5:16 | |
Then he shares with us what landed him there. | 5:19 | |
And strangely enough, it does not read like | 5:23 | |
a laundry list of trouble. | 5:25 | |
Did you catch it? | 5:28 | |
Purity. | 5:31 | |
A keen conscience. | 5:33 | |
Or what he calls knowledge. | 5:36 | |
Patience. | 5:38 | |
Kindness. | 5:40 | |
Holiness of spirit. | 5:41 | |
Genuine love. | 5:44 | |
Truthful speech. | 5:46 | |
The power of God. | 5:48 | |
Those personal traits do not strike these modern ears | 5:51 | |
as a formula for trouble-- | 5:55 | |
except perhaps the power of God-- | 5:57 | |
that's trouble in any life, oftentimes. | 5:58 | |
Yet grief and trouble, among other things, | 6:02 | |
are what Paul's discipleship yielded him from time to time. | 6:04 | |
We might strike it up to the cost of discipleship. | 6:08 | |
As he writes, "We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way | 6:15 | |
"so that no fault may be found with our ministry. | 6:19 | |
"But as servants of God, we have commended ourselves | 6:23 | |
"in every way." | 6:26 | |
In other words, he has set the example. | 6:28 | |
Paul was never modest about | 6:31 | |
inviting people to follow him and his good example. | 6:33 | |
He has lived the faith before the Corinthians | 6:37 | |
as before the Galatians and the Philippians. | 6:39 | |
Now he pleads with them to follow suit, | 6:43 | |
to commend themselves to others | 6:46 | |
as he has commended himself | 6:49 | |
to them and Corinth. | 6:51 | |
I'm afraid Paul was a few courses shy in marketing. | 6:54 | |
Highlighting as he did in these verses | 6:58 | |
the high cost of discipleship. | 7:00 | |
That's not exactly the way you claim your market audience. | 7:02 | |
Affliction, beating, riot, hunger. | 7:08 | |
Not very invitational. | 7:13 | |
Yet here he is, | 7:15 | |
pleading with the Corinthians | 7:17 | |
to incarnate the grace of God in their lives now. | 7:18 | |
Now is the acceptable time. | 7:22 | |
Now is the day of salvation. | 7:25 | |
There's no point in waiting to act on faith. | 7:27 | |
The foundation has already been laid in Jesus. | 7:31 | |
In his life, his death, | 7:34 | |
his resurrection. | 7:36 | |
He has inaugurated the day of deliverance and salvation. | 7:39 | |
The Old Testament prophecies are all fulfilled. | 7:43 | |
No need to wait for yet another. | 7:45 | |
Now the time to respond to the liberation of God | 7:48 | |
and to begin living in God's new age. | 7:51 | |
Not to live in God's new age | 7:56 | |
is to mean that Christ died in vain. | 8:00 | |
There will be no new revelations. | 8:03 | |
No new dramatic interventions. | 8:05 | |
We have a triumphant story of our Lord. | 8:09 | |
The kingdom has launched. | 8:12 | |
It's time to get on with living it before the world. | 8:14 | |
Time to become, as he says a few verses | 8:16 | |
before today's passage, | 8:18 | |
time to become ambassadors for Christ. | 8:20 | |
"Finally, put no obstacle in another's way," he says. | 8:26 | |
"Let no fault be found in your Christian witness. | 8:31 | |
"As servants of God, commend yourselves | 8:35 | |
"in every way." | 8:39 | |
That is Paul's direct address to you and me. | 8:42 | |
In this first year of a new millennium, | 8:47 | |
are we interested in hearing what he has to say? | 8:50 | |
Do we want to hear about accountability, | 8:53 | |
not only to God and Christ, | 8:56 | |
but to the neighbor on our pew, | 8:58 | |
the neighbor in our neighborhood, | 9:00 | |
the person in the workplace behind us? | 9:03 | |
Paul is telling us that we do not negotiate | 9:06 | |
this world alone. | 9:09 | |
Anymore than the animals entered the ark one by one. | 9:11 | |
"No," according to Paul, "as we move through this world, | 9:15 | |
we bring others with us by the way we live the gospel | 9:18 | |
before the world." | 9:22 | |
For over two decades, I have called | 9:27 | |
on Christian congregations from Mateo to Murphy | 9:28 | |
to interpret for them the field education program | 9:31 | |
of the Divinity School. | 9:34 | |
The field education program is the kind | 9:36 | |
of student preaching program | 9:38 | |
for students preparing to be ordained ministers | 9:41 | |
or lay ministers in the church. | 9:44 | |
On these occasions, I have tried to move congregations | 9:47 | |
from their perception of themselves as employers, | 9:50 | |
of helpers in ministry, | 9:54 | |
to an image of themselves as a teaching congregation. | 9:56 | |
Routinely, I have said to them, | 10:00 | |
"You teach in everything you do and say. | 10:02 | |
"You are a Methodist church in this neighborhood | 10:06 | |
"and by the way you organize and conduct your life, | 10:08 | |
"you are teaching this community what it means | 10:12 | |
"to be Christian and what it means to be Methodist. | 10:15 | |
"Your neighbors may know nothing | 10:20 | |
"of John Wesley. | 10:22 | |
"They may know nothing of the great evangelist | 10:24 | |
"Frances Asbury. | 10:27 | |
"But if I ask them to tell me about Methodism, | 10:30 | |
"they will likely point to one of you | 10:33 | |
"and slowly it will dawn on them that there's someone nearby | 10:37 | |
"who is a member of a Methodist congregation. | 10:40 | |
"And they will begin to tell me | 10:43 | |
"about their Methodist neighbor." | 10:44 | |
And that is how it is with students | 10:46 | |
as well as the children in your neighborhood | 10:48 | |
and the strangers near your church. | 10:50 | |
All these come into your midst | 10:53 | |
as seekers and learners. | 10:55 | |
They look at how you do ministry. | 10:58 | |
Their eyes and minds are like rolling video cameras | 11:00 | |
taking in all you do in the name of the Christian gospel | 11:04 | |
as well as all you do not do for the gospel. | 11:07 | |
They will observe the way you do ministry in your community, | 11:12 | |
and they will assume from that observation, | 11:15 | |
rightly or wrongly, | 11:17 | |
that that is the way ministry should be done. | 11:19 | |
"Daily, as a Christian people," | 11:22 | |
I tell these congregations, | 11:25 | |
"daily, as a Christian people, | 11:27 | |
"you live the faith before a community, | 11:28 | |
"and daily you instruct an entire people | 11:31 | |
"on what it means to be Christian-- | 11:33 | |
"whether you intend to instruct them or not." | 11:35 | |
Our daughters did not learn the Lord's Prayer | 11:40 | |
and the Apostles' Creed in Sunday school | 11:43 | |
or in confirmation class. | 11:45 | |
They learned them sitting with their parents on the pews | 11:48 | |
of a Methodist church, Sunday by Sunday. | 11:50 | |
Suddenly one day, they were reciting the Creed | 11:53 | |
and the Prayer with us. | 11:57 | |
And to me, that was an epiphany. | 11:59 | |
For my heart sank as I thought to myself, | 12:02 | |
"My heavens. What are they learning when we leave the | 12:04 | |
"sanctuary and go to the fellowship hall | 12:07 | |
"and observe how we Christians interact with each other, | 12:09 | |
"and what do they observe and what do they learn | 12:12 | |
"when we go home for lunch at the dinner table | 12:14 | |
"and rehearse the service of that day?" | 12:18 | |
We live in an age | 12:22 | |
which wants to say that my freedom is my own and ends | 12:24 | |
only at my neighbor's fence or nose. | 12:27 | |
It's a Burger King philosophy. | 12:30 | |
You can have it your way. | 12:31 | |
There's no implied responsibility to another person. | 12:34 | |
I am free to be and do what I will do so long | 12:38 | |
as I do not infringe on your rights | 12:40 | |
and on your prerogatives. | 12:43 | |
This mentality is alive and well in our culture | 12:46 | |
and including in our university. | 12:49 | |
But this flies in the face of ancient wisdom | 12:52 | |
which told us something like this: | 12:55 | |
I'm sorry, | 12:57 | |
but what you do speaks so loud I can't hear what you say. | 12:59 | |
Whether we will or not, we make a mark | 13:04 | |
on others with our lives. | 13:07 | |
The question is, what will that mark be? | 13:09 | |
It's slowly dawned on me recently that messages | 13:16 | |
which were common as I was a teenager | 13:19 | |
are no longer current among teens. | 13:21 | |
My generation of the Methodist church heard regularly | 13:23 | |
that we were not free to do as we pleased. | 13:26 | |
We were free to do anything | 13:30 | |
as Paul himself says elsewhere in Corinthians. | 13:31 | |
But not everything was edifying. | 13:35 | |
And not everything was positive for ourselves | 13:38 | |
or for our friends or for our community. | 13:41 | |
We can be sure that wherever we may be | 13:44 | |
or whatever we may be doing, | 13:46 | |
someone was watching and we would influence another, | 13:48 | |
for good or for ill. | 13:51 | |
"Do not become a stumbling block for others," | 13:53 | |
they told us. | 13:56 | |
"Do not let your lifestyle become an impediment | 13:57 | |
"to the gospel for yourself or for others. | 13:59 | |
"You may think you have no power and influence. | 14:02 | |
"But everyone has some power and influence somewhere | 14:05 | |
"and sometime. | 14:10 | |
"And the way you live," they said, | 14:12 | |
"whether you intend or not | 14:13 | |
"you are leading and influencing others." | 14:15 | |
We were taught to assume responsibility | 14:19 | |
for our peers and our community. | 14:21 | |
We were not free to do as we pleased. | 14:24 | |
We were free to do what God pleased. | 14:26 | |
And what our community and nation asked of us. | 14:29 | |
As a dean responsible for monitoring student progress | 14:36 | |
for ministry in the Divinity School, | 14:38 | |
I've had to confront the rather rare student | 14:39 | |
on his or her behavior. | 14:41 | |
On more than one occasion, students have responded to me, | 14:45 | |
"Well, what I do on my own time | 14:47 | |
is my own business, isn't it?" | 14:49 | |
And I usually say, "Well, you know, | 14:52 | |
if your behavior were not an issue here, | 14:54 | |
it would be your theology. | 14:56 | |
That theology wouldn't survive the first year | 14:57 | |
at the Divinity School." | 14:59 | |
But the presumption was | 15:02 | |
that there were "on hours" and "off hours" for Christians | 15:04 | |
and for ministers of the Gospel. | 15:09 | |
And I fear these students reflect the mentality | 15:12 | |
of some of our contemporaries who think | 15:14 | |
of themselves as Christian. | 15:16 | |
The church is sort of like a religious club I attend. | 15:18 | |
I pay my dues. | 15:21 | |
I have my spiritual itch scratched in Sunday service. | 15:22 | |
The rest of the week is mine. | 15:26 | |
But Christian faith is a vocation. | 15:28 | |
A calling. | 15:30 | |
In our baptisms, we were all called to ministry. | 15:32 | |
We rise with Christ out of the baptismal waters | 15:36 | |
into glorious ministry of healing and reconciliation. | 15:39 | |
There's a calling which brings with it a specific identity. | 15:44 | |
A specific self-understanding. | 15:47 | |
And specific practices. | 15:50 | |
So that's what Paul is trying to tell us | 15:53 | |
in these verses. | 15:55 | |
He writes about purity and patience. | 15:57 | |
About the sensitive conscience. | 16:00 | |
Kindness, holiness | 16:03 | |
and genuine love. | 16:04 | |
All these moral virtues are also communal virtues. | 16:07 | |
Not mere personal virtues. | 16:11 | |
When we looked at Paul's larger letters, | 16:14 | |
he tell us, "We commend ourselves through modesty | 16:16 | |
"and humility, | 16:19 | |
"through non-violence and gentleness, | 16:21 | |
"by purity of motive and behavior, | 16:24 | |
"yes, through the sufferings we endure | 16:28 | |
"as we live the faith in our communities." | 16:30 | |
It is clear from Paul's description that we as Christians | 16:34 | |
are called to put ourselves aside for the sake of Christ. | 16:37 | |
To be the leaven in the lump. | 16:40 | |
The light on the hill. | 16:43 | |
The seasoning in the dish. | 16:45 | |
We are part of a living organism called the church. | 16:47 | |
And our lives are interwoven with all those lives | 16:51 | |
as well as the lives of our community | 16:54 | |
and our world. | 16:56 | |
The notion that we can disengage ourselves | 16:58 | |
from the communities that surround us | 17:00 | |
is an illusion. | 17:02 | |
If we are not interested in pilgrimage | 17:05 | |
with all those other lives, | 17:06 | |
among whom we are set, | 17:08 | |
we have missed the point of the Gospel | 17:10 | |
and we find no abiding place among God's people. | 17:13 | |
We fall victim to desolate and impoverished lives. | 17:17 | |
Again, Paul writes, "From now on we regard no one | 17:26 | |
"from a human point of view. | 17:30 | |
"Even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view. | 17:32 | |
"God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, | 17:36 | |
"and God has given us the ministry of reconciliation. | 17:40 | |
"We are ambassadors of Christ. | 17:44 | |
"God is making his appeal through us. | 17:46 | |
"Now is the day of salvation. | 17:49 | |
"We put no obstacle in anyone's way, | 17:52 | |
"so that no fault may be found with our ministry. | 17:55 | |
"As servants of God, we commend ourselves in every way. | 17:59 | |
"So be it. | 18:04 | |
"So help us God." | 18:05 | |
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, | 18:08 | |
and of the Holy Ghost. | 18:10 | |
Amen. | 18:13 |
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