A few minutes ago we heard our lector say, “A reading from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.” As if we all knew who Paul was. So: who was Paul? 

We know about Paul from his letters, preserved by the first Christians until they became part of the New Testament – but be careful; Paul was so important that other people wrote letters in his name, saying things they wished he had said, and some of those made it into the Bible too. In addition to his letters, we know about Paul from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a short history of the first decades of Christianity written by the same person as the Gospel of Luke. The details don’t always line up, but enough matches that scholars think we can take Acts as telling us more about Paul’s life and work.  

Paul was probably born a few years after Jesus, in the city of Tarsus, in Turkey. His family were observant Jews. Paul is also Roman citizen, through his parents, which suggests that at some point his family had been favored by a Roman emperor and granted citizenship, conferring some degree of status. 

I learned in Sunday school that Paul changed his name from Saul to Paul when he became a Christian, but scholars think it’s more likely that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul or Paulus was his Roman name – which he started using more regularly when he became an itinerant Christian missionary. His first language was probably Aramaic, a linguistic cousin of Hebrew that Jesus and his disciples also spoke; but Paul was also fluent in Koine Greek, the language used across the Roman Empire at the time. 

Paul was educated; as a young man he was sent to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel, a great teacher of Jewish law. He also seems to have been familiar with the Greek school of thought known as Stoicism, which he draws on in some of his teaching, especially in trying to explain Christianity to non-Jewish audiences. 

But despite his education Paul doesn’t seem to wanted to become a rabbi or scholar of the Torah. There are hints that he may have joined the family trade as a leather-worker and tent-maker…. until the spread of the Christian movement, after Jesus’ death and resurrection around the year 33 AD, changed everything. 

Paul never met Jesus during his earthly life. He wasn’t a disciple, one of the group that followed Jesus around and listened to his teachings. In fact, Paul and his family were Pharisees – members of a reform movement within Judaism that wanted to call Jews back to more faithfully following the teachings of the Torah.

As we see in the Gospels, the Pharisees were interested in Jesus; there was some overlap in their hopes and concerns. But they didn’t like how cavalier Jesus could be about following the commandments. And once Jesus was crucified, and then his followers started telling everybody he had risen from the dead and saying that he was God – well, that was a big issue for Pharisees. Judaism holds a deep, fundamental commitment to the one-ness of God; you don’t just add on bonus extra gods willy-nilly, and the idea that the One God could somehow show up in some guy was not acceptable to many. 

That brings us to the year 35 or 36. Paul – Saul – is a zealous Pharisee, maybe 30 years old. Christianity is spreading fast, and Jewish leaders in Jerusalem are troubled. A young preacher named Stephen is arrested and brought before the Council. He accuses them of opposing God and misunderstanding their own scriptures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is condemned to death for heresy – speaking falsely about God. The punishment is stoning: a mob all throws rocks at him until he’s dead. But first, some people take off their outer robes, so they won’t get bloody, and lay them at the feet of this nice young man Saul to look after. Acts 8 tells us, with chilling simplicity: Saul approved of their killing him. In fact, Saul approves of it so much that he gets permission from the High Priest to go to another city, Damascus, and round up Christians there. Acts describes Saul as “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” But it’s on that fateful journey, on the road to Damascus, that everything changes. Acts 9 tells us, “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.””

There’s more to the story; but what matters is that Saul, very suddenly and very completely, becomes a follower of Jesus. And not just a follower – but a leader: he begins to travel and teach, and soon is founding new Christian communities himself. Now, when I say, “founding churches,” you might picture someone laying a cornerstone. But for the first decades of Christianity, churches were groups of people who met in somebody’s home. Christian architecture, per se, doesn’t come along for a while yet. So: Paul is gathering new believers in various places, to become a local body that worships and learns and serves together. 

Within a couple of years of his conversion, Paul goes to meet with the leaders of the early church, Peter and James, in Jerusalem, and gets permission from them to preach Christ among Gentiles – non-Jews – a new frontier. He founds the church in Corinth sometime in the mid to late 40s.

Corinth was – and is – a Greek city, west of Athens. Fun fact: Corinth is also built on an isthmus! In Ancient Corinth, they used to have Isthmian Games every other year, and the winner would be honored with a crown of celery! 

So: In this letter, Paul is writing to a church he founded, that is struggling and conflicted. He probably wrote this letter in the mid-50s, possibly while staying in Ephesus. This wasn’t really his first letter to the Corinthians, it’s just the first one we still have. Scholars think he’d written to them about some of these issues already, and there was pretty clearly another letter – a very angry letter – sent between the letters we know as First and Second Corinthians. 

We’ve heard the first two chapters on previous Sundays, but I squeezed them into the Sunday Supplement today too. Let’s look briefly at what’s going on here. 

Paul begins – as he usually does – with warm greetings, gratitude, and praise. He reminds them that they’re called, blessed, and beloved. And then… he gets to the first issue he wants to raise. He’s heard that there’s some infighting among them – seems like his friend Chloe may have sent him a letter about it. Folks in the church in Corinth are splitting into factions, based on loyalty to Paul or to Apollos. We don’t know a lot about Apollos; this letter is one of the main sources. Like Paul, he seems to have been someone who became a Christian early on, and started traveling around to preach and teach. Paul and Apollos were probably not exactly chummy, but they seem to have had a cordial relationship; at the very end of this letter, Paul says that he urged Apollos to visit Corinth, but that Apollos was unwilling to go. Maybe Apollos felt that visiting Corinth just then would only reawaken the factionalism; maybe Apollos just didn’t care to take orders from Paul. But I do think Paul’s issue is more with the Corinthians’ behavior than with Apollos himself. 

In chapter 1 it sounds briefly like there are not two, but four factions: Paul writes, “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’

But some scholars suggest that this is just a kind of escalation: Paul was operating under the authority of Cephas/Peter, head of the church, so what we’re really hearing is: “I belong to Paul!” “I belong to Apollos!” “Well, PAUL was appointed by CEPHAS!” “Well, Apollos was appointed by CHRIST!” It’s pretty clear elsewhere that two groups, loyal to Paul and Apollos respectively, are the presenting issue here. 

What does Paul have to say about it? Well, first, that he doesn’t want disciples. He doesn’t want anybody claiming primary loyalty to him. That’s the context for the wonderful bit where he’s trying to remember how many Corinthians he baptized! But his point is that his teaching and ministry point towards Christ, not himself. 

Second, he has a lot to say in chapters 1 and 2 about wisdom and foolishness. To some extent, that was just a core preaching point for early Christians – and perhaps still today. It’s pretty wild to preach a Messiah, a Savior, who was executed by the state; so at some level you just have to lean into foolishness. 

In this letter, Paul’s emphasis on this theme may also have been a response to Greek traditions of rhetoric, philosophy, and public argumentation that may have been part of the ambient culture in Corinth – perhaps why Paul mentions debaters and scholars. Paul is saying: Look, our teaching is not going to meet the Greek rhetorical standard, but that’s not because we’re stupid or wrong; it’s because something different, something paradoxical and impossible and holy, is at stake here. 

I think the foolishness and wisdom theme here is also Paul’s slightly grumpy response to unfavorable comparisons between himself and Apollos. Paul is, at times, a powerfully eloquent writer, but by his own testimony he was not an especially powerful speaker. Here we see him trying to make that a virtue. 

He says that he doesn’t proclaim the Gospel with “eloquent wisdom” – so that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power! A few verses later, he says, “My speech and my proclamation were made not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

There’s a definitely a hint here that Apollos is a more compelling preacher than Paul, and that that’s part of why some folks in Corinth want to be on Apollos’ team. Paul has little patience with it. In today’s text, Paul offers them a couple of metaphors: Look, you’re like a field or a garden. I planted the seeds, Apollos is watering you, but we’re just servants; it’s God who’s helping you grow. Or think of a building: I laid the foundation, and Apollos is building on it. Paul may be casting a little shade here when he says that the other people building on his foundation may be building with “gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw”… it doesn’t really matter, because ultimately God will test the quality of each one’s work. The point is – Paul tries to wrap up this portion of the letter – that you shouldn’t be so focused on human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

First Corinthians is long. We read bits of it in Epiphany every year, which… is not the easiest way to take in its overall message? If you sit down to read the whole letter – it’s not that long – you’ll find that Paul is really just warming up, in these first three chapters. 

There’s sexual immorality, and legal wrangling, court, and misbehaving at Eucharistic meals, and it’s all a total mess. The factionalism is the tip of the iceberg, to be honest. 

All right. So what? This would be great preaching material for a congregation split by rivalries. We’re not that congregation. So what is there here to carry away?

I’ll tell you what I carry away. First, Paul is a person. That may seem obvious, but it really staggers me how much we can get to know him, his voice, his opinions, his insecurities and struggles, his faith, when we read his letters. That bit in chapter 1 where he can’t remember who he’s baptized is very funny, but it’s also so real; I’ve been the pastor wracking my brains to try to remember who to thank after a big event, or something! Paul was real. His work, his struggles, his love: Real, and real to us, when we spend time in his presence by reading the letters he wrote with so much care and so much urgency. A sibling in faith, across  2000 years.

Second: Paul’s faith undergirds my faith. Sometimes we have a vague sense that the church’s ideas about Jesus got more grandiose and elaborate through time. That if we went back to the very beginning, we’d find a simple man preaching kindness, and that it wasn’t until later that people with their own motives started saying he was God and forming a religion around him. 

Paul’s letters are some of the earliest texts in the Bible. The Gospels draw on earlier sources, but Mark’s Gospel was probably written down in the mid-60s, and the other three were written in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. First Thessalonians, probably the earliest of Paul’s letters preserved in the Bible, was likely written around the year 49 – only 15 or 16 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Christianity as a movement was just getting its learner’s permit. 

And what Paul shows us (among other sources!) is that from more or less the very start, Christians felt that in Jesus they had encountered God in a new way, a way that changed their lives and imaginations and also, somehow, changed the very fabric of reality. The church’s theological language doesn’t evolve later as a justification for hierarchy and power, but as an effort to describe what people experienced in Jesus, right from the start. 

Paul’s faith shines through his letters – a profound, costly faith in Jesus Christ and him crucified, at a time when it was not at all clear that this whole Christianity thing was going to go anywhere. The stakes were so much higher for him than they’ve ever been for me. And he’s all in, heart, soul, life. A faith like that is a bold and hopeful influence on my own faith. 

Third: God can use us even when we’re really messing up. 

Things in the church in Corinth were bad, and got worse. A few decades later there’s a letter from Clement, the fourth Bishop of Rome, rebuking the Corinthians for having fired some bishops; apparently it continued to be a church in conflict! I’ve had friends pastor churches like this, where suspicion and anger and division just seem to be in the DNA of the place. It’s sad and awful. 

It’s not that it doesn’t matter that this church couldn’t get its act together. I’m sure people were wounded and pushed away; I’m sure opportunities to preach grace were lost. I’m sure, too, because grace is resilient, that lives were changed for the better, even amidst the bitter brokenness of the church in Corinth. 

And: sometimes in struggle and conflict, we get clearer about what we stand for. We can also 100% get overly focused on the details, and that’s frustrating and exhausting. But sometimes, too, we manage to dig down and articulate what’s important. What feels like it’s at stake, and why it matters to us so much. 

Because Chloe’s people wrote to Paul, and then Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, and somebody in the church kept this letter, some amazing things have been passed down to us. 

Because the Corinthians were confused about who they belong to, we have Paul telling them that everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Because the Corinthians were messing up their practice of shared holy meals, we have the earliest description of the Eucharist, in chapter 11 – “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” And so on. A text that tells us that Christians have been doing what we do every Sunday for 2000 years. 

Because the Corinthians were doing a lousy job loving each other, we have one of the most famous and beloved passages in Scripture: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude… it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” First Corinthians chapter 13.  

The apostle Paul, in all his humanity, and from the depths of his utter faith in Christ crucified, speaks across twenty centuries to remind us who we are, and whose we are, and how to try to treat one another. Thanks be to God. Amen.