Faith remains and faith is rewarded

I loved church as a child.

I was absolutely bored by the service, don’t get me wrong, but I loved church.

You see, church and worship were different.

Worship involved listening and sitting still.

As an acolyte there were certain interruptions to the routine of worship.

I might carry the cross during the gospel reading or torch.

On good days I would be the server and as a server I would get to the heave the big brass bookstand from one side of the altar to the other.

Friends, a little secret: there is no liturgical reason that I shift the book from right to left as I prepare the table for Eucharist.

I do it because I brings me back to my youth; every Sunday I am taken back to ten year old me moving that book from place to place.

But during those times of lull though, usually during the sermon, I would struggle not to fidget or swing my cincture.

My struggles were sometimes in vain.

If I wasn’t acolyting, I could be found in the pews looking at the bulletin repeatedly to check for progress as to how far along we were in the service.

The goings on before the passing of the peace was an interminably long time that could be measured only in cosmic terms; light years and parsecs, etc.

I would typically lose focus by the middle of the first reading, come back to earth for the psalm and then gone again until confession.

I would usually spend my time thinking about other things baseball in the spring, basketball in the winter, vacation in Wildwood during the summer, who knows what during the fall.

And when the doxology played as the offertory was brought to the front, well that just told me we were in the home stretch; soon to head for home or, better yet, off to my grandparents’ house we would go but not before picking up a pizza beforehand.

But I loved church!

I loved getting to see my friends before and after the service.

I loved youth group and the field trips we would take to Riverside or some other place not necessarily deriving its identity from the Holy.

I loved carol singing with peers.

My mother was the parish secretary at the time and would bring my brother and I to work with her.

We had free reign of the church and would explore its nooks and crannies with the daughters of the priest as the adults would work away distracted by adult working stuff.

A favorite activity was playing Dungeons and Dragons in the library, the priest’s older daughter was the dungeon master and we, the remaining three, would fight off demons and evil spells together.

I.

Loved.

Church.

And the Corinthians, I think, the Corinthians we read about this morning, the Corinthians Paul is writing to, loved church as well.

Yet, it seems, the Corinthians were perhaps not getting everything out of church that could and should be.

Paul, writing in his most Paulest voice is being stern with the folks up in Corinth.

He is correcting them; he is frustrated.

He says that when he last visited them, he couldn’t get the meaning of Christ across; he had to spoon feed them a pureed form of scripture, the bible for children rather than serving up the true meat and potato message of God.

He felt they were not ready to receive scripture for they were still of the flesh.

Their church was of human things rather than God things; perhaps they even had a really hot D & D game going on Wednesday nights that attracted a lot of folks through the doors but didn’t necessarily convey the story of God.

And there were some bad feelings, too.

There were splits and divisions in the congregation.

Some were baptized by Paul, others by Apollos and there was some argument as to who was the truer church member, the truer Christian.

I can imagine some folks saying that they were at the church first back when Paul started so they should take precedence.

And others would reply that sure Paul started the church but Apollos helped grow it and he brought them in, therefore the newcomers should lead.

Paul is writing to a church that is having an argument and the doctrine of God is probably barely mentioned.

We are reading about a two-thousand-year-old argument over some people being upset that someone is sitting in their pew.

Things don’t necessarily change over the years, I can tell you.

And I can tell you because I saw it happen.

That youthful idyll I spoke about was but temporary.

Those days of splendor in the grass soon faded and nothing could bring back their radiance.

And things changed rather suddenly.

The priest whose children we played with on those summery summer days fell out of love with his wife; a divorce was initiated and a he would have to leave the church.

The family would move out of the rectory.

A new priest was called.

There were those who thought they could bend the new priest to their will, there were others who mourned still the leaving of the old priest.

Tensions grew.

Human things interceded.

Flesh things came to the fore.

Church didn’t feel like church anymore.

Those past days of freedom were taken from my sight.

And eventually these goings on, the machinery of small town motivations convinced of rightness bordering on self-righteousness convinced my mother it was time to move on.

At a certain point, I left that church and for a great number of years, never returned.

I no longer loved church.

So, forgive me, but it really does feel as if Paul is writing to me.

I get the sense that I was once a Corinthian, once part of a social club that turned rather unsociable.

But it is Paul who strengthens, Paul who cajoles, Paul who chastises, Paul who says, “STOP!”

It does not matter who planted; it does not matter who watered.

It is God who gave the growth.

It is God who warmed the soil.

It is God who shone the sun.

It is God who provided the sustenance, without God there is no garden.

No green shoots to reach towards the sun.

No expanding leaves to take in its rays.

No roots to take in the waters given by God.

Paul is insinuating, rather obviously I think, that those who work for God and towards God, those who face God to receive God’s radiance, those who stretch out their arms heavenwards, those whose faith is deep-rooted to soak up the Word need not favor Paul or Apollos.

For they labor for God.

Yes, the human instinct might be to favor one or the other.

Certainly some might prefer Paul over Apollos because they worked together to build a church.

Others may favor Apollos because he brought new people into the church.

Some might like the old priest more than the new priest.

Yet, these are all human things.

These preferences are of the flesh.

And what he and Apollos are really doing, says Paul is not working for the church, not building up the church for the purpose of human things, human wants, but instead they are working for God.

They are both, Apollos and Paul, working to spread God’s word just as the church in Corinth should be doing and is in fact, not doing.

And, Paul says, both Apollos and his labors will earn the wages God desires to give.

This point about wages is an interesting one, too.

For if we recall the Parable of the Vineyard Workers we recall what Jesus had to say about God’s wage.

This is the parable where the vineyard owner goes out and hires workers for a days wage and they agree to that wage.

The owner then goes out and hires other workers later in the day.

Still later, the owner goes out again and hires more.

One last time, he again hires other workers.

And at the end of the day, the vineyard owner pays each group of workers the same wage; each group, the ones hired earliest in the day to the last group who were hired latest in the day, receive a days pay.

If we equate the owner to God, then we see that all people who worship and love and work on God’s behalf are all afforded the same thing: God’s complete and all-encompassing love.

And here is Paul saying that he and Apollos will receive that same love.

And implied in this particular reading this morning, is this: if the Corinthians get their act together, if the work to build up each other and not focus on human things, then they too can receive that love.

They too can reap the reward of God’s economy.

Earlier in this sermon, I alluded to Wordsworth’s poem “Spendour in the Grass.”

Now, rather than allusion, I will read it:

What though the radiance

which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

I sometimes mourn those memories of a childhood losing church.

I sometimes wonder how life would be different had I remained in church, if the call to the priesthood would have come sooner; if I would have somehow sooner felt that feeling of a sort of completeness I now feel in pursuing this work of loving and sharing God’s word.

I wonder too if the Corinthians felt the same once they got their act together understanding so much of their labor was wasted on works that led them from God.

Jealousy and quarrelling are never efforts wisely spent.

Yet, through Wordsworth, I realize I need not to grieve.

For in those uncomfortable feelings, I know that faith remains and faith is rewarded.

From that suffering, from those bad feelings felt, comes change when we turn and remain focused on the one who brings the soothing thoughts of spring, the one who looked through death and received his resurrected son in the heavenly kingdom to which we all aspire.

Paul asks us to turn away from human things.

Turn away from the flesh, says Paul, so that we might realize Godly things.

So that we can digest the full word of God and God’s son, Jesus Christ.

And when we do, we will realize the wages of God’s economy; an economy that affords us all of Christ’s love and the promise of salvation imagined by the philosophic mind, confirmed by the very grace of God.

Amen.