Pastor Dan Eddy

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Divided we fall – United we stand

1-30-11

Let us pray:

Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight and bring greater unity in this congregation through this proclaimed Word. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

The text for our sermon meditation comes from 1 Corinthians 1 verses 10-18.

Dear Friends in Christ.

I. Introduction – What causes divisions in the Church?

What causes divisions in the Church?

Over the past years, I have seen or heard reports of various members from various congregations cussing, swearing and yelling at pastors and other members at congregational meetings.

Thank God that didn’t happen last week at ours, especially after my comments in the sermon about Patriots’ Quarterback Tom Brady.

Recently, one pastor was being interviewed for a possible call, and a fight broke between two factions over an answer the pastor gave to a question. People had to intervene as the disagreements were potentially become violent.

It makes the rivalry between Jets and Patriots fans or Packers and Bears fans seem trivial by comparison.

In some congregations, letters and email have been circulated behind members’ or pastors’ backs over rumors and unsubstantiated information.

Other congregations report members having an affair with another. Some of these include pastors.

These are all things that divide congregations as wide as the ocean between here and Europe.

What causes divisions like these to exist in the Church?

II. What causes divisions in congregations today? What unites them?

The core of the divisions mentioned in our Epistle text for today center around preachers who baptized certain members of this Corinthian congregation.

In verse 12 when Paul identifies people saying they follow Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas (who was actually the Apostle Peter), or Christ…the sense from the text is that these groups were passionate about their allegiances, but only one group had it right. The ones emphatically following Christ.

These prideful expressions for pastors may appear to be benign at first. However, the subtle but dangerous division opened up a Pandora’s Box of problems for the Corinthian congregation.

In our congregation, I’ve heard well meaning people say things like: “Well Pastor Tegeler used to say this” Or “Pastor Schipul use to do that.” Or “Pastor Dan is teaching it this way.” The problem is…the allegiance is on the messenger not the message. As flattering as those comments are for each respective pastor, including me, they negate or at the very least can lessen Christ Jesus as the Word.

Sometimes these prideful allegiances can extend to Christian denominations. “She was baptized Catholic.” “He was baptized Lutheran.” “They were baptized Methodist.” No, if you are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…you were baptized into Christ Jesus’ Church.

In fact to make the point abundantly clear, Paul in verse 13 used the Greek word μερίζω which is translated as “divided.” The force of the verb is so strong…Paul is basically saying “Has Christ been divided into different parts and handed out to different people?” The very idea is grotesque. Apollo didn’t preach one part of Christ, Paul another, and Peter another. They all preached the same Christ.

Now you may be scratching your head asking, “I don’t get how the division described here can be all that bad.” Well Paul’s admonishment of division in this congregation doesn’t just end here. Thumb through 1 Corinthians sometime and see that this Christian congregation put the “D” in dysfunctional.

They were plagued with sexual immorality. One member was even sleeping with his step mother. Others thought nothing of fornicating outside the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman.

People were treating the Sacrament of the Altar with no respect, not believing in its reality, or in its benefits. They weren’t repentant for their sins.

The conflicts in this congregation were so great that members were actually filing lawsuits against other.

Conflicts can spiral out of control and cause a congregation to be divided rather quickly.

Would you want to be a member of this congregation and any of the others I mentioned?

No…and we wonder why the church doesn’t grow? How can it when the faith of its own members is severely waning?

This Epistle shows us what to do and not to do to be a united congregation in Christ. Instead of one that could be divided and fall to Satan. We look at division in other congregations and avoid their trappings in our own.

Pastors and members are not perfect people, and the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod is not a perfect institution, and we don’t always say correct things. That’s why the true benchmark of unity is God’s Word, given to us by Christ Jesus as expressed in Scripture.

Paul stated very well in Galatians 1:9 (ESV) even including himself in the warnings of the Church preaching the wrong message: “As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”

And this is important when conflicts come up in a congregation, because the Word of God has to be the benchmark for settling disputes. Let me give you an example.

Over 15 years ago, I attended a congregational meeting where I was chairman of the Board of Evangelism. At a council meeting held days before the congregational meeting, we had all agreed to cut 2% of our respective budgets in order to balance it before we presented it to the congregation.

But, at the congregational meeting before vote on the budget, the chairman of the Board of Education, prompted by the school principle, that oversaw our parochial school proposed an amendment. He said they could cut 2% of their expenses after they factored in their tuition.

Well you can imagine the uproar this amendment caused. I will never forget the pastor’s response in dealing with the allegiance of the school people to the school, and the congregational people to the congregation. The pastor opened up his Bible and read the following from 1 Corinthians 12 NIV, “¹² Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body…and we were all given the one Spirit to drink…The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, ²⁵ so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. ²⁶ If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

The room was very silent. Then the pastor said the school’s tuition was not theirs, nor was the congregation’s offerings theirs. There was no “us” and “them,” but “we.” The church and school were not separate entities but parts of one ministry. The electric bill was not separated between the church and school. The pastors didn’t send a bill to the school for their services. That meant to cut 2%...all would need to cut…apart from considering the tuition and the offerings.

At that moment, the Word of God touched most of the members there, and the motions was voted down 2/3^rd to 1/3^rd, and because of the way the pastor and the vast majority of the people assembled handled themselves the congregation only lost one family, and the issue never came up again.

When God in Christ Jesus builds a congregation through the power of the Holy Spirit….Satan tries to build a chapel right next door.

What divides congregations is when members and/or pastors say “ I want to do what I want to do” not “What is the Lord asking us to do as a united congregation, and what part do I play in the body of Christ” That’s what is means to emphatically say, “We follow Christ.” At our baptism, we were joined together with God to have the same mind, purpose, and conviction as Jesus Christ.

At the core of their division, the Corinthian congregation, and I would submit many congregations today, was they were bored with the fact that Christ died on the cross. It just didn’t match up with their affluent intellectual philosophy, and were quite skeptical of His resurrection, and what would happen after this life.

They thought a lot more about worldly wisdom than the true wisdom from God.

Paul’s message here is very purposeful. He does not want the intellectual sounding wisdom of his age, for that matter our age, to sweetly draw people away from the message of the Cross leading them down the path to Hell. Because the way the world handles division and the way the world defines unity is many times at odds to the message of the Cross. To the affluent Greco-Roman culture some Jew dying in the most disgusting way through the most brutal form of capital punishment did not equate with the philosophy of Aristotle or Socrates.

But the irony of the Cross is that this particular person dying in this grotesque way is your free ticket out of Hell into Heaven.

Pau here is reiterating Romans 1:16 ESV “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes…”

What unites? Jesus, His Word, His teachings, His Forgiveness, His power over death. As a result, He brings us into His one body of the church.

III. What does this unity look like?

So in practical terms, what does a congregation united in Christ look like to people on the outside?

Maybe this letter I received from this week from Lutheran Social Services can answer that. (Read letter)

I could not be prouder in a godly way of these members and their one, unified faith in Christ.

IV. Conclusion – Acting united in Christ

We will have many opportunities to act as a united congregation as in a moment we will install the congregational officers, the leaders in our congregation.

A congregation united respects its leaders. The leaders support their followers. Conflicts are discussed in mature ways. Accomplishments and the people who participated in them are recognized.

As we close today…let us remember the words to a hymn I learned growing up:

“We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord. And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they’ll know we are Christian by our love”….united in Christ by the message of Cross, and the power the Word gives. Amen.