A Sermon from First Church, Scarborough…
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, May 20, 2007. The principal reading was I Corinthians 3:10-17.
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple
and that God’s Spirit lives in you” (3:16)?
“Being God’s Temple”
I want to continue looking with you biblically (as we have for the last three weeks) for the reasons why we have church buildings, or, to use an old Congregational term, “Meetinghouses.” Why do we have structures, we call “Houses of God”? Over a period of 4 Sundays, we are using 3 texts from the Hebrew (Old) Testament and 1 text from the Letters of Paul. The fourth and final scripture is a statement written by Paul to the Church at Corinth, offering the metaphor of human beings as God’s temple.
Ancient Corinth was a great center of trade and commerce. It was a city that attracted ambitious persons from across the Roman Empire. They were people who were on the move, eager to improve their lives, and willing to seize opportunities. Corinth was culturally and ethnically and religiously diverse. There were more than two dozen temples, altars, and shrines to an assortment of gods.
The people had ever reason to worship. Corinth was a cut-throat city where only the very smart and the very ruthless long survived. There were great extremes of wealth and poverty. Ancient writers saw Corinth as a city without compassion, where people begged on the streets for bread while the wealthy consumed without conscience. Their licentious life style gave rise and meaning to a new Greek verb, “to corinthianize.” There were those who saw Corinth as a “Sin City.”
Corinth was the kind of place where the Apostle Paul liked to work.
To make a new church start, he looked for places where people were open to new ideas. Paul “planted a church” in Corinth in the year 52 CE, a generation after the death and resurrection of Christ. He stayed about 18 months to make sure the little church was up and running.
Four or five years (circa 56-57 CE) later, Paul received reports of problems in the Corinthian church. His letter to the congregation reads like a modern day tabloid. In a very short time, the Corinthian church had become divided into camps based on who the favorite preacher was or had been (I Corinthians 1:10-17).
Church members were suing each other in the civil courts (1 Corinthians 6:1-8). The congregation had become divided by differing opinions about sexuality (I Corinthians 7:1-40).
The congregation had acquired the city’s insensitivity to economic realities. When the church celebrated Holy Communion, they ate an entire meal. The more affluent members were able to get off work and get to table early for the weekly meals. By the time the poorer, laboring members showed up, the affluent had already eaten most of the food and consumed most of the wine. The result was, we are told, that “one goes hungry and another becomes drunk.” (I Corinthians 11:21). The church had become “corinthianized.”
To understand Paul’s writing, we need to know two things about Paul himself. Paul was an extrovert. Extroverts speak to think. In other words, extroverts seldom know what they think until they hear themselves say it. As a group, they think out loud.
In his letters, Paul is often thinking out loud while someone else writes down his thoughts. If his words are read as carefully outlined, ordered, reasoned, and well edited, his writing will confuse us. Paul is thinking out loud and a scribe is trying to keep us with his rush of thoughts. Read and hear Paul’s letters as though he was speaking to you.
We also need to know that Paul was an intuitive person. His writing is filled with bursts of insight and flashes of inspiration. One idea about one thing inspires another idea about another thing, and on and on, and often in a non-sequential manner. His writing is more akin to a shotgun blast thana well aimed pistol shot. We will be confused reading Paul’s letters if we do not understand that he was an intuitive extrovert.
So here is what is happening in today’s lesson:
Paul is addressing the several factions in the Corinthian church. He is using an analogy of “building a building” to do it. There is only one building foundation, he says, and that one foundation is Jesus Christ (period).
Different builders will use different materials to build on that solid foundation, but, says Paul, do not confuse the building with the foundation. Time will tell whose work is transitory and whose is here to stay. His words are a timeless instruction and warning to all pastors and congregational leaders.
Paul is thinking out loud, when this idea of the church’s foundation gives him another intuitive insight, and he says, “Don’t you know you are God’s temple, and that the spirit of God dwells in you?”
And the “You,” he uses, is plural in the Greek, not singular. Paul is speaking to the entire congregation as a single unit, “you are God’s temple.” You are where the holy and the secular meet. You, the congregation, are where God and humanity intersect and meet each other.
It is not a bad thing that a congregation takes on the local culture, character and issues of the city, town or village in which it is located. It is a very good thing. It cannot be helped and should not be prevented. Isolation is not the characteristic of most Christian groups. We are not isolationists.
A local congregation represents its locale. First Congregational Church is a lot like Scarborough, Maine. Whatever is true about Scarborough is true about us.
A local congregation makes a big mistake when it tries to remove itself or become a place of escape from the world around it or, worse, a place of denial that the world even exists. I do not, however, think a local congregation ought to stay like the surrounding culture.
Being God’s temple means that the role of the church is to be open to all who come seeking and to take into itself the culture and characteristics and issues of the world around it and live them out – in an alternative way under the influence and guidance of the Holy Spirit.
I do not think the Temple is where we pretend to be “holier than Thou,” or better than we are. The Temple is where the human and the holy meet, and the human is transformed, and we become a model for how the larger society might live if it were open to the movement of the Spirit.
I do not think the Temple is where we pretend to agree with one another and “just love one another to bits,” by being superficial or matter-of-fact, or by avoiding our differences.
The Temple is where we bring the differences of the community around us – the different interests, the different economic statuses, the different cultural assumptions – and we work together at living out our differences in a Spirit-inspired way.
If we are God’s temple, what we offer the culture and the community is an alternative way of living together. This is not easy but it is necessary. Where else is it going to happen? We live in a very divisive and sadly partisan time, and not just in our politics. We live in one of the most diverse nations in the world. We live in a time and a place with vast economic extremes.
If the several churches in Scarborough are not places where people, culture, opinion, style, status, agenda, orientation, and generations can learn to live together in new and healing and authentic ways then we are only “playing at being the Church.” (And let us, in unison, say “Ouch!”) Then we only exist within the walls of a spiritual ghetto.
But YOU – First Congregational Church – are God’s Temple and the spirit of God dwells richly in you, and not in a building made by human hands. Let’s not destroy the Temple. Let’s build it larger, more open, more inclusive, and more filled with God’s Spirit. Let us become role models for our neighbors. Let us offer Scarborough God’s good alternative. Amen.
To strengthen this morning’s message, I invite you to pick up your Pew Bibles, turn to page 1834, and join me in a unison reading of a portion of Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 3:12-17.
