SCRIPTURE: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
TEXT: 9For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. THEME: INTRODUCTION Sometimes what we know about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit is different from how we live. Living by what we believe, putting our values into practice, and living according to love instead of revenge is a challenge. SCRIPTURE As the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Corinth, they have infantile behaviors that prevents him from writing about greater matters of the church, calling and mission. All they care about is who is better than who. The first line of this passage “1bas infants in Christ. 2I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.” reminded me of something commentary writer, Julianna Claassens wrote on Genesis 3; when the fruit of the tree of knowledge was eaten. Our traditional interpretations of this passage were from men, giving us an explanation of how sin entered our world. They assumed at Creation, humans were perfect and sinless, but the pronouncement from God at creation was ‘good’ not ‘perfect’. Only the Divine is perfect and worthy of worship. We are ‘good’, with potential and capable of change, transformation, creating and choosing good or evil. Maybe some praise from time to time but not to be worshipped. Jesus says the same thing about Humans when we are described as wheat; we have the potential of being Chaff - rubbish, or grain - life giving, sustaining food. Julianna Claassens describes the fruit tasting event in the garden of Eden by Adam and Eve, as a coming-of-age story. This is when humans embrace their roles as adults. Facing the realities of life in a grownup world with choices that can be for good or evil. Along with our maturation comes the responsibility for our choices and the consequences of our decisions and actions. Adam and Eve both make a choice. But when asked about what they did, they don’t take responsibility for their decisions and place the blame for the consequences outside of themselves. This is fertile soil for sin. Sometimes our assumptions prevent us from discovering what God maybe saying in scripture and we are unaware of the unintended messages we are sending to the world. Author Glennon Doyle recalled her first impressions of this story learning about God and being a woman. The garden of Eden was great and Adam gave birth to Eve (inconceivable and nothing we have seen since). Everything was fine in the garden until the woman wanted something and went for it. In her words, “Then all hell broke loose, and everything was terrible forever.” The garden story, for her, causes women to fear what they want. This story comes as a warning for women to fear what they desire. What women want is bad, what women want is scary and stories like this cause women to be filled with doubt and second guess themselves. Wow, those messages can be embedded by male dominated interpretations of the garden. As an author she has talked to assemblies of women and has made this observation, “In talking to women all around the world, what women want is good. If women started to go for ‘the good they desire’, power structures would tumble. The structures that keep Women in their place would be dismantled and what would be rebuilt in its place, would be built on equality, justice, love, and peace.” This actually does sounds like the work of Christ in our world. Now in Corinth the members of the church are acting like children refusing to face the realities of life with God in the world. Staying in a childlike state of naivety and refusing their responsibility as adults, to be God’s field and God’s building. APPLICATION If we put aside our personal preferences and focused on what God wants to accomplish, what might our churches do differently as we participate in God’s mission? What does God want to grow in the field of us and what does God want us to be built into? We have 3 churches all in the same area, not in competition, ministering to different segments of the Christian population on Maui, unique in our own way. But if we do a quick analysis and crunch some numbers of income, expenses, membership, ages, and building repairs, our vision of the field of God and the building of God is not sustainable and too narrow. We are going to have to take all of the good work God has done in us, that has gone into building us up to this point and create something new from this foundation. We may have only a small glimpse of what this may look like. But it may be enough for us to break some things down in order to try and create something we never expected. So here is something experimental. We are having Josh Hayashi come to preach and speak to us at a round table discussion after church on Daylight Saving Sunday, March 12th. But if we want to hear him speak, we will have to go to either Kaahumanu Church that will fall back their service time by half an hour to 8:30 or go to Iao UCC who will spring their service forward by half an hour to 10 o’clock. WUC will sacrifice worshiping in our sanctuary on that day to participate in this time experience, to get to know our sibling congregation and their members a little bit better. As we get to know our siblings in Christ, we can go to visit their homes with the same ease we do our own siblings. Working together, even in just this small way, we may get a glimpse of a sustainable future. This is an adult choice. There will be lots of blame to go around. Let’s take notes, comments, good and bad and see what God may be saying to us. CONCLUSION Desmond Tutu says that he cannot imagine that his Christianity could contain everything there is to know about God. This is the voice of maturity, of someone who has studied the word of God and who has been engaged with people all over the world and through those experiences realizes, that God is not limited to reveal God’s self to only one set of people, to one set of Christians, but to other denominations, Jews, Muslims, Buddhist, and that God’s Holy Spirit goes out, to reveal to all who are made in the image of God. Then we all have a choice, to listen, to see and to live according to what we know about God or not, and to be responsible for our choices and not put blame outside of where it belongs. Act like adults not children.
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