Sermon preached at St Swithun’s by the Revd Marcus Walker at the service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on March 17, 2013. May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. I’m of Paul! I’m of Apollos! I’m of Cephas! I’m of Justin! I’m of Francis! I’m of Benedict! I’m Orthodox! I’m Methodist! I’m Liberal! I’m Conservative! I’m of the First Free Presbyterian Church of Northern Ireland! If there has been one constant in Christian history, it has been our ready ability to disagree profoundly – and with rancour – with fellow Christians. Welcome to what was to have been my sermon in the Week of Prayer from Christian Unity! Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Pagan Historian, says, damningly, that “No wild beasts are so hostile to humans as the majority of the Christians are to one another”. Frankly the next sixteen centuries did nothing to improve our reputation. Paul was in no way an exception. His furious letter to the Galatians – which he says he wrote with his own hand he was so angry – stands high on the list of the great rants of history. At one point he even cries out that he wishes that his opponents, who call for all Christian converts to be circumcised, ... would castrate themselves! Over his career he falls out with... Barnabas, his fellow worker in the Gospel, with... James, the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem, with... Peter, the rock of the Church, with ... his own church in Galatia and, as we see in this letter, ... his church – or a portion of it – in Corinth. Here we seem to find a church wracked with divisions – theological and social. The community was divided and slogans seem to have been used, identifying supporters with at least two and maybe up to four theological positions.

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Paul uses the language of Roman patronage. The factions say “I am of Paul” and “I am of Apollos” in the same way people would say “I am of Cæsar” or “I am of Pompey”. Belonging to a faction meant far more than belonging to a political party does now – you not only took the same line politically (on in this case theologically), but you had a network of people who supported you and whom you supported. You expected support from those above you, and you owed them your opinions and your political backing. You expected the same from those beneath you. These patronage networks could be spread across the empire, so that you had allies in almost every town, with their network of supporters above and below you. If a person jumped ship, they took all of their clients with them. You were judged by how many clients you had supporting you, and how well you protected and supported your clients. This was the way the Church of Corinth was going. And it is into this factional Church that Paul charges with this letter – on the one hand condemning factionalism ... but on the other arguing his own case powerfully. By the time that we enter the letter, Paul has, in ten verses, used the name “Jesus Christ” ten times – an unparalleled use of the name, forcefully reminding the Corinthian church of where their ultimate loyalty must lie. He also calls them “the Church of God in Corinth”, but ties them “together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours”. So having linked the whole church together with believers in Corinth and with Jesus Christ, he moves on to his description of their factionalism and his stark condemnation of them. “Has Christ been divided?” Paul, throughout his letters, has a very literal, physical, view of the connection between Jesus’ body and the behaviour of his followers. Later in this letter he will graphically condemn those who use a prostitute because they physically unite Christ’s members with those of the prostitute. We are the body of Christ – singly and severally – and what we do directly affects Christ’s body. And he goes on in chapter 12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” And here in the fractured Christian community in Corinth they have divided the body of Christ. And so have we. I’m of Paul! I’m of Apollos!

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I’m of Cephas! And it would be easy… to call for ecclesiastical peace… and stop now. To sit down, feeling like a winner of Miss World having just called for World Peace. Well, to be honest, not feeling much like Miss World. Or looking much like Miss World. But nonetheless having smugly called for world ecclesiastical peace. And having as much chance of being heeded as winning a beauty pagent. Because the reality of the situation is that we fight because we care. There is a wonderful exchange in Trollope’s Barchester Towers where the High Church activist Mr Arabin has been taken to task for clerical feuding by the beautiful widow Mrs Bold and he accuses her of being like a newspaper editor or a member of the opposition: willing to attack but never to consider the wider picture: ‘You are now composing your leading article, and well and bitterly you do it. “Let dogs delight to bark and bite;” you fitly begin with an elegant quotation; “but if we are to have a church at all, in heaven’s name let the pastors who preside over it keep their hands from each other’s throats. Lawyers can live without befouling each other’s names; doctors do not fight duels. Why is it that clergymen alone should indulge themselves in such unrestrained liberty of abuse against each other?” and so you go on reviling us for our ungodly quarrels, our sectarian propensities, and scandalous differences. It will, however, give you no trouble to write another article next week in which we, or some of us, shall be [charged] with an unseemly apathy in our vocation. It will not fall on you to reconcile the discrepancy; your readers will never ask you how the poor parson is to be urgent in season and out of season, and yet never come into contact with men who think widely differently from him.’ So argues Mr Arabin. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t fight. The truth is that when we’re dealing with God we’re dealing with something – indeed someone – we only partially understand. And because we can only partially understand it, other people’s partial understanding will be different from ours. And while, in an ideal world, we should be able to use that dramatic tension to enhance our knowledge and love of God and each other, in the world we have we just do what human beings do best: we fight and we feud and we try to silence those who disagree with us.

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Paul was one of the first to be caught in this dilemma. He disagreed violently with characters in the Corinthian Church. He mocked those he disagreed with. He inveighed against their sexual laxity. He slammed those who used the eucharist as an opportunity to show off their wealth and humiliate the poor. And yet at the end of chapter three, he radically overturns the language of patronage which he used in chapter one. Instead of “I am of Paul”, “I am of Apollos”, “I am of Cephas”, “I am of Christ”, he says, “Let no-one boast of men, for all are of you, whether Paul or Apollos or Kephas or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come. All are of you. And you are of Christ. And Christ is of God.” He is doing two very important things here. First, he takes the situation straight out of the petty feuding of Corinth and puts it in the cosmic context of life, death, things present and things to come. Secondly, he overturns the language of patronage. The member of a faction no longer says “I am of Apollos!” but “Apollos is of me”. And “Paul is of me” and “Cephas is of me”. If there is a faction at all, it is that we’re all part of the Christ faction. You aren’t owned by a human faction. You do the owning. And you own all the other members of the body of Christ. And each of them owns you. Because you, in the end, are owned. By Christ. As are they. So we must stop thinking “you’re a Catholic and I’m a Protestant” or “Anglicans should hate Baptists” but “I am responsible for you” and at the same time (and here’s the tricky one) you have responsibility for me. Our only faction, in the end, is Christ. And he was raised up on the cross for all. Not for Anglicans. Or for the Orthodox. Or for Methodists. And so when we disagree – as we will, indeed, as we must – when we disagree, we must disagree in love. Holding those arguing with us as equal sons and daughters of God. And this is, if we’re honest, very difficult. Because, frankly, we have each come to our theological positions rationally and reasonably. And it is jolly difficult when someone else seems irrational in their beliefs. Especially when those beliefs seem to cause pain and harm to other Christians. And it won’t be easy when you’re a woman whose orders are being denied by a man ...whom you have to love as an equal son of God.

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Or when you see the sacrament, the body and blood of Christ, treated with contempt by a woman whom natural philosophy tells you cannot be a priest, ...but whom you love as an equal daughter of God. Or when you profess that the sun does not rotate around the earth and get charged with heresy by those whom ...you love as equal sons of God. Or when you find your faith in a creator God under attack by those who believe in evolution – and realise that you must love those evolutionists as equal sons and daughters of God. We’ve mocked and we’ve bullied and we’ve burned and we’ve chopped and we’ve scorned those who’ve challenged our theologies for so long that all Christians bear the scars of how they or their forebears have been treated. The only way out is to stop looking at ourselves as being part of a faction, but as being part of the body of Christ. Warts and all. It doesn’t mean we don’t argue. It doesn’t mean we won’t disagree profoundly with each other. As a rational liberal Anglican I don’t for a second hold with the biblical fundamentalism which seeks to oppress a new generation of Christians under the weight of ill-thought-out bigotry. But I really have to think about how to do this in a way which acknowledges my duty of care to those Christians I disagree with. And, indeed, I ought to be careful of my language. I am a rational liberal Anglican. They are biblical fundamentalists. I’ve done it again. I don’t belong to rational liberal Anglicanism. They don’t belong to biblical fundamentalism. We both belong to Christ. +In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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