The following was adapted from a sermon delivered at the United Church of Christ Alabama-Tennessee Association’s Fall Meeting at Howard Community Church in Nashville, TN.

Based (loosely) on 1 Corinthians 1:10-17:

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.”  Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

My text today is the passage we just heard from 1^st Corinthians.  As we’re gathered here this evening in a spirit of unity and inter-church fellowship, it might strike you as unusual that we should turn our attention to a passage of scripture concerned with absolutely petty factionalism.  In the opening chapter of his 1^st letter to the Corinthians, the great Apostle Paul momentarily puts aside the pressing concerns of his Gospel world-tour.  The community at Corinth has deteriorated, and the situation is so dire that only a Pauline Epistle can fix it.  So, instead of spreading the Gospel or casting out demons, Paul is trying to search his memory bank for who he did and didn’t baptize at Corinth.  “None of you except Crispus and Gaius.  Oh… and also Stephanas. And maybe some other people but really I’m not sure.”  We can all thank the Church at Corinth for that eloquent little gem of Bible.

Even the most bumbling passages of scripture have something to teach us about the human condition.  One of the lessons here is that some things never change.  Paul’s letter demonstrates for us that no task is ever so great that it cannot be derailed by some completely inconsequential concern.  “So you’re trying to change the course of human history with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, huh?  Well, before you do that, remind us all who you’ve baptized and why it doesn’t matter.”  So if you were shocked that the Leader of the Free World could be pestered into producing a long-form birth certificate by a reality TV star with bad hair and a penchant for conspiracy theories, you shouldn’t have been—some things never change.

More importantly, this scripture points to a truth about human nature and church life.  Church people absolutely love to talk about unity and the church as The Body of Christ.  And yet, there are over 40,000 denominations of Christianity last I heard. (Yes, 40,000. That wasn’t a typo nor did I misspeak.)  The urge for unity, however strong, pales in comparison to the allure of sectarianism.  Wendell Berry perceived our situation well when he wrote that, for some people, “the highest Christian bliss would be to get to heaven and find that you were the only one there—that you were right and all the others wrong.”  The sectarian impulse is comfortably situated next to self-righteousness in our religious imagination, and self-righteousness is alive and well much more than we care to acknowledge.

So that’s the bad news.  The good news is that the broken Body of Christ can still be an agent of God’s redemptive activity in the world.  All it takes for us to witness effectively is a bold imagination.  We’ll need to reconsider which partners in ministry are and are not appropriate, and we’ll have to be willing to learn from those that we’re tempted to ignore or disdain.

Now seems like a good time to start drawing lessons from unlikely sources, mostly due to the fact that I have you all as a captive audience for at least a few minutes.  So here’s a sermon illustration you probably haven’t heard before:

We could all learn a thing or two about inter-church relationships and consensus building from the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. (Stick with me) If you had asked me a few weeks ago to say something nice about Jerry Falwell’s ministry, it would have been hard for me to muster a response.  Had we ever met or shared a conversation, I’d imagine that our points of agreement would have been limited to such pressing issues as the weather, what day of the week it is, and the shape of the earth.  Luckily, some people are much more objective and sympathetic than I am.  Harvey Cox, in his book Religion in the Secular City, describes the work that went into the formation of the Moral Majority as no less than a miracle of social engineering.  The Fundamentalist religious leaders that Falwell brought together under one banner were, in the words of Harvey Cox, “notoriously quarrelsome and internally divisive.”  These are the sort of folks who would split a congregation without batting an eye—usually over some point of doctrine that most of us have never before bothered to consider.  And yet, Jerry Falwell was able to unite upwards of 80,000 of them under a common cause.

What was he able to do so effectively that has escaped the rest of us?  His success cannot be credited towards more favorable circumstances.  While the ministers that he united, to outside observers, may have seemed to be birds of a feather, the reality is that they viewed one another with intense scrutiny.  During a reconciliatory meeting, one pastor reportedly said to another, “I used to think you were a dangerous heretic and possibly even the anti-Christ.”  That’s what Falwell was up against: the cataclysmic end of time brought about by a Southern Fundamentalist harbinger of the anti-Christ.  Our differences—whether political, doctrinal, liturgical, or otherwise—cannot possibly be that dire.

As we go about doing the work of the Gospel, we’ll need to reconsider which types of partners in ministry are and are not appropriate.  Doctrinal unity ought not to be a pre-requisite of social partnership, nor should the work of the Gospel be the exclusive property of Christian churches.  According to the Church Father Augustine, the true Church—the City of God—is not a recognizable institution.  The mark of God’s flock is not their affiliation with the Church, for “there are wolves with and there are sheep without.”  Religious identity, we’re meant to understand, is not always so important.  In fact, sometimes non-religious organizations put Christian churches to shame when it comes to fulfilling the imperatives of the Gospel.

I’m reminded of an episode from the 9^th chapter of the Gospel of Mark.  The ESV reads:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.  But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us.”

The disciples were worried that the work of the Gospel was being carried out by a man who lacked the appropriate religious credentials.  He wasn’t part of Jesus’ in-group, so clearly he had no right to invoke his name.   Jesus, on the other hand, doesn’t seem so worried—“the one who is not against us is for us.”  The folks who were having their demons cast out of them, I would imagine, were the least concerned of all about who was healing them.  If someone is so kind as to cast a demon out of you are you really concerned with why or how?  We, like the disciples, tend to overestimate the importance of our religious affiliation.  I know that if someone were to cast a demon out of me, or feed me when I was starving, or exonerate me from death row, I could probably care less whether or not they professed faith in Jesus Christ; I’d be thrilled to be alive and well.  Our concern for the needs of others ought to outweigh any consideration of whether or not the right people are meeting those needs.

Here’s a more current example:  One of our professors at the Divinity School, Melissa Snarr, recently published a book about the role of faith groups in the living wage movement.  An ideologically diverse group of faith leaders joined their political clout with that of local labor organizations, and their diversity became their biggest strength.  When city leadership saw that the usual suspects—those middle-class, lefty Protestants they’re so used to hearing from—were standing in solidarity with a highly conservative minister from a large, Black Baptist church, they knew that the living wage movement could not be brushed aside without consequence.  For a moment, worker dignity was more important than cultural and doctrinal differences, and the powers-that-be had to take notice.

None of this, I should say, is an indictment of tradition, doctrine, or liturgy.  One of my professors recently said that sometimes the sermon you preach is the one that you need to hear the most.  I, for one, have what my friend Cameron not-so-affectionately calls “Unitarian impulses,” and I often need to remind myself of how indispensable our traditions and doctrines are.  No social group, let alone any church, can exist without some type of shared history, ideology, and organizational procedure.  I take that back, there is a name for a social gathering with none of those characteristics—it’s called an angry mob.  Churches, though, they all do ritual in some form or another.  Even the most free-wheeling, charismatic strands of Christianity typically follow a certain procedure.  The only difference is that it’s not outlined in an official Book of Worship.  In that sense, all churches are liturgical.  A much more pressing question is “what end does our liturgy serve?”  At its best, liturgy brings us into an experience of community, affirming for us that we all belong one to another, and compelling us to action beyond the walls of our churches.  Good liturgical practice teaches us that to live as a Christian is to live in relationship to all of God’s creation.

All healthy, functioning churches are relational.  So you don’t necessarily need to buy into The Social Gospel, but your Gospel must be social.  The only alternative is a Gospel for sociopaths.

Doctrine, like liturgy, needs to occupy its appropriate place in the lives of our religious communities.  In Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead, the fictional minister John Ames writes that “doctrine is not belief; it is only one way of talking about belief.”  As we try to express our experience of the divine in human language, we’re often left in want of better words, but words are still necessary.  Our doctrines, however precisely formulated and true to our experience of God, are not our strongest tool for spreading the Gospel.  One of my undergrad professors used to say that “no one ever became a Christian because they read Thomas Aquinas.”  That may have been a bit of an overstatement, but it’s not so far off of the mark.  Truth strikes us most powerfully when it is revealed to us through beauty, and nothing resonates so poignantly with the human spirit as a story about redemption.  Doctrine is but one of several ways for us to share the greatest story of redemption ever told, and it would be a mistake to close ourselves off from finding truth in other mediums.  Certainly Fyodor  Dostoevsky expressed the logic of the Christian mission as well as any theologian when he wrote that “beauty will save the world.”

Our rituals, our doctrines, and our social actions are all fully necessary and mutually complementary components of our faith.  Nothing can be gained by emphasizing one at the expense of another.   These three aspects of our faith, if they are to function effectively, must be tended to with a spirit appropriate to their purpose.  If it is true that “there is a time for everything, and a season for all activities under heaven,” then we owe it to ourselves to figure out when those times are and how to act once they arrive.  In matters of ritual, let us remember to always widen the embrace of our community.  Let our doctrine be guided by the knowledge that “God is still speaking.”  As we form partnerships in the community to do God’s work, let us be filled with a compassion that supersedes all divisions.

As we go about doing the work of the church, let’s move beyond factionalism.  We do not, after all, belong to Paul or to Cephas or to Apollos.  We belong to each other.

That awareness may not result in us mobilizing as many people as Jerry Falwell, and it won’t necessarily land us in the majority.  But, by making connections with unexpected allies, our shared, public morality can erase some of our divisions and create strength out of our diversity, moving us ever closer to Paul’s ideal “that there may be no divisions among us.”  Amen.