Participation by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 9 February 2020
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1 Corinthians 3:6-16 NRSV
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.
For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
I'm going to tell you all a sad story about the day I was never a Girl Scout. This has been a thing that has ... I'm 27. This has plagued me since I was in first grade. I really wanted to be a Girl Scout when I was growing up because everybody else was a Girl Scout and we had a Daisy Troop at my elementary school and I could not wait to get into the Daisy Troop in my elementary school. I was so excited about it and when my mom called the troop leader ...
Now for those of you who don't know this part of the story, I was really tortured when I was in elementary school and none of the girls liked me. That's very important information because when my mom called to put me in the Daisy Troop, they said "It's full." My mom said, "Well, are you starting a second troop?" They said no. Then three more girls got into that Daisy Troop after my mom called. I never got to be a Girl Scout.
It's very upsetting to me to the point where last year, the youth group that I was working with in my previous church, my assistant youth director was a Girl Scout leader and she made me do all kinds of Girl Scout things so that I could feel like I had finally gotten to be a Girl Scout because it's still one of those things that really bothers me. But I was a 4Her so I got to go to the 4H fair and go farming and play with cows. In the end it kind of worked out.
But one of the things that I've always appreciated about scouting in the world is the deep commitment to participation, right? So much of our lives are siloed, right? We want to say that you do what is best for you all the time and what I do is mine and what you do is yours and there is no crossover between.
What scouting reminds us of is that we are all in this together and I can't be the best person that I am without you being the best person that you are and so together we work on making each other better for this world, for this country, for who we are as a community, and we strive to make a difference. And you get to have a lot of fun along the way, right? Right, Scouts? You enjoy yourselves, you get thrown in the middle of the woods and have to survive and you make ... Some troops I know do the box-car derby and you get to do all kinds of really fun things. If you're a Girl Scout, you get to sell cookies so you make the rest of the world really happy by feeding them deliciousness.
It is also deeply connected to the way that we live our lives as Christians. You can't be a Christian alone. I know that there are lots of people who try and say that you can be a Christian alone, but I am here to tell you that you cannot. Part of the Christian journey is building on life together. I cannot be the best person that God has called me to be without the participation in the gathered body in the world together. I am better because you are better and you are better because I am better.
We have this new trend going around and many of my friends, as a millennial, yes, we carry all of the stereotypes and statistics that you people like to put on us, but we have this rising notion of being spiritual but not religious. Like we believe that there is something more in this world, but I don't necessarily know that I subscribe to standardized and organized religion. You know what? I don't blame people because the institution has become more about whether or not you follow the rules that we have set forth than how do you participate in the body of Christ?
In our reading today we hear from Paul who's writing about Apollos and just some history background on where we are, Jesus has died and been resurrected and the Christian faith is underground and Paul is traveling from city to city to city preaching and teaching and creating these small communities that become churches.
Apollos is what we in the academic world call a super apostle or he's someone that has heard the word and run with it, not always in the most appropriate of ways, but now there's a big battle happening in Corinth between who is right? Is it Paul or is it Apollos? Now, much like last week when we all wore our team jerseys and we said, "Leave your rivalries at the door", Corinth couldn't do that, right? Corinth was filled with people fighting over who was more correct, Paul or Apollos? I would imagine that if they lived today, they'd all have t-shirts and they'd all have signs and they'd be arguing over who had the right belief.
It got so bad that words got back to Paul and he writes this letter and he says, "Look, the world is not about which one of us human beings is right. It's about how you participate in the kingdom building. Yes, I may have given you the seed, but Apollos is the one who watered it but the one who gave it growth is God. We each build on the next step of foundations. That is Jesus Christ."
When we go to Kentucky, if you're on my team, if you work on one of my crews, I am notoriously well known at the mission for getting my project done in two days instead of four days. Now that has earned me a whole multitude of nicknames from the people working on my job site, but we get 'er done. Okay? I have built additions and porches and decks done in two days because I have a reputation to maintain, but many times what winds up happening is if you finish in two days, you get sent to projects that other people did not finish because they don't have me running their crew clearly. Just saying.
One year we were sent to go to build and work on an addition that we were building that a group had started and they laid the foundation and our job was to now put up the walls. Okay, look, I got some stuff. Okay? I'm a little bit of a control freak. I can admit it. I'm very type A. I like when things happen the way I wanted to, but here's the problem when you build on somebody else's foundation, somebody else laid that foundation, which now means that all of the work that I have to do needs to be built for that particular foundation because I can't change it.
While that group did not lay the flooring and the foundation the way that I would have as I was putting the walls up, I had to adjust in a lot of ways and not just because it was Kentucky and there are no building laws, but because they did it differently than I did.
By the time we left, we had only gotten three of the four walls to figure it out. I knew that another group was going to have to come in and put on the fourth wall and raise the roof and build out all of these other things. I was never going to be able to finish that project. But what it reminded me of as I was working on it and getting frustrated with the way that other people do things. None of, you know what that's like, right? Yeah. Y'all are a lot more like me than you think.
It was an opportunity for us to remember that the participation and being a part of what we do is just so small in the big grand scheme of things, right? We build on what has come before us and somebody will build on what you have left. It's like when I finally go home to my home church, the church that I was raised in for my entire childhood and they changed things and I walk in and I go, "How dare you? Don't you know that's where I first took communion and don't you know that that's where Mrs. Zelman fell that one time and busted her head open and the blood was still there and it was a reminder that the trustees really needed to fix this ramp? And don't you remember that that hole in the wall was from VBS the one year that we did science projects and our science got a little bit out of control?" Just saying.
But somebody else has taken on the legacy of that place and have changed the things that mean so much to me. But just because it is not mine anymore doesn't mean it doesn't continue to change people's lives because now there's a new set of Sunday school kids who are throwing things into walls and accidentally coloring on the walls in the nursery. There's a new set of things that the trustees need to fix. There's a new set of people who take ownership and belovedness in this place.
It is like our children who we raise up and want to pour our morals and our beliefs into but will one day go on their own to do their own thing and what you hope and you pray for is the foundation that you built and the people that you put in their lives, Scout masters and teachers and troop leaders and pastors and Sunday school teachers, built on the foundation that was started from the very beginning of their lives so that when they finally go out into the world that the foundation is strong and that they become people who transform and change and are different because of what life brings them, but the structure of who they are remains the same because from the very beginning you were building on the foundation God created for them.
We are but a blip in the very large timeline of life, right? If you know anything about Einstein's work right before Einstein died, he was right kind of on the cusp of being able to prove the folding of time. If you read some of what the theologians have said about Einstein's work for God, the moment between Jesus dying on the cross and right now is but a mere second in our lives. Think about all of the things that has happened since the first century and all the things that are going to happen after us, we are merely a blip.
Here becomes the question, do we take that blip as saying nothing we do matters? And so it doesn't matter how we live our lives, it doesn't matter what we do for the world because we don't really matter anyway. Like you grow old and then you die and yay life?
Or do we take it as a blessing to see that we are part of the great inner workings of the world? We are a structure and a part of the foundation of creation and every second counts because we are not guaranteed tomorrow. We build ourselves and our children up to participate, not to be siloed individuals who do their own thing and go their own way, but people who are committed to community, who are committed to saying, "Yeah, I don't attend this church every Sunday, but this is the place in which my Boy Scout troop meets and therefore it is vitally important to participate in this life."
Do you know how much work the Boy Scouts have done downstairs? Work that given our financial situation, we never would have been able to afford and yet gets done anyway? Not because they have a deep tithe to who we are, but because they understand the participation of life and community. Did you also know that we now have two Girl Scout troops that meet here? And how vitally important they are on Wednesday nights and Thursday nights to hear the joy and the laughter of kids in this space and the commitment of Girl Scouts to being a part of the community, not because they have to, but because they want to.
We're the Christian group that we are, that says we are not siloed in this building, but we are called to leave these doors and change the community, not so that they all become members of the United Methodist Church of Pearl river, not so that they all find Jesus and we all sing kumbaya in here as we overflow, but so that people outside of our doors have their lives transformed because we participate in the life of the community.
We build on the foundation that has been created long before us, that we know someone will build on after we leave. We become a stronghold building block in the transformation of the world that God started, the beginning of time and will come to fruition at the end of time. It is not enough for us to sit back and watch the world go by, like so many scholars have a tendency to do and have a tendency to do to sit and read and look out the window as life happens around them.
But for us to step out of our comfort zones and into a space and a place that says we are a community and our calling is to build and to participate and to transform the world because when we are better, you are better, and when you are better, the whole world is better. Let us together, no matter where we come from or what we do in this life, participate in the great building of the transformation of community today and every day. Amen.
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