Train Wreck

The church at Corinth was a train wreck. Instead of hearing “Amen” and “Praise the Lord,” one would more likely hear “Screw you, buddy!” and “Oh, yeah? You and whose army?” Not exactly filled with the love of the Lord and the unity that comes with it most of the time, the Corinthian Christians were itching for a fight, not with the world outside their community, but with each other. Food fights at the communion rail, shoving matches at the elders meetings, and partisan-fueled gridlock at the program council were the order of the day. It was not unusual to see worshipers leaving church on Sunday morning with bloody noses and black eyes, rather than peace and love in their hearts.

In spite of workshops, sermons and a specialized Sunday School curriculum, the Task Force on Congregational Unity had gotten nowhere … in fact things seemed to be worse in the wake of their efforts rather than better. After six weeks of trying everything in his trick bag, one consultant left town in the middle of the night after he emailed the lay leader that, for whatever reason, the intramural conflicts at Corinth, rather than obstructing the mission of the church, seemed to actually be the mission of the church. “The churches that have a vital witness to the world,” he wrote, “consist of Christians who are continually amazed by the grace of God and power of the Holy Spirit. These folks, it seems, need the hatred generated by their division to support their existence.” When this missive was read in worship, the factional leaders began catcalling their opponents across the aisle with taunts of “Did you hear that, you moron?” and “You tell ‘em, preacher!” and “That’s just exactly what they needed to hear!”

In the middle of the brawl was a guy named Paul, a self-proclaimed apostle, formerly the infamous Saul of Tarsus. A prickly man with what seemed to be a huge ego, Paul was a lightning rod for the kind of skirmishing upon which the Corinthians thrived. Hanging with black-hatted boys at the temple on one day and having coffee with truckers at the Flying Jehovah the next and seen sipping a gin-and-tonic with the girls at the Paper Moon the next, his scandalous and erratic behavior made Newt Gingrich look like Dwight Eisenhower. “Whose side was he on, after all?” asked the baffled and contentious Corinthians.

So in his follow up correspondence that is collected and edited in our bibles as First and Second Corinthians, Paul spends the bulk of his efforts not only in defense of his authority but also explaining the method to his madness. “I did what it took,” he wrote, “to let the world know what amazing things God is up to in the world these days. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” Take a look-see for yourself.

We Corinthians in the twenty-first century have no way of knowing how effective Paul’s correspondence was in unifying the church at Corinth – I suspect not very. Centuries later, his writings are still largely irrelevant to us. The divisions we create for ourselves and the fortresses within which we find security and identity and our various reasons for being are perhaps more vicious and pronounced than ever before, all cloaked in the nobility of words like “patriotism,” “family values,” and “doctrinal fidelity.”

But one thing is certain. Those outside the walls of church life in America look at us and how we do our business and say, “What a joke.” They also say, “No thanks. Not for me. I have enough troubles of my own. Save the drama for your mama.” Perhaps we should simply be mindful of this the next time we are tempted to self-medicate on how right we are and how wrong the other guys are. The world sees what we are and what we have, and there are fewer and fewer takers.

Pragmatism is not a sin ... at least it wasn't for Paul.