The Rev. Josh Shipman
The 4th Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C, 2015
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
You’ll find that Lucille Clifton
is often my go-to poet
for a sermon.
Listen to this one:
heaven
my brother is crouched at the edge
looking down.
he has gathered a circle of cloudy
friends around him
and they are watching the world.
i can feel them there, i always could.
i used to try to explain to him
the afterlife,
and he would laugh. he is laughing now,
pointing toward me. “she was my sister,”
i feel him say,
“even when she was right, she was wrong.”
(pause)
An obituary in the New Yorker
written for Clifton,
who died in 2010, said,
“Time and again,
she made luminous poems
premised on clear truth-telling,
but always with a twist,
and with space for
evocation and mystery.
Her style was as understated
as the lowercase type of her poems,
a quiet, even woman’s voice
telling sometimes terrible truths.
Like psalms, koans, and old folks’ proverbs,
Clifton’s poems invite meditation and return.[1]
(pause)
Clifton’s meditation on heaven,
calls to mind something else
that has been the subject of meditation
and return, for me.
Of course,
I’m speaking about
the long-anticipated return
of The X-files—
a six episode mini-series
on Fox.
As with many shows,
I never “got into” The X-files
when it was in its initial run.
I saw a few episodes,
and they were good,
but it just wasn’t a series
that captured my attention.
They say our tastes change
as we get older.
I found the return of X-files riveting—
especially the second episode.
But there’s more,
the “Chiller” channel on DirecTV
offered an X-files marathon,
beginning with the original pilot.
I recorded a number of them,
and am savoring them—
one episode per night
(almost like that good bar
of organic chocolate I keep in the freezer—
one little bite at a time.)
For those of you,
who may be unfamiliar
with the basic premise of the show,
allow me to quote Wikipedia for you:
“The series revolves around FBIspecial agents
Fox Mulder(David Duchovny)
andDana Scully(Gillian Anderson)
investigatingX-Files:
marginalized, unsolved cases
involvingparanormalphenomena.
Mulder believes in the existence of aliens
and the paranormal while Scully, askeptic,
is assigned to make scientific analyses
of Mulder's discoveries
to debunk his work
and thus return him to mainstream cases.”[2]
(pause)
Mulder and Scully
pull each other to the center
from the two extremes
of blind faith and absolute doubt.
(pause)
As a priest, who preaches regularly,
I spend my time thinking about
the dangers of “going off the rails.”
This week
I’ve been thinking about all of the scientists
in the world,
and their collective sigh of disbelief,
when a rap star
made the claim that the Earth is flat.
And a number of people
expressed support for this belief.
Imagine being a scientist,
and having to explain, in 2016,
that the Earth is round.
The rapper, B.O.B.,
also a Holocaust denier and
Freemason conspiracy theorist,
took on a prominent scientist,
Neil deGrasse Tyson in a rap:
(I quote)
“Yo, you ain’t seen my best
Checkmate, ain’t a game of chess
Globalists see me as a threat”
…
“Indoctrinated in a cult called science
And graduated to a club full of liars
Heliocentrism, you were the sixth victim.”[3]
(pause)
Interestingly enough,
this isn’t the strangest news
in the world of science these
past few weeks.
Last week, scientists announced
that there might be an unseen planet
lurking on the outer edges of our solar system.
Conspiracy theorists
began linking this possible planet
with a place called Niburu,
a planet “populated by the Anunnaki,
an advanced humanoid race,
who visited Earth thousands of years [ago]
to mine gold in Africa.
As an outcome of needing workers
to carry out these mining operations
they used genetics to create Homo Sapiens.’”[4]
(pause)
But if you think it’s just
left-winging
conspiracy-clinging
New Age—bringing dingbats
worried about this rogue planet, think again.
One Christian preacher
is predicting an apocalypse
that somehow involved an asteroid
and a collision with this unseen planet.[5]
Somebody get Kirk Cameron on the line!
Perhaps another installment
of the Left Behind series
is in order.
(pause)
A wise priest once said,
“The one who is wrong
is the one who says
‘I am right.”[6]
(pause)
Saint Paul didn’t have to worry
about UFOs or
about getting into rap battles
with the anti-Semites of his day—
at least, not that we know of
(there are a lot of letters to the Corinthians
that we don’t have access to.)
(pause)
But he did have to navigate
competing truth claims.
Between the young ecclesia (or Church community)
developing in Corinth
and the wider pagan-culture,
but also within the house church in Corinth.
If you think that disagreement in the Church
began in 2003 with the consecration of Gene Robinson,
you haven’t been reading your letters to the Corinthians.
Corinth was a flourishing
metropolitan area in Paul’s day:
Syrians, Egyptians, Greeks,
and a large Jewish community were present. [7]
Likewise, the Church in Corinth
was equally diverse,
and the early Christians
didn’t know quite how to live out Christ’s
mission in this diversity.
One commentator writes,
“Although some private associations
and cultic groups also admitted poor people,
slaves, persons with different ethnic backgrounds,
or freeborn wives as members,
they generally were more socially homogenous
than the Christian house-churches,
which admitted persons to full membership
irrespective of their status
in patriarchal household and society.”[8]
Additionally, there were numerous
missionaries in the early Church,
often with competing views
of what it means to “follow the Way,”
to be a Christian, that is. [9]
In addition to tensions naturally arising
from differences in ethnicity and social class,
and differences in theology,
the Christians at Corinth seem to have
become enamored of spiritual gifts.
“Prophecy, speaking in tongues,
and [religious ]ecstasy
were highly valued experiences”
in Corinthian society. [10]
I can almost hear them, now:
My spiritual gift, is greater than yours.
My truth is somehow truthier than yours—
and, therefore, better.
Saint Paul writes back,
this isn’t the point,
this isn’t how it works.
It’s not the Christian message
to outdo one another in holy rolling.
This is an impediment to truth.
And here is what we miss
when we sanitize Saint Paul’s message
for weddings and we focus on all of the love sayings
to the exclusion of the later verses:
Saint Paul tells us:
We aren’t there, yet.
We only have a partial vision.
We haven’t received the full revelation.
For we know in part,
and we prophesy in part
For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face:
now I know in part
but then I shall know
even also as I am known.
This was an important message
for those Christians in Corinth,
and it’s an important message for us, today.
We are known and loved by God,
but we don’t have a God’s eye view.
We don’t have the complete picture.
This isn’t an anti-intellectual
or an anti-education message.
There is nothing within
the historic body of
teachings or traditions
of the Church that says
we have to be ignorant,
despite what may pass
as Christianity in the media, today.
We aren’t free to go off the rails
theorizing about apocalypses
and rogue planets and special readings
of the book of Revelation—
a book about the first century, by the way.
Neither are we free to be
uber-modernist know-it-alls
deconstructionists who pick apart everything
leaving no mystery, no sense of transcendence.
There is a middle way:
Don’t be an impediment to truth,
but don’t be so sure that you own
the exclusive rights to it.
And in all things, always, and in all ways,
make sure the journey to knowledge
and truth is rooted in love—
particularly the love found
in an open and affirming Christian community.
Be a bit like Agent Mulder,
of The X-Files,
in your journey on “the Way:”
be filled with awe and wonder.
Be a bit like Agent Scully:
see the patterns in nature,
appreciate the gift of reasoning—
a gift we can celebrate in our
Anglican tradition.
Be a bit like Lucille Clifton.
up with her cloudy witnesses
shaking her head
and laughing.
9
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/remembering-lucille-clifton
[2] Wikipedia contributors, "The X-Files,"Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_X-Files&oldid=702307009(accessed January 29, 2016).
[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2016/01/26/the-lyrics-to-b-o-b-s-flat-earth-anthem-flatline-with-science-annotations/#7c5ee441b058
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-are-saying-the-new-planet-9-is-going-to-102449567.html
[5] Ibid.
[6] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4249
[7] Welborn, Laurence L. “The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.” Coogan, Michael D., et al.The new Oxford annotated Bible : with the Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p.1999.
[8] Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. “1 Corinthians.” Mays, James L., and Joseph Blenkinsopp.The HarperCollins Bible commentary. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000, p. 1076.
[9] Ibid, 1075.
[10] Ibid, 1075.