A Sin So Thoroughly Respectable
A Sermon on 1 Corinthians 1.10-18 for the Annual Meeting of the
Massachusetts Council of Churches
January 24, 2009
Andover Newton Theological Seminary
John H. Thomas
General Minister and President
United Church of Christ
Congregationalist pastor Horace Bushnell once spoke to his flock in Hartford about “sin that clings so closely, but sin that had grown so thoroughly respectable we have lost any just impression of its deformity.” Things that are wrong can grow so comfortable for over time, that they come to be seen as right. Poverty becomes for us a lamentable fact of life rather than the scandal to the Gospel we proclaim. War becomes not merely the necessary evil of our fallen condition, but is declared by our churches to be just. Greed, at least for a time, works well enough for enough of us that it becomes a virtue; the solution to the problems caused by unbridled, irresponsible consumption is to stimulate more consumption. Yes, sin is here and sin that needs salvation,” as Bushnell put it. “But it is sin has grown so thoroughly respectable that we have lost any just impression of its deformity.”
I suspect that many of us, over the past years, have found ourselves perplexed by sectarian division within Islam. We have been introduced to Shi’ite and Sunni Islam through our dismal national adventures in the Middle East, and have no doubt wondered why and how a religion founded upon such singular commitment to the oneness of Allah could find itself splintered into two camps that sometimes seem prepared to unleash such violence upon one another. A few of us have ventured to study the historical, social, cultural, and theological background for this divide, but most of us, I suspect, have shrugged our shoulders with a certain sense of moral superiority at this incongruity all the while attending churches that do not recognize the ministry, sacraments, and confessions of others as if this is the most normal thing imaginable. We caricature and compete, tolerate and ignore. Preoccupied with the splinter in another’s eye, we have ignored the log in ours, rendering respectable the multiplicity of our churches; in the process we have, for the most part, have lost any just impression of its deformity.
In 1937, as part of the preparation for the Second World Conference on Faith and Order to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth prepared a statement on “The Church and the Churches.” In this statement Barth writes with his typically aggressive style, starkly bringing the sinfulness of division into sharp relief:
In fact, we have no right to explain the multiplicity of the churches at all. We have to deal with it as we deal with sin, our own and others’, to recognize it as a fact, to understand it as the impossible thing which has intruded itself, as guilt which we must take upon ourselves, without the power to liberate ourselves from it. We must not allow ourselves to acquiesce in its reality; rather we must pray that it be forgiven and removed, and be ready to do whatever God’s will and command may enjoin in respect of it. A great part, the decisive part perhaps, of all that we can do for the unity of the Church would be already done if on all sides we were able and willing to handle the multiplicity of the churches in this way; no longer as a speculative problem or a matter of the philosophy of history, but, to put it in the simplest terms, with a sober mind as women and men profoundly shocked but yet believing, and therefore hopeful, and, by reason of hope, ready to obey.
Over the ensuing seventy years faithful men and women – including all of us here today – have labored long and hard to establish a noble architecture called the ecumenical movement, an edifice of councils of churches, cooperative agencies, advocacy coalitions, concordats and covenants, partnerships and declarations and, yes, deep friendships, that have pointed toward the visible unity of the church and addressed the very real and pressing human needs of many in our day. In the process we have grown gracefully tolerant, even genuinely friendly toward one another.
But the question must be asked: In so doing have we also allowed the enduring sin to grow so respectable for us and our churches that few any longer have a just impression of its deformity? Could this be why the ecumenical movement often seems so listless today, so dispensable for church leaders, so marginal to the people in the pews? Has the ecumenical movement successfully taken enough of the edge off the pain of division that we have grown willing to endure the continued ache of our sinful separation? We’ve done enough – and much of it laudable indeed – that there is no longer a profound shock. No longer shocked, there seems little reason to hear Barth’s stern call to obey.
It did not take long for Christians in Corinth to grow comfortable with a sectarian spirit. Chloe’s people – like every good pastor, Paul had his network of informants – Chloe’s people have shared the news: “There are quarrels among you. . . . Each of you says ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” As we read through Paul’s revealing letter the more profound nature of the troubles in Corinth grow more evident – the grasping for spiritual privilege, spiritual condescension toward others, intolerance bred of superiority complexes, all dressed up in the theological garb that seeks to render sin respectable. It has all the makings of a first century faith and order conference; we might imagine a “food offered to idols” section, a “ranking of spiritual gifts” section, a “proper discerning of the body at communion” section, a “what’s ok in the area of sexual ethics” section – some things never change!
But Paul cuts to the quick, which is to say he cuts to the insensitive flesh of the body of Christ with rebuke and admonition. “I did not come to baptize,” which I take in this case not to imply any dismissiveness over the ritual itself, but rather to suggest that sectarian identities gathered around the personal leadership of the baptizer are out of bounds. It is the proclamation of the Cross which matters, that which is the power of God to those being saved. The Cross which is forgiveness of sin. The Cross which is the sacrifice of the Scapegoat that now resists the on-going sacrifice of the all the vulnerable victims in our world. The Cross which is solidarity with the oppressed. The Cross which bears the fullness of the suffering servant and whose emptiness reveals the mystery of the resurrection. The Cross whose death means life. The Cross which replaces the allure of respectability with the arresting power of the Evangel. The Cross which is at the heart of belief, and therefore hope, and thus is the source of our collective obedience. “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel.”
Faced with the brokenness of the Church in those earliest years, Paul’s first move is not organizational management or strategic planning but proclamation of the Cross that exposes the sin of division in all of its just deformity. Friends, does this suggest for us where the renewal of the ecumenical movement might be found? Not just in organization change, but in obedience? Surely there are things we must do together. Just as apartheid was too strong for a divided church, to borrow Bishop Tutu’s oft remembered phrase, so too is the environmental crisis that in the end will leave none of us privileged and safe on planet earth. Surely this crisis is too strong for a divided church. Or what of the injustice and greed that wraps millions in our world in a shroud of starvation, or the fascination with war and its weapons that threatens to consume us. In this week when Dr. King has been invoked so often, we remember again his last book and its reminder that we live in a world house – one oikumene – and that the choice before us truly is between chaos or community. Yes, there is much to do together, and precious, creative, fragile, underfunded ecumenical instruments struggling to do it.
But while we tend to this important work together and with interfaith friends, we also see the “reconfessionalization” of the ecumenical movement that is slowly turning Jesus’ call to lose our lives in order to live life most fully into a grasping at our little piece of life in order to avoid dying, the reassertion of turf and identities that seek to make ultimate those things which must always be penultimate, and that perverts today’s dialogues into the defense of who we have been rather than the creative imagination of what we might become. Our post-modern exalting of particularity has so overtaken us that we again distort sin into virtue and forget that the vision of reconciled diversity guards against not just unholy uniformity but also an equally unholy division. The ecumenical movement seems to have brought us only to our comfort level with each other rather than to the Cross we are called to proclaim with each other. No longer shocked, Barth reminds us, there seems little reason to obey.
In his encyclical, Ut unam sint, Pope John Paul II reminded us that all true ecumenism is, at its heart, about conversion. Conversion surely must begin with repentance, and there can be no repentance without a just impression of sin’s deformity. “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” This may not be a happy or encouraging word. But it is I think an urgent, honest word. Karl Barth wrote in perilous times when “the one Word of God we are to hear, trust and obey in life and in death” was mocked and contested by the new blood and soil pagans of his day. Today we, too, face urgent times. Creation is imperiled. Greed has literally consumed our commonwealth. Fear’s manipulation has made us complicit with torture and complacent about war. Pagan ideologies abound with seductive allure for Christians more obedient to blood and soil then to the Cross. There is a Gospel for the Church to proclaim, a cross that is not divided but that is power to all who believe. Is not this the vocation of the ecumenical movement today and tomorrow?
The question before us cannot be simply organizational. It is not in the first instance about creative programming or finding new funding streams. It is about our readiness to acknowledge a sin which clings so closely, that has become so thoroughly respectable, that we no longer feel it or see it. Barth said in those lectures long ago, “Homesickness for the una sancta is genuine and legitimate only insofar as it is a disquietude at the fact that we have lost and forgotten Christ, and with Him have lost the unity of the Church.” Paul was quick to name his disquietude with the first century church in Corinth. But he also promised something – the message about the Cross, foolishness to some, but for those of us who believe, the very power of God. Out of this very disquietude we may remember precious things we have lost, even the Christ, and thus believing, have hope, and once again be ready to obey.