1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,
To
the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in
Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every
place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
In
the book, “Ordinary Men,” Christopher Browning explores the history of a
reserve police battalion during the years of Nazi Germany. The men of Police Battalion 101 are mostly
older men who are too old for active duty on the front lines, so they have been
assigned the task of rounding up Jews for the Nazis, and then separating them
so that the men are sent to work camps and the rest – the women, children and
elderly – are shot on the spot.
At
the beginning of this history, the battalion’s leader explains the new duties
to the men and at the end of his speech he makes an extraordinary offer: if any
of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he
could step out.
There
are over 500 reserve police in this battalion.
Only
13 took up the offer not to execute the women, children and elderly Jews.
The
writer suggests that one explanation as to why so very few took the offer to be
excused from the atrocities was the sudden nature of the offer. It was unexpected and most did not know how
to react. Browning writes, “Unless they
were able to react to the commander’s offer on the spur of the moment, this
first opportunity was lost” (Browning, 71). Aside from this, the pressure to
conform also factors into soldiers’ unwillingness to abstain from the killings
at the start.
The
pressure to conform is powerful.
When
it seems that everyone is doing it – whatever “it” may be, joining in is easier
than standing up and resisting.
Even
when it comes to one of the most evil crimes of history, resistance is
difficult and seems, well, futile.
After
the war, the members of this Battalion 101 were interrogated and many of them
denied their responsibility by saying they had were simply following orders;
many of them tried to justify their actions.
One member of the Battalion even tried to justify his actions claiming
that he only shot and killed children.
He saw them as their savior, rescuing the children from a life without
their mothers (Browning 73).
Throughout
most of the book, Browning attempts to answer the question: “how do ordinary
men commit these sort of atrocities?”
The
answers, of course, are complex, and while he arrives at several conclusions,
the writer closes his book with this statement and question: “Within virtually every (community), the
peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior. If the ordinary men of
Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances,
what group of men cannot?” (Browning, 189).
Or put it
another way – put this in the language that we used as children and in the
language that is used by young people even today – “aw Mom, everyone is doing
it.”
You know
the conversation:
Your child: “Everyone else is going to the party.
Why can’t I?”
You: “I don’t care what ‘everyone else’ is doing.
You can’t go and that’s final.”
Your child: “Why are you so mean?”
As
trivial as that sounds, “everyone else is doing it,” this was the reason why
all but 13 of the more than 500 ordinary men in this reserve unit refused to
participate in one of the great evils of the 20th century.
Everyone
else is doing it.
The
peer pressure is so great.
We see this everywhere.
The pressure of our peers is all around us and at
every age. You find it on the elementary
school playground, in the high school prom, in the college dorm, in the
workplace, in the retirement community.
Everyone else is doing it.
Take a look at modern sports and the problem of so
many athletes taking illegal performance enhancement drugs. Just a few days ago, Alex Rodriguez,
considered one of the best baseball players of all time, was hit with the
longest doping suspension in history. Major League Baseball's arbitration judge
took the Yankee third baseman out of the game all of next season.
This, despite the fact that there is no positive
drug test for Rodriguez. After the decision, Rodriguez repeated that he has
never taken performance-enhancing drugs in the years that he's played for New York.
BUT – while I could not say one way or the other
whether Rodriguez has taken drugs, it cannot be denied that this is a major
problem in sports today. And it is a
problem because athletes so often convince themselves that everyone else is
doing it.
You may have seen last week’s 60 Minutes on
television. Anthony Bosch was interviewed
– he is the individual who operates a clinic from which many athletes have
obtained illegal performance drugs, and he claims that one of his customers was
Alex Rodriguez.
At one point in the interview, the report talked
about how we are not talking about nutrition or massage therapy we're talking
about drugs that are banned, that are illegal in the sport and how the use of
these drugs cuts to the heart of fair play.
That prompted Bosch to respond with this, “What is
fair play? Let me ask you that question. How about this? Follow me in thought.
I'm at the plate, and I know that the guy that's throwing the 95 mph pitch is
on sports performance-enhancing drugs. The guy who's gonna catch the ball is on
a program. The outfielder, the third baseman – they are all on
performance-enhancing drugs. Everybody's
on it.”
Of course, not everyone in sports is using these
drugs, but it sometimes seems that way.
Everyone else is doing it.
So we do too.
We justify our racism, because others are
racist. We shout angry words at
strangers and give them the middle finger because everyone else on the road
does it. We fail to stand up for the
weak because no one else is speaking out and we end up doing what everyone else
is doing.
We become ordinary men and ordinary women caught up
in doing ordinary, or even extraordinary evil, because the actions of those
around us suggest it is right.
When Augustine was a bishop in Africa over 1500 years ago. He had this great quotation about the problem
of “everyone is doing it.” He said. “Right is right even if no one is doing it;
wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
This is the heart of what the New Testament book of
First Corinthians is all about.
This
is really what St. Paul
is struggling with in his letter to the Corinthians. Paul had stayed in Corinth for a year and a half. He started the church there. He made lasting friends there. When he left, he continued to care deeply for
that church.
So
while Paul was in Ephesus, news arrived from Corinth, and the news was
not good.
Now
– I need to stop here and tell you a little bit about the city of Corinth. It was a big place. Not far from the city of Athens, this city had, in Paul’s day, about
80,000 people. It was a commercially
successful city. It was thriving. But it was also a place of immoral
behavior. In Paul’s day, if you said
someone was a Corinthian, it MIGHT mean they were from the city of Corinth. OR it might mean that they were just
downright, immoral folks.
Corinth was a city filled
with sexual immorality. Abuse of alcohol
was extreme. Crime was rampant. People were selfish and would do what they
could to get ahead and stay ahead, even if it meant hurting other people. There was a lack of concern for the poor and
hungry.
In
a city of 80,000, the church MAY have been as large as 100 by some generous estimates. And these young Christians felt the peer
pressure.
Everyone
is doing it.
Paul
addresses a lot of problems in his letter to the Corinthians, but that is
basically the problem in a nutshell.
The
church was guilty of bad behavior because – well – everyone else in town was
doing it.
And
Paul starts his letter by saying this:
“Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ
Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God
that is in Corinth,
to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints …”
Now
I know, on the surface this sounds like a long winded way of saying, “Hi
Guys. Paul here.” No – these words are more than a long winded
“hello.”
He
writing, he says, “to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be
saints.”
“Sanctified.”
That’s
one of those religious words that we don’t use much outside the church.
Do
you know what it means?
It
means “to be made sacred.”
More
literally, it means “to be made holy.”
It
means – “to be set apart.”
It
means – “to be different.”
And
who wants to be different?
Many
of us want to blend in.
Many
of us feel the peer pressure.
Everyone
is doing it.
Sometimes,
it is something simple like a hair style.
Or wearing a style of clothing.
A
generation ago, peer pressure meant smoking.
Everyone was doing it. Even on
airplanes. And people died prematurely,
because everyone was doing it.
And
now today, young people often submit to using illegal drugs – because the
pressure of those around them. After
all, in the culture of some young people, it seems that everyone is doing it.
Last year, a 12
year old girl died. She jumped off an
abandoned building. She had reached the
point at which she simply couldn’t take the constant, unending texts she was
receiving or the postings in online social media. Time and again she read messages to or about
her like, "nobody cares about u," or "i hate u,” or
"you seriously deserve to die."
Bullying is something everyone
does. And don’t think it is new. Before text messages and social media, there
walls the school bathroom and notes being passed in class.
But at some point, one has to say,
“Wait a minute. I am sanctified.”
Christ expects me to be different.
In our New Testament lesson, Paul
describes the Christians as saints who are sanctified. Saints.
Now to be a saint in the New
Testament is different from what many people think of as saints in the modern
world. We think of people who performed
a miracle as a saint. Mother Teresa –
that’s the kind of person we think of as a saint. Someone who lived the Christian life in an
extra ordinary way.
But no – to be a saint, in Paul’s
mind, was to be an ordinary Christian.
And ordinary Christians are not
ordinary men – or ordinary women. They
are sanctified – set apart for holy living.
We ordinary Christians, are meant to be different.
So when there is bullying in
school, and ordinary people let it happen – the Christian is to be different. We show kindness where others show hate.
And when someone tries to suck us
into conversation that is racist or sexist or mean spirited – we stand up and
speak out in love. Because the ordinary
Christian is not an ordinary person – we are called to be different.
I started
this morning’s sermon by mentioning a book, Ordinary Men, about ordinary people
who gave into the pressure to do enormously evil things.
I’ve been
reading that book this week, along with another book, which has a similar
title, No Ordinary Men – which is about two men who also lived in Nazi
Germany. One was Lutheran pastor,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the other was his brother in law, Hans von
Dohnanyi. Both found the strength to
stand almost alone against Hitler and the Nazis. They paid a high price. They were arrested
and put into prison. Less than a month
before Hitler committed suicide, the Nazi leader ordered Bonhoeffer and his
brother in law to be executed.
What made them resist while others bowed
to the pressure to do what the majority were doing? Neither of these two was perfect. They suffered greatly for their faith. How did they find the strength to be – well –
ordinary Christians in an extraordinary world?
The answer is in that word
“sanctified” that Paul uses in today’s reading. For Bonhoeffer, “Sanctification
is a most simple biblical doctrine.” For
him sanctification was simply understanding the biblical language of being set
apart, consecrated, or holy. And in another sense, it is … the
application of sacred Scripture to all of life.” (http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/set-apart-die-and-live/ Set Apart to Die and to Live, by Burk
Parsons)
So when you see bullying take
place, or racism occur, or the poor abused, or the weak victimized, or feel the
pressure of those around you to abuse drugs or alcohol, or to reject marriage
vows for a brief affair – whatever everyone else seems to be doing -- at all
these times, remember who you are.
You are sanctified.
You are set apart.
You are to be different.
You are Christian.
