Called
I Corinthians 1:1-9
Click here for the video, "Called."
It can be hard to know sometimes how to sign a letter. In the electronic age, so much is communicated by email that signing letters is a far less common practice than it used to be. I have two signatures programmed into Outlook on my computer. The one I’ve designated as “formal” includes my full name, title and workplace. The other I call “personal” that’s just my first name. Both begin with the salutation “Grace and Peace.” That’s easy. I’m a pastor and most of the emails I send have to do with the work I do on behalf of the church. But I usually only sign the first email that I send in an exchange. It feels a little weird to sign every response in a back and forth electronic conversation. I was recently asked to write a letter of recommendation for someone to an academic program. That felt a little more formal. For one thing it wasn’t electronic, it was paper. That seemed to change the equation for some reason. And while the academic program was religious in nature, I’m not sure I signed it, “Grace and Peace.” I might have opted for something a little more neutral, like, “Sincerely.” Clearly there is something in our signature that we use to reinforce the tone of the letter we’re putting our name on. If you get a letter from your love interest signed simply, “Regards,” your heart breaks just a little bit from the lack of love in the signature.
In the tradition of the first century in which Paul and others wrote letters to the early churches, the signature came at the beginning of the letter instead of the end, so you didn’t have to wait to read the tone of someone’s words. Today’s reading is a case in point. The first word is the writers name, his signature if you will, followed by a long form of what might pass in our day for a “Sincerely.” If you look at the letters that Paul and others send to the various churches you begin to notice that Paul too varies the tone of his signature/greeting depending on who he’s writing to and what the letter is about. The opening of the letter to the Philippians practically radiates the love he feels for that community as his clear favorite. Alternately, the letter to the Galatians keeps the pleasantries brief before launching into, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you,” letting them know right away that they are in for it.
The opening signature of this letter to the church in Corinth might sound benign at first, but If we scan for clues, we begin to see that Paul is tipping his hand for what’s to come. The church in Corinth is something of a mess. In some ways that is always the case. One of the cheap shots when it comes to discounting a church is to observe all its faults and conclude that such faults should disqualify the people involved from service to the kingdom, or inclusion in what God is up to. The irony of this, of course, is that scripture is pretty clear on the fact that God doesn’t necessarily go looking for the best and the brightest when it comes to bringing about God’s purposes. Where anybody got the idea that the people of God were any different or better than the rest of flawed humanity is beyond me. If anything, we’re at our best when we recognize our own shortcomings and trust that they are no barrier to God’s will being done. That is, we are at our best when we come to the conclusion that the criteria for entering into the work of remaking of the world according to God’s desire has little if anything to do with our credentials and far more to do with what God has in mind.
That would have been something of a radical idea in Corinth, which was a commercial hub of a port city in the trade routes of the Roman Empire. Like most cosmopolitan cities, Corinth was used to its fair share of status and status seeking. How big a deal you were depended on how rich you were, how smart you were, what you brought to the table in terms value and prestige. If someone important called on you, well, that meant that you had distinguished yourself somehow in the eyes of the community. Such honor isn’t bestowed on just anyone, it’s reserved for the best. It goes to those who have earned it, those who deserve it. Straight out of the gate, Paul is up against this way of seeing the world. He knows the litany of criticism that’s been circulating about his leadership and his authority. Who is he to talk to the church the way he does? So, he let’s them know. He was called to be an apostle of Christ, called to be sent out as Christ’s representative in the world not by popular vote, or committee review, or gold card status, but because it was what God wanted. And as Paul learned the hard way, God gets what God wants. That’s how it works. So if the initial reaction to getting a letter from Paul is a roll of the eyes and an attitude of, “not this guy again.” Paul effectively opens by saying, “look this isn’t necessarily my idea of a good time either, but it really isn’t up to me. This is what I’ve been called to be.”
That’s who Paul is, and in addressing the church in Corinth, a church broken into factions, a church beset by sexual immorality, at odds over dietary practice, fighting each other in the courts, and arguing about spiritual gifts; Paul is trying to remind them of who they are, who they are supposed to be: those set apart by Christ and called to be saints. That’s a term that has less to do with being a goody two-shoes, and more to do with being someone dedicated to a particular task- advancing God’s agenda of reconciliation, love and resurrection in the world. Paul’s letter will go to great lengths detailing what’s getting in the way of their call, but from the outset he lays the groundwork by establishing that, just like him, they too have been called. In fact, the very word that we translate as “church,” ekklesia in the Greek, literally means called out ones. It turns out that was a fairly commonly used word for any gathering a of a community in the Greco-Roman world. If there was to be a town hall meeting, a gathering of neighbors in a community, a trumpet would sound to signal neighbors to come out of their houses to attend the gathering. The church re-purposed this idea with the understanding that it was Christ himself who had called them out of their previous lives, called them out of a life dominated by sin and death, called them out of lives valued in terms of status and privilege, and into an entirely different form of association.
This is the fundamental characteristic of the Christian life, the key to understanding what it means to follow Christ. It means living with an awareness that who we are and what we do are more than a matter of self-determination. Who we are and what we do are a product of the one who has called us and what that one calls us to be. As I was writing this, I got a news alert about the deal struck between the royal Windsor family of the United Kingdom and Prince Harry and his wife Meghan. On the one hand the continued existence of royalty sounds like a quaint throwback to my American ears. But on the other it serves as a kind of lesson in the gospel. The prince and his wife want out of their official roles in the Royal family. As part of the deal, they will be giving up their titles. I can think of no better illustration of the promise and challenge of the gospel.
As a prelude to all the drama in Corinth, Paul is saying that to call upon Jesus as the source and direction of our lives is to give up whatever titles we and the world confer upon us because we understand that we have been called to an entirely different way of understanding ourselves, our place in the world, and the work we’ve been given to do. We are called out of systems and structures that assign value based on titles like race, gender, ethnicity, conformity, wealth, talent, beauty, skill, cunning or any other trait that we might lay claim to. We are called out of thinking about ourselves and those around us in such ways, so that we might live instead according the values of God who has laid claim upon us in Christ. That’s a gift to those who carry titles that diminish them in the eyes of the world, those who belong to categories that serve as obstacles in a world of discrimination and bias. But it is equally a challenge to those who gain some level of privilege from their titles, from those characteristics that the world values. To be called is to know that neither tell the truth about who we are, who we truly are. To be called is to know that what God has in mind is far better. What God has in mind is all that matters.
This is the gospel truth that lies at the heart of the struggle for civil rights that we remember as we celebrate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend. It is a struggle that continues to this day in an attempt to upend systems of injustice based solely on a person’s skin, or who they love, or the pronouns they prefer, or any other classification that the world devises to hold people down. And it is the struggle for which people of faith are strengthened to the end to lead lives worthy of the only calling that matters. One that doesn’t come from us, but from God, who is faithful through it all.