Knowledge puffs up, love builds up

15/22July                    1 Corinthians 6-8

In this fourth sermon in our series on 1 Corinthians, we come to chapters 6,7 and 8. In these chapters, we find Paul referring to letters that he has been sent by members of the Corinthian church, and responding to the issues that they have raised. As he tackles their questions, Paul keeps the heart of his message the same as it has been, and will be throughout the letter: followers of Jesus must try to live in unity. The need for unity is more important than differences between believers. The need for unity is more important than being on the winning side in an argument. The need for unity is more important than whether you believe yourself to be the one who is technically in the right.

Paul, living in Ephesus at the time that he wrote his letter, may well have had opportunities to learn from the apostle John, both in Ephesus and in earlier years in Jerusalem. He may well have heard John’s stories of Jesus’ teaching, many of which would later be put together to form John’s gospel. Paul would have learned from John, and from his own listening to the holy spirit, that unless the followers of Jesus are as one, living in unity and love, then the world will not believe in their message. Jesus prayed (John 17.22) that coming generations of followers would be one, so that the world might believe. But why should the world believe a message of love delivered by a church which demonstrates a lack of love? Why should the world believe in a God of love when we are seen to argue amongst ourselves? When we are heard belittling each other? So often what we demonstrate is that we do not love each other – or at least we don’t act as if we do. When that is what people see, why should they believe in our God of love?

In Corinth, Paul had heard, two believers were at loggerheads with each other, and had taken their case to the public courts. See these Christians, how they sue one another! Paul was troubled that their disagreement was being dealt with so publicly and acrimoniously. They should, he felt, have found wise people within the Christian community to help mediate the problem and find a loving way to sort it out. By going to court, the church – and by association, Jesus himself – was brought into disrepute.

The church – and Jesus – was brought into disrepute too by the behaviour of some members of who told Paul ‘I have the right to do anything’. Paul taught that Jewish law no longer applied, but his teaching was being misused by some church members to justify and ‘anything goes’ attitude that included a horrifying strand of sexual immorality. Paul had to put their thinking straight. The law may no longer apply, but the way of love and unity with God is a way of holiness. As the body of Christ, we must strife to behave like Christ. Or, if you like, what Cranmer described as a ‘godly, righteous and sober life’. Using deliberate shock tactics, Paul returned to his image of the church as Jesus’ body, and that body as a vessel for God’s spirit. So if a church member uses a prostitute, or commits adultery, he was taking Jesus into that liaison with him. It’s a sobering thought. Our bodies should always honour God, and what we do with them matters. What we do with our bodies reflects on God. Sexual relations can be godly and beautiful. Sex is a gift from God. Sex is not shameful, nor is it unholy – so long as it only happens within marriage.

In chapter 7 Paul turned to their questions on marriage. Some of the members were anxious about what sort of relationships were acceptable. We still hear the same concerns from people joining the Christian community now. A young person engaged to a longtime girlfriend or boyfriend, finds faith in Jesus. But their partner is not persuaded. What do they do? Can a follower of Jesus commit to living with a non-believer? Paul responds that commitments already entered into should be honoured. Yes, marry him, he says. Though if you’re not engaged, don’t marry at all – single people can serve God ore effectively. Unless of course, temptation is so strong it will distract you from serving God. Then you must marry.

The important thing is to live out God’s love in a holy way, and to be properly loving and respectful in all of our relationships. This way, we reflect God’s love, and it will be seen and respected by others.

Chapter 8 is a section of the letter addressing questions raised by members about food sacrificed to idols. Members who were wealthy or well connected would regularly be invited to feasts in temples or private homes. Meat served at such feasts would have been dedicated to one of the gods. Leftover meat from temple feasts was sold in the market. So, as a rule, any meat available wold have been from a sacrifice of some sort. Some Christians, Paul included, had no problem with this. The gods weren’t real, Paul did not accept them or join with the worship of them. So when he ate meat he didn’t feel he was joining himself with a god, he was just enjoying his dinner. But not everyone saw it that way. For some people, eating this meat was offensive, or suggestive of double standards. And for some it carried strong memories of their days of joining in with the feasting and other indulgences at the temples, and was both a reminder of a sinful life and a temptation to return to it. Paul called upon Corinthian Christians who shared his ‘strong’ position to be more considerate to ‘weak’ ones who could not in conscience eat this meat. To force them to do so would be unloving. The ‘strong’ Christians who relied on their liberal understanding risked becoming ‘puffed up’, Paul warned. Remember, Paul included himself among this group, and perhaps was reminding himself as much as advising his fellow Christians, that an attitude based on what you ‘know’ to be right can lead to behaviour that is unloving towards others. Knowledge, Paul said, puffs you up, while love builds you up.

So we are not to approach any issue that we disagree on from the point of view of ‘I know best, I know the right answer’. Perhaps you do, but that doesn’t mean that the community is ready to act on what you believe. Instead, prioritise love. Prioritise a loving approach that builds up the people you disagree with and builds up the community as a whole.

Love that builds up undergirds unity. In this case, it meant that for a while at least some people would have to abstain from eating meat in order to support a loving and united community. So be it.

As we look at the issues that divide us today, when does knowledge puff us up, and risk exacerbating division instead of supporting unity? When do we put our desire to be in the right ahead of loving treatment of our fellow Christians? When do we allow division to be more important than unity, rightness to be more important than love?

Let’s examine ourselves carefully. What is our equivalent of meat sacrificed to idols, or of taking our fellow Christians to court? Is it the way we speak of each other in emails? Or on social media? Is it our fallings out over how best to care for our historic buildings? Or whether to pay parish share? In the wider Church of England at the moment we are publicly seen to argue over ordaining women, over inclusion of LGBT people, over how we deal with historic sex abuse cases, over how we invest our money. And the more we argue and rehearse our cases in the public domain, the more we seem to show people that there is no God. And we need to take care over this. I can assure you that the amount of argument reported in the press that apparently happened before and during General Synod very much exceeds what actually happened. If we air disagreements in public, even minor ones, they will be blown out of proportion. But what the world will read in the press will tell them that we are not a loving church. And if we are not loving, how can we persuade them that our God of love is real?

We proclaim that God is love.

We teach that we are the body of Christ.

And thus, as the body of Christ, we are as Christ, and we are love.

Or, as St John put it: ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them’ (1 John 4.16).

Paul’s teaching is as vital now as it was when he first wrote it down. We must prioritise unity based on love, even when that means personal soul searching and stepping away from our own personal priorities, away from defending what we feel we are in the right about, in favour of a common loving way.

Because knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Cor 8.2).

Peter and Paul

It is AD 30. Passover has come and gone and a small but troublesome religious group was put down and dispersed. Rabbi Gamaliel had argued against it, but had been overruled by the stricter leaders in the Temple community. One of Gamaliel’s young students, a young man in his early twenties, was convinced by Caiaphas’s certainty and strong defence of the faith. He watched and learned from their tough approach. Perhaps, thought Saul, this could be the life for me. As a Benjamite, being a priest was never going to be an option, but working for these people to defend the one holy God from all these strange people who turn up with alternative movements, that would be a life worth living. A life devoted to serving the one true God.

Meanwhile, the dispersed group had reassembled in Galilee, home to many of them. One member of the group, a fisherman, married with young children, in his later twenties or early thirties, was reassessing his life. He had a trade, but for a while had begun to think he’d be leaving that trade behind in order to work permanently for the man he knew to be the Son of God, Jesus the Christ. A life devoted to serving the Son of the one true God. But he’d messed up. When things went wrong at Passover, Peter had failed. He denied Jesus, ran, hid, put his own life before Jesus’. Whatever Jesus might have suggested about Peter becoming ‘the rock on which I will build my church’, that wasn’t going to happen now. And he had mouths to feed.

John’s gospel suggests that Peter’s return to fishing wasn’t a success. A long night on the Sea of Tiberius yielded nothing, until Jesus intervened. Jesus had apparently already been fishing, or been to the market, because he was cooking fish when Peter and his friends met him on the beach. Breakfast preceded the conversation that put Peter’s life back on track. Jesus gave Peter the chance to say the words that wiped out the denials: I love you. I love you. I love you. And he responded by restating the calling: Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. Tend my sheep. Jesus was telling Peter that whatever his doubts were, whatever he’d done, he was called to what we’d see now as the role of a bishop, overseeing and caring for the people of God. No more fishing then.

Peter returned to Jerusalem, with young John, Jesus’ brother James and many of the disciples. Others of the disciples and apostles began to spread out, taking the word of God around the world, but for now, Peter, John and James stayed in Jerusalem and became known as ‘the pillars of the church’. Jerusalem was a risky place to be. Caiaphas and Annas’s enforcers were determined to stamp out the Jesus movement. Peter would likely have heard of one of the lead enforcers, young Saul, if only by reputation. And it probably wasn’t long before Peter heard the story of what happened to Saul on the way to Damascus.

Saul, so certain about his beliefs, would not have been won over by the sort of gentle encounter that settled Peter in his calling. For Saul, Jesus met him in his full glory, offering not breakfast and gentle talk, but old-fashioned, old testament style lights in the sky, voices from heaven and blindness after the conversation that could only be cured when obedience to God’s demands was fulfilled. Saul was young, determined and quick-thinking and Jesus met him as such, calling him to share his new insights across the known world. Saul started this immediately, despite at this stage not fully understanding what he was talking about, preaching first in Damascus and then in Jerusalem, where Peter will surely have heard the strange story. In both cases, Saul’s energy in preaching about Jesus was as strong as it had been in persecuting him, and the result was a huge risk to his own life. Perhaps – we shall never know – Peter was involved in organising the group of believers in Jerusalem who took Saul into their care and sent the young man home to safety with his own family in Tarsus, persuading him that – at least for now – he should curb his loud preaching, which was putting him and others in danger.

Saul stayed in Tarsus for a while, presumably during this time reverting to his Roman name, Paul. He probably took up the family trade, tent-making, and worked with his father in his workshop in Tarsus. At some point he travelled to Arabia, following the common practice of people who had encountered God and needed time to pray and reflect – going to the desert. He followed the example of John the Baptist and many prophets before him, and indeed of Jesus himself. Paul doesn’t tell us how long he spent on this extended retreat, but it changed and matured him, and gave him time to really study the scriptures, seeing how Jesus is present right from the beginning of Genesis, and to work out what he, Paul, believed. He went back to Tarsus and settled down.

There is probably a gap of about ten years between the dramatic conversion experience and the day when Barnabus fetched Saul and asked him to come on a mission to Antioch with him. When God calls us, however instant and dramatic the call and conversion might be, he always gives us time to fully prepare ourselves, to learn and to become ready for the work ahead. Peter had years listening to Jesus and then gradually learning more as he and the other apostles began settling the church in Jerusalem. Paul had years too, spent very differently, but equally important. Once Paul got started, his was to be a life of travelling, staying in places for between a few weeks in some cases, and a couple of years in others, sharing the good news, calling local people in leadership, and then leaving them to get on with being the local church. Paul and Barnabus were apostle evangelists, travelling, teaching, starting new things, moving on.

Peter had a different call. Surely, he shared the good news too, and hearing from him must have been incredibly exciting – he was one of Jesus’ best friends, so his story was as direct and correct as you could get. But when he travelled, it wasn’t to found new churches but to encourage and support existing ones. People like Paul and Barnabus got things started, and Peter followed to strengthen, bless and support the young church communities. And sometimes to correct things that were not happening as they should.

Peter was a man who avoided conflict at all costs, even if that meant retreating from a stated position and looking weak. He would doubt his own mind when faced with arguments from people who were good at offering a strong argument and being determined and unmoving about their positions. James, Jesus’ brother, appears to be the kind of strongly spoken person who could persuade someone like Peter to step back from a position he’d taken. Paul was going to have a similar effect – leading Peter to find himself caught between the two opposing views that Paul and James took.

That happened in Antioch, when Peter’s belief that it was OK to eat with Gentiles, and that they should be included fully in the Jesus movement, a belief that Paul held strongly and unmovably, was challenged by James, who cited Jewish law. Peter got caught between the two, and Paul felt his behaviour was weak. Being caught between those two strong personalities must have been pretty stressful for Peter. The conflict led to the council of Jerusalem, at which the inclusion of Gentiles was agreed, and a set of rules was drawn up – a compromise position which probably pleased only Peter. Paul was given the title ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’, and from that point on his life was one of constant movement on his mission to share the good news and to care for the poor (in the form of a collection for the church in Jerusalem).

Perhaps Paul and Peter wrote to each other after that. Paul had stayed with Peter during the council, so they’d had time to get to know each other well. Peter wrote in one of his surviving letters that Paul’s letters were confusing and easily distorted, but that Paul was wise. We can say with certainty that they had contact and knew each other’s movements. Peter went to Corinth after Paul had been there, again to encourage and support the young Jesus movement in the town, and Paul mentions this in 1 Corinthians. Paul also mentions, in the course of an argument with the Corinthians about whether leaders like Peter or Paul should be financially supported by the local church, that when Peter travelled, his wife was with him. Presumably by the time Peter was a travelling apostle-bishop (in the way we’d see a bishop – the word as used at the time applied to local leaders, more like our parish priests), their children were independent and so she was free to join and support him in his missionary work.

We don’t know how extensive Peter’s travels were. Our evidence for their lives comes from their letters and from Luke’s account in the book of Acts. Acts was almost certainly written as part of the defence case for Paul when he was tried in Rome. That is why so much of the work of the early apostles – Thomas, for example – isn’t there. It wasn’t relevant to Paul’s case, and Luke didn’t know Thomas. Luke was a travelling companion and fellow missionary with Paul in his later years, and shared a house with him in Rome. It is likely that Peter had come to Rome before Paul – he certainly wasn’t in Jerusalem during the dramatic days of Paul’s arrest, so he must have been visiting churches in Europe and probably heading in that direction. Jerusalem became a very unsafe place to be, and it is unlikely that Peter returned there.

In the house that Paul and Luke shared in Rome – you can make out parts of the first century structure amongst the later additions and adaptations – there is a 16^th century sculpture representing Paul and Peter in conversation, and Luke writing down their words.

We can date Paul’s house arrest in Rome to the early 60’s AD, so the traditional images that show Paul and Peter as old men don’t give us a really accurate image to imagine them from. Even at this point in their lives Paul would have been in his mid to late fifties, Peter maybe a little older. The likelihood is that Paul didn’t live beyond his 60^th birthday, Peter probably not much older than that. So not old men. And don’t imagine Paul with long hair, despite images, including the sculpture I’ve mentioned, showing long hair. Paul despised long hair on men and said so very firmly. So imagine for yourself the scene that the sculptor wanted you to depict. There, in that little Roman house, two men in their late fifties, remembering, telling each other things that filled in the gaps, considering together the words of Jesus, and all they had learned over their years of leadership. And Luke, listening, writing it down, making notes that informed his gospel and his book about the early church.

Peter settled in Rome, and lived the life of the apostle-bishop supporting the Jesus movement. After his death in the persecutions that followed the great fire of Rome, Peter was spoken of by the people of Rome as the first apostle-bishop of their experience, and the father of their church. They hid and guarded his remains and years later, when Christianity was the state religion, they retrieved then and built the first basilica of St Peter around them.

Paul didn’t settle. Rome was only ever a stopping off point on the way to a new mission ground in Spain. We can only speculate that he got to Spain – but the people of Tarragosa insist that he did. It seems he also revisited some old haunts, before finally returning to Rome, perhaps to support the church in the days of persecution. And Paul got caught up in the persecution too. His remains, like Peter’s, were hidden and guarded by Christians who recognised him as a great apostle-evangelist, and who reflected on the words he had written to the Roman church in almost his last surviving letter. Those remains, like Peter’s, were moved and a great basilica built in his honour.

And so these two men, whose lives were entwined by their devotion to serving Jesus and their different but connected callings, are still remembered together in Rome, and on their shared patronal day, and in churches like this one. Here we hold together the apostle-bishop, with his doubts, and his avoidance of conflict, and his encouraging, loving ways, and the apostle-evangelist, confident, loving and argument, wise but sometimes very confusing. Some like to suggest that Peter started the church in Rome and Paul the church everywhere else. We’d do well to listen to Paul’s wisdom on this: Jesus started the church everywhere. Jesus is the foundation and the cornerstone. The church that Jesus starred wouldn’t have got going and established, in Jerusalem, Corinth, Rome or anywhere else, without both Peter and Paul, and the others that Jesus called to the task. Both men, called so differently, so different in character and background, and different in their calling and task in the church, both men were essential to the beginning of the Jesus movement. They weren’t the only essential men, and we do well to remember that others, like James, or Thomas, or Barnabus, or Philip, did equally important work in those early days.

And every one of them would remind us that some things don’t change: while the church has a collection of leaders – among them bishops and evangelists – it remains as it has always been, the church of Jesus. Founded on Jesus, supported by Jesus, following Jesus. Seeking the will of Jesus and trying to do it. Loving Jesus. Living lives devoted to serving the Son of the one true God. We are a Jesus movement, not a Peter or a Paul movement. If we remember that, and live it out today, then Peter and Paul have well fulfilled their calling.