There is good news here for your hearer, good news of belonging.
Epiphany 3 features the Wonderful Counselor fulfilling prophecy, preaching the Kingdom, calling His disciples, and engaging His Galilean healing ministry across the Old Testament and Gospel readings. The epistle pericope, on the other hand, continues the study of the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, calling out the schismatics of Corinth. This is the beginning of the Apostle’s body-talk, of which 1 Corinthians is chock-full. Paul corrects the schismatic attitude and strife he knows about from the report of Chloe’s people (1 Corinthians 1:11) by appealing to the unity of Christ (He is not divided; 1:13) before appealing to the logic of the name into which these Corinthian saints were baptized in order to underscore their unity.
There is something else grammatically cool about this point, connected to 1 Corinthians 1:12, which a glance at an English translation alone might obscure. So, let us take just a moment and dust off our Greek again. Remember what the genitive case of the noun does? It governs a host of noun-noun relationships, among which is possession (the equivalent of our “’s” in English usage). The Greek of this New Testament (NT) verse reads egō men eimi Paulou, egō de Apollō, and so on, which could be rendered: “I am Paul’s, I am Apollos’s,” and the like. The English Standard Version (ESV) and New International Version (NIV) at 1:12 render the report Paul hears as, “I follow Paul, I follow Apollos,” and the rest. The King James Version (KJV) and New American Standard Bible (NASB) are equally clunky as they get at the genitive with the word “of” rendering it, “I am of Paul, I am of Apollos,” and so on. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), I think, hits the nail on the head, both fluently rendering first century Greek into contemporary English, and hitting the point that Paul is trying to connect about unity and his appeal to the name into which the Corinthians were baptized: “I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos,” and the rest.
This is because “belonging to” is all about a household of faith. That is how you render household names in Greek, with the simple genitive case ending. The same was true at 1:11 when Paul was talking about “Chloe’s people.” The same naming of an entire household by one name is true still today in our own world when we talk about a family, whether we are keeping up with the Joneses or the Kardashians.
And this is why Paul takes so many sentences and peppers them with so much clever (and frankly funny) rhetoric, to get to the point for his readers and listeners. He wants to underscore that they have all been baptized into one name, and that name is not Paul’s. He did not even baptize anyone (except for a couple; oh yeah, and that guy, oh and that guy; one of the funniest lines in the NT for my money; 1 Corinthians 1:13-16)! Much less did he baptize anyone into the name of Paul!
No, the unity of the Church must rest on their all belonging to the same One, and that One is the One into Whose name they were all baptized: Into the name of Jesus, into the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Belonging to the family means being baptized into the family, means being one body, means being folded into the one body, baptized by the head of that family, the head of that body. It is belonging, in other words, to Christ and Christ alone, all of them, each of them, as one. This unity in mind and judgment (1:10) is the cure for the quarreling (1:11, in the Greek is erides; the plural form of strife, discord) that Paul has had reported to him.
No, the unity of the Church must rest on their all belonging to the same One, and that One is the One into Whose name they were all baptized.
So, whose people are you? Whose people are your hearers? Whose name do they bear? It is salutary to think seriously about the difference between talking about this in the language of “I follow so-and-so” and “I belong to so-and-so,” even with Christ as the so-and-so. Notice that the former is agentive (the human is the subject, running the verb, attracting attention as the doer, the decider, the reason something is happening), whereas the latter is more passive (in the sense that “belonging” to someone is not a transitive, doing-something-to-an-object kind of verb). The former translates along the lines of law. The latter translates along the lines of gospel. Think about this carefully, preacher. Go with gospel on this one, the good news of belonging. In Holy Baptism, your listener has been folded into the body of Christ and now belongs to Christ. They are bought and paid for in a holy ransom, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death. There is good news here for your hearer, good news of belonging.
All that, and we have not yet touched 1 Corinthians 1:17-18, which is really the crown jewel of the pericope. Paul sets out his theme here: Evangelism, proclamation of the good news, and proclamation of the cross of Christ. And a wonky proclamation it is, wobbly and topsy turvy, like the kingdom it plants in this temporal world, where the first are last and the last first, the greatest least and the least greatest. Paul’s words are not fancy. He is no TedTalker, no Dale Carnegie winning friends and influencing people, no polished motivational speaker on the shelf with Tony Robbins or other slick peddlers of wisdom. Paul is no “leader” of a “leadership seminar” or “leadership retreat” with “leadership principles” for “leaders.” His calling as an evangelist is not in wisdom of speech (1:17), lest the cross of Christ be emptied. Here I have found no popular English translation that renders the Greek word kenōthēi at 1:17 sufficiently with just one punchy word. The best try to get at it by supplying what it is emptied of, like ESV, which says “emptied of its power.” I suggest the best way to read Paul here would be: “Lest the cross of Christ be gutted,” depleted, hollowed out, passing into the shadow of obscurity, overshadowed by wise words, by slick speech, and/or by the eloquence of the orator.
Here is one more point to dilate on in your own meditation, preacher. I have formed the habit over my years of preaching of repeating several prayers in preparation for sermon craft and delivery, and one of my constant prayers is, “Not my words, O Lord, but Yours be delivered.” This is an important bit for a person who cares about words, about beauty, about poetry, craft, and art, as well as a devoted and faithful respect for the means of grace and how God works. It is not our power of persuasion that lands the deal. It is not our diction or our learning, our compassion or our attention to detail, any more than how straight our teeth are or the quality of our breath. To be sure, all of these will, in fact, shape how your message is received, so keep flossing and read a book! But the power of salvation, the power of conversion, the power to kill and make alive, the power to change a mind, turn a heart inside out, the power to create faith, is God’s and God’s alone. He is the one who created the world out of nothing (Genesis 1), who calls things that are not as if they are and vice versa (Romans 4:17), and the Holy Spirit does this where and when He will as if by means. He utilizes the means of grace, and that includes using a humble and broken tool like Moses who was slow of speech, like Paul, the chief of sinners, and Balaam’s ass for crying out loud (and if He can talk through an ass, He can certainly talk through you).
Notice, Paul does not dwell here on self-castigation or waste time on special pleading for the non-wisdom of his words. He is articulate, knows how to argue, and employs the tools of the rhetor’s trade to make his points and deliver them convincingly. The final proof in this pericope is the last verse, which is a great climax to this little cutout of scripture. It is a chiasm that resonates with a contrasting parallelism, whose theme is the great reversal: The opposite-game of the Kingdom of Heaven. Not a word of worldly wisdom, but the word of the cross is a joke, foolishness! You have a God who died. This is the kind of God you would worship? It is certainly not high on the list of divine attributes if you poll a random sample for a first century (or twenty first century) survey. But what to the world as it perishes is a dirty joke of history, is to those who are being saved the power of God. This is Kingdom talk, where weakness is power, where suffering is strength, where death is life. And this is all cross talk, which is what your sermon should spotlight most of all if your hearers would also be saved.
1 Corinthians 1:13, 17, and 18 all have clear references to the cross of Christ, to Christ crucified. Connect this with the name into which your hearer was baptized. You can recall the liturgical formula, “Receive the sign of the holy cross both upon your forehead and upon your heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.” Connect that cross-signature to the name that was washed on them in the water of their baptism. Focus on the into of baptism. They were baptized into a name, into a family, into Christ’s death and burial (Romans 6:3), into His resurrection (Romans 6:4), into the body of Christ, the crucified Christ, the risen Christ. And His cross is where the power is (see Romans 1:16-17), the power of salvation. It is the power to live as one body, undivided, the power to survive in a world that would mock, the power to live on after it perishes, because the one who trusts the name of Christ lives with the crucified, dies with the crucified, and will be raised with the crucified. Baptism, crucifixion, and the cross of Christ are intimately linked in this Epiphany 3 epistle, preacher. Deliver the cross to your hearers this week, and you will be sharing with them the power of salvation.
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Additional Resources:
Craft of Preaching-Check out 1517’s resources on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18.
Concordia Theology-Various helps from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, MO to assist you preaching 1 Corinthians 1:10-18.
Lectionary Kick-Start-Check out this fantastic podcast from Craft of Preaching authors Peter Nafzger and David Schmitt as they dig into the texts for this Sunday!
The Pastor’s Workshop-Check out all the great preaching resources from our friends at the Pastor’s Workshop!
