To be Loving, not Right

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Epiphany 4/Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, January 25, 2026

Holy Trinity Cathedral

“To Be Loving, not Right”

Were you baptized in an Anglican church?  Roman Catholic? Lutheran? Baptist? Other? Each of us enter the faith at a particular time and a particular place.  But we are all baptized into the Body of Christ using the words of the Trinitarian formula: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.  We are baptized as Christian. Not Anglican! Or any other denomination.  We are all one.  The trouble is, you wouldn’t think it when you look at how many people of faith fail to get along today.

Ah, but remember the glorious past.  Too often, there is a tendency to romanticize earlier days in the Church.  We imagine one big happy family.  Or at least, communities of spirit-filled and evangelical followers of Jesus Christ.  And there were, but there were also big divisions even in the first years.  Remember that even most first century converts to Christianity had not known the earthly Jesus.  The accounts of his life and death and resurrection were proclaimed by apostles- those who had witnessed and testified to the Son of God.  Gospel accounts of the good news were being circulated.  The ones associated with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John became accepted by the Church as trustworthy and foundational to the faith.  And the individuals who travelled and taught new communities wrote letters to encourage them in being the Church.  One of them, Paul, writes a first letter to the Corinthians. He reveals that from the beginning there were different clashing understandings of how to live out the gospel.  

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples before he was crucified was that his followers would be one, just as he and the Father are one.  He had gathered a group of very disparate people: fishermen, a tax collector, zealots, outsiders, women.  He didn’t expect them to be all the same.  Unity doesn’t mean uniformity.  He knew they wouldn’t agree on everything.  By following him, however, they were to set aside the worldly temptations that pull people from the way of the cross.  They were to be united in purpose.  This is what Paul is reminding the people at the church in Corinth, and beyond them, the rest of the Church, including us. 

There are dangers throughout history that had already become evident in that first generation of Christians.  These are personality, power, and politics.  All three can drag us away from the cross and set us against one another.  

In the first chapter of his letter to the Corinthians, Paul meets the problem of personality head on.  He laments the tribalism that is dividing the community.  “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’ or ‘I belong to Apollos’ or ‘I belong to Cephas’”.  Hopefully in our congregations there are Christ-like individuals in leadership.  Bishops, priests, deacons, and elders do much to witness and to be good examples.  But the danger is in idolizing someone- putting them in place of Christ.  The cult of the individual goes against the Christian faith. Instead, we believe that together we are the Body of Christ.  In the Anglican tradition, we make decisions together under the guidance of Christ’s Holy Spirit.  We call this “synodical government”, and it helps guard against any one person or small faction taking the credit.  And when our leaders sin and falter, as they do sometimes, we look beyond them to our Lord to heal and find a way forward.  The state of grace in the Church doesn’t rest on any human, but on God.  We hold to the promises of baptism to love and follow Jesus in response to God’s love. .  

We will always need publicly responsible leaders in the Church, but Paul’s warning is also about anyone in power.  We receive the good news of salvation through Scripture and tradition and our own capacity for reason.  And so we need to be wary of those who would claim the right to set dogma and doctrine without prayer and process.  Within the Church there are always more powerful voices.  These are the ones who would insist on enforcing order, controlling the sacraments, and making laws about inclusion, education, and treatment of others.  There need to be checks and balances on earthly privilege and position.  In our Anglican way, there is structure for ordering our life together.  We have bishops and priests and deacons and lay people that live and work in geographical areas called dioceses.  But we do not have a pyramid of power with one person at the top.  Every bishop has the care of their diocese.  Every diocese is co-equal and in relationship with each other.  In practicality, this means that different parts of the Anglican communion have very different practices, and different understandings on issues.  We often disagree when they clash with one another.  But the bond of affection that holds us together is that we all belong to Christ.

The third danger that creates divisions in the Church is politics.  The people of God are in the world even as we are not of the world.  Make no mistake- we are political creatures as a result. We do not leave our cultural identities at the door but come with all the baggage of our experience in this world.  The Anglican Church was forged in the history of the British Isles.  It is a blend of Celtic and Roman Christianity.  We are both catholic because we are part of the worldwide Christian faith, and we are protestant because our denomination has been reshaped by the events and new insights of the Reformation.  But state and crown as well as theology have influenced our understanding of what it means to be a Christian in the world today.  This means that our tradition has brought assumptions and practices from our history to people who did not grow up in the England of the past.  England colonized many other countries, and settlers brought what they thought was familiar to those who found them strange and sometimes hurtful.  Sometimes that has resulted in a struggle for great good, like the abolition of slavery.  Sometimes that has co-opted the Church into great harm, like the residential school system.  We have not always been wise in recognizing outside pressures on the gospel.  As sin enters, it divides us.

So how are we to withstand the splintering of the Church every time we disagree?  How can we be one in Christ?  Paul points us back to the cross as our purpose.  The death of Jesus Christ signifies the strength of love to overcome sin and division.  God’s work is love and righteousness.  That is different from being right, which is a great temptation.  When we let go of the need to be better than others, to somehow prove that we are closer to God than others, we find there is room for all of us at the foot of the cross.  The Lord’s prayer and our statements of belief which we call creeds are a solid basis.  When we can express the words alongside other Christians, we reclaim the promises of baptism.  We stand beside each other, knowing that we will differ on the details and interpretation, but that we are proclaiming the same gospel.  We can work alongside each other with the same purpose of making Christ known through our actions.

There will always be the pressures of personality, power, and politics that can distort the gospel and try to empty the cross of its saving grace.  I pray that together we strive to be loving, not right. Amen.