Sermons

Digging into 1 Corinthians 

Roughly once a month, including this morning, we host a Family Eucharist. And if you’ve attended that service, you may know that Caleb Nelson-Amaker, our Director of Youth and Family Ministry, often starts his children’s homily like this: “When we read a story from the Bible, I often think to myself, ‘That was a lot!’ And Caleb saying, “That was a lot,” is what came to mind when reading today’s passage from 1 Corinthians because there is so much going on. 

When we read a passage like this, it’s easy to hear it at face value and let it wash over us. Maybe a word or two will stick, but maybe not much. Maybe some questions arise. What did this phrase or that word really mean? And so I think with this text, there are so many allusions and so much going on that it’s worth really going deep into the text itself. So, today, I want to take the time to delve into it. Today, we’ll do some exegesis and some interpretation. 

So, let’s start here: where does this passage come from? 

This passage is from the 10th chapter of what we call 1st Corinthians. What we mean by that is that it’s one of two extant letters of the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth. We have one other letter, II Corinthians, but there may have been other letters that Paul wrote to this community that did not survive to become part of what we now call the Bible. So, Paul’s original intention was to address the Christ-followers who had gathered to form a community of the early church. This letter was written just 20-25 years after the death and resurrection of Christ. In this early period, what we now call Christianity was just taking shape and was not yet totally distinguishable from Judaism. That becomes a really important point when we look at this passage, which has so many references to Hebrew scripture. I also want to mention that much of my own understanding of this passage is informed by the Jewish Annotated New Testament. 

Now that we have the overview let’s look at the text. Paul starts chapter 10 with a warning, referring explicitly back to the events of Exodus, when God led Moses and his people, who had been slaves in Egypt, through the Red Sea, and into freedom. We didn’t read it this morning, but the other text assigned for today is Moses and the Burning Bush, so we get the book ends of the beginning of Moses’s story and then this, which refers to its ending. I love it when the lectionary does something cool like that.

So Paul is telling this group of Christ followers in Corinth, remember our ancestors, who did all these things. They were under the cloud, and you remember from the Exodus story that God appears as a cloud. And God leads them through the sea, fleeing from the Egyptians. Paul here interprets that as a kind of baptism. The spiritual food he mentions is the manna from heaven that God provides to the people, and the spiritual drink is the water that Moses draws from the rock. Already, the passage makes a little more sense with those pieces filled in. 

And then, quite jarringly, we get this line: “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.” And if you stop there in the reading, it’s unclear where the people went wrong. Luckily, the next section gives context. Paul writes, “Do not become idolaters as some of them did.” This refers to the golden calf, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the law, and the people strayed and began worshipping idols. References to sexual immorality and revelry are also about the concern that those activities are linked to other gods, the aforementioned idols. This line about putting God to the test and being destroyed by serpents refers to Numbers 21, when the people, tired of wandering in the desert, turn against God and against Moses. And in that story, God sends serpents, and many people die. Makes sense that Paul would be warning people against that one. The Bible can be quite disconcerting. 

Okay, that was a lot of connecting. It’s important to remember that the Bible is always in dialog with itself, and a little study can help illuminate the text. You can see that just these 13 verses contain so many references to previous events. And then, at the end of all this dense description, we get three incredible lines of payoff, which is where I want us to spend the rest of our time today. 

First, this line: “And so, if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” Paul uses the Israelites who crossed the Red Sea as a foil for his audience, the church at Corinth. Make sure that you do not also fall into idolatry, he warns. In our world of polarization and online performance, we are so infrequently asked to examine our own conscience and our own actions. But one place that does happen is here in the season of Lent. We are asked in the invitation to a Holy Lent to engage in self-reflection, to make sure we do not fall, and to hope that all Christians do the same. What an appropriate message for this season. Paul essentially says, “Check yourself.” And what of these idols? We aren’t too likely to make a golden calf in 2025, but the worship of wealth is very much alive.

The second payoff line is this: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.” Part of the training for priests is to work as a hospital chaplain for a summer, a program that I completed at the University of Virginia Hospital in 2022. When I entered the program, I already had a lot of experience in hospitals because of various family members with illnesses, but especially because of my mom’s lung transplant in 2017. And if you’re not familiar with a heart or lung transplant, they are about the most complex procedure you can imagine. And when it happened, I was 30 years old, and none of my friends were yet dealing with anything similar. I thought this was somehow just happening to me. But working as a chaplain in the hospital a few years later, I learned how wrong I was. Every person there had a story, someone they loved who was also going through it. The tenderness, the fear, the hope. Those are universal human experiences. That’s why deep sharing is so transformative. When we tell the stories of our lives and allow ourselves to be seen, we discover that we are not alone and that nothing that has overtaken us is not common to everyone. 

Finally, Paul writes, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing, he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” Here, at the end of this Corinthians passage, we get a line that is often misstated, such as, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” It’s the kind of thing that might be written on a greeting card or said at a funeral reception. And I think we use these phrases as a kind of shield to deflect the very real pain and brokenness of a situation and assure ourselves that everything will be okay. But I think when you compare it to the text of what Paul wrote, it strikes me that in one version, God is the author of our pain, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” On the other hand, God is not the author of the pain but rather the author of salvation. “He will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” There is real hope in that that we need to face the perils of our own day. 

My prayer for us today is this: That God will provide the way out, the way through. God is with us. And yes, that is a lot, and it is enough.

Amen.