I Corinthians 1.10-18

Matthew 4.12-23

keep your eyes on the prize

Remember the old African American spiritual, Keep Your Eyes on the Prize? It was written at the turn of the century and then revised during the Civil Rights movement in this country. Keep you eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on, keep on the prize, hold on, hold. A film was made with the same name. The song stitched together Jesus’ call to keep your hand on the gospel plow and Saint Paul’s testimony that his eyes were on the prize of the high calling of God. Stitched together with verses about troubles overcome, the song became a summons for people to remember their central purpose – the prize – especially when they were distracted, divided and otherwise inclined to set their minds on a lesser things. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on.

I think Jesus’ would have been pleased with the song, and Paul, too.

In the reading of Paul’s counsel to the to the church at Corinth, he goes to great length to encourage the community there to cease their divisive, ego driven quarreling. The exact cause of the quarreling and division is not revealed but there are clues that it has nothing to do with belief or doctrine, but rather personalities. Some have given their allegiance to a favorite leader over another, perhaps the one who baptized them or first taught them, thus creating acrimony. According to Paul, by giving their allegiance to one of these groupings around personalities they had taken their eyes off the prize which is the unity they have been given in Jesus Christ. Ironically, even the group that said “I belong to Christ” was participating in the same divisiveness by claiming Christ in a pious, holier-than-thou manner that set them apart from others with whom they share true unity in Christ. This unity is not because of anything they or anyone one else had done but only because of what God has done through the cross of Jesus Christ.

One commentator said, “As admirable as each of these viewpoints might have been, the underlying assumption of each had a debilitating effect on the church. It meant that the unity they all shared in Christ was being dissolved in favor of human loyalties. What should have been holding them together – their common life in Christ – was evaporating before their eyes.” (Fred Craddock)

The pattern here is familiar to anyone who has been around the church very long or knows church history. People gather around some group’s point-of-view about the truth to the exclusion of others, and often the unwitting exclusion of God, leading to divisions, factions and the shattering of the unity of Christ. Paul clearly wants to distance himself from a person-driven ministry, even claiming to forget who he has baptized. He insists that eloquence if not harnessed to God’s purpose can distract people from the real intent of preaching which is the power of God to transform our lives. Paul is not interested in being the subject; he is interested in Jesus Christ and being the subject of the mind’s attention and the heart’s devotion.

He is clear that unity we seek that is a gift given by God to the Church and not created by some supreme human moral efforts. The role of Christians is to live into this gift, setting aside purely personal agendas in order to discover who to participate in God’s agenda which is the salvation of the world.

It’s a mistake to confuse unity with uniformity; even to imagine the Church as a Body is to revel in diversity. The true test of Christian unity is the capacity to disagree without demeaning one another. Congregations, like families, are the healthiest when they have capacity to accept differences and encourage diversity without sacrificing their essential unity, which is a sheer gift of God.

Taking their eyes off the prize – which is learning how to live into God’s gift of unity in Jesus Christ - congregations and their leaders fall into patterns familiar to the world and an embarrassment to the gospel. If Church history is any guide then no congregation anywhere, including our own, is immune from this temptation.

How then do congregations and their leaders keep their eyes on the prize?

Follow Jesus. Learn how to fish. That’s what the gospel says.

To follow Jesus means forsaking ways and means of life that contradict the ways and means of Jesus, who spent his life seeking out the lost, healing the sick, proclaiming Good News that God’s reign has come among us. To follow Jesus is to unlearn the habits that secure our personal agendas without regard for God’s agenda. To follow Jesus is to be released from fears and anxieties by living into the hope of God’s power at the work in the world changing lives. To follow Jesus is to learn how to fish.

Okay, to imagine people as fish is not a very attractive image; but there it is. The alternative people as sheep and I’m not sure that’s much better. So let’s stick with fish. Jesus says the purpose of those who follow him is to learn how to fish for people. I take that to mean the essential purpose of the Church is to go where the fish are – they rarely come to you – and cast a wide net of Good News of God’s mercy among us. Christians in our time must learn again to go out into the world where people are hungry for the bread of life, dissatisfied with consumerism and seeking for a deeper purpose, who no clue that it can be found in the Church. In fact, many are allergic to the Church because of previous bad experiences.

This is the deep water where we learn to fish for people by proclaiming a message of God’s goodness and mercy through our words and our deeds. This is what it means to follow Jesus. Wherever the Church insists on its own insular purposes, protecting its identity, maintaining its status without regard to God’s agenda, then it will cease to be a Church that follows Jesus. It will have no purpose other than its own survival and that will be its only prize in the end.

Everything I know about fishing I’ve learned by failing, including being dreadfully sea sick when my father took me on deep seas fishing trip when I was ten years old. But I did learn that you must go where the fish are if you are going to catch anything. I once visited a old fishing place of my youth – a jetty on the coast where people would set up their chairs, buckets of bait and cooler of beer and cast their lines over the rocks. I asked one fellow, “you catching anything?” “No.” he said and cast his line. I asked another, “catching anything?” “You kidding? I reckon you’re not from around here are you? Ain’t nobody caught anything here for years, we just come because we like it here and it’s a chance to get away.” Then he said, “if you want to fish, you gotta go where the fish are and they ain’t been around here for years.”

That’s something to think about.

Jesus said come, follow me. I will make you fish for people.

To hear that call is to keep our eyes on the prize.

Amen.