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Living, Breathing Church - Worship
you can hear a MP3 recording of sermon here
1Cor 10:1-11:33
Sunday, 11th May, 2014

 If you went to church in Corinth what would you expect?

 

·        No building, met in courtyard or atriums of houses.

·        Songs are mentioned, but no musicians,

·        Probably men and women were separated.

·        food played an important part,

·        a bit chaotic,

·        tongues were spoken, people had words of prophecy, other gifts were exhibited,

·        visitors were usually invited to speak.

·        Communion played a significant role.

 

 We have been looking at answers to questions from the Church in Corinth and today we flit over the some of the ones about worship. Others will be looked at later.

 

 1Cor 10:1-11:33

v1-5:Our text begins with a sombre warning from Israel’s history.

Experiencing church does not mean you have Salvation.

v6-10:The church has to recognise that the God of Israel is our Jesus. He detests the same things in us as he did in Israel.

v11-13The second warning is about pride. The hazard of thinking that we have arrived at the perfect church set-up, we have all the gifts, we have all the good teaching and we are above the mess that swills around outside of the church.

v14-17 Next we are warned to flee idolatry. And in that context we see the communion as a participation in Jesus and therefore the opposite to idolatry.

v18-22 Paul is challenging them to be clear in their own minds to separate themselves from the practices around them

v23-31 Paul addresses the particular matter of meat in the market place which Graeme spoke on two weeks ago.

Then there is this pivotal verse in 11:1 which I spoke on last week.

v2-16.We plunge into the hot debate of the day. Head-covering!

v17-22 he is arguing against individualism and divisions in the church.

Verse 23-26 will be familiar to you if you worship here regularly because we tend to quote it directly in our communion services on Sunday morning and refer to it often on Sunday evening communions.

Verse 27-34 calls for integrity in worship.

Next week Samuel will move us on to the right use of spiritual gifts in worship.

 

So that is the breadth of the discussion. Lets look at some of the detail where I believe it matters for us today.

 Read v1-5: a sombre warning from Israel’s history.

The word baptism is a bit of a shock in this context. Baptism as an English word was invented to compromise between the meaning of the Greek word which is immerse and the Church of England’s desire to retain sprinkling as in Christening. SO what Paul is saying is that Israel was immersed into Moses in crossing the Red Sea and immersed into Moses by being led by the cloud, eating manna and drinking from the rock. That rock was Jesus!

 

Paul is deliberately paralleling the greatest salvation of Israel’s history with our salvation history – the death and resurrection of Jesus, The cloud is about us being led by the Holy Spirit and the manna and water remind us of communion, where we are reminded to eat and drink on Jesus. Jesus is identified as the rock that accompanied them. Resonating with Jesus’ words “ I am with you always” which are the safest and most encouraging words in the Bible.

 We believe in ‘Believer’s Baptism’. That is that when a person puts their faith and trust in Jesus for salvation, they should be immersed in water as an act of obedience in following Jesus. It is part of  being a Christian, to identify and share in the death and resurrection of Jesus, to be baptised in the Holy Spirit and to feed on Jesus in our hearts by faith. The same is true about sharing in the communion, we only ask that you have put your faith and trust in him and are seeking to follow him repentant of sin and eager to receive the blessings of the Holy Spirit.

 

In spite of  Israel having all  that they experienced as followers of God or Jesus, they all died in the desert and failed to reach the Promised Land because they were faithless. , they failed to live by faith. And he holds it up as a warning to us that we cannot assume that just because we behave like Christians and talk like Christians we are on our way to heaven. We do need to have faith and be faithful. We need an obedience of faith that says if Jesus was baptised, I will be baptised, If Jesus says ‘do this in remembrance of me’ then I will attend communion when I can. We need to read God’s written word and be careful to observe not just the letter but the spirit of its message to us. We need to walk in the Spirit and practice the presence of Jesus.

 

READ v6-13 resist temptation 

He then turns to the temptation of idolatry which is written all over the Old Testament narrative, the people were for ever giving up on YHWH and following other gods. It got so bad that parts of the very temple itself was turned into idol and demon worship. In the days Paul was writing Corinth was well known for its cult prostitutes who served in the temples to enable men to turn lust into an offering to the gods. So adultery was the natural part of their culture. So much so that it was a serious temptation for them. It’s what you did to party! This clearly applies in our society to sexual licence, alcohol, smoking and drug abuse. It is the expected norm  and we are pressured to do it to be part of the family, part of the fun of being out together.

 

Paul calls them and us to resist and in doing so gives us a precious verse, verse 13 you need to know and use when you are convincing yourself you can’t be faithful, you can’t hold out. God has promised that there is a way of escape. It might mean a real struggle to resist losing your temper, giving in to evil thinking, and so on but God promises through his Holy Spirit that you can escape. Sin is not to rule over you! So lets read it out loud together and to each other:

 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

 READv14-17 Next we are warned to flee idolatry.

 And in that context we see the communion as a participation in Jesus and therefore the opposite to idolatry. You flee idolatry by running to Jesus!  So instead of sitting in front of your household Gods which these days speaks on any one of 100 channels of your choice, spend time being part of church, participating in the body of Christ. To Paul following Christ is seamlessly connected to the Lord’s Supper. It is there we connect our lives with the God who not only speaks  but also listens and acts. Unless you are choosing to seek the company of Christians you wouldn’t be engaging in the most important social events in your day-to-day life. As a society,we are becoming an antisocial lot, rarely spending time of any kind with others. God calls us to community, community with him. Our unity is not about getting on together, it is about the presence of Christ, drawing us together. We will return to this one body, many people, next week.

 

 

 READv18-22 be holy

The word separate triggers a key point in Paul’s mind about worship. You can’t worship God and demons at the same time. It sounds a bit like Jesus saying you cannot serve God and Mammon. You cannot serve God and idols either.  So when you come to church, it is sheer hypocrisy to switch on your Christian avatar. If  you believe Jesus has bled and died for you then you are bought out of darkness into light. Paul is clearly challenging them from Saturday night binges with their mates at the temples and then turning up on Sunday morning with a hang-over to worship God. Not only do you have a head-ache but you are more likely to arouse God’s anger than his love.

Paul is challenging them to be clear in their own minds to separate themselves from the practices around them. It is not easy and I know some of you struggle with the culture of your families, which is trying to force you into its mould. There is no easy solution, we are to be in the world and, as Paul has said earlier different people will have different solutions. What would be wrong is to decide that my solution should be everyone else’s. Each has to live before God and engage with family and friends with ever the word of salvation on the tip of the tongue, ready to spread the Good News to any that will listen.

 v23-31 Meat offered to idols

It is at this point he returns to the subject of eating meat offered to idols, which Graeme spoke about two weeks ago.

Paul recommends we follow his example as he follows Christ.  

 READ v2-16. Head-covering!

The hazard as I see it in interpreting this passage is to ignore the argument and jump to the outcome, make it a rule and stop. So lets step back  and look at what Paul sees are the method of coming to a conclusion. You need to understand where Paul is coming from. He was a Jew, who probably prayed with his head covered with a prayer shawl as the Jews to now. So did the Romans in their idolatry. He in fact is recommending the practice of the Greeks culture against his own and the Roman culture of the day. 

First, he raises the matter in the context of our relationship with God and each other. He says

Now I want you to realise that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

So your understanding of relationship between the sexes is based on your understanding of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. You need to read John’s gospel to understand how Jesus explains this to us. It is certainly nothing like the subservience of the society in which women were normally treated as lesser people to be dominated. Unless you think that Jesus’ relationship with his Father was anything but co-equality then this is a declaration that our relationships are to be similar, living out our lives in togetherness where the decision-making is not the issue but the willingness to agree together to love others.

So in that light what does he talk of next. Well, mainly cultural values of the day, few of which still apply and in these days of liberalism where anything goes, we have little to understand about the shame of being covered or uncovered or shaven. Verses 7-10 provide a framework for his argument but again notice that it is about relationship. It is that man is made in the image of God and woman similarly of man. This is not so much a distinction between men and women as underlining that we are all created in the image of God and each of us is the glory of God to each other. For his day and age, Paul maintains that Women should have their heads covered in worship and men not. But that is not relevant to this day and age because the cultural rules do not apply. Finally he notes that there is no independence, the foolish ideas of feminists and others that ‘we don’t need men any more’ is countered with the strong argument that we need each other and we need God.

So in verses 13-16 he sets out the rule for Corinth not for the church for all time. But before we move on, we must ask the question , what do we learn from here? First that how we behave and dress in church matters. But what matters in dress and behaviour is our relationship with God and each other, not a set of rules, unless they are needed to clarify what is decent and orderly.

 

 READ v17-22 he is arguing against individualism and divisions in the church. We are a community of disparate people brought together by sharing in this salvation, becoming part of the body of Christ. That inevitably has tensions. Tensions between young and old, rich and poor, racial and cultural tension, even tensions of what sort of worship we prefer. Here it seems the rich were not sharing equally with the poor. But hey, notice that we are talking about eating together! The Lord’s supper was a meal followed by the bread and wine. We in our insular nuclear family groupings with the business and stress on modern life have lost the precious opportunities of spending time together. It appears that Communion may have been a daily event in the early church but it is unlikely that everybody met every day even then I guess family and work commitments interfered with meeting together.  But we need to look to ourselves, and be cautious. Too much of our lives are demanded by work and then we seem to believe we have the right to leisure and the right to sit in front of  TV or, if you are younger, on  your computer or phone or ipad. And that is where this links up with eating meat offered to idols. We have freedom in Christ, let’s not surrender our freedom to the gods of this world and become stuck in front of some screen or other , filling our minds with the wisdom of man rather than discovering God’s way in relationship and friendship and love and forgiveness and all the great themes of life. Its not so much that you attend a church service or two that matters it is that you engage in the Kingdom of God whether in individual obedience or collective living together, egging each other on to a greater relationship with Jesus and receiving blessing from each other which are unavailable without being part of the body. Part of that blessing is Jesus’ Last Supper which he invites us to share in his death and resurrection.

READ Verse 23-26 will be familiar to you if you worship here regularly because we tend to quote it directly in our communion services on Sunday morning and refer to it often on Sunday evening communions.

 READ Verse 27-34 calls for integrity in worship. Time is against us for developing our thinking here. It is a challenge to recognise the body of Christ in our worship, that we together are the body of Christ and that our salvation is about receiving the grace that flows from his death and resurrection.

 

So we have covered a lot of ground this morning but let the Holy Spirit draw your attention to the bit that matters for your encouragement and spiritual growth.

 

We have been  warned that just being in church is not enough, we need to live by faith and obey in faith..

We must resist the temptations to fit in with the world around us and be transformed into being like-Jesus.

We are to run away from idolatry by running to Jesus and to the church meetings to gain encouragement to resist temptation.

 

We are challenged to be clear in our own minds to separate themselves from the ungodly practices around us.

We see that head covering is not the central issue, but that our dress and behaviour in church should reflect that our minds are set on following Jesus.

We are called to make sure we are inclusive and united not exclusive and divided in our relationships with our fellow believers.

We have a pattern of sorts for worship and are challenged to have integrity and reality in our worship.

 

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