“Life in the church at Corinth was a mess and getting messier.” Not much, it seems, has changed. As if the normal schisms and heresies that distress the church weren’t enough, my own church body is in the news because one of our district presidents was arrested by federal agents for crimes against children. There is no defending that, only praying for temporal and eschatalogical justice to be meted out and praying for those who have been victimized, trusting that the God who brings life out of death can restore and renew even those who have been horribly mistreated. It is heartbreaking, not because you think it cannot happen in this church body, but because you see that it actually happens everywhere. There are no safe spaces, not even in the synod that claims doctrinal purity and superiority. No amount of being right can account for the sin that persists in humanity. 

Sin does manifest everywhere and I am not exempt from that charge. It was there in Corinth too, the place Franzmann said was a mess and getting messier. Anyone familiar with the scriptures knows that they do not paint a picture that obscures the mess of humanity. It is there in Genesis, when lies and deceit and sexual promiscuity are found even among the patriarchs, even among the line from whom the Christ will descend. It is there throughout the Old and New Testaments, not as window dressing, but as the real context into which the prophets and apostles speak. Paul spoke to a people who thought the best way to deal with sin was to ignore it, to have grace even for the one who had his father’s wife. It was a mess and getting messier. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

It is easy to become disillusioned by this reality. To think that there is no way forward, no point to any of it. One step forward easily devolves into two steps back, not necessarily because I make the misstep, but because someone in the church and world does. Egos are a problem, not just as I look in the mirror but as I look at the church. We build brands and then act surprised when the brand ambassador crashes out or harms others. We feed the ego, we feed the self, and we become what we eat, self-absorbed, bent on filling our stomachs no matter how it hurts or harms the other. I hear echoes of what the psalms have to say about idols and the hands that make them. 

Paul writes to messy church and tells them that, despite the mess, the Spirit has been given them and this Spirit gives to each some manifestation of his power, but with an important caveat. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7 NRSV). The Spirit is given to a messy church and gives to that same mess a manifestation for the sake of common good, for the sake of others, not solely for the possessor of the Spirit. Franzmann commented on this section of Paul’s letter saying that the apostle “places the higher value on those gifts that edify the whole church and has little patience with religious virtuosos who think God’s music is a series of solos written for them. ‘Let all things be done for edification,’ he says  of the worship assemblies of the church, since worship is to be a reflection and summary of the whole life of the church.” We are not here to indulge the self but to serve the other.

Even as I write that it sounds too simple to be real, too naive to be possible. Franzmann noted the same when he said, “it all sounds so simple and straightforward when Paul speaks of it. The situation was simpler then, it seems, and the action called for by the situation more readily possible than now. How are we to serve the common good with the gifts of the Spirit today—we lonely men lost in crowds of isolated, solitary men, leading a meaningless existence in a system which regiments and mechanizes our lives? How are we to become operatives of the Spirit for the common good in a system that knows only a caricature of the common good and has no room for the spirit? Even the church seems incapable of functioning rightly—spiritually—in this atmosphere. Organization and administration (Paul counts ‘helpers’ and ‘administrators’ among the spiritual gifts given to the church) often seem to thwart rather than further the purpose for which they were given, namely, that all members of the body function individually and purposefully for the health and well-being of the whole body. Within the church, as outside it, men remain, it seems, locked in themselves, encrusted in their egos, existing for themselves rather than living for others.”

Recently I attended an ordination and installation of a brother pastor in my circuit. I was struck, as I am whenever I am at one of those, by the vows the candidate takes, vows I took, vows I know others took too. Vows to preach and teach in accord with the scriptures an confessions. Vows to pray for people. Vows to adorn the office of the ministry with a holy life. Those vows always smack me in the the face and this time was no different, not only because I am reminded of the promises I have made and aim to keep but because of how difficult they are to keep. The church is not made up of people free from selfish ambition and vain conceit. It is not made up of people who always do the right thing for the right reasons. Sometimes pastors make a mistake, sometimes they run headlong in to hurting other people. Those things are not the same by any stretch, but they are all failures at one level and the picture Franzmann paints, the picture we see all to well, is one that causes disillusionment all to easy, not just for those who wear a collar but for those who will never be called to wear one too. 

And yet, there is hope. Again Franzmann has something worth reading here: “Before we cry too pitifully in our beer (in our day self-pity is bidding for a place among the Seven Deadly Sins) we might recall that never in the history of man has the question of common good pressed so closely and so insistently upon us as today. The ease and rapidity of world-wide communication have confronted us with the massed misery of mankind as never before. The growth and spread of worldwide organizations of mercy have given us opportunities of responding to the needs of men on a scale unheretofore. The “good news to the poor” can speed and triumph, can be multiplied and transmitted, by vaster human and technical means than ever before.” Yes things are messy, but in the midst of the mess opportunities abound. 

The opportunities that do exist are not the only reason to remain optimistic even amidst the mess. “Above all, are not we whimpering solitaries, forgetting, unconscionably, that our Lord is King of kings and Lord of lords? His state is kingly, and ‘they also serve who only stand and wait.’ I once heard a prison chaplain tell how he was so discouraged by the lack of response to his ministry, not only on the part of the prisoners but also on the part of the prison administration and its personnel, that he was ready, one Easter Monday, to resign. He went sailing to think it over in the solitude of the sea. Then it came to him: ‘Every day that I stay on that job is a victory. I win just by staying there.’ We win by just staying there where our Lord has put us: in the ranks of the uncompromised who have not bowed the knee to whatever Baal is current and popular. He will integrate each one of us and our little manifestation of the Spirit’s working into the whole of the common good which He desires and designs. We may proceed always in the assurance that every act of love prompted by the Spirit makes the world richer, and we must act in the fear that every prompting of the Spirit left unheeded leaves us all the poorer.” 

It is true, undoubtedly, that when the ego, when the sinful self, does what it does best and harms people in conscionable ways, that suffering abounds and humanity is the less for it. When it happens in the church, the effects endure. I pastor a congregation whose story includes a pastor that had an affair and was rightly removed for it. That was thirty years ago, some wounds from it remain unhealed. And yet, Christ is risen, his tomb is empty, he is king of kings and lord of lords. We win not because we are strong but because the one who already won is still at work. He sends the Spirit and the Spirit gets to work in and through us where we are. In the places we have been put for the sake of the people beside us. Every act of love enriches because it gives to the other what the self designs to hoard. 

That does not mean we can control the outcome or avoid the pitfalls or mitigate all pain and suffering. It still seems that the problems are too big. This calculation, though, is the problem. Franzmann asks, “Who can calculate or predict what any one act prompted by the Spirit will contribute to the common good?” None of us. That was also true, as Franzmann points out, for Paul. “If Paul had paused to calculate the chances of contributing to the common good by writing his First Letter to the Corinthians, he would hardly have set pen to paper at all. What was the use? Life in Ephesus (where he wrote) was life on the razor’s edge, not conducive to writing inspired epistles. Life in the church in Corinth was a mess and getting messier. What use to write to them? Yet if Paul had not written, if he had not obeyed the prompting of the Spirit for the common good, how much poorer we all should be, all we who ‘in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ He wrote, amid tears sometimes, but he wrote, and wrote again when the common good was more elusive and harder to envision that it is for us today.”

Life is a mess, in the church and the world. But amidst the tears rightly shed, amidst the pain and frustration and struggles, the Spirit still prompts. Love still enriches. We don’t hide from the pain, from the wrong, from the tragedy, not because there is no where to hide, but because into the darkness the light is called to shine, because into the brokenness the healing must go, because the Spirit still prompts the love that dare not be hoarded. It was given to you for others and if the church and world have anything to show us right now it is that opportunities abound. 

All Franzmann quotations from: Martin Franzmann, “Gifts for the Service of All,” Alive With the Spirit (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1973), 37–40.