Christian Living

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"Morality and Whitewashed Walls"

1 Corinthians 5:1-6:11

History scholars tell us that in the first century Roman world the city of Corinth was notoriously decadent. It was a cesspool of economic corruption, religious fanaticism and sexual immorality. Could there be a better place for the apostle Paul to plant a Christian church?! And could there be a more difficult place for that church to thrive? Of all the many challenges the community of Corinthian Christians faced, none was more difficult than maintaining its distinctive life as an island of love, mutuality and respect in a sea of lust, selfishness and abuse. In this, the Corinthians of 2000 years ago were not so very unlike many churches today. We too wish to be a refuge for world-weary souls, a place of peace and acceptance for those who have been beat-up and cast aside by life. We want to be a center of meaning in an increasingly confusing time. Like many churches, the Corinthians felt not only besieged, but under attack. The apostle's intention in this letter is to sound something of an alarm, and to point the Corinthians (and through them, us) to the resources of God's Spirit that could give the strength and courage a church needs.

The deep threat that faced the Corinthian church was that some of the abusive and corrupt attitudes and practices surrounding them had begun insidiously to seep into their midst. The apostle, who was many miles away at Ephesus, had received a disturbing report from Corinth. "It has been reported to me by Chloe's people," wrote Paul "that there are quarrels among you." The church was showing signs of fracture - breaking into squabbling factions over which of the apostles they should regard as their leader. The conflicts appear to have been more than differences of opinion, they were taking shape as "win-lose" situations in which some were bound to be hurt. Not a good thing.

But the report apparently contained more than news of quarrels. "It has actually been reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind not even found among the pagans." Paul was referring to a sexual relationship between a Corinthian Christian man and his stepmother. Such relationships were regarded as incestuous in the Roman world, even among the most ungodly. Paul was deeply disturbed by this report, but more significantly he was appalled that the Christian community seemed to have no sense of moral outrage over it.

Apparently, Paul had also learned that some of the Corinthians thought that they had been taken advantage of in business dealings with others in the church. Now they were bringing law suits against each other in the civil courts. The fact that Christians would cheat one another in business was bad enough, but that they could resolve these matters within the church was horrifying to Paul. He looked on this as a humiliating disgrace for the church.

Taken together, these reported problems told the apostle that the Corinthian Church was showing early signs being corrupted, polluted if you will, by the moral decay around them. It was not that Paul wanted the Corinthians to isolate or insulate themselves from all that surrounded them; obviously they could never do this. Their church was right in the middle of the world, exactly where a church should be. The individual Corinthian Christians had lots of "non-church" friends and associations, some of whom were certainly no models of morality. There was then, and there is now, no problem with this. One of the great mistakes that we Christians make is to disassociate with the very people who need us the most. To keep from getting our hands dirty, sometimes we won't touch anything or anybody that doesn't fit our idea of goodness. Sometimes we can get such a "holier than thou" attitude that nobody dares come near us.

After they had seen me coaching a soccer game or some such thing, somebody once commented to me that they were surprised that I was so "human." Yikes! Do we ministers really emit such sanctimonious vibes that people are surprised when one of us seems merely human? I know that standing in the pulpit we are about four feet above reproach, but, please, if you ever catch me coming across like some pious puritanical parson, come up and tell me the most off-color joke you know, or tell me my shoe is untied or I've got something stuck in my tooth or . . . something.

It's not just clergy who need to pay attention here. As many of you know first hand, walking up the steps and through the front doors of a church building for the first time is one of the hardest journeys a seeker can take. We need to make that trip as easy for people as possible. And once somebody works up the courage to make that trip, we need to give her or him the warmest and most accepting welcome we can. These old buildings can get terribly chilly you know. Especially when they are inhabited by "God's frozen chosen." It is so important that we remember that Jesus was never ethereal or cold or distant. Being fully God, he is also fully human, and he took great delight in hanging out not only with ordinary people, but with people that were generally considered to be social pariahs - cracked, stained, chipped and broken people who desperately needed and enthusiastically welcomed God's forgiving and healing love.

So Paul's message to the Corinthians is not that they should somehow become morally superior and disconnected from the people who needed God to love them. His message to the Corinthians was that they should remember that God was in the process of saving and sanctifying the church. These Corinthians, and the rest of us churchly types, need to be reminded that wrongdoing is not God's will, and that it can sneak up on us and jump us unless we practice walking in the power of the Spirit of our God. Unless we keep our antennae up through prayer, and our batteries charged through worship and fellowship, and our minds tuned in through study, and our hearts tender through service, the subtle, but powerful temptation to take ethical shortcuts or indulge in moral compromise can overwhelm us.

Ethics and morality decidedly are NOT the way to God, but God is the way to an ethical and moral life. For Paul, as for Jesus, being moral or ethical is never about comporting myself according to some external standard. Ethics and morality are about having a heart transformed in love. Such a heart is held in the hand of God and looks upon others as God does - as persons of infinite worth to be loved with infinite care. If we look at the laundry list of "wrongdoers" that Paul says have no business in the realm of God, we can immediately see that they are not lovers of others or of self, but are abusers. "Wrongdoers" are people who try to use God and God's gifts of creation, including other people, without loving or respecting them. Paul names fornicators, adulterers, male prostitutes and sodomites as wrongdoers, not because heterosexual or homosexual relations are wrong in themselves, but because abusive, coercive or promiscuous sex of any sort is wrong. Such behavior is wrong because it is not an expression of love and respect, but is an attempt to satisfy unrestrained appetites for power or pleasure without concern for the cost to others and the self.

Paul names thieves and the greedy and robbers as wrongdoers, not because it is wrong to have and enjoy possessions. No, it is acquiring things by abusing or depriving others, whether through force or cunning or stealth, that is wrongdoing. Again, it is the inappropriate attempt to satisfy an unrestrained appetite that leads to wrongdoing.

The same may be said of addictive behaviors and hate speech (which is what reviling is) and idolatry. They are not wrong because there is something inherently wrong with drink or drugs or speech or religion. They are wrong because they are abusive of these things and so are abusive of self and others and God.

We shouldn't make too much of Paul's list of wrongdoers. It is a "canned" list of the sort commonly found in ethical writings of the time. The important point is that wrongdoing is about abuse - making bad use of good things. It is about what happens when a person does not know love and forgiveness and the transforming power of God's Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. This love and forgiveness and power are what mark the boundary between what is the Church and what is not. The boundary between what is the church and what is not, between what is Christian and what is not, is not formed by four steepled and whitewashed walls. It is not formed by a list of names on a baptismal registry or membership roll. It is not formed by the title of "Reverend" or by a bumper sticker that asks, "What would Jesus do?" What is and is not church; what is and is not Christian; what is and is not moral is determined by love - love that is so full from being loved that it flows out seeking ways to respect and honor and dignify all in the name of love, in the name of God, in the name of Jesus Christ. May it ever be so with us.

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