Our Hope

Icon image credit— Kelly Latimore

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Paul is writing this letter in response to one from the people of Corinth. He’s been told of some disagreements and some issues within this new Christian community—we’ve talked about this before, because I’ve preached on what follows our passage for today. Right after this comes Paul’s famous body metaphor: “For just as the body is one and has many members…so it is with Christ.” And then after this body metaphor comes his beautiful monologue about love—“…faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” So our passage today that Tom just read for us is essentially the intro to this section. More than anything, this and the following chapters are a plea for unity and for love within the Corinthian Christian community. The people of Corinth were intellectual, and so they elevated the spoken word—prophesy and speaking in tongues, over other spiritual gifts. Paul is making it very clear here that they shouldn’t be elevating any gifts over any others, and in Corinth, it’s gotten bad enough they those who don’t have gifts of prophesy or speaking in tongues were being cast aside, or disregarded. The Corinthians were beginning to make their own unjust and un-Christian hierarchy within their new church, mirroring the oppressive society they were meant to be subverting.

Now, I chose this passage with Martin Luther King Jr. in mind. And as I always like to remind people on MLK Sunday, King was not popular. In 1968, the year of his assassination, his disapproval rating among white folks was 75%. On the whole it was 63% This is a huge uptick from his ratings just a few years before—in 1964 and 1965 they were 38% and 46%, respectively. Now, thanks to MLK and his partners and allies, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, a landmark bill banning segregation and racial discrimination—and this was one King’s approval ratings were… not good still, but they were the best they would be in his lifetime. Because King wasn’t done. In his last years on this earth, he turned his attention to the North and West. He was horrified to see the poor ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, of Los Angeles. Of course he had always been a proponent of a more just economic system, but he became more and more radicalized as he saw that segregation was still alive and well in the north, even if it wasn’t officially codified, as it had been in the Jim Crow south.

Like the Corinthians, I think many of us Northerners thing we’re above it all. We think we’re more evolved, we’ve progressed further than those in the backwards South, right? But the North is just quieter about it. In an essay from the Paris Review about King’s later activism on class, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes,

If King’s strategic genius in the South was deploying nonviolent civil disobedience to disarm Southern racists while coercing the political establishment into securing first-class citizen rights, it was a strategy that ultimately failed in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In those places, obnoxious signs of Jim Crow were not the problem; rather, it was the insidious but obscured actions of the real-estate broker, the banker, the employer, the police officer, and other agents that maintained racial inequality.[i]

And as King discovered these covert ways racism could slip by undetected or at least unchallenged by those in power, he realized more and more it was not just Black folks who lost in this battle. It was all poor folks. It was all people who didn’t come from generational wealth, it was anyone who didn’t have the connections to get the right jobs, who didn’t have family members who went to elite schools. And so as King broadened his scope of activism, he made some former allies angry. In 1966, the then-mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, while in theory sympathetic and even actively pro King’s civil rights work, saw King’s activism in his city as a nuisance, and as fostering more division, though all King and his Chicago Freedom Movement wanted was better conditions in the ghettos and an end to housing discrimination.

By broadening his scope to the whole of the country, by pointing out racism and discrimination in places where people believed they were above all that, in places they believed that wasn’t a problem like in the backwards South, he made more enemies. He was shining a spotlight on unjust practices that had been hidden in plain sight for generations, he was pointing out that maybe it’s not just the south that needs some disruption. But has Taylor points out in the passage I just read, these strategies didn’t have quite the same effect in the North. Now, credit where credit’s due, the Chicago Freedom Movement is credited as being the impetus for Fair Housing Act of 1968, but—quiet, under-the-table racism and segregation is much harder to combat, especially when powerful people who were once allies decide to turn a blind eye.

Like King, Paul was certainly making no friends in this letter. He spent most of it chastising his Corinthian friends for everything they were doing wrong, and likely especially angering the more powerful, well-spoken, well-to-do congregants in the process. But Paul had to risk being disliked. He did not want to see his growing in budding church falling into the traps of their oppressors. He did not want to see this church become  a mirror image of the cruel and callous society which they were both trying to escape and trying to change. But despite some of Paul’s nagging and nitpicking, (in the passage before this he has some very specific and what we would consider irrelevant and archaic rules about head coverings), his ultimate message is one of radical, total equality. It is one that begs these new Jesus followers not to fall into the traps of the outside world by elevating some people above others, by putting other people down for their own gain. He wanted to humble the Corinthians, he wanted to make sure they knew to humble themselves. “It is the same God who activates all [gifts, services, and activities] in everyone,” Paul says; and then “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” Paul is telling them these gifts are not your own. The gift of wisdom was given to one by God, just as the gift of healing was given to another, the gift of service to another. These gifts are all equal, and they are all to be used to the good all. This all sounds wonderful and utopian, and it is! But also… no one wants to be humbled, especially by someone else, and especially those who have power to lose.

So it’s no wonder that King was unpopular. He was doing what Paul was doing. He was humbling powerful people who didn’t want to admit they were doing something wrong; who didn’t want to admit they were upholding racist and unjust systems while paying lip service to civil rights. And so it’s also no wonder that King was so inspired by Paul that he actually wrote a sermon entitled Paul’s Letter to American Christians. He wrote it in the form of a letter and in the voice of Paul, imagining what Paul would say, were he to write to modern American Christians. He wrote,

…America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about improved means to an unimproved end. How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture, and through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood. But through your moral and spiritual genius, you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. And so, America, I would urge you to bring your moral advances in line with your scientific advances…American Christians, I must say to you, as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

 King goes onto critique what capitalism has become, saying

The misuse of capitalism [leads] to tragic exploitation… God never intended for a group of people to live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. God intends for all of His children to have the basic necessities of life, and He has left in this universe enough and to spare for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.

He writes of different sects and denominations,

…I am disturbed about what you are doing to the body of Christ. They tell me that in America you have within Protestantism more than 256 denominations. The tragedy is not so much that you have such a multiplicity of denominations but that most of them are warring against each other with a claim to absolute truth. I am not calling for uniformity…; I am calling for unity.[ii]

Truly, I wish I could read this whole sermon to you— but you get the idea. Like Paul, King told hard truths to all, knowing it would not make the any new friends. They both told hard truths whether his listeners were willing to heed him or not. And we would do well to listen to Paul, to King, and to King-as-Paul. These exhortations to make sure that we, as Christians, humble ourselves to know that we are not better than anyone else, that we are not above anyone else, more progressed than anyone else, will allow us to empathize and connect and work together for a better world. And we also need to be brave enough to speak these hard truths ourselves, to humble those who need humbling when we see abuses of power taking place, when we see people putting themselves and their own interests above the greater good, the common good, in the words of Paul.

We are going to be facing a lot of hard truths, I think, in the coming days— hard truths about  what this country really stands for; hard truths about ourselves and what we’re willing to stand for, what we’re willing to do in the face of all the tension and anxiety and fear in the air.

And I know a lot of people feel paralyzed right now. But this is not the time to let the sensationalistic news cycle break your spirit. This is not the time to let the bombastic speeches and hot takes and conspiracy theories overwhelm you. This is the time to really think about each of your God-given gifts, and what we can bring to our small corner of the world, what we can do to quell all that tension and fear and anxiety in this community. This is the time to think about how we can come together to, as Caroline said at Dinner Church last week, to really show that we are a beacon of hope, of light in dark times.

Paul had a near-impossible task in front of him— to stop disunity among this new faith community, bursting with growing pains, in its tracks. But Paul had a calling. And he had a faith in this real possibility that this Jesus movement could really and truly bring people together, that one day we would all be contributing to the common good, that one day we would all be treated as equals, regardless of out God-given gifts. King too, believed in something so much better than himself. He saw the Civil Rights Act passed, ending lawful segregation in the South, and so then he moved onto something more insidious, something even harder to fight… racism and discrimination that was simply rooted in this birth, even if it wasn’t codified or law. He went onto fight for class justice, beginning the Poor People’s Campaign, to fight for all people living under the thumb of class injustice. And he fought these fights because of his faith in an all-loving God. He fought these fights because of the same Christian capital-L Love that Paul writes of to the Corinthians. Remember, 1 Corinthians 13:7: “[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Paul and King were able to keep going in the face of frustration and hate because of this Love. They were able to keep going because they always had something to hope for. They didn’t allow themselves to become overwhelmed or despairing by all the oppression and injustice they experienced and were surrounded by because they knew that a better world was possible— a world in which everyone uses their gifts humbly for the good of all; a world in which “…every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain…made low, the rough places…made plain, and the crooked places…made straight, and the glory of [God] shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”[iii] This was King’s hope. It was Paul’s hope. And church— it is our hope. Amen.  

[i] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/15/remembering-martin-luther-kings-radical-class-politics/

[ii] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pauls-letter-american-christians-sermon-delivered-commission-ecumenical

[iii] https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety