Just a quick update on the Easter message. In the process of preparation, the title was changed to the above, “No Cover Up,” and the ending focus changed a bit to celebrate the hope of our own resurrection brought to us in the message of Christ’s Resurrection. You can read the completed, and preached this morning, version here:
http://www.valleycovenant.org/sermons/sermonarchive/2011Sermons/2011-04-24.htm
Christ is risen!
One little piece of Scripture overlooked by the lectionary readings is the account Matthew adds to the Resurrection narrative, telling how the Jewish leaders bribed the Roman soldiers to give out the “someone stole the body” story. It’s a wonderful little bit of internal apologetic for the truth of the Resurrection and it ought not be missed. So I decided it to include it in this year’s Easter Gospel reading, making the text Matthew 28:1-15. I will focus a bit in the sermon on that devious plan to cover it all up.
Part of the wonder of the Resurrection message is that it is so resilient. A great deal of talk and ink and yes, money has been spilled forth to repress it, even again in recent years, but it keeps bouncing back with the resounding ring of truth.
“The truth will out,” is a Shakespeare line (“Merchant of Venice”) that applies especially to the Good News that Christ is risen. Just as the power of God must out Christ from the tomb, the truth that it has happened will inevitably out even in the midst of confusion and suppression.
Nothing displays the power of the Resurrection quite like the classic Greek icon with the risen Lord standing over Hell with His saints and lifting men and women from their graves. He’s standing on the broken down gates of Hell, which have fallen into the form of a cross or of the Greek letter chi, which of course is the first letter of Christ in Greek. Looking at what is represented in this painting we are reminded that the power of the event depicted is such that word of it cannot help but get out into the world.
The only question remaining is if the truth will out in us. Will we live in the marvelous power of the resurrected Lord, let Him be seen in our lives, or will we let the truth be covered up by weak confidence in what we profess? This Easter may we all be inspired again to let the truth that Christ is risen be known in and through us.
Welcome to my new blog location and style. We had to change web hosts this month and my old blog was created in a propietary format. It was good and seemed to get a lot of traffic, though not many comments at all. But now I’ve been forced to learn how to create this using WordPress. I know there’s lots of WordPress power I’m not using. And given the way time goes, I don’t know if I’ll ever learn to use it.
For now, however, this feels like a readable format and I hope it works for whoever is interested enough to spend a few minutes here. Blessings, and “tight lines” to everyone, whether of the text or angling variety.
My one close encounter with donkeys was not particularly happy. At about age 16 I joined with other Boy Scouts in a trek through New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch. Part of the journey included a day of using burros, small donkeys, to pack our food and part of our gear over the trails we were hiking.
Despite the pleasure of having a little weight off my own back, I found the burros to be more trouble than the benefit they provided. They stank (I wasn’t about to let my sleeping bag join the pile on a smelly animal’s back). They kicked. They didn’t like be harnessed or packed or led anywhere they didn’t feel like going. We pulled and cursed these stupid creatures up and over a pass until we were able to unload and gladly turn them over to their keepers at another corral. On top of it all, one of the critters grabbed my hat off my head and began to munch it.
So my image of the Palm Sunday parade, with Jesus riding not only a donkey, but a young, untamed, unridden animal, is not all that romantic or impressive given my experience. I’d rather walk than ride a beast like that. Which means to me that what the first Gospel describes in Matthew 21:1-11, is perhaps more impressive than superficial impressions suggest. For Jesus to somehow transform a donkey ride into a grand processional during which He was hailed as a king, is itself a kind of miracle.
Part of the miracle lies in the fact that the donkey colt submitted so apparently well to first being saddled with the disciples’ cloaks and then to carrying its first rider. No need to break the animal, no indication of any willfulness on its part at all, except to perform what the Lord asked of it.
I wonder how willing you and I are to let Jesus perform that sort of miracle with us? How accepting are we of His purpose and direction day to day and over the course of our lives? How often do we buck and rear and kick against His gentle desire to be seated in a place of honor over us and guide us where He chooses? This Sunday may we all learn a little from the donkey about being available to our Lord.
“Throw the book at them!” I would say as I dropped off one of my daughters to participate in our city’s “Teen Court” program. It’s a system where teenagers pleading guilty to minor offences are redirected to a “court” of their peers for appropriate sentencing like restitution, community service, and even Teen Court service time of their own. The program seems to work as a way of holding young people (and their parents) accountable in a substantive way.
It’s general wisdom that both children and adults with no accountability system in place are more likely to misbehave. That’s one of the reasons I am very glad to be part of a denomination that supervises and holds accountable its clergy. It is a blessing, although sometimes a harsh one, to be held accountable.
Our text this Sunday from Romans 3:1-20 is focused on emphasizing that everyone is sinful, whether Jew or Gentile. In verses 10-18 Paul quotes a string of Old Testament texts, mostly from the Psalms, to that effect. Many of them emphasize the sinfulness of human speech in corrupt throats, tongues, lips and mouths.
Paul is arguing the universality of sin in order to eliminate any claim to escape accountability on the basis of presumed membership in God’s people through external Jewish identity markers like circumcision (verse 1). Though Jewishness offers an initial advantage (verse 2), it does not eliminate accountability. Verse 19 says that God will silence every mouth that claims a righteousness it does not really have.
It’s better to translate verse 20 more literally as “Therefore no flesh will be justified before him through works of the law, for through the law comes knowledge of sin.” “Works of the law” should be understood in the New Perspective on Paul sense of not all good works or commandments, but those which are specific Jewish identity markers, like circumcision or a kosher diet. In other words, Jewish identity alone does not justify; everyone is sinful and accountable before God. Mere possession of the law only heightens one’s awareness of sin.
So in chapter 2 Paul argued that both Jew and Gentile would be judged and here in chapter 3 now maintains that both Jew and Gentile will be held accountable for sin that is the universal human condition.
The whole thrust is to drive us forward into the concluding part of the chapter about the righteousness of God made available through faith in Jesus Christ (verses 22-24). But there’s nice precursor to that while still remaining in the present text, verses 3 and 4, which show us that though we are unfaithful, God remains faithful. Though every human mouth lies, God remains truthful. That is the hope in the midst of our own failure. The God to whom we are accountable is faithful and true, and continuing in the words of I John 1:9 “will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Paul wants to remove every excuse for claiming our own righteousness, whether it’s a natural goodness or an inherited connection with the people of God, and drive us toward a righteousness that results from belonging to the community of people redeemed by Jesus Christ. Acknowledging accountability is a first step toward receiving grace.
One of the most unpleasant food experiences I’ve had is to bite in to what appears to be a bright red, crisp and juicy apple, only to find it mushy and tasteless, all the sugar and tartness gone to starchy pulp. The outside is beautiful, but the inside is terribly disappointing.
In our text for this Sunday, Romans 2:17-29, Paul argues that external observance of God’s law may lead to human lives that are like that mushy apple. There may be every external appearance of being a proper member of God’s people. In the Jewish case the external mark is paradigmatically the physical sign of circumcision. Yet having the correct external appearance is both useless and misleading if what’s inside a person does not coincide with what’s exhibited on the outside.
It’s important to note here that Paul is not arguing for a merely internal spiritual life. He singles out circumcision as a paradigm external mark of Jewish identity, but he is not concerned to deny the validity of or importance of external keeping of the law for Christian living. That’s crystal clear in his choice of three of the Ten Commandments in verses 21 and 22 (against theft, adultery, and idolatry) as matters with which to chide the Jewish person relying solely on circumcision. The insufficiency of the one external sign is manifest in the failure to perform externally these other commandments.
What Paul is concerned to show is that in Christ no one, including the Jewish person, may rely solely on external ritual markers to claim a place in the community of God’s people. There is in Jesus an internal transformation of character (or of the spirit or the heart, various language for internal human being can be used), which has the external consequence of significant and consistent obedience to the whole law and not just to external identity markers.
Once again, if Paul’s understanding of good spiritual life was that it was entirely internal, his condemnation of those who fail to keep those other commandments and his charge in verse 24 that they have thereby dishonored God’s name would make no sense. It’s only by failure in externals in other than circumcision that the internal failure is manifest.
So the lesson for us in this week’s text is not to move our spiritual focus entirely inward. That always leads in the direction of Gnosticism and a spirituality that is false in another way. No, the lesson is a proper appreciation for an internal life and character that manifests in a matching and coordinated external life. The apple is to be both colorful and shiny on the outside and crisp and sweet on the inside. And the latter of course does have an external manifestation in firmness to the touch.
We may want to consider what external markers we as Christians today may be inclined to regard in a way similar to the Jewish regard for circumcision that Paul condemns. Baptism is one possibility since it is the external identity marker that replaces circumcision for Christians. Yet baptism alone, apart from an internal Christian character and resulting further Christian obedience, is meaningless.
However, there may be other even less central cultural Christian identity markers that we have mistakenly moved to a central role in our lives and churches. One thinks of various and changing strictures about Sabbath keeping, tobacco, alcohol, church attendance, etc. As Jesus said about the Pharisee’s scrupulous tithing, none of these are necessarily bad guidelines for Christian living, but elevated out of proportion over other matters of faithful obedience, they give Christians, and ultimately God, a bad name.
One way to go at this text practically may be some individual and corporate examination of our lives to consider which markers we may have elevated too highly and which commandments thereby we have neglected. In that way we might avoid the state nicely connecting verse 19 of the text to this week’s Gospel reading from John 9:1-41. We will with spiritual eyes be better able to discern what is truly going on inside us, and thereby avoid being blind guides of the blind.
One of the blogs I’ve encountered in researching this week’s text is named “Brain Cramps for God,” and what I’ve found in the research has made me empathize with that blog’s title.
Whew! Once again I have to say that I had no idea what I was letting myself in for in deciding to preach through Romans. Years of preaching on the occasional Romans text that would show up in the lectionary was not much preparation for a serious look at the content and message of the whole letter.
Romans 2:1-16 is another especially difficult passage that requires holding seemingly contradictory ideas in tension before arriving at conclusions. Here, as Paul continues his argument that Jew and Gentile are equal before God, he says things that appear to be in deep conflict with what is usually thought to be his overall message of justification by grace through faith.
Romans 2:6-8 and 2:13 seem to be the particularly sticky verses, with the former clearly proclaiming a judgment according to works, and the latter asserting that those who are justified (“righteous in God’s sight” in the TNIV and NRSV) will be those who “obey the law,” whether it’s the Torah for Jews or the law of conscience “written on their hearts,” for Gentiles.
How then does Romans 2 square with our ordinary Protestant/Evangelical conviction that works play no role at all in the justification or judgment of Christians? One answer has been to treat the judgment by works in Romans 2 as “hypothetical,” implying that “if” one were able to rack up a solid record of good works, then it would lead to salvation. But of course no one does, as Paul says later in 3:23. But seeing judgment by works in chapter 2 as hypothetical doesn’t sit well in my book. It feels phony.
Klyne Snodgrass from our own North Park Theological Seminary has argued for some kind of combination of grace and “doing” in Paul’s gospel and the Gospel in general and I’m inclined to think he’s write. That key phrase at the beginning and end of Romans, “the obedience of faith” seems to incline in that direction.
The trick is to hold faith and grace in a reasonable tension with good works and arrive at some picture of Christian experience that can put them together. But that seems to be exactly what is expected throughout Scripture. Our experience of God’s mercy and grace is meant to make us into new people who actually do what God wants.
So I’ll be wrestling with the tension this Sunday morning in words, but we all wrestle with it every day as we receive grace and seek to follow our Lord.
As I was just saying after a baked potato lunch at church Sunday, I wish I still had my spud gun. No, not a big PVC bazooka that fires whole potatoes, but a little metal toy pistol that with a blast of air fired eighth inch plugs extracted from potatoes snitched from the kitchen cupboard. I got the spud gun by trading with a friend, then foolishly traded it away, I think for a tiny “spy camera” for which I could never find film nor anyone to develop the film if I found it. It was a bad trade. I’d love to play with the spud gun now. I wish I had never given it up.
In this week’s look at Romans 1:18-32, the word “exchange” or “barter” or “trade” is used three times, in verses 23, 25 and 26 to identify how human beings exchanged a true natural knowledge of God and sexual morality for false beliefs and depraved ways.
The word that means “to give up” is also used several times both from the human and the divine side. God’s response to human bad exchanges, a giving up of a possessed good for something lesser and evil, is to Himself give up humanity to the consequences of their bad trades. So we read “God gave them up,” in verses 24, 26 and 28. On the human side, in verse 27 “give up” is used of men relinquishing normal heterosexual relations for homosexual activity.
All these trades are disastrous for humanity and the catalog of sins and vices at the end of the passage in verses 29-31 is the inevitable result. Ultimately, the just consequence is death as is said in verse 32.
Fortunately we get to pair this text this Sunday with the story of Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus in John 3, which of course includes that wonderfully familiar verse about God’s great exchange on our behalf in verse 16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
God’s great trade is the life of His Son for our salvation. And God’s trade allows us to trade back our sins and sufferings for the knowledge of God we lost and for a new, eternal life that recovers the holiness we gave up. May we all enjoy the grace of Jesus to trade back our poor exchanges for all the good things we foolishly give up.
I must be crazy! Last November when I prayed and thought over sermon texts for this year, I felt led to tackle preaching through the epistle to the Romans. The first chapters seemed appropriate to Lent and the remainder could be spread through the summer and the fall.
However, as I embark on the first of these messages for this coming Sunday, I realize that in order to reach the goal of working through the letter before Advent I’ve forced myself to bite off impossibly large chunks. So for this week it’s: Romans 1:1-17. It would probably take at least 6 sermons to do that text justice!
So I’m afraid that I will do a rather cursory job of the first fifteen verses and zero in on the last two, particularly verse 17, which is often identified as the theme of the letter, with it’s closing quotation/paraphrase from Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous [just] will live by faith.”
Still, I will want to call attention to verse 5 for it’s statement of Paul’s mission and here choose a more literal translation than the TNIV’s “faith and obedience.” Paul says the apostles “received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience of faith for his name’s sake.” That phrase “the obedience of faith” seems nearly as strong a theme as the “The righteous will live by faith.”
The interpretation of these phrases is fraught with complexity and the options are many. But when you juxtapose verse 5 and “the obedience of faith” with verse 17 and “the righteous will live by faith,” there seems to be another dimension in the latter besides the Reformers’ emphasis on sola fidei (“faith alone”). There is an ongoing and practical outworking of faith in the lives of those who experience it. It manifests itself in obedience, in living by that faith.`
The above does not eliminate the idea that by faith one shall live in the sense of escaping eternal death for the blessing of eternal life. In other words, faith is the key to salvation, to true life. That’s true, but Paul’s concept of faith in Romans is clearly not as a cognitive ticket to heaven, but as an experience which makes life in Christ possible beginning now, especially in the form of obedience.
The sermon title phrase, “from faith to faith” (translated “by faith from first to last” by the TNIV) remains mysterious. I’m drawn to Origen’s notion that it picks up on the order of the Gospel first to Jew and then to Gentile in verse 16. So the righteousness of God is revealed both in the Old Testament faith of the Jews and then in the New Testament faith of Christians. But commentaries tell me that’s unlikely. Oh well.
For our purposes Sunday there’s another unlikely suggestion that “faith to faith” is the passing of the good news from one believer to another person. It identifies the way in which God’s revealed righteousness actually becomes known in the world. That actually seems to fit with the passing of faith from Jew to Gentile ala Origen.
As anyone who’s read this far can see, it’s all terribly complicated, way more than I want to tackle in a twenty-five minute sermon. And I still haven’t been blessed with any stories or images to crystallize it all in a way that will preach. I’ve got some ideas floating around our weird decision to celebrate St. Patrick this Sunday in combination with Paul’s desire to journey to Rome (both men went captive to their destinations, Paul to Rome, Patrick to Ireland), but it’s all inchoate as yet.
So pray for me and rejoice that God saves us and gives us faith even when we remain well short of sorting out all the theology and biblical interpretation.
He had directions from Google maps. He had long experience driving in the area. He had a GPS unit. Karl still got very lost driving from Chicago to the north suburbs. In a recent article in the Covenant Quarterly, Karl Clifton-Soderstrom explains how his ill-fated journey resulted from too many directional resources. Google conflicted with GPS, which conflicted with Karl’s directional sense, and all of it failed to take into account construction and the directions offered by detour signs.
Karl likens his driving experience to the plethora of moral voices which offer to guide us in today’s world, but it seems also an apt illustration of spiritual life in general. Browse the religion section at Borders; tune into a PBS special on the Bible; talk to friends; listen to religious broadcasting; attend church–put all those guides together and the result is likely to be more confusion than enlightenment.
Yet the spirit of the age seems to demand all those different navigational options, not just for driving but for spiritual life. We would chafe if told not to learn all we can from every possible source of information and not to consider all the possible interpretations and takes on the deepest questions of life.
In particular, we of our age might resist the implication of our text for Transfiguration Sunday this week, Matthew 17:1-8. After an incredible spiritual experience of multiple dimensions of sight and hearing–Jesus transfigured and talking with Moses and Elijah–the three disciples end up at this point: “When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.” Are we able in this day of pluralism and choice to insist on a spiritual life based on “no one except Jesus?”
Love Wins, a book by Rob Bell, which no one has even read yet because it’s not out until the end of the month, generated an on-line brouhaha because pre-pub publicity seems to suggest Bell embraces universalism, the view that everyone is saved. Just the possibility of such a view offered by a prominent young evangelical figure caused a firestorm because the pluralist spirit of the age is so much feared in some Christian corners. The vicious attacks on Bell make it apparent that it is more and more difficult to appear (and to be) loving and reasonable while insisting that there is only one Savior, “no one except Jesus.”
The great Christian challenge of our day may be this: to hold a faith exclusively based in Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection while doing what the disciples ultimately did, proclaiming that faith in a way that welcomes and includes anyone and everyone who will believe in, love and follow Jesus as God’s Son and our Savior.
So my hope for this Sunday is that we can remember to look only to Jesus as our spiritual guide, but that we can learn to do it with grace and love.
This week’s text seems almost too personal to preach, on a couple different levels. First, I Corinthians 4:1-5 seems very much about Paul claiming for himself and his fellow apostles exemption from judgment by the congregation at Corinth. Second, insofar as it has extended application it seems to address those who like Paul have a vocational ministry in the church. So how to have this passage address the larger church?
The best I can make of it is to take what Paul says here about being servants and stewards (“those entrusted”), about being faithful, AND about not being judged until the end and apply these thoughts to Christians in general. We are all in some way servants of Christ and stewards of His Gospel. And we all struggle with issues of self-justification and the judgments of others.
There’s an old joke about the first mate on a slave galley coming to those who sat chained and pulling at the oars with “good news and bad news.” The good news was that the captain was giving them an extra long lunch break and double rations. After the cheering dies down, the first mate says, “The bad news is that after lunch the captain wants to water ski.”
The original derivation of the word translated “servants” in verse 1 (not the usual diakonos, but hyperetes) was something like “under rowers,” those who rowed at the lowest bank of oars on a galley. By Paul’s time it had lost that nautical sense, but it clearly designated someone in subservience to a master, an assistant. Perhaps, in language made popular in recent film, a minion. Paul’s self-assessment as a galley slave of Christ, totally subordinate to His will, calls for a similar self-understanding by us all.
Yet that awareness of one’s role as Christ’s servant also allows a certain self-confidence which stands against the proclivity of human beings to assess, judge and condemn each other. Paul is able to stand up under the attacks of opponents in Corinth through his awareness that his ministry and motivations would ultimately be judged by God alone at the return of Christ. He’s able to counsel the Corinthians against any hasty judgments of himself (and we would presume of anyone else), leaving that to the light which would reveal everyone’s heart in the day of the Lord.
There’s a great deal of confusion about judgment in the contemporary church, because we read passages like this (see Jesus’ own words in Matthew 7:1) and suppose that it means all judgment and critique is forbidden. But in just the next chapter of I Corinthians in 5:12 & 13 Paul wonders why there is not some judgment taking place within the church, and in 6:2 asks the Corinthians to judge even legal disputes between members. Clearly judging is not ruled out all together.
It’s a rough distinction, but I think we might distinguish between judging and even punishing actions and judging motivations (Paul’s concern in this Sunday’s text). The first is a necessary part of protecting community life from those who would do harm. The second is God’s province and not ours. Hence the command not to judge.
In our attempts to minister to and shelter the homeless here at Valley Covenant, we’ve recently dealt with a young man who has abused our hospitality through disrespect for rules, possible theft and unpredictable behavior. We sadly made the decision to ban him from the property and call the police to deal with him as a trespasser if he returns. That all seems within the bounds of the first sort of judgment. However, we make no guesses or judgments about the state of the young man’s motivations and his relationship with God. Perhaps he is a believer and we will see him more clearly in the light of that Day. Yet for now we need to protect our congregation and property.
Paul’s message for us here is that we leave knowledge of the heart and the eternal quality of each person’s soul to God. We are all servants of Christ and we must not usurp the place of our Master in dealing with each other. May we offer each other the same kind of grace which He offers us.
A little over nine years ago my family and I walked around the site of the city where the letter we’ve been studying these past few weeks was addressed. The archaeological site of ancient Corinth is fascinating largely because so much is preserved. One gets a marvelous sense of walking where saints actually walked. There is the long line of shop stalls in the Agora seen here below the temple of Apollo. There is the road on which Paul very likely entered the city.
There is the Bema where Paul was brought before the proconsul Gallio in Acts 18. And there’s even some stone toilet seats making it plain that real people lived there.
The stone construction of Corinth was done well enough that we can visit and learn from what was built even 2,000 years later. It was good work. Paul had something like it in mind in our text for this Sunday, I Corinthians 3:10-23, as he writes to the church at Corinth exhorting them to consider the quality of what is being built in their lives. “Each should build with care,” says verse 10. The foundation is Jesus Christ and those who lead and participate in the church build on that foundation with various qualities of material.
As C.S. Lewis pointed out in an essay to which I’m always returning (“The Weight of Glory”), that which lasts in this world is what we build into each other’s lives. You and I are the only eternal constructions in sight. We are to live in the church in such a way that we build each other up with the spiritual equivalent of precious metals and precious stones, material that will last even through trials that feel like fire.
The text is complex, moving to reflection on being together the temple of God in verses 16 and 17, and then pulling in themes from chapter 2 about wisdom and foolishness in verses 18-20.
The last three verses seem to sound yet another note, but they also carry forward the wisdom and foolishness theme and relate it back to the business of what is built by leaders in the church. It was a common sentiment in Greek philosophy that the wise “possess all things.” Wisdom was a virtue that gave one ownership of the life and the world around one. The Corinthians were claiming to be wise and so Paul accedes to their claim while putting it in its place.
Yes, says Paul, you are wise, you possess everything. But quit your division and your boasting about this leader or that. They are all yours. All the good which is built up in the church, no matter who does it, belongs to you all. So “Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you. . ..” Then comes the clincher in verse 23, “and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”
The keen thing about the clincher is that not only does it preclude boasting by humbling us all together as the possession of Christ in whom we are saved (nicely tying back to the Christ as the foundation of the Church), but it shows us even Christ humbling Himself to the Father in the closing phrase, “and Christ belongs to God.” Ultimately we are to be what Jesus is, people who submit and give ourselves away to God in each other in love. That’s the material for buildings that will stand in the fires and last forever.
The front page of our local paper this morning carried a story about two Kidsports middle school basketball coaches who got into a physical altercation at a game last night. Such events tempt me to fulminate about the pointless emotion and immaturity that surrounds the pursuit of sports, but the reality is that we are all guilty of the kind of immaturity that just happens to manifest itself so visibly in a gym or on the field.
In our text this week from I Corinthians 3:1-9, Paul chides the Corinthians for the immaturity being displayed in their church in the form of their own jealousy and quarreling (v. 3). Just as some spectators surely wanted to shout “Grow up!” to two adult males tussling in front of the kids they were supposed to leading, Paul directs a stern “Grow up!” message to Corinth, painting them as infants not even ready for solid food.
Yet Paul wants to present a unified front for the leadership of the church, arguing that the Corinthian division around different leaders is nothing desired by either Paul or his supposed opponent Apollos. Instead, their ministries are complementary and ultimately subservient to the work of God. Verse 6 says, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.” And that means that ultimately the merely human work of ministry doesn’t amount to much, but only the growth that is God’s work.
This theme of complementary ministries and roles will be fully developed for the whole church later on in this epistle, with chapter 12’s great image of the Body and its members. However, for now Paul gives us this brief reminder that all who labor in the church are “God’s co-workers.” We are partners with God and therefore need to work harmoniously as partners with each other. It’s a lesson I’m constantly learning, trying to work bit by bit on that solid food.