Jesus As Brand Name
5th Sunday of Easter1 Corinthians 1:10-18 (& Acts 18:1-4)
April 24, 2016
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
In the Old West the grazing lands were often not owned by anyone. Cattle grazed on open range land unattended by cowboys. Cattle owners need to be able to tell whose cattle were whose, so they used what they called "brands." When the cattle were calves they were marked with red-hot irons that left a scar in a shape that people recognized as a particular ranch’s “brand.”
Brands become important when someone needs to claim their cattle from a common herd of animals that mostly resemble each other. Maybe that's why the term was taken over by people who want to market and sell as their own products that are pretty much like everyone else's. Take soft drinks for example or, to narrow it down even further, Coke and Pepsi. Although the market in the US for sugary carbonated drinks is not what it used to be, worldwide, a lot of people are drinking them. Coke sells 1.8 billion drinks each day. Coke dominates in the US with a 43% market share while Pepsi trails at 31%.
When it comes to competing against each other, both Coke and Pepsi have a problem and that is that their products are really quite similar.
There are little differences. Pepsi is said to use lemon oil while Coke uses orange oil as a flavoring. Pepsi claimed during the Pepsi Challenge days in the late 70s that in a head-to-head blindfolded taste test people preferred Pepsi. Interestingly, an independent test showed when people were presented with two cups marked with either the letter "L" or "S " (the labels used by Pepsi in its challenge) and both filled with either Pepsi or Coke, they overwhelmingly preferred the cola in the cup marked with an "S".
Another experiment asked students their preference between Coke and Pepsi. (Someone has joked that college students are the only group we really know anything about, psychologically, since they are so often used in experiments.) They were then asked to compare the two to verify their choice. Cups were filled in plain sight from Coke and Pepsi bottles and the students were asked to pick the one they liked better. What they weren't told is that the Coke bottle contained Pepsi and vice versa. Twenty-two of the students said they preferred the cola from the bottle of their brand choice even though the cola itself was not their preferred cola. Eight of the students correctly detected that the drinks had been switched. [Mary E. Woolfolk, William Castellan, and Charles I. Brooks, "Pepsi Versus Coke: Labels, Not Tastes, Prevail." Psychological Reports, 52 (1983), 185-186.]
What do I conclude? That getting people to buy either Coke or Pepsi is more a matter of branding than of product. The two companies know this well. Each company has devoted not so small fortunes over the years to advertising and efforts to "branding" their products. Since almost all advertising is done with images and sound, this branding has little to do with taste. Most people can't tell the difference in taste, anyway. Just beginning in the sixties, when Coke featured bands of lost hippies holding hands and singing on the tops of hills, and Pepsi claimed that drinking its product was the mark of a new generation, they have piled up a significant list of slogans and mottos that have little, sometimes nothing, to do with flavor. Here are some samples, first for Coke: "Things go better with Coke", "It's the real thing", "Coke is it!" "You can't beat the feeling!" "Can't Beat The Real Thing" , "Always Coca-Cola", "Open Happiness", and "Taste The Feeling". In the interests of fair play, here are some from Pepsi: "You're in the Pepsi Generation", "Pepsi Pours It On", "You've Got a Lot to Live, and Pepsi's Got a Lot to Give", "Join the Pepsi People", "Pepsi. The Choice of a New Generation", "Drink Pepsi. Get Stuff", "Generation Next", "Every Pepsi Refreshes The World", and "The Joy of Pepsi-Cola."
It's about the brand, the images and feelings associated with the thing, more than the thing itself.
With that in mind, let's turn to the church at Corinth where, says Paul, Christ is being branded. There have been a number of preachers in Corinth: Paul, Peter (called Cephas in our reading), and someone named Apollos. Each of them has been preaching about Christ. Each of them has framed their preaching a little differently both, I suspect, in terms of style and in terms of content. What else would we expect, since Paul was trained in rabbinical circles, Peter was a fisherman, and Apollos seems to have had a pagan background and perhaps the education to go along with it.
Imagine that instead of Paul, Apollos, and Cephas, this list consisted of Jim Dale, Laura Arnold, and John Caldwell. We, too, have different backgrounds, different personalities, different experiences that have influenced how we tell the Christian story. Just as each of you finds each of us more or less persuasive, so did each of the ancient Corinthian church find Paul, Apollos, and Peter more or less persuasive. They each had their favorite preacher.
They heard different versions of the story. They heard different version of Christ being offered. They knew that they had to make up their own minds.
So far, all is well. In Confirmation class we have been reading the Gospel of Mark. We read it separately and then compare notes around a single question that we are keeping in mind: What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? Does it surprise you that we come up with different answers to the question? Mark, of course, has different answers than the other writers. Mark's presentation of Jesus is different from the other gospels and from the rest of the New Testament. We each read Mark a little differently. When I share with them the answers to our question that I have found, I also say, "But, don't forget that this is my version of Mark's Jesus."
So far as United Methodists we have never required that we all have the same version of the story nor the same version of the figure at the center of the story. That means that my reading is not a privileged reading. I don't get to decide that my reading will be the only reading. I'm still allowed to ask questions and I do, like, "I don't understand where you're getting that answer. What in the story led you to that conclusion?" We are all allowed to do that. We can have fierce, spirited conversations. All of that is fine, to be encouraged, even.
What I can't do is to say, My version of Christ is the only acceptable version. But this is what people in the church at Corinth had been doing. They had used different understandings of Christ to draw boundaries around factions in the congregation. They say, "I'm in the Paul party" or "I'm in the Cephas party" or "I subscribe to a more or less Apollonian position." My favorite brand in Corinth is the Christ party: "I belong to the Jesus party".
In branding Jesus the various parties in Corinth hope to claim ownership over Jesus and his message. They hope to be able to use Jesus as a weapon or a tool in their internal congregational struggles. Each party claims that their Jesus is a better version. Each party claims that all the others are inferior. Like Pepsi and Coke, though, I suspect that most people chose for reasons that had nothing to do with the content of their party's version of Jesus. Apollos followers liked erudition and cultural references. Peter followers liked his down-to-earth style. Paul followers liked his tight, rabbinic reasoning.
Now all of this would be merely an interesting historical footnote were it not that this pattern of behavior, this partisanship, this brand-name jingoism is still around.
The United Methodist Church's General Conference will meet next month in Portland, Oregon. Over 800 lay and clergy delegates from annual and central conferences all over the world will gather for ten days of celebration and deliberation. They'll review our global ministries. They'll act on plans to publish a new hymnal that will be cloud-based and can be downloaded, projected or printed on-demand in whole or in part anywhere it's needed. They'll and approve plans for ministry for the next four years, the 2017-2020 quadrennium.
But all of this will be overshadowed by the continuing struggle over an issue that Jesus never mentioned: the role and place of LGBTQ persons in the United Methodist Church. There is a showdown coming that hardly anyone wants and no one will be able to prevent. There are groups coming prepared to split the church. There are groups coming prepared to expel those who disagree. The Right is looking to enforce its version of "the rules" and believes that the alternative is "anything goes." The Left is looking for some way to cling to a vision of inclusion. Those in the middle don't know which way to turn and are praying for a Rodney King, can't-we-all-just-get-along miracle. What would that look like, I wonder?
I am fearful of the outcome. Oddly, perhaps, I'm not fearful that we will split or that we won't. I am mostly fearful because, no matter what comes out of the General Conference, our denomination will come away wounded and preoccupied with the result that energy that could have gone into the transformation of the world will instead have been wasted on a fight that no one can win and all will lose.
But despite the partisanship, despite the pre-conference rhetoric, there is only one Jesus Christ. His message, while addressed differently in each place and time, is still focused on announcing good news to those who are forced into the margins of society: prisoners driven insane by decades of solitary confinement, kids kicked out of their homes for being gay, Muslim refugees fleeing from their homes in terror, toddlers killed by the guns that were supposed to protect them, young black men who can find no evidence that their lives matter, native American women survivors of sexual assault who can find no justice, mothers in Honduras who face a nightmare choice between seeing their children killed in their own neighborhoods or sending them north at the mercy of "los coyotes", Pacific islanders who watch their homelands being swallowed by an ever-rising sea while congressmen hold up snowballs to prove there is no global warming, and retirees who have watched their retirement savings gutted while the bankers that put those savings at risk are richer than ever, just to name a few. Everywhere a mother suffers, everywhere a father's humanity is erased, everywhere a child is abused, Jesus is there. He bids us join him in loving the unloved and unlovely, standing in solidarity with the vulnerable, feeding the hungry, welcoming the refugee, healing the sick and the broken-hearted.
At the risk of enlisting in one of the mercenary bands invading Oregon next month, I hope that's the Jesus who shows up at General Conference. But even if it's not, even if the Conference is a disaster, that is the Jesus I know we will invite to be present among us, the Jesus that we will follow into our community, the Jesus in whose name we will gather no matter what happens in Portland.
