It’s Lent and the scripture selections are intended to make us squirm a little in our seats.  It’s an uncomfortable season, as a wilderness adventure is ought to be, and we’re out here letting our soul loose in the wild without the comforts of home.  Out here in the dessert of a Lenten journey, not even the scriptures give us much comfort, nothing here about a soothing God, or Jesus as a great comforter, or even angels who will wipe you brow and feed you honey. 

Since Lent, as a season, is designed to make us remember that all of us are dependent on God and God alone to get us through our life, the scriptures leave us with little else for the imagination to chew on.  It’s one thing to attribute the good things that happen in our lives to God, like when the traffic lights all turn green on our way to an important meeting, or the bills somehow all are miraculously paid even in a tight fiscal year.  But when things turn south, is that God’s doing too?  What about the bad stuff? Is our discomfort now because of God?  Is our suffering some sort of divine punishment?  If we had been better behaved before, would things be better now?

It’s a good question, even a theological one, because it admits that there are consequences to our actions.  If I had eaten better when I was younger, would I have a heart condition now, if I had stayed in better shape, would I have to...

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At 6:00 EST, 3:00 PST, the 44th Super Bowl begins. And 5 minutes before that, the Colts team will bow their heads to pray, their team molded by Tony Dungy and now coached by Jim Caldwell, two devout and openly Christian men. The coaches don’t hide their faith in interviews, don’t hide their faith from the players, don’t require it of the people who play on their teams, but they do make faith a part of their ethics for coaching. Which means that they try to coach in such a way that players get to lead real lives, make time for family, and understand the stresses that the game puts on the players.

The faith of the Colts coaches and some players has had a lot of attention, especially by Christian television and news teams. Even though the Colt’s coaches have said repeatedly that they don’t prostelytize, and don’t speak about their faith to convince anyone of anything, they are Christian and so speaking faith is just a part of who they are -- it’s been mostly conservative news and media sources that have covered the role that faith plays in this team.

Now wait a minute. Only conservatives speak about their faith?

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Today’s reflection on our text is the 3rd part in a series of sermons to prepare us for our congregational retreat starting the week after next.  These sermons are intended to start a conversation and prime the pump for our own reflections on what God is doing in our congregation and how God is moving among us, shaping us, and to what end, and for what purpose.  The lectionary texts from the 12 and 13th chapters of Paul’s first letter to Corinthians provided the perfect chance for this reflection.  In the first sermon we talked about how spiritual gifts are given by God so that a church can participate in God’s mission in the world.  Paul led us straight from a conversation about spiritual gifts into a passage about the body of Christ, and in last week’s sermon we discussed how the body of Christ are the people who are on mission with God and yoked to God, committed to God’s purposes, moving as a Body with Christ.  Today, Paul takes us straight into the a beautiful passage about love.  Why love?  If I can pull a line from Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?”

How does love fit in to all of this?  This is a passage about love!  And probably the most popular scripture to use at a wedding.  Back in December I performed a wedding for a lovely young couple. I met with the bride and the groom before the wedding and asked if there was a scripture that they would like for me to use.  They admitted they weren’t too familiar with the scriptures, so I turned to 1 Corinthians 13 and read them this passage that we’d heard today.  Love is patient, love is kind, love is boastful or envious or rude.  How does that sound, I said.  Have you heard this before?  No, they said, they’d never heard it before, but they thought it sounded really nice on a day when two people were joining themselves forever in love and in commitment to love.  So we used it. 

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Today’s sermon is the second in a series to get us prepared for the congregational retreat we are going on in a few weeks.  The point of this series is to start a conversation on what the church is, why it matters, and where it is going.  I am promising you that I will be honest with you about what I see happening and try to be as clear about what I can articulate, so that we can engage in this conversation together.  This is not the ending point, or definition, but rather a beginning point for us to be honestly engaged and brave with each other about our church and where we see God working in our church.

Last week, Paul told us that there were many spiritual gifts and that these spiritual gifts have been given by God.  In my sermon last week, I said that spiritual gifts were given by God for the church during times of transformation and great change.  Paul was living and doing ministry in an era where the religious ideals and principles of both Roman and Judaism worlds were being remade, reinvented, and transformed, because of the life and ministry of Jesus.  People from two different cultures changed their religious thinking, practices, and ideals because they had experienced God’s love in Jesus and saw it in his life and ministry and death and resurrection. 

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For the next couple of weeks we are going to walk with Paul through a couple of famous chapters in the first of Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth.  I thought that this little 3 week excursion would be a good trip for us and give us a chance to reflect on what a church is, how it functions, and what its purposes are.  Today’s text is on spiritual gifts and the role that members of a church body have with each other.  Next week we continue with Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ, which is his favorite description for how a church functions with each other and relates to Christ.  Lastly, we’ll read together a chapter on love, you’ll be familiar with it:  love is patient love is kind.  Which is not just a thing to read at weddings, but is rather Paul’s description for the nature of church and purpose of the church.  It’s no coincidence that Paul ties these three together:  spiritual gifts of members, the body of Christ, and the function of love.  These are his descriptions of a church, what a church does, how church members relate to each other, and why a church matters.  So, we’ll be reflecting with Paul on these three attributes for the next 3 weeks, to help prime the pump, so-to-speak for our congregational retreat which follows just after we’ve finished with this series.

I’ll be using Paul to dialogue with him on what a church is and how a church functions and what the purpose of a church is about, and hopefully my reflections will provide some method for us to begin thinking about these ideas together as a congregation before we dialogue about them together at our retreat.  I am not going to try to make this a complete thesis on the nature of church, but rather to share with you some of my emerging ideas on what church is becoming in the 21st century and give us a conversation that we can all be a part of, whether you can go to the retreat or not.

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