Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 7th August 2022), continuing our new series ONE ANOTHER. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel.
The New Testament writers often adopt the terms one another or each other.
They do so because the New Testament writers understood that Jesus had chosen community, ‘one another-ing’, as the means of his expression to the world, in the world. It’s only through ‘one another-ing’ that we can represent Jesus at all.
One of those New Testament writers—Paul—coined a great illustration to describe this one-another life and it’s centrality in God’s plan; a body. Not just any body. But, for Paul, we (as opposed to ‘I’) are the body of Christ.
In the first week of this series, we already looked at Romans 12, were Paul uses this picture. Today, we’re going to read from another passage were Paul draws on this powerful image; 1 Corinthians 12:12.
We’re doing so because I want to explore the principle of ‘DON’T SNUB ONE ANOTHER’. Admittedly, unlike the other titles in this series, you’re not going to find a verse that says ‘Don’t snub one another’. But, as we read Paul’s words, I hope those words make a good summary of Paul’s point.
READ: 1 CORINTHIANS 12:12—13:3 (NLT)
‘Now all of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a separate and necessary part of it.’
1 Cor. 12:27 (NLT, italics and bold mine)
SNOBBISHLY SNUBBING
Not so long ago—possibly only three or four years—I was an open-minded person, with few preferences and prejudices. Yet, despite my best efforts, I must confess to you, that I am now a ‘coffee snob’.
I’m horrified at what I have become. It used to be that I would happily drink any coffee; it all tasted the same. It didn’t matter to me if it was Maxwell House or Starbucks, whether it was instant, ground, or filtered. As far as I was concerned, all coffee was coffee.
I didn’t even care about the differences and distinctions: Cappuccino; Macchiato; Americano etc. I was one of those who would go into a coffee shop and be paralysed and confused by the options, one of those people who would say, ‘I just want a coffee.’
I used to believe that all coffee was equal. But I’ve come to realise, to reword something George Orwell once wrote, ‘that all coffee is equal. But some coffee is more equal than others.’
I’m joking, of course.
But the reality is, I am a ‘coffee snob’.
Some snobs don’t like this term, they prefer to say that they are ‘coffee connoisseurs’ (i.e. specialists). As one self-proclaimed coffee snob website described, ‘a coffee snob is someone who cares deeply about what kind of coffee they are drinking.’[i]
I love that wording, ‘cares deeply’—maybe we could use the word convictions, or better still, preferences.
Of course, I’m talking about something humorous like coffee to help us talk about something serious. Because there’s nothing wrong with being a connoisseur, and there’s nothing wrong with caring deeply about things. We all have preferences! It’s a part of who we are. In a way, we are all snobs.
The problems start, though, when our preferences produce snobbish behaviour.
There’s nothing wrong with being a connoisseur, but when you believe your specialism makes you part of an elite, and no longer equal (and better than others), then that’s problematic.
There’s nothing wrong with ‘caring deeply’, having a conviction. Sadly, however, our caring deeply about some things can cause us to be uncaring, insensitive, overly critical and harsh towards others. More so, when we become uncaring and critical of other people who don’t care deeply about what we do.
Being snobs can wrongly lead us to snub. To snub means to ignore, disdain, mistreat and marginalise; to look down on others; failing to see and appreciate the value and contribution of the other, believing the other isn’t necessary.
In what we’ve just read, Paul says that the church is full of connoisseurs. God, according to Paul, has filled the church with different specialities, abilities and spiritual gifts. But it’s not just about ‘gifts’—as Paul has said already in this letter (and other letters), the Messiah’s people is full of people from different walks of life (as I said last time, see ONE ANOTHER / BEAR).
Like our physical bodies, the body of Christ has an intentional and beautiful gift of diversity and distinction.
We are all different, shaped by a vast array of circumstances, with different strengths and different weaknesses. We come from differing backgrounds, cultures, experiences, with differing perspectives. The church, thank God, is not one-dimensional or monochromatic (at least, it shouldn’t be).
The church gives us the gift of the other. But, it’s a gift that every generation of church has struggled with.
Some people say that the hardest spiritual discipline for Christians is prayer. Others say it’s fasting, or reading the scriptures, or living holy lives. Whilst important, and yes, challenging, none of those is the hardest. The hardest discipline is being a body—being together with those who are not on the same page as us.
It’s was a challenge in Paul’s generation. It’s a challenge for today’s generation.
CORINTHIAN PREFERENCES
Paul addresses this letter to the church at Corinth because they had purposely divided themselves from each other (1 Cor. 1:10-13). The church in Corinth found themselves in contentious factions, with differing preferences for certain people, certain ideas, certain spiritual gifts, and even certain teachers.
Just like today! (There’s a reason why I don’t put who’s preaching on a public rota list)
Also like today, these ideas existed in the church because they existed in the surrounding culture. Church doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We bring who we are and where we are from into the church.
For example, Corinthian culture was a hot bed of Roman and Greek ideas. One of those ideas was that the weak should be ruled by the strong, the unsophisticated should be ruled by the sophisticated, and that the ignorant should be ruled by the wise. In turn, this produced a hierarchy of who deserved honour who did not; who had freedom and who did not; who was indispensable and who was not. In sum, who should rule and who should be ruled.[ii] These ideas influenced the church.
So, it’s no accident that Paul spends the first three chapters of 1 Corinthians, disrupting hierarchy and fragmentation, emphasizing that we all belong to Christ (1 Cor 3:23). Furthernore, repeatedly, throughout the letter, Paul insists that every single member of the body is as indispensable as any other.
There was cultural, social, and ‘spiritual’ snobbery within the church at Corinth, and people were getting snubbed as a result. Paul encourages them to care about one another equally (1 Cor 12.25), because they were not doing so.
There was mistreatment to the weak and the poor. There were tensions between Jews, Greeks and Romans. There were Christians of status and privilege within the Corinthian society trying to lord it over those without status in the church—especially when those without status claimed their equality in Jesus. Some people feasted, others starved. And with regards to theology, there were differences all over the place—so when they met together, it was just noise and chaos, with people shouting over the top of one another.
I suppose, we could look at it like this: The Corinthians had their convictions and specialisms—which isn’t a problem. But, it led some of them to think they were better than others. They tried to curate and customize the church community in their own image; to dissect the body, to fragment, to create bubbles and cliques, and push out the gift of the other.
They were not on the same page as Paul, who wrote, ‘No part can say to the other, “I don’t need you.”’ (1 Cor. 12:21).
Because of their factions, the church failed to look like Jesus. To use Paul’s comical image in this passage, they didn’t resemble an organism, they looked like a giant ear (1 Cor. 12:17).
Now it could be that the Corinthians didn’t recognise this as a problem at all. Like modern times, they could have just seen church as an event to attend. As long as it was entertaining, the music was good, and the preaching was inspirational, they were happy. But, for Paul, this was failure.
To paraphrase Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 13:1-3, ‘You can have a great preacher, awesome music, miraculous happenings etc. But, if there is no genuine desire to connect to others, it’s meaningless, useless and of no value whatsoever.’
Even though the church in Corinth was exercising spiritual gifts, they were not listening to the leading of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12 and 14). Even though they spoke eloquently, and were entertaining, had knowledge and miracles, they failed to love one another (1 Cor. 13).
They failed, because you cannot love one another if there is not an other to love.
MODERN ECHOES
Admittedly, there’s a number of places we could explore with this. We could look at the problems at Corinth and apply them to local, national and global church in numerous ways. And I’m sure this all raises plenty of great questions about what this does and doesn’t mean.
We could talk about consumerism, prejudice, hierarchal attitudes and power plays, spiritual elitism, or wrongly seeing church as a ‘place’ rather than a people.[iii] We have covered some of these things in previous weeks.
However, I just want to focus into one modern equivalent of this problem that affects the church: Echo Chambers.
You may not be used to the term. But, I’m sure we all know what an echo is. We have all stood in a cave or a tunnel and shouted only to hear our own voice repeated back to us, multiple times.
It’s the same thing socially. Generally, most people tend to listen to people they already agree with. We don’t cope well when hearing the perspectives and experiences of others. So we curate and customize environments that will echo, amplify and reinforce our existing views.
There is the old saying, ‘Birds of a feather, flock together.’
Humanity has done this for years, but it has intensified with social media. If you have Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, you can ‘like’, ‘hide’, ‘mute’, ‘block’, and ‘share’ whatever voices you choose. After a while, the algorithms will do the rest, and your perspective will be the only perspective you’ll be ever exposed to.
To be clear, social media isn’t to blame! We did it before social media—we did it through what books we read, what newspaper we bought, what radio and TV shows we tuned into, what people we chose to mix with or chose to snub.
We bring our culture into church, and so Christians, too, have echo chambers—there’s loads of them! Again, social media isn’t the problem, but the amount of hate, disdain and snubbing there is between different Christian echo chambers online is heart breaking. The factions; the venomous tones; the lack of care for one another; the inability to see each other as part of one body.
We snub and slaughter one another before the watching world. This is a far cry from Jesus’ words, ‘Your love for one another will prove that you are my disciples’ (John 13:35).
Christian echo chambers are unhealthy for three basic reasons:
1. You never learn from anyone who sees the world from a different perspective. This need not mean that you have to agree. However, listening to and understanding others is essential if we want to grow and mature (and engage with other viewpoints). Without hearing others, you will struggle to develop humility and empathy.
2. You will become more prone to seeing people you disagree with as your enemy or opponent. In turn, this will stain how you talk to others and treat them. Hate, suspicion and demonisation, prejudice, stereotypes and bigotry thrive in echo chambers.
3. As well as damaging our credibility as witnesses to Jesus (as mentioned above), it also distorts our ability to embody Jesus.
We could spend ages exploring each of these.[iv] But the third one, briefly, is a biggy.
If my Christianity is based on an echo chamber—if all I do is surround myself with voices that echo my own thinking, and ignore the gift of the other—then God will no longer be ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ Instead God will look like, me, myself and I.
I don’t want ‘Tristianity’. Actually, when I think about it, the only reason I started following Jesus is because the news of Jesus burst the walls of my echo chamber.
We need the contributions and perspectives of others if we are to avoid me-shaped Christianity.
So I have to ask, in your own life, where is the gift of the other?
There will be some who will be quick to say, ‘well, I used to think like this, but then I listened to so and so, and now I have moved to their way of thinking…’ Ok. But, you’ve missed my point! Have you stopped listening to others, have you just moved from one echo chamber to another one?
Seriously, where is the gift of the other?
Do you just read the same person or school of thought on social media or in books? Do you just watch the same preacher, or preachers just like them, on YouTube, God TV or TBN? Do you listen to Christians different than you?
If you’re young, who are the older voices you’re listening to, and vice versa?
If you’re into your modern church teaching, are you also looking at the ancient stuff too, or have you just snubbed it?
If you’re white, British and male, who are non-white, non-British, female voices in your world?
If you’re conservative or liberal, evangelical or orthodox, who are the voices outside of your bubble?
And when I say listening, I don’t mean with the intent to criticise, listening for what you disagree with. Are you listening to understand? Are you listening to see were you may be wrong? Are you listening to see where they could be right?
To put it another, when was the last time you listened to something that challenged you and not just something that confirmed what you currently think? When was the last time you encountered the other?[v]
Mark Twain once wrote that, ‘[T]ravel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindness’.[vi]
Twain was talking about how going to other places, encountering other people, spending time with them, had a way of dismantling his prejudices, badly formed perspectives and our echo chambers.
The thing is, we don’t need to travel in that way: the church is purposely full of connoisseurs, the church gives us the gift of the other. Even within our family at MCC, we are different. And our task is to function together, not pull each other apart.
This doesn’t mean there are no right or wrong perspectives (1 Cor. 11:19), or that all perspectives are equally valid. But neither does it mean that just because someone is wrong in one part of their theology that they are wrong everywhere else. And even when we or they are wrong, it does not permit us to be unkind, snobbish or cruel. We are called to care for one another equally, and value the necessity of one another.
We can’t say ‘I don’t need you’. We are all, together, the body of Christ.
And whenever we forget this, we need to remember that we were not baptised into echo chambers, but into Christ.
BURIED PEOPLE
In a book called, Spirituality According to Paul¸ theologian Rodney Reeves makes the point that, whenever Paul brings up baptism, ‘[In] every case but one (Rom. 6:1-4), Paul refers to baptism [because] he is trying to get his converts to learn how to get along with each other (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 1:13-17; 12:13; 15:29; Eph. 4:5; Col 2:12).’[vii]
One of those occasions is here, in 1 Cor. 12:13a, ‘we have all been baptised into Christ’s body…’ (NLT).
One reason Paul does this is that, as someone once said it, ‘death is the great equaliser.’ No matter who you are, what status you have, what accolades you’ve achieved… they all end at death.
We’re all equal in death. No one is better than anyone else. The first are last, and the last are first.
’But’ as Reeves states, ‘for those who have been buried with Christ in baptism, the grave has already been visited—the great equaliser has already happened.’[viii]
Before baptism, the Corinthians saw themselves as either Jews or Greeks, slaves or free etc. But afterwards, they were supposed to see themselves as one people.
It’s the same for us. We are to be one people. Yes, we have specialities—we are connoisseurs. We are not all right. We are not all wrong. But, we are all equals.
Are we trying to divide the body of Christ into pieces? Are we clinging to our preferences, echoes and individuality more than our corporate identity in Jesus? Are we snubbing one another?
It’s a challenge to be together—again, it’s the greatest spiritual challenge there is. But God seems pretty invested in drawing people to himself and forming a community from them, so we have got to learn to drink from this one Spirit we’ve been given to drink from (1 Cor. 12:13b)
“Can Christ be divided into pieces?”
The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:13 (NLT)
[i] www.wakacoffee.com, How to Know if you are a Coffee Snob? [Italics mine]
[ii] For example, ‘[Plato] held that humanity is divided into people of gold, silver and bronze and that hierarchy is written into the structure of society.’ (Plato, Republic, book 3, 415a-c). Aristotle ‘believed that some were born to rule and others to be ruled.’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1254b10-26). [As quoted in Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s essay, The Home we Make for God, in Covenant & Conversation, Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid Books, 2010), p. 209]
[iii] I imagine there may also be some who want to talk about differing denominations and how they fit into this, e.g., Are denominations wrong? In short, no. Denominations can be a practical way in which the gift of the other functions within the body of Christ. The problem is not denominations; the problem is denominationalism. Sadly, those who argue against denominations can also fall foul of the same thing they protest against: they to express a denominationalism in their spurring of denominations.
[iv] If you’re looking for some further Christian explorations around Echo Chambers, here’s a couple of articles: Joseph Mcauley, Epistemic Bubbles and Echo Chambers; Brett McCracken (The Gospel Coalition), Exit the Echo Chamber. It’s Time to Persuade; Jacob McMillen (Brazen Church), Why You Need To Escape Your Echo Chamber (And One Practical Way We’ll Do It Together). If you want to suggest a few more, please do in the comments section.
[v] Of course, the question can be pointed back at me. I am in no way perfect. But, if it helps, I’m a reader, and intentional reading is one way I manage this. It would be all too easy to read what I know and what I agree with. Currently, beside my bed, there is a stack of fifteen non-fiction books that I’m slowly working through. Most are theology, a quarter are not. Three of the books are from writers I’ve read before, the rest are from authors I’ve never read. The one I’m reading at the moment is by a Jewish Rabbi. In addition to these, I have three yet-to-read commentaries on that wonderful book, Revelation—all from three differing perspectives (in addition to the three differing perspectives I read earlier this year).
I also read broadly from fiction, too.
When I preach, I usually like to quote from a wide circle of other people. It’s purposeful, I want to encourage a more holistic outlook on the church. The church is beautiful! However, I do have my preferences; the Anglican theologian N. T. Wright (aka Tom Wright) is easily my favourite. Nevertheless, I haven’t read anything substantial of Tom Wright’s for over four years (although, I did read his 60 page book, God and the Pandemic back in 2020). Mainly because, I understand my bias and that echo chambers are a death trap. I do pick up an occasional Wright book for reference when I preach, but I will not only pick up a Wright book.
Interestingly, this intentional reading mechanism has, in turn, developed another preference of mine: I love writers and theologians who also adopt this intentional and broad approach to theology. I especially love it when theologians display this appreciation of differing perspectives and model respectful disagreement.
[vi] Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869), as quoted by Rutger Bregman, Human Kind: A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury Publishing, Dublin, 2021), p. 364.
[vii] Rodney Reeves, ‘Spirituality According to Paul: Imitating the Apostle of Christ’, (InterVaristy Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2001), p. 96
[viii] Ibid, p. 101
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
Leave a comment