Epiphany 3, Year A 2023: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

  We are currently in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, celebrated between January 18 and January 25 - or between the feasts of the Confession of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul. During this week, Christians around the world are invited to pray for the unity of all Christians, to reflect on scripture together, to participate in jointly-organized ecumenical services, and to share fellowship.

I’m struggling this year with where we are in our quest for Christian Unity. If we’ve even left the station. If we have any idea what Unity looks like among us and our siblings in Christ who have a very different experience of society. The Week of Prayer falls during an interesting time in our church and civic calendars. In the church calendar, our lectionary brings us Paul pleading with the church in Corinth to stop identifying themselves with who baptized them, asking “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?” In our Gospel lesson we have Christ calling his first disciples while proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In our civic calendar, we celebrated Martin Luther King Day, marking the civil rights leader’s birthday - his date in the church calendar is April 4, the date of his assassination, as we mark saints’ days by the day they return to the Lord. However, most people go by our civic calendar and so my social media was filled, as yours might have been too, with King quotes over black and white photos of him with a contemplative look on his face. They tend to be very gentle quotes. Quotes that make white people comfortable. Quotes that make it difficult to see why anyone might disapprove of him, let alone assassinate him.

If you are reading quotes from people who were assassinated and you can’t for the life of you figure out why anyone would want to kill them, dig deeper. While you might not agree with their assassin, you should at least be able to see why someone might be upset. If you can’t state your opponents’ views in a way that is recognizable to them you are simply setting them up as radical straw men which does no one any good. For instance, while Jesus did say, “let the little children come to me,” he also said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

And while Martin Luther King did say, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear,” he also said this, in his letter from a Birmingham Jail: “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not…the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

In 1999, Gallup used a special research procedure to determine the most admired individuals from the 20th century. Martin Luther King was second, behind Mother Theresa. Following King on the list was John F Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, and Franklin D Roosevelt. However, a Gallup poll from 1965, the last year that Gallup polled on King prior to his assassination, put King’s approval at 32% positive, 63% negative.

Too many of us are convinced that we would not be in that “disapprove” group in 1965. That we would be Thomas who in John 11 said, “Let us also go that we may die with him (Jesus)”, Thomas who was ready to go to the grave with Jesus, rather than Peter, warming his hands by the fire, declaring “I don’t know him”. How can we be prepared when faced with the question, “do you know Jesus?” Are we ready to stand up for those who have a struggle different from ours, but to whom we can lend whatever power and influence we may have to assist with their cause - even if that influence is just our voice, backing them up? In my Christian Ethics class, we did some of the classic thought experiments - like you’re on a boat that only has space for two fewer people than you have, and if you don’t throw two people overboard you will all drown, how do you decide who goes overboard? I had some classmates suggest they would volunteer to be thrown overboard. While that is very noble, it’s easy to be noble sitting in a classroom with a cup of coffee and no boat in sight. I hope those same noble classmates spent some time with the idea that they might, in crisis, not be quite so noble. That they might launch half-filled lifeboats from the Titanic so they could survive, others be damned. Until we are willing to admit that we might not be that noble person, we probably don’t have what it takes to be that noble person.

The example I look to is St Maria of Paris. St Maria was a Russian nun in France during World War 2 who was eventually arrested and killed in a concentration camp for helping her priest forge baptismal documents for Jews. It is said that she remarked that if the Nazis came to her church looking for Jews, she would bring them a picture of the Blessed Virgin. I hope and pray that if I were in her position that I would have the strength and courage to forge baptisms to save lives and to be so bold as to bring soldiers the mother of God as a “Jew in hiding”. But I am not confident that I could be St Maria. None of us truly know what we could do until faced with the most extreme versions of what we are asked in our baptismal covenant: will you persevere in resisting evil, will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself, and will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? I don’t know that I can be sure that I will persevere in resisting evil, seek and serve, love and strive. But the answer is the same to all three questions: I will with God’s help. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. Far from it. That doesn’t mean it will be comfortable. Far from that, too. But we can start by simply being willing to be uncomfortable on the behalf of others. For how can we say we are respecting anyone’s dignity if we are unwilling to even be uncomfortable for them? How can we say we seek and serve the Christ, the God incarnate, in all persons if we don’t learn to stand up for them, as Peter learned. Peter might have denied Christ at the cross, but that’s not where Peter’s story ends. It was Peter who, after Pentecost, risked his life to do the Lord’s work, speaking boldly. It was Peter whose strength and courage helped the young Church in its questioning about its mission beyond the Jewish community. It was Peter who had the humility to admit a change of heart regarding baptism of Gentiles. And it was Peter who followed Jesus to his own cross. We, too, have the opportunity to be better. To not let our story end at “I don’t know him”, but instead to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near”. To live as if the cross is not foolishness.

Performing artist Leslie Odom, Jr., probably best known for his role as Aaron Burr in Hamilton, says it this way: “When looking at the task we have before us as citizens we must handle our most troubling societal ills with the seriousness they deserve. The more serious the sickness, the less likely you are to find the cure over the counter. One’s (personal) commitment to risk or to ‘fail in the spectacular’ (as he points to in his book) is not a societal override key for sexism or homophobia or transphobia. Only our commitment to citizenship can do that. A collective commitment to compassion could do it.” I might add, a commitment to our baptismal covenant in Christian community, truly seeking to understand where others are coming from so that we can serve them as Jesus served us - “for the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” So that we can all have access to the road toward Christian Unity and may, as Jesus prayed, “all be one.” Amen.