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Of all the passages in Scripture, our epistle today may be the one that has taught me the most about how to read Scripture.
When I first read this passage many years ago, I was shocked by what Paul said. The line “‘I belong to Paul,” or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided?” really confused me. We are divided as denominations after all, and as a young person I thought, “those divisions are good, though, right?” It was easy to look at this as a puzzling passage and just shrug my shoulders and move on with my life.
As I dove into this passage as part of my St. John’s studies, I started to be more and more bothered by what Paul says. I began to realize, maybe we were in the wrong. Maybe having all these denominations wasn’t such a good thing. It’s not that we shouldn’t be able to worship God differently or that having different understandings of what Scripture is saying to us can’t help us get at the truth of what Scripture actually does say better. It’s just that we, as the church, have become so divided, and that is most certainly not a good thing.
Many of you have heard me saying in Christian Formation sessions and other settings that I believe Scripture should not be used as a tool to condemn others, but rather a tool to condemn ourselves. This, I would argue, is one of those passages where we do need to condemn ourselves.
The world is divided along so many lines, even more so now than it was when I, at least, was younger. We divide ourselves along ideological lines as well as by those people we choose to follow. This isn’t just true in the secular world, but it is true within the church as well. How many times have we let issues that Jesus doesn’t even comment on rip us apart? How often have we excluded others because of the school of thought they belong to? How often have we heard others speak about [so and so] or [X] is if that person was the next Messiah? How often have we done the same?
What Paul tells us is very different. Paul is telling us that it’s not about following [X] or [Y] or even [Z]. There’s only one person we should be following. It isn’t Paul, it isn’t you, and it isn’t me. The only person we should be following is Christ Jesus.
I have worked with many people in my time in ministry. I’ve agreed as much as you can agree with anyone with some while others I have disagreed with greatly. It has taken me a long time, and it is sometimes still difficult to do this, but ultimately only one thing matters to me in our service: are you following Jesus, or are you not? If you’re following Jesus, then in my book you are okay because we are serving the same Lord, even if we agree on little else.
There are so many things vying for our attention in the world. There are so many people saying “follow me.” The answer for which direction we should go in is pretty simple. Don’t follow after those who are clearly about themselves. Don’t even follow after those whose allegiance is to an organization or another fellow sinful human being, as good as those organizations and people may be. Don’t follow after anyone unless you know for sure that person follows Jesus, and Jesus alone.
That’s the message we should be spreading to everyone: “Don’t follow me, follow Jesus.” It’s the message I hope you take away with you today. This isn’t a problem for just conservatives or liberals, or, to use the much more accurate terms I personally prefer, traditionalists and expansionists. There are people on both sides of the aisle, in the church and without, that are guilty of the division Paul is preaching against. In the end, none of those divisions matter. What matters is Jesus.
My hope is that, in spreading that message of following only Jesus, others will hear you. My hope is that churches will stop splitting from each other, as we have seen in our own denomination and are seeing now with our Methodist siblings in Christ, but that denominations will start coming together, as we did 20 years ago by coming into full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. My hope is that one day we can break bread together with those who have left The Episcopal Church, as sad and angry as those divides may make us some times. My hope is that we can see our differences not as divisions, but as ways to make us stronger together. My hope is that one day we will focus less on divisive issues and a little more, as Paul tells us, on Jesus.