I Corinthians 1:1-9
“Begin at the End”
January 16, 2011 - Second Sunday after Epiphany

         In conclusion, be the people that you are, the people God called you to be in Jesus Christ. Be people redeemed and brought into the community of God’s people by grace. Be people made rich by God in the spiritual gifts that He has given you. And be absolutely blameless in the way you put those gifts to use serving God and serving others. Amen.

         Yes, that was the conclusion. The plan for today is to begin at the end. We’re starting there because that’s where Paul started his first letter to Corinth. As Paul wrote from across the Aegean Sea in Ephesus, it had been at least two years since he had visited the Corinthians. In the midst of his third missionary journey, he took time to write a letter to address problems and questions arising in Corinth. As the letter unfolds we learn that he wrote to a seriously messed-up church. There were divisions and factions. There was sexual immorality. They were spiritually proud. They were confused about the Resurrection. And they weren’t even doing the Lord’s Supper right. Paul tried to address all that and more in this letter. And he started at the end.

         That is, in verses 8 and 7 of the first chapter Paul points to what Christian faith generally regards as the end of the story. He talks about waiting “for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed,” what we often call the “Second Coming” of Jesus. And then he says that God will “keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

         If you open up any introduction to Christian theology, you won’t find talk about the end times in the first chapter. Theologians may start with the doctrine of God or the concept of revelation in the Bible or possibly with the person of Jesus, but they never start out talking about the “last things.” They don’t begin at the end. But Paul did. And that’s where we’re starting this morning.

         So the fourth point of this sermon is just what Paul says in verses 9 and 8, we will be blameless on the day when Jesus returns. It’s a difficult point to understand, since we have to admit that we are pretty far from blameless right now, just like the Corinthians. The great fourth century preacher Chrysostom says that Paul’s talk of the Corinthians being guiltless “is not praise but backhanded reproof, since [they] were far from ‘guiltless,’ as the rest of the epistle makes clear.”[1] Another church father says much the same. They see it as sarcasm. “You Corinthians are blameless—not!”

         As the points we’ve already covered make clear… or maybe they don’t, because we haven’t covered them yet, because we’re doing this backwards. In any case, what we would realize if we were going at this forward is that blamelessness is not something that comes from our own moral strength. It’s not our work; it’s God’s. That’s why verse 9 says “God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Blamelessness is not about trying hard to be better. It’s about being in fellowship with Jesus.

         In our Gospel lesson from John 1 verse 29, John the Baptist told his disciples to look at Jesus and see “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” It is Jesus who takes away our sin, Jesus who makes us blameless. That’s why our very identity is to be people who are in fellowship with God’s Son. It’s as you and I are incorporated into the person and life of Jesus that we move toward that end goal of being blameless.

         If we were talking about a football game, we would know where the end was: down there past the goal line. And almost no player carries the ball to the end zone without teammates around him, blocking all opponents who would like to take him down. Sin and temptation will take you and me down on our way to the goal of blamelessness, unless we are in the community of people who belong to Jesus. He runs interference for us, taking out all those sins that would pull us down. He puts teammates around us who also help us evade the tackles of sin. It’s only within the team, in fellowship with Jesus, that we go all the way to that final goal.

         Of course we know that it takes more than teamwork and determination to win at football. It also depends on some talent, some giftedness for the game. Whether it’s speed or agility or just massive size, playing at the highest level demands some gifts. That’s why the third point of this sermon, as we move to verses 7 through 5, is that we are rich.

         Paul wanted the Corinthians to know that he knew their giftedness. When you read the rest of the letter you discover that the Christians in Corinth were all about gifts, spiritual gifts. They had teachers; they had prophets; they had miracle workers and healers; they had people who could speak in heavenly languages. They had gifts coming out their ears, and it wasn’t doing them much good. They were squabbling about those gifts, honoring some more than others, valuing some gifts more highly, trying to decide who had the most and the most important.

         So again Paul starts at the end and just acknowledges the Corinthian gifts in verse 7, “Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift.” Yes, they’ve got it all. As he says in verse 5, “For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge.” Those were the gifts the Corinthians cherished most. They loved the gifts of speech, speaking in tongues and making prophecies. They prized the gifts of knowledge, the ability to understand the deep mysteries of God. So Paul just grants that to them. “Yes, you’ve got it. You’re rich, you’re flush with all these gifts. The question is, where are you going with them?”

         It’s a question of the end again. They might be rich with spiritual gifts, but where are those gifts taking them? Is it into pride and arrogance, into division and jealousy, or is it deeper and further into Jesus? That’s why he says, “you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ…” He begins at the end to remind them where their gifts are supposed to take them, down the field toward the goal of being with Jesus.

         You and I might possibly need to hear verse 7 differently. Unlike the Corinthians we may be tempted to focus on what we’re lacking rather than on the fact that we are gifted and rich in Christ. Both as individuals and as a church community we may be more aware of our deficits than we are of our rich endowment of spiritual gifts.

         Tempted by sin, we suppose that we lack the will or strength to resist. It’s easier to just give in. An old friend, Craig, heard me preach a sermon on the sin of coveting. He told me that his response was to go out and buy the banjo he had been lusting after in a shop window so he wouldn’t have to covet it anymore. Those of you who know Craig know that coveting possessions is hardly a great sin for him, but his light-hearted response is often the serious mistake you and I make. We think we haven’t got the resources to be any better, so we just give up and keep on in the same old sins.

         Paul teaches us we don’t really lack any resources, any gifts needed to move toward God’s goal for us of being blameless in Christ. In and through Jesus, you are enriched, you are blessed with spiritual gifts both in yourself and in others around you in the church. You can in fact make spiritual progress. You can resist that sin; you can deepen your prayer life; you can grow in love and kindness. It’s all there, everything you need, everything we need together in our church.

         Verse 6 says that all these riches are “God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you.” In other words, the fact that we are so richly blessed with spiritual gifts together in the church is a confirmation of the truth of the Gospel. We know that what we hear and believe about Jesus is true because we see it working out in wonderful giftedness in the people around us. One of us who’s shy and quiet turns into a leader. Another of us who’s fearful and timid takes a great step of faith. Someone else who’s been pretty selfish starts to become generous. It’s all because we’re rich, rich in Jesus.

         Yet remember that we’ve started at the end, so we need to always remember from where those riches come. That’s why we now step back to verses 4 and 3 and the second point of this message, which is that we are graced. We have done nothing to earn or merit all those gifts and riches we have in Christ. Instead we must acknowledge what Paul says in verse 4, “I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”

         Spiritual gifts are gifts of grace. They are absolutely unearned and undeserved. We have them because we have grace in Christ Jesus. God gives us forgiveness of sin and new life in Christ completely out of generosity, not out of obligation.

         That greeting Paul offers in verse 3 is so commonplace to our ears that it sounds like a Christian throwaway line, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” But that grace is no throwaway at all. It’s the heart of the whole thing. It’s what is going to get us through to the end. Paul puts grace up front because he’s got the end in mind. He knows the Corinthians are not blameless. God know we’re not. Grace in and through and from Jesus is our only hope.

         Grace is the heart of who we are in Christ and it’s hard to understand. In almost every other arena of life, we don’t get our identity by grace. We become who we are through transactions. You do something to be included. You work to get good grades, you fill out all the forms; you pay the tuition and then you become a college student. You create a good résumé, you make a good impression, you pass the skill tests and then you’re hired as an employee. You treat her nice, you say the right things, you find a romantic way to propose and you become a husband. You listen well, you show interest, you extend some help and then you are a friend. All those identities are based on what you do.

         We imagine it’s the same with God. Do what He asks, come to church, read the Bible, pray regularly, and then you’ll be a Christian. But that’s not grace. Grace is God identifying us as His before and apart from anything we’ve done. God starts at the end. Long before you and I look anything like real Christians, long before we are blameless, God sees us that way, sees us as belonging to Him, sees us as His children in Christ.

         At our gathering in Tigard this past week, one of my fellow Covenant pastors started singing a chorus I haven’t heard in a long time, but I grew up singing regularly. “Oh, how I love Jesus; oh, how I love Jesus; oh, how I love Jesus, because He first loved me.” That’s it. That’s grace. It all starts with God making us who we are in Jesus, people whom He loves. Everything we do, even loving Him, follows on that grace. We begin at the end, begin with who we are becoming, people that God wants to love and cherish and save.

         That’s why the first point of this sermon is about how God gives us our identity through grace in Christ. We are called. In this letter’s salutation, verses 2 and 1, Paul begins with the idea of calling. In verse 1, it’s his calling. Paul took his own identity from the fact that he was “called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.” It wasn’t his own will, his own choice. Paul did not decide to be an apostle. God called him. God identified Paul as an apostle long before Paul identified himself as an apostle.

         Our reading from Isaiah 49 verse 1 says the same thing about the One identified as “the Servant of the Lord.” “Before I was born the Lord called me…” We know this is ultimately a prophecy of Jesus, who became the Lord’s Servant on our behalf. Back to that reading from John today, we have John the Baptist trying to sort it all out and getting tongue-tied as he tries to tell how God begins at the end. He says of Jesus, “This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’” You and I might say, “Huh?”

         It’s just more of God beginning at the end. Jesus came after John, but long before John was ever born, even before Jesus Himself was born, Jesus was the Lamb of God, the One who would surpass John by taking away the sins of the world. Even when God made the world, Jesus was the Lamb of God, ready to die and rise so that we might receive grace, might be welcomed and included in God’s people. Revelation 13 verse 8 says that our names were written in the book of life because of the “Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.” God began at the end, even when He was creating us. He saved us and made us His before we were born.

         So verse 2 of I Corinthians 1 moves from Paul’s personal calling to the fact that the Corinthians are “sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people.” Long before that sanctification and holiness are concrete reality—remember these are messed up people—God looks to end and calls them into that reality. And it goes on, “together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours.” It’s not just the Corinthians, it’s we who are called in Christ Jesus to be His holy people.

         Like God called Jesus, like He called Paul, like He called the members of the church at Corinth, God called you and me to be His long before we were born. He called us to be holy people way before we’ll ever be very holy. He called us into grace and peace and spiritual riches and a blameless life ahead of any of it actually happening. Like a coach pointing down the field or friend giving you directions to his house, He called and invited us and showed us where we’re headed before we’ll ever get there. He gave us the end at the beginning and set us off in that direction.

         So as this sermon begins I’d like you to look toward the goal, look toward your end. Consider your calling toward a perfect ending, and then consider how you will live toward that end. Remember that you are in Jesus Christ. That’s your identity. He is who you are. He is your goal. Hear your call, look toward the end, then in grace and giftedness discover how you will get there.

         My sermons usually start with a story, so let’s begin this one that way. There was a little girl who always read the last page of a book first. She just had to know how it would turn out before she started reading. So whether it was “I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you, thank you Sam I Am!” from the Dr. Seuss book, or Sam Gamgee saying, “Well, I’m back,” at the close of the Lord of the Rings, or the end of War and Peace where Natasha wonders why Pierre must go to Petersburg, this girl always read the ending first, before she read the book.

         People told her she was ruining the stories, that it kills all the joy to know the end before you get to it. But she kept on doing it, flipping to last page of every new book she picked up. And more often than not, if it was truly a good book, she turned from the last page to the first and read the whole thing, wanting to discover how the story got to where it ended. And you know, she enjoyed every page she read.

         Amen. Or perhaps I should say, the Lord be with you. This is the end… of the beginning.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj