February 6, 2022 “Popeye or Paul?” – I Corinthians 15:1-11

I Corinthians 15:1-11
“Popeye or Paul?”
February 6, 2022 – Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

“I’m strong to the ‘finich,’ ’cause I eats me spinach, I’m Popeye the sailor man.” Some of us grew up watching a cartoon character with enormous forearms sing that song as he battled all sorts of evil and won back the affections of his wayward girlfriend Olive Oyl from a thug named Bluto. A can of spinach fueled his superhuman strength and he often sucked it all in through the corncob pipe constantly held between his teeth.

So as I read verse 10 of our text, Paul saying, “But by the grace of God I am what I am…,” I cannot help but recall Popeye singing:

I’m Popeye the sailor man.
I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam,
I’m Popeye the sailor man.

In this sermon I will compare and contrast Popeye and Paul and ask us to consider which of them might be the better model for us. You may think that’s too easy a comparison, with Paul the Christian apostle winning hands down. I agree. But first consider some similarities between them, beyond that pithy, true-no-matter-who-says-it trademark line, “I am what I am,” or “yam,” as Popeye pronounces it.

Popeye fights all sorts of enemies, not just Bluto. They include the Sea Hag and Mars men. Paul takes on spiritual enemies of various kinds, but here in I Corinthians he is particularly concerned with combating misinformation about the Gospel, even distortion of the Gospel of Jesus until it was no longer recognizable. At the beginning of the letter he addressed various mistakes reported to him by others. In chapter 7, he began a long section answering the Corinthians’ own questions, saying, “now concerning the matters about which you wrote…”

Paul takes each question in turn, about marriage, about food offered to idols, about the Lord’s Supper, and about spiritual gifts. That last topic is the one we heard him addressing in chapters 12 and 13 for my last three sermons. He continued it with practical directions about spiritual gifts in chapter 14. But now, at the beginning of chapter 15, Paul no longer merely answers questions they asked, but addresses false doctrine he’s heard exists in Corinth, misinformation about the Resurrection.

So the very first thing he does is go back to the basics. Verses 1 and 2 say,

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news [that’s the Gospel] that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which you also stand, through which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

Paul asks us to remember the basics of what saves us. Popeye sings something similar, but it’s a very different message. A lesser known verse of his signature song goes:

If anyone dares to risk my “Fisk,”
It’s “Boff” an’ it’s “Wham” un’erstan’?
So keep “Good Be-hav-or”
That’s your one life saver
With Popeye the Sailor Man.

With Popeye, “your one life saver” is “Good Be-hav-or.” Behaving yourself will save you from the sailor’s righteous “Boff”s and “Wham”s. Stay away from his girl, eat your spinach. Asking children who watched those cartoons to “keep ‘Good Be-hav-or’” wasn’t a bad moral message, but to ask for it by the threat of a spinach-powered fist is not the good news Paul preached. No, the true good news begins in verse 3.

“For I handed onto you as of first importance what I in turn had received.” Paul is talking about “handing on” a tradition. Tradition is the mechanism by which the Gospel got passed along and still gets passed along. And the first and most important tradition is what Paul cites here: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”

Look at the beginning of Acts. It’s the same basic message Peter and other apostles preached. Jesus the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Scriptures, died for us and then rose again on the third day. If you go back to Jesus Himself, you find that is exactly the message He kept repeating to the disciples as the time drew near, three times in Mark chapters 8, 9, and 10. It’s the story at the heart of our faith. Jesus died for our sins and rose again. That is what saves us, says Paul, “if you hold firmly to the message…”

Writing to Corinth, Paul was very concerned about their behavior. Much of it had not been good: fighting with each other; sexual immorality; spiritual pride. Yet when it comes down to it, what he’s most concerned about is not so much what they do as what they believe. Where are they placing their faith?

As we will see next week starting in verse 12, the specific false belief Paul worried about is that “some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead.” They’ve lost faith in a hope which goes beyond this world. That may be one reason they were so caught up in spiritual demonstrations and power in this world. In any case, Paul knew that questioning that statement of faith we will say at the end of the Apostles’ Creed today, “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” puts in question the affirmation that is at the center of the Creed, at the heart of everything, “the third day he rose again from the dead.”

So Paul not only recited core Gospel truth here. He recited the evidence for it, a list of eye witnesses to the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. He starts with “Cephas,” Peter, then proceeds to the twelve disciples, then to a huge gathering of five hundred. He notes “most of whom are still alive…” In other words, for the Corinthians it was still possible to go and ask an eyewitness. Then he moves to James, the brother of Jesus, who was not originally a disciple, and then to “all the apostles.” This list of witnesses is preparation for what Paul is going to say later about the importance of the resurrection. But, in the meantime, he ends it with “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

Unlike Popeye, who celebrates his strength, Paul often focused on his weakness, on his original unsuitability to be an apostle. In verse 9 he says, “For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Paul can’t rely on his good behavior because he knows his behavior was bad, terribly bad. Before he met Jesus, he had Christians imprisoned and even killed.

That’s why when we come to verse 10 and Paul’s “I am what I am,” it means something radically different from Popeye’s “I yam what I yam.” Popeye attributes his strength to spinach. Paul prefaces his statement that he “is what he is” with “By the grace of God.” It’s not spinach or eating properly like the Corinthians were worried about. It’s not powerful forearms or powerful prophecy. It is grace that makes Paul what he is.

Paul’s relies on grace but Popeye relies on himself. That’s what Popeye means by “I yam what I yam.” He is pleased and confident in what he is and wishes to be nothing else. Paul’s use of the Popeye’s words, then, is radically different from how Popeye and many others use such assertions. Too often we may assert “I am what I am” as a kind of defiant unwillingness to let one’s mind, heart, or character be changed, even by the grace of God. Sometimes that defiance even makes a dubious appeal to God’s intent. We say, “I am what I am. This is how God made me, so it must be good.”

While it is absolutely true that God made this world and you and me and everyone else as good creations of His love and power, it is not true now that what we are is what we were meant to be or what we should be. Paul means to put distance between what he was and what he currently is and is still becoming, by the grace of God.

You heard that same worry from Isaiah and Peter in our other readings today. In Isaiah 6, the prophet saw God and didn’t simply say, “I am what I am.” He cried out because he wasn’t what he should be. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”

In Luke 5, Peter reacted the same way, when he saw that impossible net full of fish and realized that Jesus had divine power and holiness. He did not express self-confidence. He expressed humble dismay. Even in his own profession, fishing, Jesus outclassed him in every way. So fell to his knees and pled, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

Paul, when he tells us Jesus appeared last to him, is remembering how he met Jesus on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, how Jesus spoke to him about his persecution of the church, and how he too fell to the ground in fear, only to arise blind until the Lord sent someone to heal him.

None of them, not Isaiah, not Peter, not Paul, could stand on who they were when they met the Lord. It was only after those meetings that they became people who could boldly say something like Paul does here, “I am what I am,” and then, only by the grace of God, only by the grace and power of Jesus risen from the dead, not by their own power.

Popeye says, “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam.” He never expects to change, to grow, to be any better than he is now. Apparently he is happy that way. Yet the good news Paul preached and which we believe is that God raises the dead. He raised Jesus. He will raise us. We will not stay the same, as Paul goes on to teach in the rest of this chapter. What is perishable and corruptible will rise in glory, imperishable and incorruptible. In the meantime, Jesus starts that transformation in us just as He did in Paul.

You are what you are. That is true. God made you what you are, and what He made is good. But what you are is also a product of your own choices, many of them not so good. That’s what Isaiah and Peter and Paul recognized. Yet God set before them and before you the glorious possibility of being something else, of answering the call to receive the grace to become something new. Isaiah became a prophet. Peter became a fisher of men. Paul became an apostle. Jesus means to make something new out of you and me too.

In the rest of verse 10 Paul says he worked harder than any of the other apostles. You could make a case that he was the greatest apostle, fulfilling Jesus’ word that “the last shall be first.” Yet he goes back to that basic truth, “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

Like Paul, we start out unfit and undeserving, yet in Christ we are worth saving and raising. Paul was not fit to be an apostle but God saw in him a vessel worth pouring grace into. The same is true for all people. We are unworthy sinners, except for grace.

Growing up, you may have heard some version of a playground parody of Popeye’s song, which makes him a bit more humble:

I’m Popeye the sailor man
I live in a garbage can.
I eats all the worms
And spits out the germs
I’m Popeye the sailor man.

Without grace, we all live in a garbage can made filthy by our sins, and our bodies are destined to be merely food for worms. Yet by the grace of Jesus we are blessed to spit out the germs of sin and be destined for glory.

Let’s not rest in our garbage cans and live in our sins saying, “I yam what I yam.” Let’s not let Popeye make us imagine that such a poor life is “all what I yam.” Instead, let us receive the good news which in verse 11 Paul says he proclaimed and that we have come to believe. As we will repeat at His Table, Christ has died and Christ has risen. And Christ will come again. When He does, we too will be raised with Him. In that hope, we may say with Paul, “By the grace of God I am what I am,” confident that what we are and what we will be is good and glorious, by His grace.

Amen.