Community (6th Sunday of Easter; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; May 1, 2016)

Community

6^th Sunday of Easter
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
May 1, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

When I work with couples to plan a wedding, I give them a list of scripture passages to use as a menu, but the texts that actually deal with marriage aren't on it. That’s because the Bible says very little about marriage and what it does say is spectacularly unhelpful. So, the list contains other references and this reading is one of them. In fact, it’s probably the most often chosen.

This is in spite of the fact that marriage is not Paul's subject here. Paul's subject is community and the values and attitudes it takes to make one. Of course, the smallest possible community is two people so maybe what Paul has to say about larger communities could work for a couple.

Paul, of course, is writing to the church at Corinth. The Corinthian church was his problem child. We heard last week that they were divided into factions by their conflicts. When parties start to form we know that conflict has gotten pretty bad. Based on the preachers that each of the parties favored, I think it would be fair to say that the members of the church had a variety of backgrounds. Further evidence for this comes in the place where Paul takes them to task for their practices around their shared meals. There are rich people in the congregation and poor people. The rich people were bringing their own rich food to supplement or replace the simple meal of plain food that everyone else was eating. While everyone else was having tuna casserole and Jello with fruit salad, they were dining on langostino bisque and steamed peacock tongues in a red wine reduction.

Church had become a place to show off, a place to celebrate and underscore their status in the community. (Thank God nothing like that has ever happened in Decorah!) They even jockeyed for position in their ministries. Some of them had special talents that were thought to be gifts from Holy Spirit. They bragged about their gifts and the more bizarre the gifts the more they bragged.

From Paul's point of view the problem was that they had failed to grasp the values and the attitudes necessary to form genuine community. The culture around them was no help. It knew nothing about community that wasn't based on hierarchies of wealth and status. Ancient Greco-Roman society seethed with the constant struggle to achieve honor and status. There was only a certain amount of honor. One person could only gain honor at the expense of someone else. And that someone else was also trying to gain honor. Life in the ancient city was a constant and often vicious struggle.

It's no wonder they had a hard time leaving that at the door of the church. It's no wonder they had a hard time embracing an entirely different way of being in community, one that was not based on competition and struggle for status, but based on the love for each other that was due to them because all are created in God's image. It's not that easy to step out of one story and into another. Old habits die hard and they died the hardest in Corinth.

Of course, we know a similar struggle. Our culture tells us that we are individuals whose happiness lies in meeting our own needs and desires. If we can get what we want, we'll be happy. The things that we want are in the hands of other individuals and so we try to figure out how to get those things from them. They, of course, are doing the same thing. Now, if we are lucky we have more than enough of some stuff and we can trade it for what they have and we'll both be happy. In fact I may even make more of the stuff I don't need so I can get more of the stuff someone else doesn't need but I want. The ideologues of our culture tell us that we can achieve the general happiness and well-being of all if only we are each free to be selfish. They preach a kind of alchemy in which the lead of our basest desires that treats the whole world and every other person as the means to my happiness is somehow transmuted into the gold of general prosperity and happiness.

I can't deny that this culture is rich. It flashes a lot of cash. There is an extraordinary amount of wealth on display all around us. It comes at the cost—as we are discovering—of an overheated, depleted and poisoned planet. It comes at the cost of the human misery that wealthy nations export to poor nations. It comes at the cost of our own humanity as we discipline ourselves to ignore those costs.

One thing this culture cannot produce is community of the sort that Paul puts forward as God's dream for us. Community is not something that can be had by using other people or even the earth to meet our wants and wishes.

Some eighty years ago another Jewish teacher named Martin Buber explored some of these same issues. In his famous book I and Thou¹ he said that individuals do not exist outside of a relationship. The “I”, the self, exists only in relationship. That relationship can be with a thing, an "it", in which case the "I" can have "it". Or that relationship can be with a another subject, a "Thou", in which case there is no possession, only relation. The "I" that arises out of an I-It relationship is different from the I that arises out of an I-Thou relationship. The I of an I-Thou relation is fully human, but the I of an I-It relation can never be fully human. It is only a fragment, a distortion, of the fully human.

This is dense language and hard to grasp. Maybe, at the risk of over-simplifying, I can say it this way: when we relate to something or someone as if they were a thing we become users, possessors, owners, exploiters, that is, less than human. When we relate to something or someone as a person, we give up owning and live in relation as human.

When put in this way, it's impossible for me not to conclude that the culture that we live in, the world in which we work, buy, and sell, the world of schools and jobs and the internet, teaches us and even disciplines us to live as I-It I's. In that world we are reduced to owners and renters, buyers and sellers, superiors and subordinates, producers and consumers, and winners and losers. We give up ourselves, our true selves, for a shot at having the experiences and things that we believe will make us happy.

That is the myth of consumer capitalism. But that myth is a lie and it doesn't work. In all my life I have never met anyone who gave themselves to the world of objects to be possessed who was happy. We hope and maybe believe that we will not let this world become our whole reality. We want for there to be some area of our life that isn't run by those rules. We want our marriages, families and friendships to be exempt, to be spaces where we live in I-Thou relations.

But our culture's myth is a powerful one and it invades and colonizes every physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual place that is not firmly defended. We don't want to treat our children as things, but we spend our time making sure that they have the right experiences, cheering them on so that they will be winners and not losers. How many parents in the stands are living vicariously through their children, pushing them to be as strong and successful as they weren't. In preparing our children to be winners in a consumer capitalist world, have we made it harder for them to relate to people and things as anything other than means to an end? While pushing them to become functioning adults, have we made it harder for them to become human?

Paul, our first Jewish teacher, had an innate grasp of this. He understood that the church, the ekklêsia, as he called it, the assembly of God's people that was the Christian alternative to the citizen assemblies of the ancient city, had an alternate set of values and attitudes. Paul understood that the ethic of the I-Thou relation is love.

For Paul the choice was stark. It was the difference between night and day, between death and resurrection, between damnation and salvation. No wonder his prose reaches its highest expression in this chapter. His subject is worth everything he can bring to it.

Of course, this isn't a choice that most of us are able to make once and for all. We find ourselves with a foot in two different worlds. But we can remember which way the universe is moving. We can remember that God's final word is love not ownership. We can practice loving each other. I know it's not always easy. At least I know that I'm not easy to love. But churches are places where we can learn to love people we might not have chosen had the choice been left entirely up to us. In the midst of a world powered by the I-It relation, we can choose to say "Thou" to each other and to our world. Instead of trying to own each other and the world, we can come into relationship and in this way begin to become human.

We can check that tendency to view each other as sources of the things we want. Our spouses are not those who bring home a paycheck or make sure that we have clean shirts. Our children are not here to give us a sense of our own accomplishment. Our parents do not exist to give us spending money and pay for our unlimited texting. Our friends are not here to relieve our boredom or to be sources in an economy of exchanged favors. Our neighbors are not our competitors for limited goods. Our planet is not a neutral chunk of stuff for us to use and abuse in any way we please.

Instead we are called to love, not use, our lovers, our children and parents, our friends and neighbors, our world and all the creatures that share it with us. This sounds like a dream, a pretty bit of poetry. To be sure, it is poetry, it is a dream. But it is God’s dream. A world that is populated by I-Thou I’s, a world that lives by the love ethic seems fragile, but it is in fact the world that is coming into being all around us. It is the new world. The death-dealing dehumanizing world of self-serving and self-seeking is reaping what it has sowed. It is dying and will pass away. Consumer capitalism and any system that might pick up where it leaves off, is doomed. What will survive is community. Those who choose to serve each other are not the losers. The will no longer be doomed to see themselves reflected in the people and things they own or control. Instead they will live fact-to-face with those who know and are known by them. Whatever is lost, whatever crumbles, whatever is destroyed, love will remain for ever.

1 Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Martin Kaufmann. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1970.