Left Everything and Followed

Now Paul is nearly done (though we aren’t! A long Epiphany this year), so he turns back to the basics. “Now I would remind you,” he says, “of what I started with.” What you started with. What this whole thing started with. We need to go back and remember together, or even individually remember where we first said yes. When a relationship is struggling, it is often helpful to go back and remember where it started, to recapture those first emotions and thoughts and decisions. In the book of Revelation, the complaint against the church of Ephesus is that they had forgotten their first love. Having just waded through the love chapter of I Corinthians, Paul now invites the members of the church, who are at odds with one another, to go back and reclaim what they knew at first.

And where does he start? Remember the good news; remember the proclamation; remember Jesus. We must go back to Jesus, at all times, but particularly in times of strife and division. Go back and remember the story, the simple, straightforward story of the life and death and Resurrection of the living Word made flesh. It is still at work in you. Notice that? Paul says not only which you received, and in which you stand, but also that story, that person through which you are being saved. Being saved.

Here is a word for those who think themselves better than the rest: you are still in process. Here is a word for those who think they aren’t as good as they should be: you are still in process. God hasn’t given up on you, why should you give up on yourself? Why should you consider that you have it made, or will never get it right?

And then, typical Paul, he tells his own story. When all else fails, according to Paul, tell your own story. There was a time when he first heard. There was a moment when everything changed, and he didn’t earn it; he didn’t deserve it; he wouldn’t have chosen himself to receive it. But there it is. There it was. And now everything he is, he is by grace. Not that grace is a free pass, an easy ticket. He “worked harder than anyone of them.” Them? Who is them? Which them? Well, he just itemized the other followers or leaders; Cephas and the twelve, and the other leaders, James and all the apostles. Is this the “them”? Is he comparing himself to the other leaders? Probably. And he does it with his typical humble brag: “I worked harder than any of them— though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (15:10). As much as that might frustrate readers, it is not hard to believe that he is sincere. Paul is establishing his credentials, but he is also leaning into the grace that comes from God as the true source for his authority.

Here is an interesting aside: How do we exercise authority? Paul’s example is the opposite of the top-down model that says you need to listen to me because I have power or position or wisdom. He says, “I am the least of the apostles, one untimely born.” It sounds almost Shakespearean. What he means is that he missed the chance to be one of those who stumbled around after Jesus on the earth. That is why, it seems, that he stumbles around after Jesus through the known world at the time as if trying to find the Christ he missed in the flesh but knows and loves deeply in the spirit.

That is the authority he claims, not in him, but in the Christ who lives in him. It is in the relationship, the image of God that radiates from him in his living and his doing. This is what he is pleading with the Corinthians to hold on to – to be able to move past their gifts and go back to the relationship that brought them into the sphere of the Spirit’s influence that now equips them. Hold firmly to the faith that Jesus is who he says he is. And that out of that fundamental relationship comes our motivation for unity and for life within the body and out in the world. Hold firmly to that fundamental relationship, to that first word, to that initial hope that is Jesus the Christ. Hold firmly.

But holding firmly to the good news we first heard doesn’t mean we don’t or can’t grow in our faith. The good news, the proclamation of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ doesn’t change, but our understanding of it does. Our application of it does. Our experience of it does. We change and grow and push the boundaries of our faith all the time. We ask questions; we challenge old expressions of the faith. This is a part of the process in which we engage as we make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The world won’t change if we keep doing the same things in the same way using the same words we’ve always used.

Still, we can say, “hold firmly to the Christ you heard of and now know on your own and through your community. Hold firmly even as you question and grow.”