Don’t Give Us Points for This

First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA, February 4, 2024

I Corinthians 9:16-23 (Message)  I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Saint Paul wasn’t always the best writer in the world….and this is a great example, where even the best translations can’t make it clear.   Paul is trying to help people understand why he does what he does – boasting, which is the Greek word, just doesn’t work in our minds – it means something else to us.  So, listen now to this version, as translated by Presbyterian pastor and scholar Eugene Peterson, as he worked to move from what the Greek says to what it meant for his congregation in suburban Baltimore:

I’d rather die than give anyone ammunition to discredit me or impugn my motives. If I proclaim the Message, it’s not to get something out of it for myself. I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t! If this was my own idea of just another way to make a living, I’d expect some pay. But since it’s not my idea but something solemnly entrusted to me, why would I expect to get paid? So am I getting anything out of it? Yes, as a matter of fact: the pleasure of proclaiming the Message at no cost to you. You don’t even have to pay my expenses!

What Paul is trying to say, and what Peterson makes clear is this:  when we live the Christian life at our best, we are not doing it to make points with the world.  We are doing what we do because we can’t not do it, because we’ve gotten it, because we now know that what we’re doing, how we live, is more important than anything else in the world.

But why does he say this? Why is it so important that we know he wasn’t telling us about Jesus to make points, get ahead, maybe rake in a good offering?

Here’s at least one reason:  Paul is telling the world about a God whose foundation is love.  

Think about it.  Some people thought that the way you got good things from God was by making offerings. And if your offering was good enough, pure enough, expensive enough, then God would give you want you wanted.  You know how this works…. In our world, we all know about bribes.  

Down my way, with the continuing challenge of the bridge on 195 going towards Cape Cod, we’re hearing more than usual about bribes…. Did they happen this time?  Is that why the bridge failed?  Every time, any time, something like this fails, someone’s going to be asking about bribes.  Any time, all the time, when someone looks to be getting better treatment than you’d expect, someone of us will wonder if there wasn’t an exchange, a quid pro quo, going on.

Paul teaches us, however, that our God loves us as we are.  We do not need to pay God off to love us.  That truth is the foundation of our world.  It underlies every single thing we do every day.  Because God loves us, even before we do anything, we reach out in love, without any expectation of a quid pro quo, without any need for payment.  We love others because God loves us, and we love others the way God loves us – freely, without compensation, without earning any points for what we do.

Now think about this.  Because we know God loves us before we’ve even thought of God, we aim to create communities where all have equal standing.  

Because we know God loves us before we know God, we aim to create marriages where both spouses are equal.  We do not believe that one member of the marriage is in charge of the other.

Because we know God loves us first, we work to be communities where all people, regardless of their political beliefs, financial standing, age, ability, ethnic background, immigration status, gender, affectional preferences, or marital status are welcome, equally loved, equally honored.

We don’t succeed, of course.  The world, never mind you and I, is not yet perfect.  But that’s our goal.  God loved us, so that we would share that love with all the world.

I say that we don’t always succeed, that sometimes we don’t even try, because it’s important to remember that we,  and our world, are works in progress.  This is really important.  If we thought where we are was all there was, that this is as good as it can get, we’d give up.  And that would mean, even if we continued to come to church, that we really would have given up on Jesus.

Last week, a friend sent me a video of a toddler taking their first steps.  I know you have seen this – if not the very first steps, then for sure sometime in those first days – the kid has a vaguely astonished, bemused look on her face, like “what the heck is this that I’m doing?” as she lurches across the floor.  From time to time, she falls forward on her outstretched hands, and she bounces back up to keep on going.

The first time your toddler gets up on their feet, they’re not very good at it.  It’s kind of mind-boggling, however, how quickly they get better and better, and how much fun they have with this new ability.   

We’re like that toddler, except old enough to whine about how hard this is, or to wonder if crawling really wasn’t good enough – is this effort necessary, we might ask.  What if we just get one of those creepers they use to work on cars?  We’ll move just as fast with less effort.  It’s only $30 and comes in a nifty lime green.

Sometimes, we’ll do almost anything to avoid change and effort, even by getting something as absurd as using a $30 creeper to avoid having to make the effort to learn how to walk…..

Now, that’s so absurd that no one is really doing it – and this is, I want to add, not about actually not being _able_ to walk, but about being unwilling to put in the effort to move from crawling to upright standing and walking.

But it is kinda what happens with us when we’re being challenged by some new growing edge.  Sometimes the work – maybe physical work, but as often emotional work, of growing into a deeper way of living – is just really hard.  And there’s such a temptation to just step back and take a shortcut.

This past fall, a very conservative evangelical preacher named Alister Begg, was asked, on his radio show, whether or not it was permissible for a devout conservative Christian grandmother to attend the gay wedding of her granddaughter.  Begg asked if the granddaughter knew that her grandmother thought what she was doing was wrong.  Yes, grandma said, she knows where I stand, where I believe faith requires me to stand. Then, said Begg, you should go to the wedding, out of love for her granddaughter.

Now, I’m not going to discuss gay weddings, because this isn’t really about that.  It’s just the occasion for what’s turned into a real fight for Alister Begg.  So many of his conservative co-believers were upset that he told the grandmother to attend the wedding out of love, that they cancelled his radio show and he’s under personal attack.

Begg is in line to lose a lot of respect in circles that matter to him.  And so far, he is saying that he believes that love is more important than anything.  Every temptation is before him to step back from what he believes, to preserve his acceptance, to keep on benefitting from his importance, and he says, “no, that’s not right.”

We all get tempted from time to time to step back, even highly respected pastors.

But that doesn’t mean we’re failures; it simply means we are human.  And as human beings, we are able to get up off the floor, like that teetering toddler, and try again — because we are God’s hands in this world.  

We are called to make God’s welcoming love to everyone we know, in the communities where we live and work.  Because God loves us unconditionally, always, and for ever, we can get up off the floor and go at it again, every day getting stronger in our faith, clearer in our purpose, and more and more loving.

May it be so.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child