Sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on January22, 2023 drawing from Isaiah 9:1-4 and 1 Corinthians 1:10-18.
Back when I was at seminary, one of my favorite times of the year was when we would have that big, community used book sale. Basically what would happen is that one of the offices - the International office, if I remember correctly- would spend months soliciting book donations from all the old pastors and academics around town, and then sell all their used books, numbering in the thousands, to the student community for next to nothing.
In my first year at the seminary, I was fresh off my Master's in education, so I was already familiar with the idea of having a comprehensive-yet-reasonably-sized professional library. So when I heard about this book sale, I figured it'd be a good opportunity to start building my pastoral library in the same way. I thought - quite naively, as it turns out - that I'd show up at the gym on the day of the sale, and find a few hundred leftover books that had been scraped together, and that perhaps among them I might find one or two on which I could start, over the next few years, building my collection.
But when I rocked up to the sale on the day, expecting a few students quietly milling through a handful of donated texts, what I encountered could perhaps charitably be described as absolute bedlam.
The seminary's basketball court, had been filled wall-to-wall with enough books that one could safely say that, for the weekend at least, Princeton Seminary had effectively gained an entire second library. Thousands of tomes, haphazardly stacked all around the room in great, towering piles of knowledge and wisdom, loomed over crowds of students below excitedly tearing through pillars and walls of literature and reference material in search of that next great find. As I walked into the room I was at first overwhelmed by the frantic chaos of the place but, as I adapted to it, I started to get lost in awe and amazement not just at the quantity, but the quality of the books I was seeing.
This was no collection of errant discards. There were entire reference library sets, some well-loved but many seemingly brand-new; untouched, perhaps even unopened. There was an entire section of the gym set aside just for commentaries, and another for historical textbooks. Stacks of Bibles in every conceivable language, just scattered along a wall; I picked up a copy of the Latin Vulgate that was 120 years old! Some of these books were absolutely baffling for how well-kept they were, and it wasn't uncommon to find books that were decades, even centuries old, dusty and perhaps a bit brittle, but otherwise in pristine condition despite their age.
Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth of course, I took advantage of their special "whatever you can fit in a box for $5" deal, and filled up the entire back of my car with enough ancient theological texts to potentially either put my home library on some kind of government watch list, or to classify it as a UNESCO World Heritage site. And on my way out with what would be my final box that day - which….mostly…fit into my car - I stopped for a brief chat with a friend of mine, who was helping run the sale that day.
I asked him just how it happened to be that there could be this many books, all so ancient and valuable, but still in such remarkably good condition. He explained to me that most of their donations came from retired pastors and academics, most of whom had been given stipends from their churches or institutions over the years to buy and maintain a big, important-looking library which, in most cases, just sat there looking pretty for the entirety of their academic or ministerial careers.
Think about that for a minute. Hundreds of books, entire generations of knowledge and wisdom, just sitting on a shelf for the look of it all. Utterly useless in every practical sense, used only to present the image of wisdom, intelligence, and authority to others - an image perhaps unearned by the pastors and teachers who owned those libraries, who never once bothered to read these books which they had adopted as a form of defensive camouflage rather than embracing them as what the good Doctor once called them; the greatest weapons in the world.
Think about how many sermons might have been written differently, if only those books had been used. How many people might have been inspired, how many lives might have been changed, or even saved, had these books been put to their intended use, rather than just strung up like so many props? How many tepid, uninspiring, lukewarm years of mediocre Christianity and soporific worship might have been exchanged for the resonating call of a Christ whose very name evokes the specter of newness and change?
Who could we be today, but for all those books left on the shelf, avoiding wisdom by trying to appear wise?
In our passage from Corinthians today, we're presented with an image of Paul whose frustration and annoyance burn like troubling fire against a congregation which has descended into pettiness and infighting. We see Paul being genuinely, legitimately pissed off because these people, a church where he has lived and worked for a time, baptizing people in the name of Christ Jesus, has turned in upon itself in useless conflict.
At one point, Paul flat-out says "Thank God I only baptized the two of you, because the unimaginable ridiculousness of your collective behavior would embarrass me directly into the grave long before the Romans get their chance, if it were that I had baptized you all!"
Now I'm betting that, much like me, most of you have heard people preach on this particular passage before. It's been a popular one for a long time, particularly among that specific brand of Christian clergy who spend their careers aching longingly after that peace which is, as Rev. Dr. King described, "the absence of conflict rather than the presence of justice." And on first read, it does rather sound like Paul is throwing it back to Corinth with the same "exhausted parent energy" that I have been known to deliver to my own children after breaking up the 95th fistfight in a 10-minute span.
But, like most scripture, that understanding only really works if you don't look directly at the blinding contradiction at the heart of the passage, which suggests to us either that the Apostle Paul is doing something very different here, or that the Apostle Paul is profoundly insane.
Think about it. If Paul is dead-set on "just stop fighting and be nice to each other" as his theological position…why's he being so mean about it? How is his being so obviously abrasive even remotely appropriate as a means to ending conflict within the community?
Before we even consider what Paul actually says here - and it is important - it's worth noting that even his tone, the frustration and complete "done-ness" of it - serves a purpose. His tone of conflict is meant to be shocking, disruptive, and to a certain extent silencing; like when your introverted, quiet and eternally patient friend suddenly blows up out of the blue, leaving you stunned into silence as you attempt to figure out just where exactly that came from.
Because that's what's missing here, in the community of Corinth; that moment of introspective silence.
You see, they had become so accustomed to conflict, so expecting of it, so immersed in it that they had long ceased to question whether each other's thoughts, opinions, or positions held any real validity or worth. They had stopped bothering with trying to see the other side, to understand; to listen to each other. They had entrenched themselves, drawn party lines, declared allegiances to what they were certain they knew, defending themselves with the sort of partisan absolutism that is the last refuge of both the truly determined and the truly demented.
They had all of them become so certain in their own righteousness, their own goodness, their own correctness, that they had neglected that great discipline of community; not compromise, not silence, not even the great multi-tool of virtue that is patience, but the very act of listening.
And when I say listening by the way, I do not mean the simple act of allowing the words of another to flow through those nice little head-holes we now use for holding air pods and whatnot. I don't mean the act of listening carefully to another person so that you can gather enough information to manipulate or convince them to exchange their perspective for yours. And I certainly don't mean the act of listening as a kind of semantic trench warfare, the way too many of us often do it today; listening defensively, waiting for the other person to say something you can use as ammunition, to throw back in their face with gleeful rage as though you've just slapped them with an uno reverse card in the middle of what was supposed to be an actual, human conversation.
What I'm actually talking about here is listening as the act of taking in the fullness of another's perspective, and seeking to see the human being at the heart of it, with all their worries, concerns, hopes, and fears, that we might embrace them fully, and seek to move forward together with mutual care and respect.
That kind of listening is a very different thing indeed, and what makes it different is that it asks more of us than any other kind. The book of James says it perhaps more clearly than most when it implores us to,
"be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for human anger does not produce God’s righteousness." (James 1:19-20, NRSVUE)
That's asking a lot, especially when we realize that being quick to react and quick to anger is something that is hard-coded into each of us; a built-in facet of our own evolutionary biology. Apex predators sitting at the top of an entire planet's food chain don't usually benefit from patient, quiet, and compassionate listening, especially when we're not blessed with overwhelming strength, claws, or teeth. Whether by sin or design, the nature of humanity is to labor by the sweat of our brow for thorns and thistles which means - among a great number of other things - that compassionate communication doesn't exactly come naturally to us. And in order to accomplish it, we are required to set aside those pieces of ourselves that demand we do otherwise; deeply held instincts and desires, masquerading as righteousness and truth in our minds, telling us that we need to fight for what is ours, fight for what is good, and true, and holy, and that if there is any reconciliation to be had, it will be by all others coming to the table we have built, and never the other way around.
We all love an open table, so long as it's our table.
But it's not our table; it's Christ's table, and that table - built out of an old wooden cross - seems like foolishness to those perishing in the fires of conflict and hatred, because the person God has invited to sit down isn't that collection of theologies, political positions, arguments, biases, prejudices and hatreds we've built up around our hearts and minds and called a personality, wrapping ourselves up in it like a toddler wearing their father's suit to try and look more "grown up," but the beautiful, innocent, deeply emotional and deeply loving child of God at our core, who has been buried for far too long under all the "other stuff" we cocoon ourselves in to mask our vulnerability in a deeply painful, hurtful world.
Right around the time my wife and I got married, nearly 15 years ago, we were taking all those pre-marital and post-marital classes one does, to learn everything we could about how to communicate with and understand each other. In truth, it was probably the smartest thing we did in those days - as a couple of kids in our early 20s, smart wasn't always in ready supply, so I'm always proud when I can report on my young self making a good decision! But as a newlywed couple - and one from wildly opposite language and culture backgrounds too - we decided to go all-in on any counseling, church group, or activity based around helping newlywed couples figure each other out.
And one of the first things I learned in one of those classes was something I have heard repeated in just about every pastoral care course I've attended, every counseling training session I've been to, and every book I've read on interpersonal conflict, anger, and all those moments of seemingly irreconcilable difference that arises between people:
When we get angry, when we find ourselves in conflict with each other, the true root of our feelings, the core of what we're hurt and angry about; it's almost never the thing we're actually fighting about. It's almost always something other, something deeper, which drives us to fracture the bonds that connect us to each other - to draw swords, rather than draw closer to each other.
You see, most of the conflicts we have with each others are proxy wars; we pick some high-stakes-sounding idea, some grand piece of world-changing rhetoric, some theological point or justification, some big…thing, and we make that the thing we're arguing about because if we were to boil it down to the thing that's really bothering us, the cold and dark emotion that grips our heart like a vice in the dead of night, that thing usually sounds, in the truthful and unyielding light of day, childish and more than a little absurd.
When we say, "you've made a mockery of my values and disrespected the God of my fathers," it sounds like a much more suitable reason to feel hurt and offended; much more suitable than "what you said made me feel small, and hurt my feelings."
Saying what we are really feeling makes us sound like we're three years old, and as serious, grown up people we can't have that at all! So we build on it, twist it, and make it into something far bigger than it ever was, far bigger than it ever needed to be, just so that we needn't endure the embarrassment, the humiliation of working through our wounded pride, admitting that we're hurt or sad, and working towards healing and reconciliation by admitting that our own hurt almost certainly caused us to say or do something that hurt someone else in the exact same way.
The first sacrifice required to make a community unified in God's justice and united under God's love, is our own selfish and stubborn pride because being together - whether that's in a relationship, a church, a community, a nation, or even an entire planet - requires spiritual openness and emotional vulnerability. The great challenge of a true and loving community is that conflict is never resolved, reconciliation is never obtained through strength of argument leading to decisive victory, but through a connection born of honesty, openness, and emotional vulnerability.
The struggle in Corinth is the same struggle of those revered, respected, retired pastors and professors perpetually feeding the great used book sale - living a life of conflict and confusion because you were so wrapped up in personal pride of appearance that you wind up accomplishing far less than you ever could have if you just admitted you didn’t actually know what you were talking about, turned around, grabbed a book off the shelf, and read the stupid thing.
But for most of us, giving up that pride is more than we can bear. Being that degree of vulnerable, being that degree of open, especially in the sight of the whole community, is a kind of anguish that we cannot suffer, a darkness from which we fear we might never emerge.
But in Christ there is no gloom for those in anguish, but a great light shined into the darkness that engulfs us. Where others might fear the soul-rending darkness of vulnerability and self-sacrifice, we who follow Christ know no such fear. The power we are given in Christ isn't the strength to proclaim, the perseverance to endure, or the boldness to speak difficult truths in holy conflict. The power of God is not made perfect in our boldness, our brashness, or our willingness to defend to the death the very things we hold most dear.
No.
The power of God is made perfect in weakness. Made perfect in vulnerability. God's power is made perfect every time we look to another person, even the great perpetrators of injustice in our world, and sing to them of our failures, lay bare to them our pain. God's power is perfected every time show our full and true selves to each other, lay bare our hurt and broken humanity, and then look and see where others hurt and pain might be on display as well.
We are not the keepers of doctrine, or the guardians and protectors of the faith. Even in an era when there are truly legitimate reasons for conflict, things against which all Christians must rise to speak on behalf of all the poor, the wounded, the oppressed, and the suffering who stand to lose so much to the excesses of the wealthy few; even still, ours is not to draw battle lines, and pursue the righteousness of our cause clear to it's bitter, painful end.
We aren't the keepers of righteousness, but we are our brother's keeper.
I am deeply and keenly aware - perhaps more so than most - that pointed rhetoric does not an effective solution make. Conflict and division are the seemingly insurmountable challenges of the day, and no sermon I could ever preach will provide us an end to this difficult period in the history of our culture, our nation, or our world. But what Paul does here in Corinthians gives us a glimpse of the light talked about in Isaiah, the light made manifest in Christ Jesus. It shows us a way forward that isn't simply "winning the battle" against all those with whom we may quite rightfully disagree, but one which calls upon us to sacrifice our pride and approach each other with the sort of honest vulnerability that would make Elon Musk faint with fear and Fred Rogers cheer with glorious and supportive glee.
Victory through love and compassion, fought with the tactics of openness and emotional vulnerability, a war ended without a single shot fired.
Just as a library serves no purpose unless someone is using it, so too does our faith serve no purpose unless we are opening ourselves to the radical, vulnerable, self-sacrificial love that Christ calls forth from us. Our faith is as useless as those old pastor's libraries when we use it as a bludgeon to fight back against others, when we use it to draw lines of attack and defense, to man the battlements, cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of holy war.
But when we approach each other, even when we approach our enemies, with a silencing vulnerability, with honesty and openness, looking to find the true hurt that lies at the root of the fellowship brokenness between us; that is when we truly grow to be the community we are called to be in Christ Jesus.
Comments