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God Gives the Growth
Through us
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2/16/2020 Year A, Epiphany 6, 1 Corinthians 3:6
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Walnut Creek, CA
Read (PDF): 2020.02.16 God Gives the Growth_Transcript
Watch (video): God Gives the Growth
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(Transcript below):
The thing that grabbed me the most from today’s scriptural selections, the one that spoke to me as I meditated on these readings, was a line from Paul’s epistle – his letter – to the Corinthians, where he wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
We know and read a lot about Paul, I would think especially in this congregation, and it seems evident that what he planted was early church communities and seeds of faith. So what do we know about this other teacher?
Apollos is first mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, which was written by the author or authors of the Gospel According to Luke. According to that account, Apollos was a Jew from Alexandria, “an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures.” He came to Ephesus and in Luke’s words, “spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John…”
Because his information was limited, two women who were followers of Jesus, Priscilla and Aquila, brought Apollos to Corinth and taught him further once he was there. Apollos believed that Jesus was the foretold Messiah, and he publicly defended this position against other Jews, and he stayed in Corinth to teach. But factions had developed in the fledgling church in Corinth. It had started to fracture into polarized groups and some of the new Christ-followers started to identify themselves as Paul’s followers, while others declared for Apollos.
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul says he cannot speak to the people there as spiritually mature, because they would not understand. What he says is, “even now you are still not ready… for as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?”
Paul feels he needs to bring guidance. He points out the schism that has taken place and rebukes them, saying that they cannot say they belong to him – they were not “baptized into Paul” after all, they were baptized into Christ. They – and we – belong to Christ; and through him, to God. Apollos and Paul were messengers, servants and teachers. They planted and watered, nurturing people in their faith.
The next line in Paul’s letter was, “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, only God who gives the growth…” I took exception to this at first. I felt like Paul was saying that it doesn’t matter what any of us do… but that’s not quite it. What we do is important – it is of utmost importance! But as Paul said, we are human, and in our humanity, we are spiritually like children. Not only in our understanding, but also in our “centered-ness”; and so we forget that it is God who acts through us, not we who act on our own. This is what we call Grace – God taking action in the world.
Saint Teresa of Avila put it this way,
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks… Yours are the feet with which God walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Christ has no hands, no feet on earth but yours.”
Paul planted, Apollos watered. And God brings about growth… through us.
Our psalm today proclaims, “Happy are those who keep God’s decrees.” It speaks of walking in the law of the Lord, choosing to use it for guidance, being steadfast and seeking God with our whole hearts. That’s a good place to begin.
Our Hebrew Bible reading from the Book of Deuteronomy points out dualities in the paths available to us… life/death, prosperity/adversity … and teaches that whichever we choose, that is what we will become. Whatever we plant and water, God gives growth to that.
So it is important to think, to pray, to understand the choices we make and how they might impact others. And it is important to seek community and communion with others who follow those ways. And this is what Paul was trying to teach the early Christ-followers in Corinth. Not that everyone MUST get along, no matter the choices each made; but the importance of being intentional about our choices, grounding them in the Eternal; surrounding ourselves with others who do their best, as Krista said last week, to live humbly and walk with our God.
I would like to say that that’s everybody… but it isn’t. Not everyone means well, acts from a place of love… there is what I WANT to be able to say: that ALL people are Good, there is no real evil in the world, and can’t we just all get along?)… and what I NEED to say – which is that not everyone treats others as themself; there is evil in the world, and sometimes we need to stand for what we believe in.
Our gospel proclamation also has something to say about this.
For the first week or more of working with the readings for this sermon, I diligently avoided our Gospel. I did. Even though I knew that I was gonna need to understand it more deeply to be able to truly proclaim it for you, not just read it.
I read and re-read the epistle, I looked a few times at Deuteronomy, I riffled through the psalm, went back to the epistle… and I steered pretty clear of the Gospel for a while. But it wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept hearing words from it, popping up at random moments: adultery, divorce, murder, judge, swear… and ithey made me uncomfortable. So I tried to ignore it; you would too, right? When you heard it today, when you heard me proclaim the Gospel just now, did you catch yourself thinking, “ooh – I wonder what the preacher is going to say about that”? Yeah, me too. It’s not that I don’t have opinions and some really choice words about these topics… because believe me, I do; but y’all don’t know me that well, and it didn’t seem appropriate to get too far into my personal arguments with the Bible. And I really was captivated by what Paul said about God giving the growth. But as I have experienced time and again, Jesus’ words would not let me alone.
So I went back to the Gospel passage. I prayed and pondered… I did some exercises I’ve learned to do, like re-writing and annotating the passages, meditating on them, stream-of-consciousness writing, seeing what words popped out and meant something to me; and I finally realized that not only was the Gospel passage relevant to this idea of planting and growth, but it was all about it. It just took getting beyond some of the words, to the meanings and implications behind them.
At the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he gets into the nitty gritty of the human condition. He didn’t just teach about the nature of God and the importance of faith (though he certainly did that)… he wanted his followers to understand who they were, who we are as human beings, and who we can be. He taught that because we are human and imperfect, we need to make conscious decisions about who and how we are, both within ourselves and in our interactions with each other – especially that last bit. Because we are not all of who & what we are individually, independently – we need each other to grow, to change… to plant, to water. Not “so that” God can give growth – God already does that. But because the way that God does that is through each and all of us, imperfect as we are. And we are. We do harm to each other. We lust in our hearts and our minds for things and people we cannot have. Sometimes we do have them anyway, and through that connection, we harm others who love them and us. We hurt each other, accuse and judge each other, cheat, ignore each other’s needs, swear that we will or won’t do something and then do the opposite… this is part of the human condition.
But… and. We each have it within us to do and be different. To be kind and to love, to be compassionate and forgiving, to reach out, to stay through difficult times and put the needs of someone else before our own desires, to make the life of another person even a little bit better. God gives growth through us. Through our “planting,” nurturing, growing, guiding, walking alongside. Maybe we don’t need to know why God gives growth – let’s just focus on how; because that how is all of us. It happens through us, not to us.
What we do, matters. Who we each are, makes a difference. How we live affects others – sometimes in a very big way and sometimes in small ways that we may never learn about. And whatever our beliefs, spiritual, political or otherwise… I can’t help but think that if we lean on the words, on the richness of our tradition – which today we heard from Deuteronomy, the Psalmist, from Christ and Paul – if we seek to bring God into our hearts, to love and treat our neighbors as we love and treat ourselves… we will be walking together in the right direction. And God will give the growth. In words from an Affirmation in the Daily Prayer book that I use,
We are called to be the Church:
To celebrate God’s presence,
To live with respect in creation,
To love and serve others,
To seek justice and resist evil…
In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us.
We are not alone. Thanks be to God.