I Corinthians 3: 5-9

Our place in time

I know you waited in suspense. Would it happen? Would Tom Brady win his fifth Super Bowl trophy?  Could it happen that the man who already has everything got some more?  Okay, you didn’t care either. You have to give to him and his coach for a total commitment to quality and preparation. At the ceremony Brady celebrated with such passion that he looked like a man who had just won the lotto after forty years of trying.  How you interpreted his response to his victory depends on your perspective.  Perhaps he felt he had now truly surpassed his hero John Montana as well as Terry Bradshaw. Perhaps he felt vindicated because he had been suspended earlier this year because of underinflated balls and still won. Or perhaps he is one of those people who always have to win. Or maybe it’s all of the above. I can just say that it really bored me stiff to football. After the concussion reports and with all the commercials after every kick and run, I think this may add to the demise of football.  When is enough enough for the Patriots?  Everyone plays their hearts out and the Patriots win. Let’s skip the next season and go straight to the fourth quarter of the Superbowl. I think maybe we can say God does not care about equality in sports: here’s a statistic for you.  Throughout sports history, when you count championships in major sports, Boston: 37, Atlanta 1.  This must not sit well in the heart of Dixie.

We are a nation of teams. Sports teams, political teams, religious teams.  We tend to be true to these teams.  The reason is because our identity and self-esteem get wrapped up with those teams.  Which fan is objective about the calls of referees?  If our team does well, we are worth more in our own eyes.  Who wants to wear the jersey of the team that has never made the Superbowl. In Corinth people are picking teams and they are picking leaders.  Paul has to play referee, even though he is the leader of one of the teams they are choosing.  We have talked about today’s Bible passage where Paul is referring to his relationship with the congregation at Corinth. Paul has not spent that much time with this diverse community of new Christians and is spreading himself pretty thinly across the whole of the northern Mediterranean.  He talks more to his followers as if they were children. Paul has pulled their hair out over the behavior of their people.

Paul has to deflect his congregation away from the competing teams and their leaders.  His wisdom really shines through. He turns himself and the other man, Apollos, into joint leaders of the same team: ”I sowed and Apollos watered.” It is the same ministry with different moments. It is not about who gets the trophy or the credit. “Only God makes things grow,” says Paul.

I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of times during my life when I wanted people to admire me.  And we do things to get that result.  But as you get older, you realize that the people who might have admired you won’t recognize you on the street ten years later or have forgotten completely who you are.  Friends, you and I do so much to please the people in our lives: our parents, our siblings, our teachers, our schoolmates, our colleagues, our college friends.  So much effort is put into proving that we are smart, kind cool and lovable.  We all have awards that would have been nice to get, but I am learning that what we need to be after is a sense of peace.  With sense of peace I mean that we slowly become comfortable with our contribution to the world, the feeling that we do not say wow (in a positive way that is) when we look in the mirror in the morning (who does anyway?), but that we are comfortable with the person behind that aging face. Now that is not easy to achieve and it takes a lifetime, but I think that is what we should be after.

I think this is partly what Paul is trying to tell the people in Corinth in his letter: It is not whether you are on the winning team and it is not whether you get the credit for the endeavor, it is whether you are playing your role in God’s work on earth.  That puts things into perspective.  I truly hope Tom Brady has a sense of peace after his fifth trophy that he did not have after his fourth and I hope all the sportsmen and women are at peace with never having won anything that made the news.  For that feeling is more important than all the accolades we pick up along the way.  Friends, whenever we are not in touch with that experience of peace, may we find what it would take to get it.   May God give us wisdom.