A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
28 April 2024
Acts 18.1-4
1 Corinthians 1.10-18
As a way into our reflection on scripture for this morning,
I’d like to invite you to take a moment
to think of those people who have been particularly important to you
in the story of your life.
They might be teachers, friends, family,
parents or grandparents, people from church or work;
take a moment and hold their names in your mind,
and give thanks for them, and for the influence they’ve had on you.
We all of us have people we can give thanks for,
individuals who have mattered to us and influenced our lives.
And of course there will be those who we would rather forget,
people who have made life difficult for us,
who we have struggled to relate to and possibly struggled to forgive.
Individuals are complex, we all are,
but individuals also matter.
Communities such as churches, or even towns and cities,
are made up of individuals, personalities, people.
And what struck me quite forcefully as I was reading through the passages
in preparation for this morning,
was the number of personal names mentioned
in these two short passages.
Here they are now:
· Paul
· Aquila
· Priscilla
· Claudius
· Chloe
· Apollos
· Cephas
· Crispus
· Gaius
· Stephanas
Ten names, two of them women;
all of them individuals who, for better or worse,
played their role in the drama of the early years of the church in Corinth.
There can sometimes be a tendency for us to de-personalise
the various characters we meet in the New Testament.
Some of them we just ignore:
I mean, when did you last hear someone
preaching a sermon about Cripus, or Gaius, or Stephanus?
But then sometimes we go the other way,
and we mythologise ‘big’ characters such as Peter and Paul
who then become kind of stock characters,
more archetypes of idealised discipleship
than individuals with personalities, flaws, and graces.
You’ve heard it in a hundred sermons:
Peter is the comedically inept failure who comes good in the end,
while Paul is the classic villain-turned-hero
who consistently exercises a superhuman strength of character
in the face of overwhelming threat and opposition.
And if we’re not careful, we lose sight of the individuals,
the people, the personalities,
that lie behind the names on the page.
So this morning, I want us to keep alert for the personal touch,
for how the people that these names speak of
featured in the life of the early church;
because in their significance
we can discover something of the significance of our own lives
and of the people that have played their part in our stories.
So, to Corinth.
I went through Corinth when I was about fourteen,
in a car driving from Athens where my uncle lived,
to the southern tip of the Peloponnese where the family village was located.
We stopped for a few minutes, to have a look at the Corinth Canal,
this amazing four mile cut through the isthmus,
linking the Aegean and Ionian seas.
Plans for a canal here date back to before the time of Jesus,
but it wasn’t actually constructed until 1893.
So when Paul was staying in Corinth,
goods needing to be taken from one side to the other
had to be taken off the ships, hauled across,
and loaded onto other ships on the other side.
There were even some ships that were designed
so the whole ship could be hauled across
without needing to be unloaded at all.
This trade and transportation made the city of Corinth incredibly wealthy,
as it could charge a tax for all the goods passing through;
and at the time of those people mentioned in our readings this morning,
Corinth was a bustling, multicultural, and vibrant city,
with two ports and a thriving industry.
When Paul gets there, he quickly teams up with a married couple,
two Jewish Christians named Priscilla and Aquila.
Between them, they exercised the original ‘tent-making’ ministry
by, well, quite literally making tents.
These days we often use this phrase, tent-making ministry,
to describe people who have a self-supporting ministry,
where they work a normal job for their money,
and then volunteer their time in the service of their church.
As churches are struggling financially, particularly in rural areas,
this kind of ministry is becoming more and more common.
And as we see in our reading, it has strong precedent,
with Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila all self-supporting missionaries
founding the Christian congregation in Corinth.
After some months in Corinth, Paul then moved on
and eventually ended up in Ephesus ,in what is now western Turkey,
and from Ephesus he had a series of correspondences with the church in Corinth,
writing possibly as many as five letters to them,
although only two of these seem to have survived
and made their way into our Bibles.
We pick up this so-called Corinthian correspondence this morning in chapter 1,
straight after the initial greetings with which all ancient letters started.
And it seems that what had prompted Paul to write
was that there were problems in Corinth
with division in the church.
The issue seems to have been about which strong character
in the leadership of the early church
people were following.
Some were following Paul, some Apollos,
some Cephas (or Peter as he was better known),
and others were just being annoyingly super-spiritual
by saying they followed Christ, and not any human being!
Yeah, we’ve all met Christians like that…
Anyway, Paul tells them not to be so obsessed with who baptised them;
as if it matters who did the dunking!
The important thing, for Paul,
was whether they were living out
the truth of their baptism in their daily lives.
I’m sure many of us can relate to this issue of hanging our faith
onto a particular person’s ministry.
After all, most of us have a soft spot in our memories
for the minister who baptised us, or nurtured us in our faith,
or welcomed us when we turned up at church.
Maybe you even gave thanks for them a few minutes ago.
And most of us prefer the preaching of one person over another…
Are you a Rob Bell person or a Brian McLaren person,
a Tom Wright person or a John Piper person?
Are you a Simon person or a Nigel person,
Or are you a Ruth person or a Brian person,
a Barrie person or a Howard Williams person?
Can those who have come after ever measure up
against the idealised and mythologised preachers of days gone by?
We all do this, and Paul points to a great danger
in this factionalising and idolising of preachers:
The danger is that of confusing the messenger with the message.
So Paul says, in v.18,
that it is the message of the cross itself which is most important,
not the words that different preachers use to frame or communicate it.
And there is an ambiguity in the Greek here
which may, or may not, be deliberate.
When Paul says that the message of the cross
is ‘foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’,
it is not clear whether he is referring to the message ‘about’ the cross,
in other words, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion;
or whether he is referring to the message ‘of’ the cross,
what the cross itself says to us
about who God is and how God is made known.
I tend to think that it is this second option that makes the most sense,
because the message of the cross to each of us
is that God speaks salvation not through the words of humans,
but through decisive action in history in the death of Jesus.
If salvation is found in the message about the cross,
that makes us mere spectators or consumers of the message.
and there is a risk of reducing our faith to passive observation
or intellectual understanding,
which may not inspire active engagement in living out our faith.
But if it is found in the message of the cross,
then we are invited into that story
as participants in what God is doing to turn the world upside down
by realigning our understandings of power, authority, suffering, and death.
This perspective invites us to actively participate
in the transformative narrative of salvation,
as we live out in the world the truth of the cross
as the place where God fully embraces
the depth and breadth of human experience.
The first-century world was very familiar with the techniques of rhetoric,
and public speaking was regarded as something of an art form.
They knew what it was to be consumers of messages;
you could go to the forum in any Roman town,
the equivalent of Speakers’ Corner in London,
and hear people talking eloquently about any kind of subject you desired.
But Paul wants to differentiate the word of salvation
spoken by God in the event of the cross,
from the words of those
who would merely speak about the cross.
The crucifixion is not just another subject
for public spectacle or rhetorical excellence.
It’s not a theological conundrum to be discussed,
dissected, and debated.
For Paul, it is the cross itself which speaks,
and it does so through the brute fact of its existence in history.
And when it speaks,
the cross cuts through the babbling words of well-intentioned preachers,
proclaiming its own message of Christ crucified,
of God-on-the-cross,
of the all-powerful becoming the utterly powerless.
The message of the cross is an ugly message of suffering,
a controversial message of cosmic disruption,
and a dangerous message of political and social revolution.
And there is nothing that can, or should, be done by preachers
to sanitise or beautify the shock, the horror,
the ‘scandal’ as Paul puts it,
of the word of the cross.
The communication of the power of divine love
through the murderous and barbaric act of execution by crucifixion,
speaks directly to us of the radical lengths to which God is prepared to go
to make God’s own love for humans known.
The cross speaks a message of the extent of God’s love,
which cuts through mere human words
to send a message of forgiveness, acceptance and welcome,
direct from God’s broken heart to ours.
This is the message of salvation,
and it comes from God to me, and from God to you.
And so we’re back at the personal touch,
with the valuing of each created person
by the one who made them.
People matter, individuals matter.
You matter, and I matter.
We matter to each other, and we matter to God.
And God loves us, and forgives us,
and welcomes us into the new and radically constituted kingdom of God.
As we take our place in this kingdom
alongside all those others who hear and respond to the word of the cross,
we play our part in the transformation of the world
as the kingdom of God is made known on earth,
as it is in heaven.