From Corinth to Clemson - Lessons in Integrity
On Tuesday, February 11, it was my privilege to travel to Clemson University to teach the Tigers in the Word student Bible study. They extended wonderful hospitality to a priest coming up from Gamecock country, and I am especially grateful to Carter Senf, student president of Tigers in the Word, and their faculty advisor Dr. William McCoy for their gracious welcome. For my Dispatch today, I’d like to share the message I presented up in Clemson.
I have been asked to speak this evening on the question “What does it mean to have integrity in ministry?” As a man always keenly aware of my own many faults and shortcomings both in my life and my work, I must admit this question leaves me a little wary of stepping into a trap. But trusting that God’s grace more than covers those things of which my conscience is afraid, and trusting that y’all do not somehow have a blooper reel documenting all of my biggest mistakes and failures cued up and ready to play the moment I finish speaking, I hope you will allow me to offer, humbly, a few thoughts on this important topic.
My desire is to explore the question of integrity in ministry in the life of one key leader in the early Church: Paul the Apostle, who was born Saul of Tarsus. In particular, I’d like for us to see what lessons for integrity in ministry can be gleaned from Paul’s continued engagement with the Christian community in Corinth. Paul’s record of this engagement is preserved for us in the two letters now enshrined in the New Testament as the First and Second Epistles to the Corinthians. A few passages from First Corinthians will be our texts for this evening.
But first, let’s refresh our memory of who Paul was, and what sort of place Corinth was. Saul of Tarsus first appears in the biblical and historical record in the Acts of the Apostles, the follow-up volume to Saint Luke the Evangelist’s account of the birth, life, ministry, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Luke’s Gospel tells the good news of what God has done in Christ, the Acts of the Apostles tells of how the early Church carried that good news, by the power of the Holy Spirit, across the Mediterranean world.
In this great drama of missionary expansion, Saul of Tarsus first steps onto the stage as a villain. He is the chief antagonist of the early Christians, and a principal persecutor of the Church. What motivates his animosity? We know from both Luke’s description in Acts and from his own self-disclosure in his surviving correspondence that Saul is a devoted Pharisee, a learned and pious Jew zealous for the Law of Moses, the sacred Scriptures, and the traditions of his people. He is also a Roman citizen mindful of all the attendant rights and dignities conferred with that status. For a man like Saul, the assertion that a Galilean carpenter-turned-itinerant preacher executed through the disgraceful and disgracing means of crucifixion as a rebel against Roman authority and for blasphemous transgressions of the Jewish law has now been raised from the dead and thus revealed to be the Messiah–the anointed Savior of the Jewish people–is not simply offensive and absurd. This message is infuriating. It is foulest heresy. It must be stopped.
And seek to stop it he does. When Luke in Acts tells of the stoning of Saint Stephen, the first Christian to be martyred–that is to say, to witness to his faith in Jesus through the shedding of his own blood–he tells us plainly that Saul guards the laid-aside coats of those who carry out this lynching, and approves of their actions. Saul quickly becomes a figure of terror and dread throughout the Church, “breathing threats and murder” against Christians and roaming far and wide to round them up and bring them in chains to face charges before Jewish religious tribunals.
His roaming takes Saul as far as Damascus, toward which he travels carrying authorization from the High Priest to drag back to Jerusalem any followers of “the Way” of Jesus. But something happens on the road to Damascus. A blinding brightness suddenly overwhelms Saul of Tarsus, and a voice asks him “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” When Saul meekly inquires “Who are you, Lord?” the voice responds, astonishingly, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” When Saul rises from the ground–for where else could one be through such an encounter but crumpled to the ground?!–he is blind. His traveling companions, who hear the voice but see no visions, escort him into Damascus. For three days, Saul remains in utter darkness taking neither food or water…rather like a dead man in a tomb.
But on the third day, a member of the Church makes bold to come and pray over this fearsome enemy of his faith. A man named Ananias obeys the call of Christ to go to Saul, and restores his sight through the invocation of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. The scales fall from Saul’s eyes, he rises and is baptized, and the Church’s greatest persecutor is on the path to becoming the Church’s greatest proponent.
In an ironic twist delightfully demonstrating the divine sense of humor, Saul the pious and zealous Jew becomes Paul the Apostle–“one who is sent”–to the Gentiles, or non-Jewish peoples. He begins to travel across the Mediterranean world proclaiming 1) that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Messiah of the Jewish people, 2) that he was indeed crucified and has been raised from the dead, and 3) that this is triumphant, transformative news not only for Jews but for Gentiles also.
Paul’s difficult and dangerous travels around the Mediterranean take him first through Asia Minor–what we today call Turkey–then into Greece and Macedonia, and finally to the city at the center of the known world: Rome itself. In Rome, Paul joins Stephen and the dozens of others who have given their lives for the Gospel and is himself martyred, probably around 65 A.D.
This, then, is Paul. But what of Corinth? This Greek city lies on the narrow isthmus separating the Peloponnesian peninsula from the rest of mainland Greece. The strategic advantage of this location made Corinth significant both economically and militarily. Indeed, it was due to that latter significance that the Battle of Corinth proved decisive for the Roman conquest of Greece in the middle of the second century B.C. The Greek city was completely destroyed in this conflict, and a new, Roman Corinth was founded on the site and given as a reward to veterans from the Roman legions.
While Roman military might may have subjugated the Greeks politically, Greek language and customs conquered the Roman empire culturally. Koine Greek became the common language of the Roman world. Greek ideas and philosophy spread across the Roman Empire, particularly in theological and metaphysical speculations. And Greek city-states, preserving as they did their distinctive local character within the larger Roman network of travel and commerce, offered a varied and fruitful mission field for an educated and energetic man like Paul.
Reestablished by retired Roman soldiers and straddling critical economic crossroads, Corinth was a city obsessed with status, wealth, power, and the various pagan religious cultic practices promising those things. Paul would have entered a city of sharp-elbowed strivers seeking to establish their place in the world over and against the people around them. The impression we receive from Paul’s Corinthian correspondence and from other contemporary accounts is that Corinthians were fractious, factious, boisterous, and shrewd–long on savvy and worldly-wiseness, short on humility and compassion.
Though Paul had success in Corinth proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and gathering a community of believers to his message, the Church in Corinth clearly struggled to separate its ways of thinking and acting from the common culture in which it existed. Divisions had arisen in the Church based on their apparently status-seeking attachment to different teachers and figures. Personal lives were marred by particularly outrageous expressions of sexual immorality, whether related to pagan cult rituals or even, scandalously, incest. Communal life was fragmented by disputes both philosophical and practical, implicating everything from their ethical and theological commitments to their table manners. To top it off, congregational worship services had devolved into self-aggrandizing cacophony contests where a few folks got drunk on the communion wine before others even had a chance to get a bite of bread. The Corinthians’ difficulties not only threatened the foundation that Paul had established in the city–they threatened the credibility of his entire ministry.
Paul’s response to this crisis in his First Epistle to the Corinthians gives us an extraordinary example of ministry exercised with integrity–that is to say, ministry exercised in a way that is fundamentally consistent with the core of his proclamation. Paul begins by directly addressing the deep rot at the heart of the Corinthian community: their factions.
I appeal to you, brothers, by the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? … For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the Gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Paul confronts the problem of Corinthian divisions, rooted as they are in pride and pretension. The fact that they have separated into factions shows that the Corinthians continue to think and act in the sharp-elbowed ways of their world. The cross of Christ calls them to a way of being and living that looks like complete foolishness to their culture–indeed, to every merely human culture. Paul calls them out of their useless struggling and striving into the unity found in Christ crucified. A leader ministering with integrity must keep first things first.
In calling them out of their worldly thinking into a singular focus on Christ, Paul necessarily takes the focus off of himself. This requires humility, and a willingness to acknowledge the valuable contributions of the other preachers and teachers that some of the Corinthians are now putting forward as rivals to Paul in his work.
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants or he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
Paul’s humility is a direct manifestation of that folly of the cross to which he first recalled the Corinthians. An ego-driven human teacher seeking to build up a following cannot acknowledge either the significance of the contributions of others or the ultimate insignificance of his own work. Paul does both, because the manner in which he exercises his ministry is consistent with the basic message of the cross itself. The ways of God make no sense to a world of power and domination. But God has overcome those ways in the most unexpected way: by offering himself in love to the very worst that those ways can muster, and rising triumphant over their broken power through the resurrection of Jesus.
The power of that resurrection transforms every aspect of human life for Paul. Sexual ethics are transformed, because our bodies are no longer our own to do with as we please, but rather have become temples of the Spirit of the Living God. Legal ethics are transformed, because we who will one day be called to judge angels ought not to drag our brothers and sisters before courts to settle paltry, petty disputes. The ethics of eating and drinking are transformed, because we who are perfectly free to eat and drink anything in the knowledge that God has made everything are also perfectly bound to consider the implications of our actions–even that most basic animal action of nourishing our physical bodies–for the consciences and faith of the people around us.
Love becomes, for Paul, the only thing that matters and the only thing that abides. By love, of course, he does not mean the sickly saccharine feeling we will celebrate on Valentine’s Day with chocolate and flowers and fancy dinners and stupid cards. He means that self-giving love by which Christ died and rose. He means the love that sacrifices all claims to privilege and precedence for the sake of the well-being of the people depending on us. He means the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This love never ends.
And this is the most essential element of Paul’s integrity in ministry. It is this love that keeps him wrestling–through many more than two letters, though only two survive for us in holy Scripture–with the difficult and disputatious Christians in Corinth. It is this love that keeps him from simply washing his hands of them. It is this love that keeps him motivated to call them out of their errors and into deeper unity and maturity in Christ. It is this love that, with faith and hope, abides–but the greatest of these is love.
May the Lord bless you in the ministry to which he has called you, whatever your field of study and service. May he grant you the integrity–the essential wholeness of word and deed–that keeps first things first, confronts problems head on, humbles you, implicates every aspect of your life in his service, and crowns all your endeavors in love.