Epiphany 3 Year A 2026: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

During my first year in seminary, our Intro to New Testament class was assigned formal debates. We were given topics addressed in Pauls’ Epistle to the Corinthians and prepared a pro or con position. Judges were brought in from outside the class to decide whether our arguments for or against eating food sacrificed to idols were more convincing. My team won that debate. I brought up this story in a text thread of classmates as we were all writing our sermons this week. The group text includes a member of the opposing team who is apparently still salty about the “lack of imagination” in the judging panel.

The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians was written in around the year 54 to a congregation he had founded several years earlier. Corinth was a large and prospering urban center with an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse population. Paul writes from Ephesus, where he intends to stay for a while before traveling to Macedonia and then on to Corinth. The congregation of the church in Corinth was predominantly Gentile and it probably mirrored the diversity of the city’s population. It is likely there were small groups of believers situated in different quarters of the city who were organized into separate home churches. At some regular interval, all of these would “come together as an ekklesia (assembly, church)” for a common meal and worship.

So it is not surprising that there would be conflict in this very diverse congregation coming together to practice a religion that everyone was still figuring out how to practice, how it was similar yet distinct from Judaism. But here we were, just 20 years in and already there were divisions. In today’s scripture Paul reminds the church he founded at Corinth that the source we are always to return to is Christ. That whatever leader we admire or may have an allegiance to - that admiration and that allegiance is always to be secondary to that which we have to Jesus. 

There is a temptation to find a civic parallel and consequent answer to divisions. Pleas to return to a unity that we have never actually had in our national history, because, civically, we lack the firm foundation that we have in the church. And when we treat the two as partners, we tend to give our civic history and laws a moral weight that they should not have. Legal and moral are not one and the same. 

The myth of American exceptionalism leads us to a belief that legal and moral are on the same plane. It leads us to overlook horrors in our history like the treatment of Native Americans, Japanese Internment Camps, and slavery and Jim Crow because we don’t want to believe that that’s who we truly are. But an unwillingness to look at the less than savory parts of our past keeps us from repenting. Moving on without repentance is a luxury of the powerful or of those who were not targets of those horrors that time.

On Monday, my husband and I were explaining the Civil Rights movement to our six-year-old. How there were separate bathrooms and separate schools. That she and her best friend from back in Colorado, Beatrice, couldn’t have been at school together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is younger than…several people here today, I won’t ask for a show of hands. It was 1974 before a woman could get a credit card without a male co-signer. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, - upheld by the Supreme Court in 2023 - was an attempt to keep Native American children in their own communities. The foster care system, before ICWA, continued the genocidal work of Indian Boarding Schools by removing children from homes at disproportionately high rates and then oftentimes placing them with white families, even when there was an available and suitable family member with whom the children could live. My friend Ben, who has always been proud of his Irish heritage, has an antique sign in his home which reads “Irish need not apply” to remind his family of all of that heritage. We, in the land of the free, have always had a hierarchy of those who are more free than others.

We see this false belief in a correlation or equivalence between legal and moral with the current ICE operations, particularly in Minneapolis. That, even if it is legal, that what we see with our own eyes - a man dragged from his home in his undergarments, a child used as bait to capture his father - becomes justified and therefore what we see can’t be the truth because that would be morally wrong. And we then accept the false belief that our own legal system - the one we’re supposed to put our faith in - is incapable of processing criminals while respecting their rights or their inherent dignity and therefore, the abuse of criminals is justified. Furthermore, what began as an assurance that only the “worst of the worst” were being targeted has turned into families being pulled off the street and sent states away. Offduty Minneapolis police officers are reporting being racially profiled. And we are supposed to accept the kidnapping of these families and this overt racism as collateral damage. It is heartbreaking to see this unfold. In the words of the Rt. Rev. Craig Loya, the Bishop of Minnesota, “For those of you outside Minnesota, it is hard to overstate the magnitude of cruelty we are seeing, and the depth of fear that nearly everyone is living with all the time. So we are weary, weighed down, angry, and heartbroken.”

But in all of this heartbreak and disappointment, there is good news: “America” is not our foundation. Jesus is. One of Paul’s recurring concerns throughout his Epistles is idolatry, and we treat our country as an idol at our own moral peril. I am uninterested in whether something is legal or not. I have actually made zero vows to my country, and unless you are in law enforcement, an attorney, or military, odds are you haven’t either. I have made several vows to God, at my baptism, at my confirmation, at my ordination to the diaconate, and at my ordination to the priesthood, and one set of vows to my husband in front of God at our marriage. I feel so strongly about the foundational importance of baptismal vows that I made them on behalf of both of my children. We just renewed some of those vows last week when we renewed our baptismal covenants and eight of us were confirmed or received into The Episcopal Church.

I was listening to a podcast on mindfulness where the host said, “what if your family had a mission statement of what you stood for or believed as a family?” And I responded. “We do. It’s the baptismal covenant.” The reminder that we renounced all the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. We promised to follow and obey Jesus as our Lord. We promised to persevere in resisting evil, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. This is what it means to be followers of Christ, and is foundational to everything that we are and everything we believe about how we ought to be trying to behave, with God’s help.

I’m reminded this week of the hymn “All my hope in God is founded”. It was written in 1680, translated into English in 1899, and it still speaks to our situation today, especially the second verse:

Mortal pride and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray our trust;
though with care and toil we build them,
tower and temple fall to dust.
But God’s power,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.
Amen.