Go Team Jesus--June 15, 2022

Go Team Jesus--June 15, 2022

"So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future--all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God." [1 Corinthians 3:21-23]

I say the following as someone who cares deeply about good theology, who is committed to living out my discipleship in the intentional community of congregations, and who openly owns the tradition, the Lutheran one, in which I have grown up in the faith:  in the end, it's not about me holding the right membership or set of beliefs about God, but rather about God holding onto us.

That change, that flipping of polarities so to speak, between my grip on God and God's grip on me, makes all the difference in understanding the gospel as Good News, rather than just being another failed self-help scheme.  It all comes down to God's claim on us--a claim that comes to us through Christ, and yes, then through a whole host of different individual people who have shaped us, grown our faith, and pointed us toward Jesus.  But it's God's pull and power I rest in, not my ability to have chosen the "best" denominational structure to belong to, or to attend the "trendiest" congregation in my area, or even have learned the most "correct" theology, that matters in the end.  It is God who makes me belong--through Christ--and not a matter of how strong, smart, or sanctified I make myself.

Something else changes, too, when I follow Paul's train of thought here.  When I realize that it's God's grip on me that really matters in the end, I can see other followers of Jesus, and even other groupings of Christians, not as competition or enemies, but all part of one great movement initiated and sustained by Christ himself.  We are collectively "Team Jesus," so to speak.  And that makes a huge impact on how we see our life and work together as real people living our faith out day by day, because it means we don't have to waste our energy trying to "outdo" the church down the street or across the state, but can see that Christ is present and working through them as well as through us--and that Christ reserves the right to correct, grow, and stretch both "them" and "us."

In the first century, Paul was dealing with people who were aligning with the particular names who had first brought them to faith, whether Paul himself, or a popular and eloquent speaker like Apollos, or even Simon Peter himself (here referenced by his nickname in Aramaic, "Cephas,").  And it's worth noting that these three did not always agree on everything or get it all right all of the time.  Paul makes mention in others of his letters about a time he had to call Peter out for discriminating against Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians when there were other Jewish Christians from Jerusalem around.  Or there were times when Paul and Apollos butted heads.  And even Paul himself could be something of a stinker--there was a time when he couldn't work things out with his good friend Barnabas over their intern Mark, and it broke up their partnership to go their own separate ways.  All of this is to say that when Paul says that all these different names--Apollos, Cephas, and Paul himself--all belong to God in Christ, he's not saying that they are all in total agreement about everything all the time.  They had clashes of personality, differences of opinion, and even different theological takes at different times.  Paul doesn't see their "belonging" as dependent on their sameness, or even on their "rightness," but rather on God's grip on them through Christ.

That's a really powerful--and maybe provocative--thing to realize in our day and age.  It is so easy in this time and place for Christian groups not only to split from one another, but to treat the "out" group as though they are damned to hell and irredeemably lost heretics.  And it is really easy to assume that our being "in" with God depends on our being "right" about whichever set of theological positions we think are the deal breakers.  I went to an undergraduate college where the mindset tended to be (sometimes implicitly and somes explicitly), "We're not saying that only Calvinists can be saved, because you know, if someone in the Middle Ages, centuries before John Calvin was born, came to the same conclusions as Calvin and believed them in defiance of Roman Catholic teaching at the time, they, too could have been saved."  In other words, "You can be saved by explicitly being in our group, or by unofficially being in our group, but we are still the group you have to have a connection with in order to be saved... but we're still technically saying you're saved by grace."  That's not what Paul is saying here--that still puts the focus on our rightness, rather than on God's claim on us that we belong.

We also have a tendency in this era of polarization to ratchet up the urgency of our differences--it's really easy to say, "That group of Christians believes differently from what we believe on this hot-button issue, and we have decided that THIS issue is really the test of whether you love Jesus or not!"  And with that we end up casting out people whom Jesus still claims.  There is a really big difference, I would say, between being able to say, "On this question here, we do not agree, and we need to be honest about that," on the one hand, and, "Not only do I not agree with THOSE people, but I won't be in fellowship with anyone else who is willing to be in fellowship with THOSE people!" on the other.  It's worth paying attention to where folks are drawing those kinds of lines.  And before we decide that some group is "out," we should see what happens if we put their name in the sentence Paul gave us--to they still belong to Christ?  And if so, can we dare to say they do not belong to God?  

The market-driven culture in which we live has infected the American church in particular to make us see everybody else's church group (whether at the congregational or denominational level) as competition for business in a zero-sum-game environment, rather than all being a part of Team Jesus.  And if I accept that damnable logic, I'm going to see every other church out there as a threat to mine, or deficient in some way, or an enemy to be defeated.  The lingering effects of COVID on the church has only made that worse--when so many congregations feel their own health threatened with lower attendance, limited giving, aging membership, and depleted energy, we can so easily see the church down the road as a threat to be stopped rather than partners on the same team.  If in the end our greatest allegiance is to our own little sub-group, sure, then, I guess we have to see everyone else as competition, and we'll see the world as a dog-eat-dog contest for survival.  But if we see ourselves--as Paul surely does--as part of Team Jesus, then the people around us are still claimed by the One who claims us, whether or not we are always in agreement or get along or would choose the same color carpet for our sanctuary.  

It's ok--more than that, it's healthy and honest--to be real about the differences between different ways of following Jesus.  But it is a huge mistake to assume that the ones who don't agree with me are outside the grip of Jesus' grace.  They're not.  I'm not, either.  And Jesus doesn't need any of our permission to hold onto people in a wide and strong embrace.

Go Team Jesus.

Lord Jesus, hold us, and allow us to see the ways you are holding others.