Sermons

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Confronting Success
June 10, 2001
Series on I Corinthians
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

I Corinthians 4:6-16

You know there are some parts of scripture that you sort of want to skip over. I Corinthians 4 might be one of those. In fact, I Corinthians 4 doesn’t even appear in most lectionary systems. Why not? The apostle Paul seems to have somehow woken up on the wrong side of the mat. He’s sarcastic. He’s pointed. He’s sort of “in-your-face” challenging. Parts of chapter 4 make me want to say “Why would any self-respecting pastor want to talk about this?” But one of the good things about studying our way through an entire letter is that we have to come and listen. We don’t just discard. We come and listen and say, “God, how is this your word to us today? Help us listen.” So we come.

The first three chapters have already talked a great deal about leadership in the young church there in Corinth. Two things have been emphasized:

1) Paul has urged the Corinthians not to be split in their loyalties to one particular leader or another, including him…because it is God’s church.
2) Paul has scoffed at the idea that the Corinthian church had anything to boast about in terms of their own abilities…he has repeatedly brought up their need to rely on God’s Spirit for their work, and their very identity.

THAT is what will hold them together as a community.

I had a hard time reading chapter 4 this week. Paul’s letter to I Corinthians discusses all these hot issues: church discipline, sexuality, worship practices, charismatic gifts…I’m eager to get into those. And instead, Paul keeps taking us back as he tries to show the Corinthians that there are some foundational issues, some underlying things they need to address…first. Things of the heart. And I felt like God was saying to US: If your heart isn’t facing the right direction, then the other things aren’t going to make any sense anyway.

Paul is never one to shirk a difficult topic. And really in this portion of the letter, he says to the Corinthians: “What does successful Christian living look like? Because you are missing it. You are allowing your culture to define success for you.”

We need to think for just a second about that Corinthian culture. We’ve talked some about it before. The Greek culture was undergirded by wisdom…a wisdom marked by rhetoric and built on some of the classic philosophies. One particularly strong piece of the internal make-up of Greek culture was the influence of “Stoic” philosphy. It taught, in part, that humans, though often confronted by things beyond their control…had the freedom to chose and control their responses. This led to controlling emotions (which is how WE use the word “stoic,” sort of emotionless), but also to ideals of strength that had to do with self-sufficiency and self-determination. This comes out in a 1st century critic who wrote that the Stoics think “their wise man is not only prudent and just and brave, but also an orator, a poet, a general, a rich man, and a king…”

These are at least some of the underlying pressures around the Corinthians. And Paul says: “You worry me. You seem to feel that you are successfully living out the gospel. You have all you want. You are rich. You are strong. You think you are kings. You are held in honor. This is what you think success looks like.”

Now be honest with yourself this morning. Who doesn’t want those kinds of things? Don’t we want it all? What does success look like today where we live? Certainly we are pulled to be materially successful. To have nice houses, new cars, take trips. It’s a very interesting thing for me to have grown up in this part of Seattle, when Queen Anne wasn’t very affluent…and to leave for a number of years and then come back to a pretty changed area. [We don’t seem to realize that the way we’re living is something radically different from 99% of the rest of the world.]

But success is more than just materialism for us. We want to be educated. We want our kids to have the chance to go to schools and then colleges that are top notch. We want to be respected in our communities. Lawyers, doctors, educators, business people. We want to be recognized as doing reputable things. Living successfully most often looks like working a career, raising a family, eventually setting up a retirement where you can travel and play some golf and read. The wisdom of our world says…this is successful.

And in the Christian subculture, it seems that success often has to do with doing all those same things…AND being a Christian too, or as a friend of mine puts it, “doing exactly those same things but being a little bit nicer person.” Writing a successful Christian book still means “how many has it sold?,” being a successful Christian businessperson still means “how much money did we make this year?” What Paul says is: What does all this have to do with the cross of Christ? For Paul, all of life is to be lived in the shadow of the cross. And if the shadow of success keeps one from giving your life away for the sake of the gospel, there’s something wrong.

Friends, this scares me. It scares me because in most places in my life I’ve been what our world sees as successful…the right education, scholarships, sports, job, houses. And now that I’m a pastor… the same questions rise up. Everywhere I go, people want to know if the church is “doing well.” What they mean is…are the numbers in the church growing? Is the budget okay? Are you adding onto the building? And I believe Paul would say…those aren’t the right questions. In fact, they have little to do with success.

Paul knew what he was talking about. He HAD success long before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He HAD it all. Education, bloodline, respect, stability, reputation, everything. And then absolutely everything changed. And success had to do with being a servant (verse 1), a “steward” of God’s mysteries that had grabbed ahold of his life. And Paul’s new picture of “success” meant something very different.

What does Paul offer as an alternative? Hold onto your seat cushions. It meant following Christ into ministry in the world, it meant living out and speaking about the grace of God offered in Christ. It meant that embodying the forgiveness of Christ in one’s life was THE highest calling. Successfully living out the call of Christ meant being someone willing to appear as a fool, or a weakling. To be held in disrepute. A willingness to be hungry, thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten, homeless, weary. Success looked like having a heart that blessed when reviled, endured when persecuted, spoke kindly when slandered. Strength was weakness, and weakness was strength.

I was reminded this week of how much I love JRR Tolkien’s fabulous series of books called the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Many of you have read those books. They tell the story of a great battle of Light against Darkness. In the battle, some of the main characters are little creatures called hobbits. Hobbits are extremely small, weak and worldly insignificant creatures. Out of a band of nine “good guys,” it turns out that four are hobbits. They are recruited for a quest to save the world, threatened by the unlimited, coercive power that is embodied in a magic ring. One of the nine is a good, strong and powerful wizard named Gandalf the White. Gandalf understands the power of the ring, though, and refuses it when it is offered to him. He knows he would be unable to resist its temptations. He entrusts it instead to the little hobbits, small and exceedingly modest and unambitious. They inherently know that they must destroy the ring…and their very insignificance and lack of ambition is their strength. Very unlikely heroes, very upside down idea. It’s a very New Testament idea, of course. It’s a very Pauline idea. Power, and success…are not what we might think them to be.

That is what Paul wants the Corinthians to understand. In verse 9, he gives them a very powerful illustration: “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals.” The Corinthians have been thinking of themselves as gifted kings…and Paul says instead, true apostles of Christ…are like prisoners who are sentenced to death.

The Romans, you see, had an ancient practice called the “Triumph.” A victorious Roman general would parade in a chariot through the streets of a city that he had just conquered. The leaders of the defeated army or city were forced to trail behind, at the rear of the parade, on their way to execution… “exhibited” and humiliated as a public “spectacle.” Paul’s picture turns the Corinthian’s self-perception on its ear. While the Corinthians have pictured themselves as the triumphant heroes leading the parade…Paul says that it is GOD who has won the victory and Christians follow at the rear. And so, Paul writes, “We have become rubbish, the dregs of all the world.”

To be a follower of Christ is not/may not be such a pretty thing. To follow Christ means everything. In our day, we have pretty much eliminated the idea of suffering and cost and …replaced them by assurances of spiritual success and good feelings. If Paul’s writing here is the word of God for us, we have some rethinking to do.

But Paul doesn’t just chew the Corinthians out here in chapter 4…he also offers up some practical advice. If there is a different kind of living that is to be termed “successful”…then the Corinthians will need someone to model that out for them. We learn much more by watching and being with than we do by study.

And so Paul says, “I’m not just trying to chew you out…I’m writing to you like my own kids, that I care so much about. I appeal to you then…be imitators of me. And for this reason I sent Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus, as I teach them in every church.” When I read this, I thought “Wow, Paul is pretty bold! When he looks around for an example for the Corinthians, he can say “Look at me!” [That’s why he’s an apostle, and I’m not!] It can seem arrogant…though of course, if we read the whole sentence, rather than glorifying himself he really says “Follow me as I follow Christ.” And then he holds Timothy up as well, as someone to watch in living out the faith.

I don’t know what hit you as I read this. It did two things to me. First, it raised for me again the importance for our community of having people available to those new to the faith, people who have followed Christ for some time…modeling and teaching those younger in faith. In this church, we have many people who are relatively new believers. And we also have lots of people who have followed Christ for ten or twenty years or more. It is imperative that the two come together.

Now many of you who have followed Christ for some time…if I were to come to you and say, “Would you spend time with Joe over here, and help teach him about following Jesus?”…you would say, “Who, me? I could never do that! I’m just barely making it myself faithwise. I have all sorts of questions and struggles; I could never help someone else be a disciple.” That’s a problem. In general, people new to the faith are not going to grow closer to God JUST by listening to sermons, or JUST by being in a class or Bible study. They need mentors and role models.

Henry Nouwen, the Catholic priest and author whose writings have helped so many of us…tells a story of being on a personal sabbatical at a monastery, and running into a group of young college students who ask if he will spend a day with them, talking about Jesus. The next day, Nouwen was complaining to the Abbot of the monastery in a conversation about this request, bemoaning the fact that he would have to spend hours and hours preparing for such an endeavor. And the Abbot listened for awhile and then said: “Henry, you don’t have to prepare anything. You’ve been preparing for forty years. These young people just want to be around you, and hear about the Jesus you have come to know.”

And second, as I read Paul’s plea to “imitate me as I imitate Christ.” I think …who do we look to as role models in our community? Maybe a better way of thinking about that is “Who do we hold up as role models for the next generation?” It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Solid role models seem to be sorely lacking. It seems as though our first thoughts are always towards those who are “successful” in our culture. And so we often are drawn to those most in the news. Athletes, movie stars, writers, politicians. There are many, many disappointments there, of course.

Since we’ve had kids, I’ve put a lot more thought into role models. Who do I point my kids to? In most cases I’ve moved away from the people in the news…to more everyday people. A friend that chose to take a job close to home with very little prestige attached…so he could spend the bulk of his time with his family. A teacher who faithfully and loyally taught and modeled a life of integrity for 35-40 quiet years. Someone who chooses to live in an impoverished area for ministry. People who haven’t made the news or splashed across CNN…but who have consistently chosen to value people and live out the gospel in their own worlds. People who love Christ, and who love the people around them.

Many times those are not the people the world labels as roaring successes. But those are the people I want my kids to be around. Those are the people who will help us…and our kids…understand more of what success looks like.

So…Paul’s question for us this morning: What does successful Christian living look like? It is radically different than what the world around us calls “success.” It’s not a new question. You’ve heard it many times before, but it seems to me it is a question that we need to have put before us over and over. Because if it isn’t, then we just keep living life like everyone around us, and we slide right into thinking that’s what it’s all about. So I’m thankful for Paul this morning. Sarcastic, in-your-face, pointed…because he keeps confronting us with success…and asking us if it has more to do with our culture...or the cross of Christ. Amen.