Written by Gordon McPhee
John 1: 29-42
SCRIPTURE FOCUS: 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 [MSG]
1-2 I, Paul, have been called and sent by Jesus, the Messiah, according to God’s plan, along with my friend Sosthenes. I send this letter to you in God’s church at Corinth, believers cleaned up by Jesus and set apart for a God-filled life. I include in my greeting all who call out to Jesus, wherever they live. He’s their Master as well as ours!
3 May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours.
4-6 Every time I think of you—and I think of you often!—I thank God for your lives of free and open access to God, given by Jesus. There’s no end to what has happened in you—it’s beyond speech, beyond knowledge. The evidence of Christ has been clearly verified in your lives.
7-9 Just think—you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all! All God’s gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale. And not only that, but God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus. God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up on you. Never forget that.
SERMON TITLE: “THANKS BE TO GOD”
INTRODUCTION:
Welcome to the second Sunday after Epiphany, which I think means we are through another busy Christmas-New Year's season, well into January, but still far enough away from Easter and Lent to take a little breather. And, overall, I think we can say we have much to be thankful for. We’d all admit there are some blips on the radar; a few old trials and worries that still assail us and, unfortunately, some new ones as well, I’d presume. In fact, if we’re really honest, we often look at life from the perspective that we’re thankful things aren’t worse than they are.
The old and far too familiar exclamation, “Oh, thank god!” seems to be the main course of daily affairs rather than a genuine sense of thankfulness because of how well everything is turning out. I might ask, “When is the last time tomorrow turned out to be as wonderful as you hoped it would be?”
Unfortunately, that leaves us no better off than the next person who doesn’t think there’s a god out there who loves us and sent his only son to die on the cross to redeem us. We need a prescription of peace, love, hope, and joy; the four candles of Advent, which you’ll say to me is, of course, Christ, and that is true, however, Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, wraps this answer up in a pill of unbounded thankfulness to God, or as we Anglicans are want to say, “Thanks be to God.”
SERMON:
“Thanks be to God” is a very familiar phrase for us Anglicans. Any time a scripture, other than the Gospel, is read, somewhere in our minds we automatically want to say, “Thanks be to God.” I’m reminded of the Looney-Tunes mantra, “Shave and a haircut,” ……. “ two bits” (Roger Rabbit)! In our Church context, it translates as, “This is the Word of the Lord, ….. thanks be to God.” The question this evokes is “Are we really thankful, or is this just a meaningless mantra we repeat in the hopes it may become true?” Or worse, that the situations around us and in the world that make us despair of good reasons to be thankful will change.
We hope for peace and love because that would bring us joy, and then we could truly be thankful. Too often, we find it difficult to see these things in our day-to-day lives. Our eyes and minds focus on a plethora of daily difficulties, trials and tribulations, imagined and real, and we despair that things will really get any better in this world. We keep saying the glass is three-quarters full when our hearts tell us it is below the half and on the way to empty. So we focus our hope on, as we call it, the life to come when all will be made right. Yet none of us really knows what that will be except that we’re sure it will be glorious, or at least, that’s what we hope, though not really knowing, and I fear a hope based on wishful faith will do little to engender true faith and hope in our hearts and lives today.
In the opening of his first letter to the Corinthian community, Paul pours out a truly exuberant and heartfelt thanks for what the church there has become since his visit during his second missionary journey. He makes no equivocation, no conditions, holds nothing back. It’s not a couched thanks of encouragement to egg them on to more and better things, they have arrived, or as Paul puts it, “you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all!”
Which is wonderful until you read the rest of the letter, which has been criticized by many as a pretty damning litany of judgment and retribution on the part of Paul. In fact, the verse immediately after our reading begins with a call to stop quarrelling amongst themselves and be “united in mind and thought” (1 Cor 1:10). But that is only the beginning. The litany of problems is enough to destroy any church community just imagining it. Some of the issues cited were:
factions in the church (1Cr 1:1-4:21),
sexual immorality (1Cr 5:1-13),
lawsuits among brethren (1Cr 6:1-11),
moral defilements (1Cr 6:12-20),
as well as
misunderstandings about marriage and celibacy in the last days (1Cr 7:1-40),
eating meats sacrificed to idols and the harm it may cause (1Cr 8:1-11:1),
women praying and prophesying with heads uncovered, a problem even if culturally specific (1Cr 11:2-16),
dishonouring the lord’s supper (1Cr 11:17-34),
spiritual gifts unused and missused (1Cr 12:1-14:40),
misinterpretations of the resurrection of the dead (1Cr 15:1-58),
and delays in the collections for the saints, the needy brothers in Jerusalem (1Cr 16:1-4).
(https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/eo/1Cr/1Cr000.cfm)
I’d say the list goes on, but in fact, that covers the entire rest of the letter except Paul’s concluding remarks and benediction.
What we see in this is Paul beginning with the prescription, the remedy, for the overwhelming problems faced by this community, whom he cherishes dearly, yet knows he must admonish severely if they are to prosper and grow. I would hope that we don’t see our problems and shortcomings as somehow more extensive than those of the Corinthian church. In their defence, if I may divert for a moment, they were in a challenging and precarious situation. Corinth was an ancient Greek city, prominent and influential because it was dedicated to the worship of the gods, which is why, when the Romans destroyed it in 146 BC, under Roman law, it had to sit unused for 100 years. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar rebuilt the city as a colonial settlement, making it a showcase of Roman culture and commerce. The temple of Venus boasted a thousand cult prostitutes, male and female, as you preferred. It is incredible and a testament to how God used Paul that a church survived there at all.
The Cure
May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours” (1:3)
Paul is very concerned about the effect of what he has to say will have on them. He wants to make sure they won’t be discouraged and give up, and we know from church history that the church there did survive and flourish. So what is this amazing medicine Paul dispenses through the Holy Spirit to the Corinthians, and to us?
Well, let's begin at the beginning. First, he tells us who this prescription is for by saying, “I include in my greeting all who call out to Jesus, wherever they live. He’s their Master as well as ours” (1:2)! It’s for the long-term faithful-from-infant-baptism church goers to the uncertain seeker who wants to know more. The ills and weaknesses are the same, and so the cure is equally efficacious. Next, Paul tells us that the medicine is made of the desire that “all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours” (1:3). Now that may sound like the cure is just more wishful thinking, a gentle platitude to encourage believers, but in substance it is so much more.
It is the longing for the best that life with God in God’s creation can afford. It is, in truth, what we all seek. It’s what we desire so that we can be thankful. Everything that is meant by “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:7-8), and likewise, “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (6:33), is bound up in this medicine Paul prescribes.
Every time I think of you—and I think of you often!—I thank God for your lives of free and open access to God, given by Jesus. There’s no end to what has happened in you—it’s beyond speech, beyond knowledge. The evidence of Christ has been clearly verified in your lives. (1 Cor 1:4-6)
Paul has taken of this same medicine he is prescribing. When he thinks of these Corinthian believers with all their failings, frustrations, and floundering, and he thinks of them a lot, what strikes him as most noteworthy is their “lives of free and open access to God, given by Jesus” (1 Cor 1:4). In superlative terms Paul extolls their situation; “it’s beyond speech, beyond knowledge” (5).
How can he, knowing them as he does, speak in such glowing phrases of their present state of affairs? Well, it’s because he is not looking at how they are doing in terms of this world and our human perspective, but on the gifts and benefits that come from God and Jesus Christ. This is the evidence he speaks of, as clearly seen in their lives, that is beyond speech and knowledge. Clearly, he’s not talking about good Christian conduct, or any of the other virtues of which he was about to take them to task.
“Just think—you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all!” (7). Now that’s what we want Paul to say of us. And what I am saying to you today is that this is precisely what he is trying to get through to you, as he did to the Corinthians. You’ve got it all, already. “All God’s gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale” (7). What superlatives with which to describe our life in Christ? The glass is not half empty nor even three-quarters full; it is full to overflowing, as it says in Luke 6:38, “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,” and the 23rd Psalm, “my cup overflows.”
We so often miss out on the joy, peace, love, and hope that thankfulness produces because we lose sight of all that is there before us to be thankful for, all that Paul saw in the flawed and faulty Corinthian church, and in us. We’re like children who are so transfixed by the empty glass in our hand that we can’t see we’re standing in a river full of fresh water. Stoop down and drink and live (I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say).
Forgive me if there’s a sense of filling your minds with feel-good platitudes. I’m not forgetting or ignoring the past when this church was full, and four or five generations of families sat in a pew. There was so much future to hope for that it could almost be taken for granted. But as each layer was stripped away, lost to progress, necessity, and time, we adjusted our hopes to a lower bar, keeping alive a spirit of thanks that at least it wasn’t worse, at least there was still something to hope for. And as we gathered to hear God’s Word, we would reply, “Thanks be to God,” and hope that tomorrow that would be true, at least as much as it was today.
I suggest to you this morning that compared to the Corinthians of whom Paul declares, “you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all!” we are far better off and even more richly blessed. The difference lies in what we value to give thanks for and find our hope in. “The gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ,” is what Paul valued most highly and saw abundantly in the Corinthians. They were far from perfect and had a long way to go, as righteous believers and as a community, but they had the gift of the Holy Spirit, as evidenced in “free and open access to God, given by Jesus.” All God’s gifts, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, were all right there amongst them to provide the strength and means to love one another despite their failings and difficulties.
Never forget that. (1:9)
This building and the community known as St. Simeon’s Anglican Church will assuredly one day disappear, but the love that was shared here and is being shared amongst us today and tomorrow, and every day that there is even one of us left to pray for this community and this world, will never disappear. The love of Jesus in the Holy Spirit goes out through us to the world. It is a sustaining light that is not extinguished. God began this journey in us, fills us with the person of His Son Jesus by the Holy Spirit, and He’ll never give up on us. What more could we need? Thanks be to God.
Amen