1 Corinthians 1-13

This week we learned with shock of the tragic and unnecessary death of one of our own. I have happy memories of Dave Llewelyn trying to persuade me to go Vegan (I'm already vegetarian) and admired him for all the great changes he'd made in his life. Our church community now has a Dave-shaped hole in it, but maybe by building a more loving and caring community, where every member knows they are needed and valued, we can prevent such heartbreak in future. I dedicated today's Sunday School lesson to Dave.

I presented the lessons for the last two weeks together because the theme of the two weeks was pretty much the same: “Be perfectly joined together” and “Ye are the body of Christ”. Romans has been called Paul's great letter about theology, but 1 Corinthians is Paul's letter about community. In it Paul sets out his vision for what a church community should look like. 

Paul isn’t my favourite scripture writer. He tends to go off topic and ramble a lot (he wasn’t expecting his letters to be analysed by the word for thousands of years) and he tends to be quite heavy-handed. He also has some jarring opinions. 1 Corinthians 11 is about women covering their heads in church and being submissive to men. Ever since I was asked to put a tea towel on my head to attend a church when I was 14 I've bristled at that scripture. Happily, Come, Follow Me makes it clear that it's just  about the fashion of the time. And 1 Corinthians is a lovely epistle, for all Paul's quirks, as evidenced by just how much I seem to have highlighted and made copious notes on in earlier read--throughs.

Remember that the New Testament is not in chronological order. The church at Corinth did not have the gospels, only the Old Testament and word-of-mouth stories about the saviour and His teachings. 1 Corinthians is actually the third earliest of the books in the New Testament, after 1 and 2 Thessalonians. It was written around 53AD, which is only 20 years after the resurrection of the saviour, so there were still people around who had witnessed the saviour's ministry. Remember mobile phones with pull-out aerials and worrying about the millennium bug? That's 20 years ago for us.

1 Corinthians was written in response to a letter from the house of Chloe. We don’t know who Chloe was except that she was probably an influential and important member of the church in Corinth. We don’t have her letter, so we have to guess at its contents based on Paul's response, but in 1:11-15 we learn that she was writing about divisions in the church at Corinth. People were identifying themselves according to who had baptised them (and, accordingly, how long they'd been baptised) - Paul, Apollos, or someone else.

In addition, remember that the church was a mixture of Jews who believed Jesus to be the messiah, and Greeks who had converted to the new "Christianity", and there were some issues as these two cultures learned to relate to each other as brothers and sisters.

So like every church, Corinth struggled with people of different backgrounds and political persuasions struggling to get along; people thinking that they had some sort of status in the church that others didn't; and people who just plain didn't know how to see eye-to-eye with everyone.

Paul starts trying to unite them right away with one of my favourite scriptures ever in 1:2:

"Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours"

1. He reminds them in the first clause that they are just a small part of the larger church - the Corinth branch, if you will. He gives them the bigger picture of the greater church they belong to. "All ... in every place" similarly reminds them that there are other Christians outside Corinth.
2. He turns the focus onto Jesus Christ
3. He reminds them of their obligation to be better; they have been "sanctified" and are "called to be saints"
4. "Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours" reminds them that we all worship the same saviour

He goes on to set out what he expects of them in verse 10 - still right at the beginning of his epistle.

"Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment."

In class we asked how realistic this was. Can we ever really dwell together in perfect harmony? Brother Bleakley pointed out that many of our commandments might also be called "unrealistic" but that we are striving to "be ye perfect". We aim for perfection because. while we might never hit it, attempting to do so stretches us. Setting more "realistic" goals (maybe Paul might have said, "try not to squabble too much") isn't as effective in bringing about real change.

This advert appeared on my Facebook timeline recently. It suggests that our church and ward is a community, a place where people will feel part of a family. Is it? Are we achieving what we are purported to be? Do we have cliques--groups of people who naturally flock together because they have similar interests or personalities (nothing wrong with that) but then make others feel excluded? I like to think not, but we do need to guard against it.

Paul mentions several things in these chapters to endeavour to promote unity in Corinth, and these can help our own wards, branches and churches too.

• In 1 Corinthians 1:1 9-27, and 2:3-4 he talks about the wisdom of God and the foolishness of man. It's a lesson in humility for the saints at Corinth who think they know it all.
• In 1 Corinthians 3:9-17 he uses the metaphor of a building which we are working on together. "For we are labourers together with God." It's a bit of a mixed metaphor, since the building turns out to be ourselves as the temple of the holy spirit, but the point is that we are working together on building something holy.
• 1 Corinthians 10:16-17, 11:23-30 talks about the sacrament, and how taking communion - participating together in a sacred ordinance - brings us closer together as a fellowship of saints. "For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread"
•  As we reach the end of the letter, Paul spells it out more completely. 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 uses the metaphor of a body. "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body." Paul goes further to point out that we all have different spiritual gifts which complement each other, and we are all needed. Several years ago I sat next to a sister in Relief Society who was feeling pretty low. We were discussing this passage, and she told me she felt she was just the "useless little toe". But you know what happens if you lose your little toe? It completely messes up your balance and makes it very difficult to walk. If any in our ward are feeling like this - that they don't belong, that they're not needed, that they're not important - please talk to someone. Talk to me if you don't know who to talk to.
• Finally, the big guns. 1 Corinthians 13 is Paul's treatise on "charity" which is translated as love in every other English translation. We know that "charity is the pure love of Christ" (Moroni 7:47) so this chapter is really talking about a pure, unconditional, forgiving love which we ought to show towards one another. Paul is talking about how we should behave towards one another - being kind, patient, unselfish, rejoicing in the truth. So important is this that he concludes by saying that everything else he had talked about matters not one jot if we don't act with charity, and everything else will pass away and be forgotten. Only love matters.

So as we strive to be a loving and unified church community, 1 Corinthians really is our roadmap. Remain humble, work and build together, take the sacrament together, respect that we all have a part to play and gifts to offer, and love each other without ceasing. 

Two parts we didn't get to in the lesson:

1. The manual suggested we spend a lot of time looking at 1 Corinthians 10:13. There is a lot in this verse, and it's worth studying, but I wanted to note mostly that it's often misunderstood. It says that "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." Note that it says that we will not be tempted more than we can bear. It's often misquoted and thought to mean that we will not be given trials or suffering more than we can bear. Many people suffer problems and struggles which are more than they can bear (I believe Dave was one of them) but when it comes to resisting our own temptations and demons, we'll have heavenly help.
   
2. Finally, 1 Corinthians 10:24 is interesting. It states, "Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth." My dear friend Milena used to tell me that it meant that if you prayed for someone else to get rich then your prayer would be heard, but if you prayed for yourself  to get rich then it wouldn't. So I used to pray all the time for Milena to get rich, because if anyone needed temporal wealth, it was her (she had plenty of spiritual wealth). It turns out that the word translated "wealth" in the King James version is translated "good" in every other English translation. The scripture doesn't refer to money, but is an old-fashioned use of the word and means wellness or benefit. What I found interesting is that in the Joseph Smith translation it is also translated "good". Joseph Smith had no access to other Bible translations, no knowledge of ancient Greek, but through the gift and power of God was also able to clarify the meaning of this verse.