Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them.  Take our minds and think with them.  Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen

Our nation seems to be in love with dichotomies.  We seem utterly infatuated with polarization.  Individually and as members of a broader cultural reality, we are constantly juxtaposing two distinct and well-defined sides—standing different positions up against each other.  This becomes ever more apparent as we enter another presidential election year.  Everything is black or white, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, democratic or republican, red or blue.

A political analyst named Michael Barone has written a book called Hard America, Soft America.  The book categorizes American culture into yet another dichotomy.   He describes a division in our country between those who are hard and those who are soft. Barone believes that Hard America is marked by competition and accountability, while Soft America is defined by government regulation and social safety nets.  An example of Soft America is our public school system.  It’s filled with progressive values, including a desire to promote the self-esteem of its students.  Playground games that seem to be too competitive and cruel, such as dodge ball, are banned in Soft America.  After all, you remember how dodge ball was defined in Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller’s movie with the same title?  Dodge ball is the sport of “violence, exclusion and degradation.”

Hard America, on the other hand, is not afraid of competition.  Private companies fire people when profits plunge, and the military puts its recruits through intense physical training including exercises using live fire.  There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about Hard America, and very little coddling.  In Hard America, survival of the fittest is a value not a scientific theory.  Hard versus soft, competition versus coddling is one way to view a divided and polarized America.

Divided and polarized could also describe the church in Corinth when Paul wrote his first letter to it.  From the very beginning Christian communities have had their fair share of divisions.  And nowhere was this clearer than in Corinth, where the apostle Paul had to plead with the Christians to settle their differences. “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,” he wrote in his first letter, “by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”

The Corinthian church was a shattered Greek urn, lying in pieces on a cold stone floor. Some of the members of the church community were swayed by brilliant rhetoric, others were influenced by knowledge, others were impressed by spiritual gifts, and still others attached importance to wealth and social status.  There were also questions then as there are today around issues of appropriate sexual morality.  In the face of these fractures, Paul calls for the Corinthian Christians to be “united in the same mind and the same purpose.”  Unity was a problem then—2000 years ago, and it continues to be one today.

Now, if we apply Michael Barone’s Hard versus Soft America to the church today, hard faith people are those who place an emphasis on the obligations of religious life.  They appreciate moral clarity.  Their scriptural foundation is a covenant with God, an agreement defined by right living.  Simply said if we follow God’s will in our lives as defined in scripture, God will bless us.  If your faith is hard, you’re focused on knowing God’s truth, keeping the God’s Commandments, and living a disciplined life.

On the other hand, the soft faith people see religion much like a liberation movement.  They tend to stress God’s love for the oppressed and marginalized, and they trace their spiritual roots to the exodus, when God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  If your faith is soft, you’re focused on experiencing God’s grace, keeping the commandments of Jesus to love God and neighbor, and living a life that is open and receptive to new understandings of God and God’s world.  Hard faith is about obligation, clarity, covenant, truth and discipline. Soft faith is committed to liberation, inclusiveness, exodus, grace and hospitability.

Now, I have to say something important at this point.  I think our tendency to define individuals and even groups of people by polarizing them into opposite categories is dangerous and more than that harmful.  First of all, polarization keeps us from ever having to really get to know another person because, after all, we already know everything about them.  You see they are already defined by the stereotypes we assign them!  Moreover, polarization fosters an “us versus them” attitude that inevitably leads to conflict.  When we are talking about hard or soft Christians we’re not talking about right or wrong, good or bad, because both sides are important to the church, both have deep roots in our scripture and tradition, and both are necessary for a fully formed faith.

Nonetheless, hard and soft Christian perspectives create a very tricky tension—they exert a kind of magnetic pull that draws people of faith in opposite directions.  When this division inevitably takes place, the church looks most like the world.  And I don’t mean that as a compliment.  The church is no longer the unified body of Christ, but a just another divisive human institution painfully divided along ideological lines.  

This takes us back to the problem in the Corinthian church.  The Christians in Corinth felt drawn to different leaders.  Some felt they belonged to Paul, others to Apollos, others to Peter, and still others to Christ.  Some of these leaders were eloquent, some were not—some we might categorize as hard, and some as soft.  However, Paul rejects these distinctions by asking the Corinthians point blank, “Has Christ been divided?  Was Paul crucified for you?  Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”  You see for the apostle Paul, the unifying reality for all Christians is always going to be Jesus, whether we are hard or soft, competitive or coddling, obligated or liberated—or some combination. 

You see Jesus, after all, is all things at once.  Jesus lays out the obligations of discipleship.  He is clear about the Christian way of life.  He calls us into a New Covenant, one that is sealed in his very own blood.  He is devoted to the truth and he asks his disciples to be so disciplined that they actually deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow him. You simply cannot get any harder than that.

At the same time, Jesus liberates us from captivity to sin and death.  He challenges us to show Christian love to the hungry, the thirsty, the naked and the imprisoned.  He leads us on a new exodus, one that passes through death to everlasting life.  And he shows grace and forgiveness to all who follow him in faith, receiving with open arms the outcasts, the sinners, the brokenhearted, and the sick.  He is a soft, soft Savior—no doubt about it.

Paul knows this, which is why he calls for unity in the midst of the Christian community’s diversity.  He doesn’t expect the Corinthians to have identical perspectives on all things, nor does he expect them to live out their Christian faith in exactly the same way.  But he does expect them to be united in their determination to follow Jesus, and equally dependent on the power of His death and resurrection.  The cross of Christ is what unites us, according to Paul.  It is the perfect symbol of Hard Truth and Soft Grace.

But the hard and soft truth of the matter is our journey toward unity is a difficult road to travel.  Michael Battle, Cannon Theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, mentioned to us at a retreat I attended last weekend that there are twenty-seven thousand Christian denominations registered with the Internal Revenue Service—Twenty-seven thousand denominations.  As large as this number is, it doesn’t even begin to reflect the actual degree of division within the Christian community.  In so many ways the Body of Christ is fractured beyond recognition.  Nonetheless, we are all connected by our head, who is Christ.  The Church, you see, is called to look different than the world, to witness to a possibility of unity with diversity rather than reflect the polarization of the broader culture.  The reason for this unity is not unity itself.  It is not simply so that we feel good about ourselves because we know people different from us.  This unity exists for the purpose of building God’s kingdom on earth, right now, today.  The Church is meant to be an agent of transformation.  In order to be that agent of transformation, we must preach the Gospel, in word and deed, with one voice, walking together.  Only then will the church fulfill its mission to tear down the walls of discrimination, poverty, and violence that seek to destroy the children of God.

As we remember and give thanks for his life this week, I believe it would be helpful to recall these words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We must live together as brothers or die together as fools.”  This is sage advice to us who comprise the present-future of the church.  Dr. King reminds us that our power to transform is only as strong as our willingness to walk together.  And as St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth so he reminds us now, unity begins with our common proclamation that Jesus is Lord of all and Savior of the world.  Amen.

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