Did you hear about the man who was stranded on a desert island for several years after a shipwreck? They finally found him; he was so glad to see human faces again and to talk to real people instead of a deflated volleyball. He was overjoyed that he’d be living among other humans again, but he didn’t jump into the boat right away. Before they left, he wanted to show them his camp. He pointed to a hut, “This is my house.” He pointed to another hut, “This is where I worship.” His rescuers pointed to a third hut, on the other side of his house. “What’s that?” they asked. “Oh, that’s where I used to go to church. Three years ago I got mad and left.”
Church life is messy. Where two or three are gathered in his name, chances are they won’t be together for long before they get the itch for other configurations. We gather in the name of Jesus Christ, but other names pull us in other directions.
Paul opens each of his letters with the greeting, “Grace to you and peace,” and he also closes all of them with a word of grace. No matter how messy the situation he addresses, no matter how hard and heated the arguments between the first and last paragraphs, Paul reminds his listeners and readers that grace embraces and surrounds us, and grace claims and equips a people for God’s purposes in the world. This grace bears the name of Jesus Christ, in whose death and resurrection God has judged the world of sin and begun a new creation where righteousness is at home.
The church in Corinth was barely four years old, when Paul wrote them this letter from Ephesus, on the other side of the Aegean Sea. Corinth was the capital of the Roman province of Achaia, a wealthy city with a steep social pyramid. The number of church members in the city was probably in the dozens, rather than hundreds, but the small size didn’t mean they didn’t find ways to divide. “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you,” they were reading from Paul’s letter in homes across the city where house churches gathered. Some heads may have turned, some believers may have mumbled under their breath, “They just had to tell him, didn’t they?” Others must have been glad Paul was aware of these issues and addressing them. Would all of them welcome his urgent appeal to be united in the same mind and the same purpose?
It appears a good number of them had begun to identify themselves by the name of the person who had first told them the good news of Jesus Christ and baptized them. I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos. I belong to Cephas. You notice there’s a lot of “I” in those statements. It sounds like those new believers weren’t just saying, “Paul’s alright” or “I really like Apollos; he is such a great teacher.” Folks in the church in Corinth weren’t looking around and appreciating the variety of Christian witness and teaching, they were drawing the first denominational lines. It was getting to the point where their identity was shaped more deeply by their respective allegiance to the particular tradition of Apollos, Cephas, or Paul, than by their new life in Christ.
“Really?” Paul shouts across the sea from Ephesus. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” Other names get in the way of who we are in Christ, and who we are becoming as a people being saved, a people set aside for God’s purpose in the world.
There’s a lot of “I” in our divisions, but our hope for salvation is wrapped up in the grace with which Christ has made us his own. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians (2:20). No longer I, but Christ in me, and all of us in Christ.
Jane Lancaster Patterson writes, “Many people in America today would say that divisiveness is one of the most dangerous issues in our common life, that factionalism and misguided allegiance keep us from being able to address the very serious challenges that confront us today.” She then goes on to name some of the very serious challenges that confront us today: the increasing disparity between rich and poor, climate change, global violence, competition for natural resources, migration due to war and famine (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 - Working Preacher from Luther Seminary). Reading her reflections, I was nodding along, but I also noticed that her list didn’t include abortion or crime, not to mention “the deep state” or “the great replacement” — issues that others would have named first on their list. Our divisions run so deep, we can’t even agree on the very serious challenges that confront us today.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research for her most recent book, Strangers in Their Own Land, took her, you might say, from the bluest spot on the bluest coast to one of the reddest spots on the electoral map of the United States, Lake Charles, Louisiana. She didn’t move there, but she traveled back and forth over the course of five years to meet people and visit and deepen relationships. She came, she writes, “with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me.” She describes an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.” And she continues,
In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.[1]
She thought she had “some understanding of the liberal left camp,” but she had “a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right — that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes.”[2]
And that is what she did. She sat at kitchen tables and went to campaign events; she walked through refineries and drove across old plantations; she went to church and to crawfish cookouts, and she did the work of imagining herself into the shoes of the people she met. She asked questions and listened, and whenever she ran into the empathy wall—and she did, again and again—she didn’t walk away, but asked more questions and listened even more carefully. She began to see the world through the eyes of the men and women who welcomed her interest and she came upon what she calls their “deep story,” a narrative not just of a world view, but of how the world is felt. Reflecting on the whole process of discovery and transformation she initiated and shared with her readers, she writes,
The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.[3]
Our polarization … makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt—that is where we are, and not only in this country, and not for the first time. We forget too easily, and some of us have never learned, how to make room for strangers whose deep stories may be utterly unfamiliar, yet just as human as our own.
We still read Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth, because he addresses the very serious challenges that confront all of us who are called to live as God’s people in the world. Thirty-eight times in his first letter to them, significantly more than in any other of his letters, Paul uses the simple address, brothers and sisters. Thirty-eight times he affirms the common ground and the equal standing of all who are in Christ. Brothers and sisters he calls us repeatedly, so that when the letter is read aloud in the assembly, we would perhaps remember that all of us belong to the family of God. That we don’t “belong” to Apollos or Cephas or Paul or any other earthly label, but that Christ had made us his own; that we belong to no other master, not even to ourselves, but to Christ, and therefore, in a radically new way, to each other. Brothers and sisters he calls us—not ladies and gentlemen, or Gentiles and Jews, or dear members and guests.
“In order to form a Christian community identity within a pluralistic pagan world, Paul repeatedly calls his readers to a ‘conversion of the imagination,’” is how Richard Hays has put it.[4] A conversion of the imagination. A complete reordering of our inherited cultural norms and practices. Our thorough resocialization, from all sorts of backgrounds into a new community where Christ is Lord and brother of all. A community where we look at ourselves and each other not through the usual lenses of who matters and who doesn’t, who knows and who doesn’t, who has a voice and who doesn’t, who counts and who doesn’t, but instead through the complete and radical undoing of all of that in the cross of Christ.
Baptized into Christ, we are being soaked in God’s freeing grace, and we are being transformed after the pattern of Christ. His love makes room for all of us strangers, and in his embrace, his story becomes our deep story.
[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016). Kindle Edition. Location 170.
[2] Ibid. Location 70.
[3] Ibid. Location 117.
[4] Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), 11.