1 Corinthians

Okay, well, welcome to 1 Corinthians, which has a ton of stuff to talk about.

And I'm curious if there was anything that really grabbed your attention.

And many of you have probably been wrestling with some of the things in this book for a long time.

And we should start there, I think.

Anything of interest to you or questions or um again reactions?

That was one of my favorite passages in there.

Would you say more?

Oh well, no.

It's different.

I don't have that message Bible.

But the old Bible, I I read that when I was a child and you spoke to me.

I just did.

Thank you.

So you were talking about like love is a patient, love its kind.

I was like, wow.

You know, looking for the last newly of the face of face is like I I remember reading that.

I just stunned me.

I was like, wow.

That's what stood out for me too.

I think it was 13, yeah.

Thank you.

Not just specifically in verse Corinthians.

As you read more, you see Paul contradict himself.

And also some of the things he says seem very contrary to the way that Jesus said it.

In terms of that whole uh depending on other people or something versus supporting yourself.

So I just notice a lot of disparity.

Sure.

Sure.

Change in in his thinking or contradiction was the word, right?

But yeah, I think Darlene helped to see it that way as he probably as he grew in.

I mean we should change our minds about things.

And I think this is a really um really good thought, and uh I I think it helps us to figure out how we approach scripture in general.

I think if we say the Bible's completely inerrant, then it's really puzzling how women can be apostles and then they can't speak in church, or how you can't have food sacrificed to an idol, but if you don't ask and don't tell, it's okay.

Or don't make circumcision such a big deal, but yet circumcise Timothy.

Absolutely.

So it's it's interesting to think about how there can be some tension here, and another opportunity, I think, is to remember that the word Bible means books, and that uh books have conversations because truth is really robust.

And so there is tension, I think, in truth with a capital T.

Another opportunity is to invite us to join the conversation instead of silencing us with how to do it, and maybe another opportunity is that we continue to learn, and quite honestly, there are things that are appropriate when we're young, ways of being, that I think are less appropriate as we're old.

You know, so there's part of our mental and moral formation that requires things like hard, strict rules, but if we live in hard, strict rules later, we miss context.

Our kids need those so that they have a basic orientation.

So what's appropriate at one time in our life may do a disservice to us later.

So I think there's a whole lot of opportunity for us to consider that.

Yeah.

If you're in the if you're in the inerrant position, though, this is hard, it's really hard stuff.

Because what's your takeaway?

And and maybe one of the nice things, if you are in that position, is that a couple of times in the letter, Paul says, This is my opinion, not the Lord's.

I mean, that's really but I think I'm right.

You know, it's really interesting, you know, because Paul says, doesn't nature itself put man to shame to have long hair?

Well, all the pictures of Jesus have got long hair, you know, and and uh I know lots of um, well, uh praise band singers and musicians that have long hair.

So isn't it errant or not?

And what's the difference between nature putting you to shame and something being sinful?

I mean, I think those are really important questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Something stand out to you, or you're wondering what this might mean for us?

For me, this chapter is a dichotomy, but meaning where it's some of my very favorite scriptures here, and some of my least favorite is here.

Yeah.

Scripture that has kept me separated from the church.

Would you say more about those?

About would you name a little bit of both?

Okay.

Uh I love the love portions, which is a hard faith for me.

I very much dislike the uh prohibition on women.

And uh when and as a result, I have disliked Paul for years.

I've been angry at Paul over years, and so when I found that we were gonna be studying Paul's letters, I decided I needed to try to make it easier because I didn't want to come in angry.

So I did a lot of reading before we ever got here, and so I'm okay with Paul now because I see growth, and because I don't think he said everything that says he said, I think there have been things inserted later, possibly.

So I think maybe that's just me trying to give make an excuse for Paul so that I don't have to be so incredible.

So I I'm I'm okay with Paul now.

That's nice to hear.

Can I give you maybe another thought on it?

Because I don't know if it's right, but along that line about um particularly things like women, I hope it's okay to hear that maybe one of the strongest themes about the whole 1 Corinthians is what does freedom in Christ mean?

Paul is really grappling with that.

And I want to tell you, I think the Corinthians take it more seriously than Paul does.

They take it so seriously that everything is renegotiable, and I think Paul is really concerned about how a very young group of people who have found something new can easily come off track with everything as renegotiable, and how that can sort of create a scandal in the rest of the community because I think Paul is really concerned about waiting instead of soliciting change.

Like we talked about last week, the theme about waiting versus loitering.

Again, the opposite of loitering is soliciting, and that's where you are trying to cram stuff down.

I think Paul's worried that if you go too far too fast, you're going to completely lose your credibility and you'll have no foundation.

And sometimes I want to say I think that's pastoral, and when we do it is always a thing.

So I hope to make a modern bridge here.

Like as a clergy person, I feel like I normally know what we need to do.

But when and how we do it, the devil is in those details.

Timing is so important.

And I remember that part of the reason I'm an Episcopalian is that I went to General Convention in 2009.

They were having the referendum on what to do with openly gay clergy.

And I sat there on the floor, I didn't have voice or vote, and I heard people talk.

You had two minutes, and at the two minutes exactly, 120 seconds, they turned your microphone off, and they went to the next microphone.

So you had to be prepared.

As a result, people were eloquent and thoughtful.

I mean, they had done their homework.

And some, I remember just the the spirit of the discussion for the people who said no, was not the morality of the issue.

It was, listen, we belong to the Anglican communion.

And if we go too fast, we're going to separate ourselves from Christianity and the rest of the world.

It would be like losing the wings of the plane.

It was sort of a really interesting thought.

I disagreed with their position, but I had a whole lot more empathy.

It wasn't no, it was not yet.

I don't know if that makes sense.

It wasn't no, it was not yet.

Here is not no, just not yet.

And he does, like every human being does, when he gets agitated, sometimes he becomes a little pompous.

You know, uh not self-aggrandizing, but he's got a relationship with him.

This is an important thing.

He wasn't writing this to us, he was writing this to a group of people with whom he'd spent a year of his life, earning all the money for himself while he did this.

He's written multiple letters to them, so he knows these people.

They aren't some unknown quantity.

So when he's a little pompous, he is so out of his relationship, not from afar.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Sometimes I think we lose that perspective, and again, when I was a kid, I read Paul talking about doesn't his righteousness better than theirs, and I thought, oh, like pomposity is appropriate.

And it's and it isn't.

He's doing that out of a relationship, not on a cold call.

I don't know if that's helpful, but again, to talk about how we make change is super duper tough.

And and maybe I can tell you, you know, we we voted as a parish to be open and inclusive about a year, almost two years ago.

We did a study and we had conversations and and we did it.

And not only did we want to do that, we decided to put it on our our bulletin.

And we lost two families, and and that was tough.

I didn't know we'd I didn't actually know we'd lose them.

Um it doesn't mean we didn't make the the the right decision, but the timing, it's always hard to lose families who have been a part of the life of the church.

And so there's, you know, I I I think how we make these significant changes is just really, really important.

And I think that's what this letter reminds us of.

It's complicated.

Yeah.

I always wonder about Paul being Apophis if he lost, they lost some of those other two letters out of the water.

I wonder about that too.

Maybe those letters weren't life-giving, which is why they threw them out.

Yeah, who knows?

Because if they read like Galatians, boy, I would want to throw that one away, too.

Yeah.

Um, I was just gonna say, which is what you said, um, that the culture at that time might not have been ready to accept women in any kind of leadership role in the church.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting, and I think it depends on the place.

And Corinth is not like New York City, it's like Houston, which is the most cosmopolitan city in the United States.

Except, even more so than Houston, uh, we're still in the Bible belt or the remnants of the Bible belt, so there were open displays of other kinds of religion.

And we have to remember that Judaism was only somewhat acceptable to Rome, and the only reason they tolerated it is because it was old.

Antiquity was the only reason Romans allowed Judaism to exist because they didn't recognize the Caesars as gods or having divine, it's called the genius of the emperor, that's sort of like the divine spirit in the emperor.

And um Christians being new were not tolerated because they weren't antiquated.

So this is part of the this is part of the deal.

Um, one of the things we see in Corinth that may be interesting is um Paul taking people to task over speaking in tongues.

And part of the appeal of the early Christian movement in a lot of places was miraculous acts, especially things like healing and speaking in tongues and prophecy, because they they sort of are ways with communing with the divine in order to get power in the world.

And Paul takes those people to task and says, speaking in tongues is personal piety, not corporate.

It's actually destructive.

This is sort of an interesting, interesting thing.

He's trying to say, look, a lot, and this is the case, a lot of people in Corinth and the rest of the Greek world, when you're polytheist, there's always room for one more god.

It's not like Zeus is going to be mad that you also worship Hera and Isis and Athena, because there's a bunch of them.

Fine.

What a lot of people were doing was adding different deities when they were exposed to different religions to their pantheon.

So we see this a lot.

People who worship the Greek gods, there were things like the Isis cult when they came in contact with Egypt because they believed there was power that Isis had power.

So you see people in speaking in tongues, that's that's helpful.

So just add Jesus to the pantheon.

Um Paul's trying to caution against that.

Not that speaking in tongues is wrong, it's just not in the way it's being done.

It's the not yet.

I think, I mean, I think that's a strong way to read this.

And the way he does that is I do it more than the rest of you.

But I would never do it if it was going to be confusing.

That's an interesting, interesting call on his part.

Confusing or disruptive.

Confusing or disruptive to you or any visitor.

He spends more time reigning in than saying this is a good thing.

He does say, I wish you could do it like I do, but you're not doing that.

You're doing it publicly, it's confusing and disrupted.

And I'd rather you quit it.

Stop.

There's more discussion of keeping it contained and appropriate than saying it's a good thing.

And I would tell you, I think that's the whole letter is about containment.

And let's think through a couple of those issues together.

Maybe that's a helpful approach.

I don't want to like roll you over with this idea, but just to make sure it's not coming out of thin air, it's been told that a boy is now together with his mother-in-law.

And that you are accepting that, and not even pagan people accept that.

Well, it's probably not his birth mother.

It's probably his stepmom.

And to be honest, we don't know the particulars of it, but this woman didn't raise him, perhaps.

He could be 20, she could also be 20.

His father could have married her, and uh, she didn't have that real mother influence over him, so in some ways, they actually could be kind of equal in status.

One of the problems with incest is that you're mixing roles of who's in authority over whom.

I don't know if that makes sense.

It's another problem with your brother and sister, is like those aren't really equal roles.

Um, same basic problem we would tell you with juveniles and children is this the power cannot be equal in those roles.

That's why teacher-student is a major problem, right?

They may have equal power in the role because she may never have mothered him.

So, again, we we don't know any of that.

What we know is Paul is saying no, but the people are saying, look, if we're free in Christ and she didn't have this mothering role, good for you.

Like, this can work.

And Paul says, no, it can't work.

It's because not even pagan people do that.

I mean, that's his reasoning.

His reasoning isn't moral or theological, it's not even pagan people do it.

So it's cultural awareness.

So it's cultural, and he calls it immoral.

But immoral is a really good thing for us to think about.

Is immoral is morality immorality, is it absolute or is it culturally dependent?

Oh Mike, that's a slippery slope.

I I think it's an adult approach.

And I remember once upon a time I took a missions class in college, and my teacher was a missionary to the Maasai people, and this is just one of those things where he was talking about how you'd relate to Maasai.

You would never look at women in the eye.

Because if you did, it made them prostitutes.

One of our members in the class was from Russia, and he was adamantly angry at this.

And I said, No, I would look them in the eye because that's what Jesus would do.

And the professor said, Jesus would make women into prostitutes?

And he said, you know, we have to do this because when people do whatever they want, they get drunk and blow up nuclear plants.

And I think he was talking about Chernobyl.

I'm not really sure.

But it was this interesting thing to think that in the United States, if you don't look somebody in the eye, there's something wrong.

But in other parts of the world, that's propriety.

Is it absolute?

Should those other people in the world make eye contact like we do?

Of course, none of that matters.

It's all culturally dependent.

Well, I think so.

I mean, I don't think the Lord mandates we look one another in the eye.

I just think in our culture, we should look one another in the eye.

And this, I think, is a part of the way to read what's going on here.

I don't think all of Africa's like that.

No, it's just Kenya.

Yeah.

Well, and that's part of the point.

Not all of it's like that.

And you know, here in the United States, if we walk down the street and we saw two men holding hands, we would make certain assumptions that in the Arab world it means they're good friends.

Oh, okay.

And that's all it means.

In fact, it would be very odd if you walked down the street and you didn't hold your friend's hand.

It would mean that you weren't friends.

And of course, women always walk behind you.

I mean, that's how it's been.

If we did that here, it would be like, boy, you jerk, you misogynist, or they're fighting or something like that.

It's not absolutely right and wrong, it's culturally dependent.

And part of what we have to do, I think, is tease out which is which.

You know, it's interesting about looking in the eye.

As a child growing up in a Hispanic culture, if I was being scolded, I would never look at my parents in the eye.

Yeah, you're not supposed to.

You actually the the response, the hardwired response of shame is to look down.

And uh it's not this, I guess it's not a cultural thing.

Maybe it's I I don't know, but that's the only place I experienced it, and I mean that's why people would look like that.

Breaking eye contact is hardwired on the human persona, but that's how you separate from somebody else, and that's why you never look the queen in the eye or the emperor in the eye.

You're not good enough, so you look down.

You avert your guess.

That's what I would say, that's what my teacher said as well, and I think he's right.

But here it would be disrespectful enough to make eye contact because it means I'm better than you or I'm breaking from you or something like that.

Or I'm autistic or something.

I think we could make this argument here.

If you're 20 and your father gets remarried to a 20-year-old and dies within a year or two, is it incest for you to marry your mother-in-law's stepmother?

It's weird, is it wrong?

I I mean I think those are the kinds of questions that we have to ask.

It's weird, but is it wrong?

Suspicious.

Well, I mean, maybe did your father in, or something like that, and when you're saying that.

I think people would be leery of that.

But is it wrong?

I think this is the important question.

And sometimes because it's leery or weird, we say must be wrong.

And and the Corinthians are actually taking freedom in Christ really seriously.

And you say, yeah, just don't do it.

Because it's not worth the trouble.

And I will tell you, sometimes I think that's held the church back from making bolder stances that God calls us to make.

That's too weird.

We don't want to be scandalized, and how we discern that is really hard.

Yeah, I I'm just saying we because that's true.

I think it is true.

Certain changes are made because it's weird.

Rather than whether the right big thing to do or not.

And timing is a funny thing, right?

Like how you know when to wait.

If we were going to decide intellectually to ordain women before we did it, it still wouldn't have happened, I can tell you.

The reason women got ordained in the Episcopal Church is some bishops did it without permission.

And then we had to deal with it.

The reason we had to deal with gay clergy is because Gene Robinson got elected bishop before they asked permission.

And then they had to figure out what do we do with openly gay clergy.

And that's the other side of that.

It is, and it's super tough because we lost a lot of episcopalians who unfortunately says we can't stay with you anymore.

So again, how you negotiate that is really, really hard because part of what we get taken for taken to task two in Corinthians is there's one body, not a bunch of this, I'm Apollos and I'm Paul, I'm Episcopalian and I'm Anglican.

No, there's one body.

Somewhere throughout the Bible, and I can't quote it, but there's a lot of proscriptions and definitions on whom you shall or shall not sleep with.

And so, I mean, I think if they said, yeah, you can be declined that way, but you better not do it.

Maybe well, you can read that in Leviticus, but I would tell you that I mean there was really no understanding of sexuality among equals like we have today.

And to be honest, I mean, sexuality, when you read it in the Hebrew Bible, men are dominant and women are inferior.

Women are sex objects.

I don't want that in my marriage.

I think that's wrong.

I mean, I just think that's wrong.

And so when a man treats a man like a woman, that's what Leviticus has in mind.

But you don't sleep with your father's wife, you know, who are all the people you're not supposed to sleep with?

Can you quote that because I don't think that's a good one?

Yeah, your brother and your sister and your aunt and your uncle.

Uh-huh.

But those are biological.

Your father's wife, your I mean, sure.

All that stuff is like, you know, you're not supposed to do that.

I mean, they all do that.

They all learned that, so they should remember and not do the things you're not supposed to do.

And the Corinthians are saying Christ has made us free.

So I think that's the conversation is what does freedom in Christ look like responsibly managed?

And again, again, somebody who has unequal power to you, that's not a consensual mutual relationship, which is why homosexuality is off the table in Leviticus.

You can't have equals.

One has to be inferior.

They just didn't understand that.

Sex was about dominance.

I hope that's not how our marriages work.

I really hope that, because I don't think that's what God has in mind.

That's the difference between humans and animals.

Animals aren't able to have consensual sex among equals.

There's dominance involved.

And there can be for us, but in marriage, hopefully we take that off the table.

What is the word?

That you may come apart for a while, but then you may come back together.

And the way he's explaining it, it sounds clearly as though men and women both would want to be joined together periodically in marriage.

Not that just one has the decision about it as I think this.

Yeah, I don't like that chapter.

I'm going to tell you.

I don't like that chapter.

Uh, because I think it lays down this thing that we take so literally we forget to take seriously the context.

Paul says God's coming really soon.

So don't mess with stuff on earth.

Um, but we're still waiting on that.

And, you know, to me, if people want the sacrament of marriage, I wouldn't advise them to wait till Jesus comes back.

I would say I would love to bless the sacrament of marriage for you, provided it's going to be sacramental.

And I do think it's great that women are able to say no to their husbands and husbands to say no to their wives.

But again, this is one of those things I didn't learn as a youth.

Very rarely have my wife and I had the same sexual openness desire at the same time.

Usually one of us is more interested than the other, and we go along together and hopefully it works out.

Now, if one of us is absolutely opposed, that's not gonna work.

So we get that part, but what we don't get is sexuality is always a negotiation in some ways.

And it's because of that, it's unified.

Well, I think so.

Maybe we were more on equal footing the first two years of our marriage, you know.

But I will tell you, uh, sexuality is not the most important part of my marriage.

It's not, it's an expression of the most important part of my marriage.

And I don't know if Paul gets it exactly right.

Because he says it's better for two people to get married than to burn.

That's what he says in Greek, than to burn with lust.

But I would tell you, this is where I think Paul even gets his bodily resurrection thing mixed up.

I think it's really interesting to hear about the bodily resurrection.

The bodily resurrection could be about you get your body back when you die, but it could also be Paul saying, Look, the things we do in our bodies matter.

It's not just our spirit trapped in a bad prison.

No, our bodies matter.

Which to me means expression of sexuality really matters.

It's not just about some kind of temporal pleasure, it's about intimacy when done correctly, and thereby it's sacramental.

Again, part of my disappointment with church is it didn't teach me what sacramental intimacy looked like.

It assumed we would just figure that out.

Yeah.

But culture told me what it looked like.

And culture was wrong.

Culture is wrong.

Cultural sexuality is about dominance.

In almost every form.

The man is the dominant person, whether it's in a movie or it's in another, you know, I I don't mean like pornography, I definitely mean pornography, but I also mean, you know, your major Hollywood films.

And, you know, if if we don't correct that, then we can believe that that's culturally right and miss an opportunity about something that could be better than what we're doing.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Well, in our culture, too, a major large percentage of our culture, marriage, the male is dominant.

Yes.

Because we don't teach anything else.

There's no competing narrative.

And I and the churches that raised me absolutely believe the man is the head of the house and dominant, and they don't take seriously that the husband submits to the wife as to the Lord.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This I think is becomes really interesting conversation uh about all kinds of things.

You know, and sometimes Paul is literally talking about human bodies and intercourse, and sometimes he's using that as a metaphor for the ways in which we commit cultic prostitution with wrong ideas.

Because remember, prostitutes were all working at temples.

So it's this it's this mixing of are you really talking about sexual intercourse, or are you talking about infidelity to God because you're being faithful to other ideas?

And it's not clear all the time which one he's doing.

When you unite members of your body to a prostitute, we've taken that literally.

When I would tell you what I think Paul is asking us to take that figuratively.

When members of the body of Christ get involved with ideas, ideas that are going to take us away, it hurts the whole body.

And very little work is done contextually by us or anybody else.

We usually just assume, look, the Bible speaks for itself.

And then the other question is not just what did it mean then, but what does it mean now, given that we've got some differentials going on?

We no longer sacrifice meat to idols quite like they did then.

But remember, all meat was sacrificed to an idol.

And Paul says, look, uh, I won't do anything to hurt anybody else's faith, but everybody should do what's right in their own mind.

It's don't ask, don't tell.

I mean, that's what he's saying, right?

If somebody gives you meat, don't ask about it, because if they tell you it was sacrificed to an idol, you shouldn't eat it.

But all meat was sacrificed at temples.

Jewish meat was sacrificed by priests.

I mean, so it's it's a sort of funny thing.

And he says, well, look, don't do anything that is going to hurt somebody else's faith.

So be willing to set aside your rights for somebody else.

At the same time, there's time to stand up for your rights as being socially just.

Otherwise, Rosa Parks would have got up out of that seat.

So, like, it's otherwise Jesus wouldn't have talked back to the Pharisees in the temple or wherever he's he's.

He just would have been good and compliant.

And so it's really hard to know when do you do what.

And I think actually, it is really hard to know when do you do what?

And that's where Paul actually mirrors the truth and faith really, really well.

It's hard.

I can't even imagine it.

All that sacrificing going on in the temples, that's like a temporalist picture show.

Yeah, well, if you want to know how we what idols we worship, just go to Greeley, Colorado and see how we treat our meat.

And we can say, oh, it's just a commodity.

It's idolatry, the way we treat animals as commodities.

In Colorado.

Greeley, Colorado?

Oh, yeah.

That's where a lot of our meat comes from.

Those commercial agriculture food lots.

That's where animals are put on a conveyor belt, and just uh it's just it's dreadful.

I lived in Wichita, Kansas, and there were there were meat packing plants there, and that's I I knew people who worked there, and they said it was it was horrific.

Of course, the truth is, where else are you going to get your meat?

So in some ways, we're don't ask, don't tell people, but I can tell you the way we treat animals is absolutely not biblical.

Biblically, you're supposed to pray to God every time you kill an animal, not only to give the life, but to ask forgiveness.

Rabbis say, God, it's wrong to kill the animal.

Because the commandment says, Thou shalt not kill.

It doesn't say murder, it says don't kill.

Um, I used to eat meat just fine, but I mean I took eating humanely, raised and slaughtered meat really seriously, and I bought my animals live.

I didn't kill them because I can't.

I don't have that licensure, but uh the local butcher did, and um I'm not saying you should do it like I do, but what I do want to say is our meat production represents our values, and so does idolatry.

I mean that's that's really it.

I think I might have asked this before that you don't know what's the difference between the kosher and the halal.

A lot of difference.

I don't know if it's actually gone out of the halal.

The kosher is significantly more stringent than halal, and again, a a rabbi should be doing the law ring of the kosher, whereas in halal you don't have to be.

I mean it's just it's it's it's very different.

So in those days when they had the the temple.

So the people were stupid asking this, but they had the the Jewish temple, the Israeli temples, and then they have other temples for all the other gods, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so do they have different ways of doing their sacrifices?

Um the slightly.

In general, what sacrificed involved everywhere was that you kill the animal as a sacrifice, and then the god feeds you at the god's table.

So sacrifice and table are always related.

You give part of the animal to God, usually the fat, you burn that up, uh, whether you're Greek or you're Jewish, and then there's a feast.

I mean, they needed to have feasts because they didn't really have good ways to preserve the meat.

Yeah.

So you need to cook the whole animal and you need to eat the whole animal.

And festival days, if you're Jewish, happen like eight days a year, and that might have been all the meat you had.

When they had the feasts, was that open for the townspeople or was it by family?

And that was your religion in general if you were Greek or if you were Hebrew.

In general, your religion was played down at shrines.

Okay.

Not in your home.

We usually think like, hey, um, you know, hypocritical Christians just go to church on Sundays and they do whatever they want.

That was religion in the ancient world.

You go to the temple and then you go live your life and you try to make it work.

And maybe you have some personal piety because you bury statues of the goddess in your garden so that she'll help that grow.

Or maybe you have statues of the goddess in your home as a shrine to help you get pregnant.

I mean, this is sort of the way religion played out.

Part of the reason people were really attracted to Judaism, especially Pharisees, is because there was a code of ethics.

A lot of Greek people were really interested.

Those people are called God fearers.

Because they wanted their piety to mean more than just that.

And by the way, the rosary came from that.

Catholic people went to a service in which they understood no words, and having the rosary was something that allowed them to have an experience of piety while that happened.

They got it from Islam, Islam got it from Hinduism, um, but it was something you could do during a service that meant nothing to you.

The early popes were against the rosary, but then they decided they couldn't fight it.

Because so many people wanted it.

The Islam people in India, when we've been there, they they're still they still wear the beads.

Absolutely, so the Buddhists, right?

I mean the bead counting is really really old.

Yeah.

Because otherwise you'd never know where the what's going to stop.

That's right.

Well, it's a way to keep it focused, to focus if you have a behavior that helps you focus.

It's useful to help you on what you're doing at all when you're as a Catholic, being raised a Catholic.

When I would pray the rosary, and every once in a while I will do at least for some decade or two.

It is a wonderful, it is a good way for me to stay focused on what I'm doing and what my purpose is.

Otherwise, I get the action, the physical action of it.

It's hard.

It's poetic and poems.

Yes.

It is a poem that most scholars would tell you it's much older than Paul.

He employs it here to say what he's got in mind.

And I do hope it's really helpful to hear that this is not about feelings at all.

This is about practicing love.

So the way you practice love is that you practice patience.

Nobody feels a patient.

You practice kindness, but nobody feels kind.

It's a commitment you make.

Nobody feels self-control.

You practice self-control.

Patience repossess your soul.

I don't know about that.

There's lots of different ideas about us.

But I do think that's an interesting bit because we heard on Sunday, um, G.K.

Chesterson says the biggest problem with human beings is not pride, it's impatience.

And that relates here.

We want something too soon and we don't wait to do it properly.

And Paul gives us another one of those criteria.

Knowledge puffs up and love builds up.

So it becomes this question: is this controversial action I'm going to do on behalf of the gospel?

Is it puffing up or is it building up?

That's interesting about impatience in that from the time a little baby, a child, they banned everything now, and as we grow older, sometimes we still struggle with that of wanting what we want.

There's that dreadful Stanford marshmallow test.

I don't know if you're aware of this.

It's the biggest predictor about whether a child is going to live a productive and happy life, says the Stanford people.

It's controversial.

Do you know about this?

No.

You give a child a marshmallow and you say, I'll be back to give you another one in just a second.

If you don't eat that, I'll give you another one.

If you eat it, you don't get another one.

And you can, and then they have a camera in the room.

They leave and they time and see how long.

They usually come back within like 15 minutes.

But there are kids who are eating that marshmallow before the doctor towned the door.

And then there are other kids who like put the marshmallow on the table and like, I want to eat you so bad, but I need two.

Like there's this sort of deal.

And supposedly the biggest predictor about self-agency, control, um, and joy is whether or not you can suspend gratification.

And the kids that wait the 15 minutes supposedly are the ones that have more joyful and productive lives.

Because they're able to suspend gratification.

They're getting twice, they're getting twice the marshmallow.

And it's really controversial.

And so at what age would you do this?

Oh, it doesn't matter what age you do it.

They do it when they're young, though, which is why you see the little children yelling at the marshmallow.

I'm gonna say I I I grew up Catholic.

I was at Texas Women's University Girls School.

And on good and on holy, well, what was it?

Was it all Lent when we didn't eat meat?

There was a time when we didn't eat meat until after midnight on Friday.

So if they served meat in the cafeteria in at TW, we would get meat, and those of us who were Catholic, we would hang around together and be together until the minute after midnight to eat to eat the chicken or whatever the heck it was.

And it was crazy.

Thinking back on it was crazy, but it brought this well, it brought us together for one thing.

But but it was it was really silly on my.

No, no, that's exactly what community formation is all about is you wait together and then you celebrate together.

That's how Ramadan works.

No one eats during the day and then at night you feast.

And you do it together.

Because you've all waited for the same thing.

Yes, right.

And I think you could easily say because the current generation has very little tolerance for waiting, this is what entitlement means.

Spending all this money on things like nine dollar coffees and waxing their mustaches and having no money, they get everything they want and they're not happy because they've never had to wait.

There is something really important about waiting and goal setting, this is the real word, is goal setting, is related to happiness.

But if you don't have to set goals and you just get, get, get, get, get, when you don't get what you want, you just get really mad.

Like a three-year-old who's eating their marshmallow and wants another one.

I mean, because the controversial study, the Stanford marshmallow exists.

You can read more about it, but there is a lot of this lot of resonance in it.

Strange to me over here, 50 years later, I'm 75 or whatever old I am.

I'm thinking about remember doing that at Texas Women's University with a couple of girlfriends all sitting around in the dorm room waiting for it to be midnight.

And that's what Lent is about.

Lent is about us all doing something together, and then we suddenly.

Great when it's done.

And I have to tell you, there's this really interesting bit about waiting.

I was just talking to a parent who said, you know, we toured all these universities, and academics are what they are, but you'd go to this one and they have a rock wall, and this one's got a lazy river that the student center, and it's sort of like, well, I mean, I don't have that stuff.

So if we're picking schools based on that, we're introducing our kids to a standard of living we don't even have when they're children, and we're normalizing them to that standard of living.

And we're paying an insane amount of money in college tuition so that they can have a standard of living that's not sustainable when they don't even have a degree.

I mean, it's sort of interesting to think through discernment and waiting, and when you do what you do.

And being a teacher in the classroom with a couple of kids who are raised that way.

I mean, you feel sorry for them because their tolerance for um waiting for anything is I mean, it's just sad because there the frustration that they feel.

Yeah.

And they don't know how to handle it.

And that I would tell you is is the problem with video games and movies is that it's life with all the boring parts cut out.

So it trains you always action, and I would tell you that's one of our church challenges is people get disenfranchised with waiting because they went, oh, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and there are times to move and then there's times to wait.

And we have not figured that out corporately.

There's a generational gap.

I mean, I wouldn't say because my parents grew up on farms, I have more appreciation for waiting than some of my peers do, depending on the issue.

But there's other things I know that I'm not patient about at all.

Sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.

Do you think that's the reason why Jesus hasn't returned yet?

Um I'm not convinced Jesus hasn't returned yet.

I think we have the opportunity to receive that return every minute of every day.

Now, when it's going to culminate, I don't know about why.

Eventually, I guess so, but you know, I think Paul is actually trying to say since our bodies matter and resurrection is real, it should be happening all around us all the time.

I think so.

I think that's part of his argument.

This is not like a holding pattern for the soul.

This matters.

And this is, I think, one of the hardest bits about where my evangelical friends have gone is you're starving, but it's your soul that really matters.

So we're going to go send missionaries to convert you, but not necessarily change your conditions.

We've changed that thinking, hopefully.

Like the world is changing that thinking that, hey, you can't even think about your spiritual needs when you don't have basic physical needs.

Like we're figuring that out a little bit.

But what we do in our bodies matters.

That's what Paul's saying, I think.

Again, Paul's being very Jewish here.

The body was created good, albeit impermanent, but good.

Yeah, I I think to in response to when the fact that we live together and we get along so well and all that, that to me as God, being present all the time.

I mean we have a good life, it's we like each other.

Yeah, it's just waiting for God.

I was thinking you see the sunshine or a raindrop or a little bird flitting around around your birth feeder and stuff like that is.

But that's the difference between loitering and waiting.

That's what he tried to say two weeks ago.

And we don't loiter for the resurrection, we wait for it to completely happen, but we have opportunities to participate all the time.

So resurrection happens when we're reconciled with somebody who and there was hurt in the relationship, and we choose to be reconciled.

It doesn't mean that hurt goes away or we forget, it just means instead of bleeding, now there's a scar.

I would probably talk more about that.

What is the difference?

When you say you're not convinced that Jesus hasn't already returned, but the culmination hasn't happened yet.

So can you help me understand what you're trying to say?

So there's and and and we've changed a little bit about resurrection.

So the earliest doctrine of resurrection was if you if your life was cut short because you were killed because of your faith, like if you were a martyr, you would get your life back.

You would get to live out the rest of your life in your real body because you'd lost the chance to live.

And that's turned a little bit more into this idea that there's an eternal soul and sort of goes to heaven in a different place.

So there's some gap between those ways of thinking.

Um, in terms of the return of the Lord, though, um, I mean, Jesus does show up after Easter with the body.

So the bodily resurrection of Jesus has already been at work in the timeline, if that makes sense.

And I and I want to say, without sounding nuts, that the bodily resurrection of Jesus can still be at work in the timeline, depending on whether or not we see it and recognize it.

Sometimes we say, no, just apologizing and making up is just being nice.

But I want to suggest it's a way of participating in the resurrection of Jesus in the body in this life.

Okay, so I think I was confusing.

You meant resurrection, and I thought you meant his return.

I mean, I think I think Jesus returns any time we're reconciled.

But there will be the final return as well.

It's it's sort of both end.

We could say, look, I can't get along with you for good reason.

Jesus will fix it one day.

And I think that's true.

And we also can fix it now.

So I think that's part of the both end.

And maybe it's the opportunity to live into resurrection now instead of to just have to loiter until it God does it for us.

God will do it for us.

But why not enjoy it now as well?

So maybe another way of saying it would be like the kingdom of God is here.

And we work for that now.

I think so.

But and it's coming.

I think that's right.

Okay.

And working into the kingdom of God, it's work, but it should be joyful.

And if we find ourselves getting puffed up, like we talked about that hymn, if we find ourselves getting a hump on our back and getting long teeth because people are not cooperating in the kingdom of God, it's a chance for love to build us all up instead of knowledge to puff us up.

One body many parts.

Some people are the armpit in the body of Jesus.

And you know, your armpit does something real important.

And I would tell you, there are people who are colons in the body of Christ, and we need our colons.

We need them.

They do things like make sure we don't get dehydrated and throw away stuff that's really good.

I mean, people who are really good stewards of resources are colons in the body of Christ, and that's important.

We have some vestigial structures in the body of Christ.

We have an appendix.

We don't need our appendix, but boy, if it's not healthy, it will kill us.

And I think it's really helpful to take that so seriously and playfully.

I think it's really important.

I was listening to this being read today on my reading.

And sometimes when you hear someone else reading it, they take a different take on it.

Yes.

And it was the first time I heard that this kind of a take on it.

That you can't just like saying, I'm not the I, therefore I'm not part of the body.

Yeah.

The way I heard him, it was almost like saying, Well, that's not my gift.

Yeah.

So I don't have to.

Yeah, and there's another really interesting way to hear about the gifts, is that the gifts are given.

There's a variety of gifts which are for the common good, and the spirit gives us the spirit sees fit.

And that means that sometimes we're deluded when we take a spiritual gift inventory thinking this is my gift.

It's not yours.

It belongs to God.

And our gifts might change as the spirit sees fit.

And the whole point is whether or not we're building up the temple, or whether or not we're puffing up.

And so the variety becomes really, really important.

And again, this showed up in the sermon on Sunday.

I tried to say it anyway.

Sometimes we think, oh, here's what we do.

We're the altar guild, and we're the holy smokers, and we're this, so how will you fit in there?

And I think Paul is saying, sure, there's that, but then how will all of those things fit into who you are?

Because one isn't better than the other.

The real question is whether or not we're building up the temple of the Lord, and that's where we use the word y'all.

Paul says, Y'all are the temple of the Lord.

And if you kill the temple, God's gonna be mad at you.

So if if you tear each other down, God's gonna be upset.

This is not Paul saying that if you commit suicide, you're going to hell.

And unfortunately, that's how it's been used.

This is you and the second person plural, which means I am not the temple of the Holy Spirit.

We are being built together brick by brick by brick to hold the Holy Spirit.

And there's this really beautiful image going back to resurrection.

When I lived in Germany, we started out in Dresden, and you know, Dresden was punitively bombed by the Allies in World War II.

There wasn't a single military target.

They just did it for revenge.

They blew the place up, and it's awful.

They carpet mommed it with fire, and there was this big, beautiful cathedral, the Frauenkirke with this big dome, and it was torn to cinders, and there was one window left, and a bunch of bricks.

They rebuilt it about 20 years ago.

They started this, and they used computer modeling to use all the bricks that were conceivably left over, big limestone blocks, and then they quarried new ones around it.

The new ones are all tan, like that countertop, and of course the remaining ones from the war are black, sooty and destroyed.

So there's like one black window and a bunch of limestone, and then here and there is a bombed-out brick.

That's the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that's the resurrection of the Lord, is even bombed-out bricks get knit together in the temple.

This is in Dresden?

It's in Dresden, yeah.

I hope they never clean it because it's it's it's amazing to see how it is that they restored these ruined blocks.

It would have been much cheaper to discore a new blocks and build it.

But again, they did all this modeling to incorporate scorched blocks.

And I'm pretty sure that's what all of this is about.

How do we incorporate incorporate people into the temple that God wants for the Holy Spirit, whether they're brand new and shiny or scorched?

Well, that that's also true for each of us individually.

It seems to me that a part of me is scorched.

Yes.

And um is not, and you you try to work towards rebuilding it and putting it together.

It takes more time and more thought, and it's a more of a testimony to God's redemptive power.

That God doesn't chuck that away.

God says those parts of you that you are afraid of or have been burned, that's exactly where your light's gonna come in and come out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's beautiful.

And you talked about that when when the uh when uh trust with a broken glass, does the light go in?

Does the light go out?

Yeah.

There's a lot of truth that we see in a mirror, Demly, isn't there?

I mean, I don't know if you've if you've heard this, but every time you look at a photograph, you remember it differently.

According to what mood you're in and what's going on in your life.

And every time you look in the mirror, you don't see what's there, but you see what's there.

We look through all glasses differently.

That's an interesting thing.

You know, it's it's interesting that I go to shade in the morning.

The person I see in the mirror is not the person I think I am.

Or if someone has taken a photograph of me, yes, I think we're looking at that photograph.

And I have no idea who that person is.

The person I see is a whole lot older than that.

And I think one week we can hear it is we see in the glass dimly, like we're looking at a dirty mirror.

But I think another way Paul is saying it is um we're seeing what we believe.

And that's clouded.

What we believe is clouded, and it changes, and we have opportunities to grow and change, or to just go with those cloudy images.

Incorrect idea.

Well, I would tell you in general, one of the best things we could do is see ourselves the way our friends see us.

And that's one of the things we usually struggle with.

We see ourselves much worse than our friends see us.

So I think I think, again, here's an opportunity.

Are we gonna see each other's others see us like how much worse we are?

Or, I mean, again, I would tell you so many times I've said to people, like, oh, I'm selfish and whatever.

No, you're not.

Like you're one of the most giving people I know, and I wish you could see yourself like I see you.

Paul could be talking about that.

Well, sometimes we read the we read the Bible, sometimes the Bible reads us.

Just going back to it, it tells us where we are, not where we ought to be or where we should be going.

So we should have a better self-invention, I suppose.

In general?

We'd be a lot happier if we did, or more joyful.

And again, if you see a gift in somebody else and you're not grateful for the gifts you have, you will be jealous.

If you're grateful for the gifts you have, and you see gifts that are different in somebody else, you can say, good job, God.

But over over a lifetime, I mean, for me, that has changed.

It seems like when I was younger, I didn't see myself in a good positive light.

Yeah.

As I've as I've aged and matured, I I don't know what it is.

That it's it's it's more positive.

I had um explain this.

After I met my husband, it was for like for the first time in my life I felt the same.

That's just strange because I don't know.

I guess I never trusted.

I didn't really know it, I guess.

You didn't really know you didn't trust it.

I haven't really thought about it.

I think I think I was correct.

That's the sacrament of marriage.

That's why it's sacramental.

Uh we only have a few minutes.

Did I miss anything else that's of interest to you guys?

Can we talk about the Lord's Supper then?

The Lord's Supper was not bread and wine, it was a whole meal.

And people were coming and eating a meal, not a little tiny bit of bread.

And the people who did not have to work came and ate up all the food.

And the people who came after work had nothing to eat.

And so as a result, they weren't included in the table fellowship.

And Paul says that's eating the bread in an unworthy manner.

You know, as a little kid, I was told you better be really worried about how you take communion.

Because if you don't take it with the right intention, it will hurt you.

Instead, what Paul's saying, I think, is we, if you don't include people at the Lord's table adequately, it will hurt y'all.

Because you're not practicing what God wants you to practice.

So this is really interesting.

I was told as a kid, if my mind wasn't right, I shouldn't take it.

And then by saying that, the church was excluding me from being accepted at God's table, which was violating exactly what Paul had in mind.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Of course, we all know what happens in the Baptist church or one of those churches where you shouldn't take it unless you mean it, and you don't go up.

Oh my god, who's in a state of sin?

And that's exactly what Paul does not want us doing.

That's that's one of things, one thing that I enjoy when you say, This is not the table of the church, this is the table of the Lord.

And that's a difference.

And it's an important difference.

Yeah, because the question is who would God not sit at God's table?

And there's this really big question for us, and I think this is true whether you're Roman Catholic and you believe in transubstantiation, or you're snakebelly low Southern Baptist and you believe in symbolism, can a sacrament be dangerous for you, or does God always work to our good through the sacraments?

And as a Roman Catholic, if in pre-Vatican II, if you hadn't been to confession, like within 30 days, I forget, there was a there was a rule, you know, and so you all the kids would line up every Friday and go to go to confession because otherwise you could not go to communion on Sunday because your soul wasn't clean.

And it was, you know, looking back on it, it was I just don't want to say the ridiculous, but it was in a way.

The only thing it did, I think the only thing it did is it did cause you to stop and think sometimes, and even as an adult, that sticks with you as an adult.

Stop and think about, okay, what am I doing here?

Why am I doing this?

What am I doing here?

But then uh on the other hand, uh then there's all that guilt, oh Jesus.

This is where I think consubstantiation, this is what Luther said, consubstantiation is the position of the Episcopal Church.

Yeah, there's no change in the accidents, like the way it tastes, and there's no chemical formula change.

Right.

There's a mysterious change where Christ is really present.

And if Christ is really present, wouldn't you want that no matter what state you're in, or should you be afraid of Christ's real presence?

And I think that's one of the most important questions of faith.

Is that not what transubstantiation means?

No, transubstantiation means it doesn't taste like blood or flesh, but at the chemical level it has become blood and flesh.

Oh, okay.

Which is why it's sort of like if you don't get the spell right, the magic can blow up in your face.

I I guess well, maybe I misunderstood what the nuns taught me.

I I thought of it as well, I will have to talk.

No, you're okay.

I mean, I think the easiest way to say it is bread and wine give nourishment to your body.

Yes.

And the episcopal position is that bread now nourishes your spirit.

Yes.

How can that ever harm you to have nourishment in your spirit?

How can it ever harm you?

But but um for me before I used to have to go to concession today.

Yeah, and that that's not true.

It hasn't been true for that.

I've got a follow-up for that, but Richard's ready with something else.

Yeah, I'm about to size a uh one to adult baptism before the supper.

Yeah.

And some other six child baptism.

Before Jesus well.

Oh shit.

And this I think is the really interesting question because some Episcopal churches say the Lord's table is open to baptized Christians of any denomination.

Some priests say the Lord's table is open to Christians.

Some people say this is the table not of the church but of Jesus Christ.

So if you want to come to the Lord's table, is God going to say you aren't baptized?

And again, this becomes really important.

Is baptism magic that God needs?

Or is it something to support us in our journey?

Is the Lord's Supper something God needs?

Or is it something that we need?

And how do we need it?

I think this becomes really, really important, right?

Is confession something God needs, or is confession something we need because of what God's already done?

Like if you don't confess it, you're going to hell.

That might be something we need so we can let it go, but surely God doesn't need our confession to forgive us.

For us to forgive others in order to be forgiven.

Yeah.

That is for no, that's totally a switching direction.

No, no, I think it's right.

I don't think that's for our need.

I think that's for our sake.

And those are different things.

I don't think we have to be.

I think we want to be and work toward that.

When we make hard rules, we being mankind, that's for me that's exclusive.

Excluding others.

It's tribalism rather than being inclusive like Jesus said, come to me.

I am convinced that if I don't forgive other people, I will enjoy my life less than if I do.

I am very not convinced that if I don't forgive somebody who hurt me, God will send me to hell.

Because that's lunacy.

That's God acting like we act.

And surely God is greater than we are.

The whole point of forgiveness, though, is so we can live into the kingdom of God, which is later and now.

So don't miss it now.

But I again, I've told you, I'm confident God is going to get us there when we die.

God will take care of whatever we can't do.

But why wait for that?

So I kind of have a question that I'm not sure of.

And I don't listen to Dr.

Laura because I don't get her.

But she's very unforgiving.

Like somebody bothers you, why would you be bothered with that person?

Just stay away from leave them alone.

And so, and I'm thinking, now are we supposed to that's that's what she's saying.

We don't get the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness means I don't live in the past anymore, but I don't ever have to see you again.

Reconciliation means we've had a past, it could have been real unpleasant, and I'm gonna try to make it work in the future.

It's crazy to tell a woman who's been physically beat up by her husband Jesus wants her to go back in the house.

That is wrong morally.

She should forgive him for the sake of her life, but forgiving does not mean she forgets.

It doesn't mean she takes his calls, and it definitely doesn't mean she goes into his presence unless that's what she really wants to do.

However, if she lives the rest of her life bitter and defined, defined by that abuse, she can, and I think God understands why.

It's hard as heck not to, but I think God hopes she won't because she'd be missing out on a lot of the rest of her life.

So forgiveness is just saying, look, whatever happened to me in the past, that's what happened.

And now I'm grateful for who I am no matter what, and I'm gonna live into a future.

But I don't have to return to those past relationships that are gonna continue to injure me.

Just remember, women were property of men in the Bible.

There was no marriage of unequals anywhere in this book.

If you divorce a woman, you call you cause her to become an adulteress.

Yeah, because she has to be a beggar or a prostitute.

Because women were property.

And that's a cultural thing.

It's a cultural thing.

No, they couldn't own anything.

So women now, I would tell you, there's some women that should divorce their husbands, and that would be fulfilling what God had in mind.

Then that wasn't even possible.

Can we save it till next week?

Because I'll have to do this, Anthony.

Yes, I should save it.

Next week we're going to be two Corinthians.

Thank you all for being here.