Pizza Prerogatives and Christian Unity

1 Corinthians 1:10-18:

NOTE: The following is a sermon prepared for January 26 at North Baptist Church in Port Chester.

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.

For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.

What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.”

Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius,

so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

“The shortest honeymoon on record.” – Gov. Peter Florrick, The Good Wife

If you don’t live within 100 miles of New York City, you may have missed Gotham’s greatest scandal since Donna Hanover threw Rudy Giuliani out of Gracie Mansion.

Bill de Blasio, New York’s new mayor, was sitting happily in front of a huge pizza at Goodfella’s restaurant in Staten Island. Ignoring unblinking cameras and aghast customers, he anchored the pie delicately with his fork and made a surgical incision with his knife. Leaning politely over the plate, he slid a forkful of oleaginous delicacy into his mouth and began to chew.

“Cue the foodie firestorm,” wrote Michael M. Grymbaum in the New York Times.

“Disaster, declared a writer at New York magazine, citing the longstanding city protocol of devouring pizza, no matter how greasy, with the hands, and the hands only.”

Some journalists declared it de Blasio’s first major mistake, the end of a honeymoon that began when the city’s 109th mayor was inaugurated only days earlier.

Luckily for Hizzoner, passions eventually cooled along with two subsequent snowstorms and sub-freezing weather. Unless he inadvertently extends his pinky while sipping a bottle of Brooklyn Ale, de Blasio should soon weather the crisis.

But, really. What was all the fuss about? Up in Central New York State, where I grew up, people were expected to follow rigid codes of culinary behavior. Peas were eaten with spoons, not knives, and Utica Club was sucked from a bottle, not a glass. Corn on the cob was consumed from left to right, as if it were a typewriter carriage with an imaginary bell reminding you to slide your teeth fluidly back to the left. Persons who shaved the kernels from the cob were shunned. Eccentric behavior was not encouraged in my household.

But we always assumed that New York City, the world’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, a city that thrives on diversity, would welcome infinite varieties of manners and behavior. 

That was always the charm of living in New York: unlimited specimens of race, ethnicity, language groupings, accents, religions, ecclesiastical garb, political persuasions, comportment, and – not least – styles of eating. In New York, people always ask you if you want your bagel toasted or your coffee “regular.” The assumption is that everyone is free to choose.

My hope, then, is that New York will allow its citizens the widest possible latitude when it comes to manners.

Admittedly, that’s a lot to ask. Most of us find it instinctive to align with certain habits, points of view, political parties, or church denominations, and assume – egomaniacs that we are – that we are the normal ones, and people who choose other paths are weird. When I was growing up in Central New York, we strove to conform. We all rooted for the Yankees. We all liked Ike. We all watched Howdy Doody and, later, American Bandstand. We all went to the same church.  Or thought we did.

Actually, we barely noticed that some familiar faces were missing among the kids who attended Sunday School in Morrisville’s United Church. These were the same kids who were mysteriously excused from class on Thursday afternoons to attend something called “religious instructions.” 

These same kids rooted for the Yankees and watched Howdy Doody but there was something about them that was different. Indeed, not all of them liked Ike, which seemed distinctly abnormal, but followed a different persuasion one of the teachers called, “sadly-for-Adlai.”

“Religious instructions” and “sadly-for-Adlai” were our first clues that we were not all the same – that we were, in spite of ourselves, separated into involuntary factions. As much as we wished to be alike, we were – as one of my Sunday school mates put it – “Catholics and Christians.”

Gradually we realized that we were merely the latest manifestations of ecclesiastical divisions that had been going on for 2,000 years, and first documented in Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth.

There is much about Paul’s epistle that I admire, particularly his inability to remember who and how many he baptized. (“I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.”)

We have no idea how old Paul is at this point, but If he is confessing to senior moments, I empathize. 

But whether his short term memory is failing or not, Paul’s main point is clear enough: there is much more that unites the Christians in Corinth than divides them and that unifying factor is Jesus Christ. (“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.”)

Growing up in a small town in Central New York, the differences among Christian sects were not obvious. The clerical collar worn by the Methodist minister was not that different from the priest’s Rabat, and we couldn’t see the difference between Catholic and Protestant kids while we watched Bandstand.

After high school, I joined the Air Force as a chaplain’s assistant and discovered many practices that were, to me strange and unfamiliar: the elaborate vestments donned by the priest to say mass, the smell of incense, or the deep reverence for the tiny wafer that was, for some, the physical body of Christ.

Years later, when I worked for the World Council of Churches, the apparent differences among the wide variety of Christians began to coalesce for me in a profound way.

The epiphany moment came one evening in Geneva, Switzerland, as I sat in the home of a Methodist minister from Sri Lanka. Gathered in the living room were a Canadian Methodist, a New Zealand Anglican priest, a Cuban laywoman, an Orthodox metropolitan dressed in black robes with a dazzling golden icon of hanging from his neck, and a Mar Thoma bishop with a long gray beard dressed in pink robes. (We called him the Pink Panther, an epithet that seemed to please him.) 

The host called on the Mar Thoma bishop to say an opening prayer. We bowed our heads, and with a lilting Indian accent, the bishop prayed as I had heard Christians pray all my life:

“God, our heavenly father, we ask you blessings on this group of Christians gathered from near and far to seek and do your will. We ask that we may be given opportunities to serve you by serving the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, the imprisoned, the desolate. Open our hearts and give us courage to speak love to the despised and truth to power, and to be prepared to sacrifice our comfort, our fortunes, and out lives if you call us to special service. We pray in the name of Jesus, our savior, who unites us in a common bond of love. Amen.”

If I still had vestiges of prejudice that Christians had insurmountable differences, the bishop helped me wash them away.

Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian pastor, teacher, and theologian, puts the differences between Christians in perspective.

“There are some genuine differences between them, of course,” Buechner writes. “The methods of church government differ. They tend to worship in different forms all the way from chanting, incense, and saints' days to a service that is virtually indistinguishable from a New England town meeting with musical interludes. Some read the Bible more literally than others. If you examine the fine print, you may even come across some relatively minor theological differences among them, some stressing one aspect of the faith, some stressing others. But if you were to ask the average member of any congregation to explain those differences, you would be apt to be met with a long, unpregnant silence. By and large they all believe pretty much the same things and are confused about the same things and keep their fingers crossed during the same parts of the Nicene Creed.”

When it comes to variations of faith and practice, I like to say, vive la difference.

I love the many styles of Baptist worship, with their various levels of octane and energy.

I love the poetic liturgies of Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Eucharistic services.

I love the cadences and rhythms of holy liturgy in Orthodox Christian services.

I love the infinite varieties of worship around the world, and smile when pastors of the Church of South India declare, “Christmas is hot and humid where we live, but still we sing, When in bleak, mid-winter.”

I love the practice of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in gatherings of the World Council of Churches when 300 churches from a hundred nations are represented and people are invited to pray on the first language they spoke. The Pentecostal mergence of languages, voices, accents, is a powerful reminder that we all have one message, one creed, one Lord.

Buechner sums it up:

“When Jesus took the bread and said, ‘This is my body which is broken for you’(1 Corinthians 11:24), it’s hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the church as his body. There's no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unite them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess.”

Paul asks pointedly, “Has Christ been divided?”

Buechner asserts that the only things that divide us are “relative inconsequentialities”.

And the single purpose that brings together all the 2.20 billion Christians on earth is this: to proclaim the gospel ... so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.