An apology to readers for stepping away from this blog for the last week. Graduations, family vacation, the launch of a new effort at leadership development and, yesterday, seeing our oldest daughter off to South Africa where she’ll spend the summer in mission with HIV/AIDS victims and refugees - all meant the blog had to take a back seat.

Today we launched a new series of sermons at Church of the Resurrection on Paul’s First Letter to Corinth. We’re challenging the entire congregation to read together I Corinthians during June. There are three ideas that will resurface in each message - Holiness, Conflict and Love.

I’m convinced that the major premise of I Corinthians is captured in I Cor. 1:2 when Paul tells the Corinthians, and “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” that they are “called to be God’s holy children.” In the rest of the letter he’ll help his readers understand what holiness looks like as it relates to issues over which the Corinthians are in conflict: sexuality, marriage, food offered to idols, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, the resurrection and others.

As Paul addresses the conflicts in Corinth, it is interesting that he often takes a middle path between the two sides - he “sees the gray” between the black and white of the extreme positions. This is not always the case - but it is frequently the case.

Each week in the sermon series we’ll end by turning to I Corinthians 13 - Paul’s well known  “love chapter.”  We’ve relegated these words to wedding ceremonies, but that was not what Paul had in mind.  These were prophetic words written to address a church in conflict. How do these words speak to us today about our current conflicts within Christianity?  About how “liberals” and “conservatives” act towards and talk about one another?  These words are one picture of what holiness is meant to look like…

1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

On a different note - if you are interested in seeing a great collection of photos and learning more about first century Corinth, click on this link.