“Signs of Encouragement”

I Corinthians 1:3-9

This is the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Thursday we thanked God for our many blessings. As Christians one of our major areas of thanksgiving is the church. We thank God for his church and our place in it. We thank God for all those sinful, fallible, and imperfect people who are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

This is the First Sunday of Advent, a time for remembering what God has done and anticipating what he has yet to do. Advent is a time to celebrate the Christ event: the birth, life, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. In its own way it is a season of thanksgiving. We are thankful, that in Jesus Christ, God became one of us, and even more thankful that he took upon himself the sins of the world as died on a cross.

We are also thankful that this world is not all there is. Jesus is coming again. The Kingdom of God will be realized in all its fullness. The peace of God will reign. Sin, death, and evil will be vanquished forever. The reconciliation of God with his fallen creation will be complete. All that alienates us from God and one another will disappear.

Our world is a messed up and mixed up place. The Church of Christ, is a messed up and mixed up body. But that’s nothing new. The world in which the Apostle Paul lived and did ministry was just as messed up and mixed up as ours. Even in its infancy the church was constantly messed up and mixed up.

The church in Corinth is a prime example. It was a mess. Folks were getting drunk during Communion. Members were openly engaging in sexual immorality. The church was divided into at least three rival factions. There were clear distinctions being made between rich and poor and slave and free. Members were denying the reality of the Resurrection. Those with whom the Spirit had blessed certain gifts thought themselves spiritually superior to those whose gifts were different. The church was a disaster waiting to happen.

Knowing all this, what did Paul write in the opening to his first letter to that church? “I give thanks to God always for you…” Later on in the letter Paul would confront their various failings. He didn’t sugarcoat reality. He didn’t tap dance around the issues. He called sin a sin. He laid down some moral, ethical, and behavioral boundaries. He strongly exhorted them to replace pride with humility, competition with cooperation, and their lust for power with an attitude of servanthood. He spoke the truth, the hard truth, but he spoke it in love. And in the speaking never retracted those words he wrote at the beginning of the letter: “I give thanks to God always for you…”

During Advent fifteen years ago I experienced an attitude adjustment. At that time I was hot and heavy into the prophetic mode. In my sermons I was a chronic critic of our denomination. I bewailed its loss of members. I bemoaned the seeming lack of accountability on the part of those who were supposed to be leading and serving us. I went on and on about the wider church’s general lack of spiritual health. I was an ecclesiastical gadfly, a royally self-righteous pain in the neck.

Then one of my elders took me to task. He didn’t think that it made sense for me to stand in the pulpit and preach about what poor shape our denomination was in, and then turn around and invite visitors to join the church. That’s when the attitude adjustment began. He was right. I was wrong. His criticism was a powerful reminder of what I had answered a call to be. My primary calling was to preach the Gospel, to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ.

There was another major factor in my attitude adjustment. I was reading a book entitled Good News Travels Faster. Its writer, Joe Donaho, was a champion of encouragement rather than criticism. His model for this can be found in the fourth chapter of Acts. His name was Barnabas, son of encouragement.

Wrote the good Reverend Donaho, “Barnabas is a model for the church to consider in [this] time of confusing disappointment. To continue to encourage the church while others debate and criticize… [and] give generously to the mission of the church while others find fault or withhold their gifts – these are the marks of the encourager.” Those words truly adjusted my attitude. That gadfly has worked intentionally since that time to be a son of encouragement.

Back to the text - Paul wasn’t Barnabas, but his words to the church in Corinth were extremely Barnabas-like. “I give thanks to God always for you… You’re a mess, but I love you. God loves you. He has called you. For all your messiness God is using you to spread the Gospel. By the grace revealed in Jesus Christ you will some day stand spotless before his throne.” That’s what Paul told the most messed up and mixed up congregation in ecclesiastical history.

Is our denomination perfect? No, it is not. Nor is any other. Is it a mess? It most certainly is. Do hard truths need to be spoken? Absolutely? We live in a culture that closely resembles the moral cesspool that was ancient Corinth. Instead of serving as a counterpoint to that culture, the modern American church more often than not accommodates it. To be sure the church, specifically the Presbyterian Church (USA) has its critics. Sometimes I’m one of them. The criticisms are valid but not unique to our church, our culture, or our time in history. The church has always been a mess. It will continue being a mess until Jesus comes again.

That being said, it’s way past the time for a church-wide attitude adjustment. We ought to be concentrating more on encouragement than criticism. We Presbyterians need to start saying to one another, “I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace God has given to you in Christ Jesus.” The time has come for us to become modern day sons and daughters of encouragement within the context of our congregation, our presbytery, and our denomination.

It’s so much easier to be a gadfly, to debate and criticize rather than encourage. We get such a self-righteous kick out of finding fault. Being able to use the power to withhold offerings is such a heady experience. We human animals take perverse pleasure in choosing up sides and demonizing those who differ with us. It’s so sinfully delightful to play down and dirty church politics.

But as easy, pleasurable, and delightful as it may be to engage in all those things, it’s definitely not Christ like. Such things are not compatible with a lifestyle of Christian servanthood. They are not things that sons and daughters of encouragement ought to be doing much less enjoying.

What we ought to be doing is looking for signs of encouragement within our denomination and giving thanks to God when we find them. The church, messy as it is, is a recipient of God’s grace. That’s a sign of encouragement. The church, messy as it is, has been given spiritual gifts. Is that not also a sign of encouragement? These gifts enable us, in spite of our messy sinfulness, to faithfully witness to the Good News about Jesus: his humble birth in Bethlehem and the sure promise of his coming again in glory. That is indeed a sign of encouragement within our denomination and throughout the entire Body of Christ.

There are other signs of encouragement. In the midst of our individual brokeness there is the hope of healing and redemption. Messy though the church may be there is within it, by the grace of God, potential to be better than it is. In the midst of all our personal and ecclesiastical messiness we can take cheer from the words Paul wrote to the Corinthians in verse 7 of today’s text.

Listen to those words as translated by William Barclay: “… there is no spiritual gift which you do not possess, while you eagerly await the time when our Lord Jesus will again burst upon the stage of history.” These are words of encouragement that God is speaking to the whole church, even its most messy and mixed up factions. These are words that we need to take to heart. These are words that we need to share with all Christians everywhere, be they liberal, conservative, progressive, orthodox, or whatever.

We who would be true sons and daughters of encouragement must stop our constant criticism of the church and start saying to it, “I give thanks to God always for you…” If Paul could write that to the Corinthians, surely we can say it to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Amen.