Christ United Presbyterian Church
January 19, 2013
The Second Sunday After Epiphany
“How To Find Your Way in Brooklyn”
I Corinthians 1: 1-9
Many years ago, when I was a
young seminarian, the pastor of the church in which I was doing fieldwork told
a story about giving directions. We were
in the largest African-American Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and the
pastor, his name was Milton, was quite a character.
Milton told a story about a
man who was in a car stopped at a red light in the middle of Brooklyn, and he
called Milton over from the curb and asked directions. New Yorkers are not good about
directions. It’s not that they don’t
know how to get from here to there, it’s more that they don’t pay a lot of
attention about HOW they got from here to there. They tend to recognize corners by the stores
that are on them rather than the street name, and the concept of distance is
measure in blocks, not miles.
Well Milton told the man to
go down about 3 blocks until he came to a shoe store at a traffic
light. Turn right at the shoe store and
go about
2 blocks to a candy store (that’s a term of art in New York – it does a lot
more than sell candy, but it’s called a candy store) and make another
right. The place the man was looking for
should
be about
two more blocks down on the left. It’s
next door to a butcher shop.
“About,” “about,” “should
be,” and another “about.” Hmmmm. Milton knew exactly where this place was, and
he knew how to get there, but explaining it to a stranger left some big holes.
Well, traffic being what it
usually was, Milton decided to run down the 3 blocks to the first turn at the
shoe store. He beat the man in the
car. The man was very surprised to see
Milton standing on the corner waving at him to indicate that this was the shoe
store that he needed to turn at. Milton
said, “I just wanted to be certain you made the first turn. After that it’s pretty easy.”
Explaining the story, he
said, “I knew where he needed to turn, and I just wanted to be sure that he
made the right turn. It would be pretty
obvious from there where he had to go.”
You see, Milton knew the way.
Milton knew the truth. And he
needed to be certain that the man he spoke to also could find his way. So even though it took him away from his own
original destination, Milton wanted to make certain that this man would reach
his.
Milton was excited about
passing on the truth; about helping the man find his way. He didn’t want the man to get lost,
especially since the man had asked him for directions. He wanted to encourage the man with the
example of his own witness, so that the man would find his way and not get
lost.
The congregation at Corinth,
which Paul had founded personally, was showing those frequent signs of family
dysfunction that seem to afflict so many congregations. If you read the whole letter you will find
that they were engaged in all sorts of personal, economic, political,
spiritual, and theological conflicts. They
had missed their turn. They had missed
the point of that hardest part of the Gospel:
love one another.
They were arguing and
throwing negative comments at each other.
They needed to be corrected and brought back to the right path. Paul knows the truth of the Gospel. Paul doesn’t want them to lose their
way.
Paul is more concerned with
helping them find their way, find the right path and the right direction, than
correcting them. He knows that the only
way to effectively do that is to encourage them:
“4I give thanks to my God always for you because of the
grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5for in
every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every
kind— 6just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened
among you— 7so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He doesn’t open with anger or
words of harsh correction or condemnation.
He opens with words of encouragement.
He doesn’t open by saying “You can do much better.” He opens by saying “You are so much more than
you allow yourselves to be.” He opens
with the enthusiastic encouragement born from love and the knowledge of the
truth of the Gospel. He openly displays
his own passion to share the truth with them and show them the way in which
they need to go. He doesn’t want to
discourage them: he wants to make sure
that they make the right turn at the right corner and continue on their way to
the Lord.
I have a question for
you: does anyone remember where the
lines “where seldom is heard, a discouraging word,” come from? I know I have some unusual notions in my
head, and when I was a kid I had a really unusual one about that line. I could never figure out why “seldom” was a
discouraging word.
The line comes from the old
song “Home On The Range.” The author was
writing about the beauty and joy of the new lives pioneers were encountering as
they pushed westward into unsettled lands.
They were building new lives for themselves and their families and the
courage to do that took encouragement – not discouragement – as they sought our
new lives.
Perhaps like some of you I
have thought about discouragement as a feeling like sadness. So I looked up
“encourage” and “discourage.” I never
thought about the fact that the word “courage” was at the heart of these
words. “Courage” is that quality of
mind that shows itself in facing danger without fear. “Encourage” means to inspire with courage
sufficient for any undertaking. “Discourage”
means to deprive one of courage, to lessen or repress courage for an
undertaking. Paul speaks of God as being the God of faithfulness and
encouragement.
Paul knew that the Gospel of
love was what a friend of mine calls “the hardest Gospel.” It takes courage to live that Gospel. Make no mistake, the gospel of love was
exactly how Paul wanted the congregation to live. That’s why his great and often
inappropriately quoted chapter on love is in this first letter to the
Corinthians. To find their way, to find
that truth of the Gospel of love required courage then and still requires it now.
Christ United Presbyterian
Church faces a future that requires great courage. We face a great many unknowns. We face some hard decisions in the months and
years ahead. As long as we remain
focused on the gospel of love; as long as we remember that we exist as a congregation to encourage and love one another and
give witness to that love to all the world around us, then God will
faithfully be a source of encouragement, a source of courage and strength.
We will have to decide with
currently scarce and dwindling resources what we need to live out and share
God’s message of love. And as we move
ahead we must encourage one another with the words of Paul: “4I
give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been
given you in Christ Jesus, 5for in every way you have been
enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— 6just
as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— 7so
that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of
our Lord Jesus Christ.”
God has given us all that we
need to spread the word of His new kingdom.
Don’t let a discouraging word be shared among you, but always encourage
one another as God has encouraged us, build up one another, so that we face the
future with confidence and audacity. God
will show us how to get there. He’ll be
waiting at every corner to show us the way, encouraging us to find our way to
the destination He has prepared for us.
Amen.
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