January 25, 2026

Epiphany 3 Year A

I Corinthians 1:10-18

Epiphany, Winnipeg

The Apostle Paul writes a letter to the church in Corinth, a city in southwestern Greece. It was some time around the year 50 CE, and Paul was probably one of the first, if not the first, to preach the gospel in that place. He lived there for a year and a half or so, and by the time he left Corinth there was a good solid community of believers there: The first Christians in that place. They were like a body that worked together; in fact, Paul thought that whole image of the body worked so well that he started to call the church The Body f Christ. When Paul left Corinth, he knew that the body was healthy.

A few years after Paul leaves, though, he gets word from some slaves of his friend Chloe that they’re not getting along so well in Corinth. Over the years they’ve had a few different pastors and teachers, and it seems that people are dividing along the lines of loyalty to this teacher or that teacher. So some people say, “I belong to Apollos,” that pastor we had after Paul, and some say, “I’m a student of Paul.” Some of the others say, “We think Cephas got it right” – that’s Cephas, who we might know better as Peter. Paul wonders aloud whether anyone says, “Oh, and I belong to Christ.”

Now if you think about the Apostle Paul at all (and don’t worry; it’s OK if you don’t, but why not give it a try now…?), you might think of him as a theologian/philosopher/head-in-the-clouds type who writes long letters with long sentences. But I think Paul is more like a pastor who’s watching a former congregation come apart. Or like a parent who watches as their kids squabble and separate over politics or estates or the family cabin. Or like a friend who hears that the old gang back home is being broken up by snits and quarrels and loyalties.

His heart is kind of broken at the thought of the community he’s left behind, as it pulls itself apart. It feels like a body dividing against itself, and it hurts to see it and hear it and feel it.

Does that one on the right of the picture there belong to Paul? From the look of her, I’m thinking that the tall one in the middle is a follower of Cephas. And the one on the left with the long hair, they could only be a follower of Apollos; No one else would have hair like that.

And Paul asks, “Has Christ been divided?”

Fifteen or twenty years ago, as most of us here know, the ELCIC was in a decades-long debate over human sexuality. Everyone who was around here at Epiphany during all that knows how difficult it was.

In my last few years at Seminary, in the late ‘80s, we felt the tension of that so deeply. One of our classmates was one of the first openly gay students at the Seminary – he came out near the end of his first year - and it wasn’t long before the community started to divide along the lines of who was supportive or not supportive of him, and he became the focus of so much competing energy, negative or positive energy.

Over the next few years there always seemed to be a kind of sizing up that would happen in the first few weeks of each new Seminary year. As returning students and incoming new students met for the first time, you could feel that somewhere inside most of us we were looking for clues so we could figure out which side everybody might be on. You’d see the way somebody dressed, or you’d hear their last name or find out which congregation in which synod the came from, or you’d see that they were or were not wearing that rainbow pin, and then you knew where everybody’s loyalties were. We knew who belonged to Paul, and who belonged to Apollos, and who belonged to Cephas.

I believe with all my heart that the decisions we made as a church were the right ones. I’m convinced that the path we’re on now, where we try to be as expansive and inclusive as we can possibly be, is the right path to follow. And at the same time, there are people who I once counted as good friends who I have not spoken with since that convention in 2011. I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas.

Sometimes it feels like the body is broken, and we don’t know how to fix it.

There are positive signs. I reconnected on Facebook with one of those people I hadn’t talked to for years. We don’t really talk theology, but we do wish each other happy birthday, and every now and then we exchange pictures of our latest sourdough creations, along with a baking tip or two. We’ll type out a “Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed!” every Easter Sunday, and we mean it. We both know that if either one of us showed up at the other’s church some day the one handing out the bread would say, “The body of Christ, given for you,” and the one receiving it in an open hand would say “Amen” and receive that gift. Because in the end, or just plain right now, “we belong to Christ” gets to have the last word. Christ looks at the two of us and says, “You belong to me,” and that word is always the last word.

In that reading today Paul says, “I appeal to you, by the name of Jesus, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no division among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.” It might seem like Paul is saying that we should agree on everything….but we know that we won’t agree on everything. An apostle named Paul knows that we won’t; Jesus knows that we won’t agree on everything, and that sometimes we will part company over disagreements. But I think that what Paul is talking about when he calls on us to be united in the same mind, is that we let “We belong to Christ” be the last word, and to trust that is stronger than whatever divides the body.

We belong to Christ. We belong to the crucified one, who is gathering up all that is divided; who is reconciling all even when we struggle to find reconciliation ourselves, who is making peace where there is anything but peace.

This really matters. We’re so divided, and that’s so plain to see in a place like Minneapolis today. Just for a minute, think about how that divides the Body of Christ. There are members of the Body of Christ who, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, have put on an ICE uniform, covered up their face with a mask, and hauled other members of the Body of Christ out of their homes in the cold of winter, or put five year olds in detention. There are members of the Body of Christ who have thought that it would be just fine for one country to buy another country; just take it over from the members of the Body of Christ who live there already. And to look a little closer to home, and to be fair, there are members of the Body of Christ who stand in pulpits like this and struggle really hard not to wish the very worst for those people who stand on the other side of all these clear and uncrossable lines.

It’s not only the divided Body of Christ. The division runs inside and outside the church, this side of the border and especially across the border. It’s about divided families, where people who are united by blood cannot talk to each other anymore. Long time friends struggle to communicate, or if they do talk, it’s heated arguments over the dinner table or nasty online spats. Even in peaceful Winnipeg, eight hours from Minneapolis we’re experiencing a kind of division and anxiety and fear about where all this is going, how it might all spill over here.

Right there in the thick of all the division and the fear stands the cross. Paul talks about it as foolishness that is wiser than wisdom, and weakness that is stronger than strength. It’s not a system, or a program, or some piece of a weird theological process that we can use to make sense of God or of our life in troubled times. The cross just stands among us, declaring that God’s place is in the suffering of the world, among those who are the least protected. And somehow that is how God is at work reconciling all things and bringing to life all that seems so dead.

We do try to follow faithfully, like those first disciples Jesus called, and we’re never quite sure what we’ll get ourselves into. People protest in the street and stand up to power, the quiliting group shames a truckful of armed and masked government agents into packing up and leaving the church parking lot; when they started that group none of them knew that that’s what they’d one day be doing. We pray and we pray. Two pastors on opposite sides of a line share Easter greetings and sourdough tips, and people on both sides of a church that once divided still see each other and eat together and care about each other.

All that, because we belong to Christ, who stands in the midst of all that is divided. And even if we’re not sure how, and we can’t explain it all somehow, by that cross God in Christ is reconciling all things. So wherever we follow, we are in the company of that one who is reconciling all things.