Read: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
“be united in the same mind and the same judgement” (v. 10)
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…
This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Even near the holiday, I always hesitate to quote Dr. King. In my opinion, as with the Bible, far too many folks pull quotes out from Dr. King’s work without reckoning with its full breadth and the deep challenge it continues to offer to our broken world.
With that said, there may be no better encapsulation of Paul’s message to the Corinthians. Paul hears of factions of people who belong to various leaders saying “I belong to Apollos” or “I belong to Cephas” (v. 12) and who oppose each other based on the leader they follow (sound familiar?). What I find remarkable is that Paul includes even those who say “Paul” or even “Christ” is their leader. Paul’s problem is not so much with which leaders people have chosen (of course, Christ is the only right answer) but with how the idea of leaders has split what is supposed to be the united body of Christ.
For Paul, as for Dr. King, “belonging” is not just about a leader-follower relationship. Instead, we who are in Christ belong to him and to one another, indeed we belong to the whole of creation which Christ has redeemed. As much as you and I belong to one another in Swepsonville UMC, we each belong equally to the people who grow our coffee or sew our clothes, to the person serving us at Bojangles, and to those people we consider “enemies.”
My guess is that we all belong to one faction or another that allows us to be callous to someone, and it is especially easy to be uncaring about people we will never meet in far off places. Yet our lives affect each other! With Christ we are harmed when others in this world are harmed, even those we do not know (or don’t like!)
What groups are you a part of? To whom or what (teams, political parties, writers, states or nations) would you say you belong? Including church, how do these groups increase your love of others? Who might they tend to ignore, forget, or demonize?
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