Hilton Head Island, SC – October 12, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 3:1-9; 10-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. – I Corinthians 3:5 (RSV)
The Sad, Inevitable Disunity Of The Church
When I was in sixth grade, our family lived for a year in Ellicottville, New York. Ellicottville was a village of a thousand people in the northern foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, fifty miles south of Buffalo. The town was filled with Irish, Italians, southern Germans, and Poles whose forebears came there in the mid-19th century to work in the lumber mills. By the time we arrived there, in 1950, the lumber mills as such were gone, but there were two or three companies which produced the wooden “last blocks,” as they were called, on which shoes were manufactured back in those days. There also was a company which cut small mountain ash pieces of lumber to be fashioned into Louisville Slugger baseball bats.
Because most of the early residents of Ellicottville were Catholics, most of the later residents were also Catholics. In fact, Ellicottville was the only place I ever lived where Catholics outnumbered Protestants, except perhaps for Bayfield, Wisconsin, where I served for three years as pastor of the Bayfield Presbyterian Church.
For some reason I didn’t think much about being part of a religious minority in Bayfield, but as a child in Ellicottville I did. I would guess that all the Protestants put together wouldn’t equal 40 to 50% of the Catholics. The Catholic kids didn’t lord it over the Protestant kids, but nevertheless we were quietly made to know that there were a lot more of them than there were of us, which was visibly true every Sunday. Our Presbyterian congregation there was the smallest Presbyterian church with which I was ever affiliated. In sixth grade it didn’t feel to me like all the Ellicottville Christians were one big unified bunch.
Looking back on it, I realize the Ellicottville sojourn was psychologically and ecclesiastically a good thing for me. It taught me a lesson I have never forgotten, namely, that the various branches of Christendom vary greatly in size and influence in various communities, states, nations, and even continents. For example, Catholics and Congregationalists (or the United Church of Christ) dominate in parts of New England, but they are both very rare in this neck of the woods. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and there Scandinavian and German Lutheran congregations represented a larger percentage of the population than any other kinds of Christians, including Catholics. I went to seminary in Chicago, and I served a church there for five years. The Archdiocese of Chicago was then the largest diocese in the country, but there still were far more Protestants than Catholics in the Windy City. In the South, in general, there are more Baptists than people, and a strong preponderance of those folks are Southern Baptists, although there also are droves of people from other Baptist denominations as well. No group of Christians is more adept at creating distinctively different Baptist denominations than Baptists. Hilton Head Island, South Carolina illustrates that fact in spades.
Curiously, the word “denomination” is a word used mainly in America. That is because we have so many denominations here compared to virtually every other nation in the world. Part of the reason for that is because we have had so many different nationalities who emigrated here. In Scotland, for example, Presbyterians predominate. In England, Anglicans do, although their numbers are drastically dwindling. In northern Germany Lutherans are the largest group of Christians, and in southern Germany it is the Catholics. Catholics are still more numerous than Protestants in southern European countries and in South America, but Protestants are more numerous in northern Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia than Catholics.
Every branch of Christianity and every denomination originated because an individual or a group of individuals believed that they had discovered the best way, or perhaps they thought the only way, to be a proper Christian. The New Testament was completed about the year 120 in the Christian calendar. It is obvious, especially from reading the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the apostle Paul, that the New Testament Church was not a solidly unified institutional entity. It was, in fact, already splintered, as the New Testament itself asserts.
But far more serious splits were to occur after the Christian scriptures were finished and became canonical, which means when they were adopted into the New Testament. There were, and are, other groups of Christians besides what came to be known as Catholic Christians. The word “catholic,” as most of you know, means “universal” or “world-wide.” Nevertheless, not everyone in the world became Catholic. Some of the Christians now being persecuted in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt historically were never a part of the Roman Catholic Church. They were and are Nestorians or Assyrians or Monophysites or Monothelites or other kinds of Christians.
The Eastern Orthodox Church was slowly breaking away from the Catholic Church for centuries before the most serious rupture visibly and finally occurred in 1054. Still, Catholics and Orthodox Christians are more alike to one another than Protestant Christians are to either the Catholics or the Orthodox. I cannot take time to try to explain what the differences were that caused these splits, but suffice it to note, again, that it happened either because an individual or group of individuals convinced other people to form a new branch or denomination or family of Christianity. And without having explained any of it, I hope you will trust me when I say that many of what seemed like huge issues back then seem absolutely inconsequential now.
Martin Luther was the founder of the Lutheran Church. John Calvin was the spiritual forefather of the Calvinists, who later were known as the Presbyterians or as members of the various Reformed Churches: Scots, Dutch, Swiss, French, Hungarian. John Wesley is said to be the founder of the Methodists, although he probably considered himself a loyal Anglican until the day he died. He saw himself as a denominational reformer, not a denominational founder.
Most of the people who followed the denominational founders were probably ordinary people who became convinced that the teachings of those men were the most acceptable of all the various examples of Christianity put forth through the centuries. But some of the original followers also were zealots who insisted that their way was the only way, that every other branch or denomination of Christianity was apostate. An unidentified 17th century writer became anonymously famous for saying, “I would rather see a whole army coming at me with drawn swords than one lone Calvinist convinced that he is doing the will of God.”
At the time of the Protestant Reformation, there were genuine theological differences which distinguished one group from another. How should the Lord’s Supper be celebrated? Should it be celebrated at all? What is the difference between a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister? Does salvation occur by means of God’s grace or by means of our own good works?
Unfortunately, most Christians today have minimal understanding of the origins of the denominations or branches of Christianity to which they belong. In fact, especially in America, many people have been members of two or three or several denominations during their lifetimes. I know that is true for some of you. Sometimes “church-hopping” happens because people prefer one type of worship to another. Sometimes it is because they prefer one pastor or preacher over all the others. Sometimes it is based on the old slogan of the real estate industry: “Location, location, location.” They move, and they join a church close to where they live or which is easily accessible by car or public transportation, or where their children can walk to Sunday School without their parents having to drive them there. Hardly anyone ever stops to ask themselves before joining a congregation, “What, exactly, do these people actually believe?” The nature and content of belief matters greatly in virtually all fundamentalist and in many evangelical congregations or denominations, but for most of the rest of us, we feel free to believe whatever we choose, and we’re not worried whether others agree with us or not. We don’t try to bend anyone to our way or thinking, nor do we allow ourselves to be bent to their way of thinking.
There is a sad inevitable disunity in the Church of Jesus Christ. From the days of Jesus himself to the present day, the Church has been continually divided and disjointed and diversified. If you have not personally experienced that, then I suggest you talk to an unusually committed Catholic or Seventh Day Adventist or Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon or Hard Shell Baptist or Wesleyan Methodist or Orthodox Presbyterian. Talk to most Catholics or Baptists or Methodists or Episcopalians or Presbyterians, and it is “Kum Bah Yah” all around. But talk to people who are seriously committed to their particular congregation or denomination, and you will quickly discover the sad, inevitable disunity of Christ’s Church.
You may be wondering whether I think anybody can join any church and it is perfectly acceptable. Essentially, I do think that. How Christians “live and move and have their being,” as it says in the Bible, and especially how they think, is strongly influenced by their choice of church. But the choice is theirs, and that is as it should be. However, God observes denominational disunity, but He certainly does not cause disunity.
Let me offer two potential axioms about the Christian religion. I never thought of these things until preparing this sermon, but I think they are perhaps so valid as to be axiomatic. The greatest strength of Protestantism is diversity; the greatest weakness of Protestantism is disunity. And conversely, the greatest strength of Roman Catholicism is unity, while its greatest weakness is an attempted uniformity. Protestantism allows almost everything in under the sun, although millions of individual Protestants insist on their particular way alone as The Way. Catholicism tries to make everyone believe the same things, but that level of uniformity has never been achieved at any time over the past 2000 years, despite pathetically persistent attempts.
Paul alluded to these issues in the 3rd chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. He had been to Corinth at least once or twice before writing his letter, and he told the Christians in Corinth that he had addressed them back then as “babes in Christ.” He fed them with milk, he said, not with solid food. But because they were children in the faith, he wrote, they started dividing up into factions, some following Paul, others Apollos, or others some of the other early missionaries. “When one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely men?” Paul asked. He might also have added, “And are not I and Apollos and Barnabas and Mark also merely men?”
Which is more important --- to be a Lutheran, or to be a Christian? To be a Calvinist, or to be a Christian? To be a Wesleyan, or to be a Christian? To be a Swedenborgian, or to be a Chrstian? (Around here, we need not worry about a groundswell of Swedenborgians. In truth, such a groundswell is unlikely to occur anywhere, even in Sweden. You almost have to go to seminary even to know what I’m talking about.)
If ever a congregation or denomination or tradition becomes more important to us than Christianity itself, we will have missed the whole point of the existence of congregations or denominations or traditions. They are to assist people to become better Christians; they are not the essence of what it means to be Christians.
By now I am sure that most of you who have heard me preach frequently know that I am not a great enthusiast for the Gospel of John. I find it impossible to believe that the historical Jesus, the man told about in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, said many of the things the writer of the Fourth Gospel said Jesus said.
That is especially true of the long soliloquy Jesus is purported to have delivered to the disciples at the Last Supper, in John 13 through 16. After that, according to John, Jesus prayed what scholars call “The Great High Priestly Prayer” in John 17. Even though I don’t believe Jesus said much or perhaps any of that prayer at the Last Supper, I agree with the writer that he might have said it, if he had just thought the way “John” thought, which clearly he didn’t.
The Fourth Gospel, it is claimed, was written about the year 100 AD, or “CE” as some of us now say. By then, there were significant divisions within the New Testament Church, and the writer was well aware of that. “John” (or whatever his real name may have been) was greatly vexed by it, even though he himself may have been a major factor in creating some of those divisions. Despite all that, he had Jesus pray this to God about the earliest Christians in the Great High Priestly Prayer: “The glory which Thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and Thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that Thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as Thou hast loved me” (Jn. 17:22-23).
The Synoptic Jesus never talked like that --- ever. But the writer of the Fourth Gospel wrote like that from his opening verse in John 1 to his closing verse in John 21. And the prayer is a valid one, even if Jesus probably never said it or anything like it. Would a larger percentage of the world have become Christians if the Christians had always presented themselves as being more united? Very likely. But it was not to be. Permanent division has always characterized the world-wide, ecumenical, universal Church of Jesus Christ. Disunity has plagued us from the beginning, and it shall undoubtedly plague us to the end. The same is true of every other religion as well, however.
What does God think about the ubiquitous reality of the multitude of Christian denominations, branches, and traditions? I certainly don’t know for certain, but I believe God has decided that the divisions within Christianity are inevitable, even if they also are an undeniable illustration of imperfection. But unquestionably they also are a factor in the astonishing growth of Christianity down through the centuries. It is the “Different Strokes for Different Folks” principle of institutional religion.
“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (I Cor. 3:5-6). Therefore to God, and not to any of us, be the glory.