Manuscript of sermon preached on January 22, 2017. (Poor quality) video here.

Scripture text: 1 Corinthians 1: 10-18

Eleven thousand people on the streets of Ann Arbor. Five hundred thousand in DC. Over a million around the world.

I wasn’t able to attend any of these Women’s Marches myself. I’m recovering from surgery and I wanted to be here this morning with you. So I decided not push my body or my luck. As I expressed my regrets to a friend texting me on her way to DC, she wrote back, Alex, this is only the beginning.

She’s right, of course. We’ll be faced with plenty of other opportunities to protest.

So instead of marching on the streets, I watched the protests from the comfort of my couch and my computer, sending notes of encouragement to my friends and reveling in the amazing turnout.

I especially loved seeing the signs. So many clever signs.

“My dog would be a better president”

A photograph of Rosie the Riveter strong-arming Donald Trump

“Donald don’t combover human rights.”

“Trump is a facist Cheeto”

“Mike Pence likes Nickelback” (For those of you who don’t know, that’s a much maligned pop-rock group who’s heyday was in the early 2000s. They get a big “NO” from most millennials.)

Everyone was practically shouting #Not My President!

People- marginalized people, especially, women and people of color and lgbtq people- are worried about their future under this administration. They’re angry and they’re scared and they’re not willing to be quiet about it.

The new president appears to have little interest in protecting their rights, their dignity, or even their lives.

No, this new president has made his agenda clear. Issues explicitly lifted up by the Obama administration- like LGBT, Civil Rights, and (perhaps ironically) Rural Concerns- have been taken down off the President’s website and replaced with six simple topics of interest, including Protecting Police Officers and Expanding the American Military.

The new president has repeatedly publicly abused people (often via Social Media) using gendered or ablest insults. His habit of ‘being honest’ not ‘bullshitting people’ has given others implicit permission to do the same, hate crimes spiking in the country since his election.

Like so many of the protesters yesterday, I want to be absolutely clear: I do not support Donald Trump.

Divides over leadership are not new, not to this country, not to the world.

Yesterday seemed to be a throwback in many ways to the protests that happened in 2003, against President Bush and congress’ decision to take our country to war in Iraq.

The vitriol toward that leader continued into 2004 and beyond.

My husband’s first radical political act was to get himself suspended from school for wearing a shirt that said, “Buck Fush.”

This sorting behind or against a leader, it’s a natural part of human life. It’s something we’ve been doing for a long time. Longer than the span of this election season. Longer than the life of this country.

Archeological evidence suggests that we’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years.

The early church, we know, had its fair share of leadership squabbles. Our reading from Corinthians today highlights one such leadership struggle.

In it, Paul addresses the Corinthian church about their divisions, which lie along the lines of who’s following whom.

Some claim to follow Paul. Some claim to follow Apollos. Some claim to follow Cephas.

Paul rejects these divisions, reminding them that they are of one mind and one Spirit, through Christ.

First Corinthians is perhaps Paul’s most famous letter in our day. It includes the passage that’s quoted at many weddings about the nature love, the passage describing the church as God’s body, and the passage we quote each week at the communion table that begins, “On the night he was betrayed…”

Given its weight and repetition over two thousand years, we might expect that, even if we were politically divided by leaders, at least in church, we’d be of one mind and one spirit.

But, of course, that’s not the case.

The church hasn’t stopped fighting over leaders for the whole of its history. Sure, some of our splits and divisions have had to do with deep dissatisfaction with the religious institution and its status quo.

Martin Luther, a Catholic monk in Germany during the Renaissance, posted his 95 Thesis – a document that called into question many of the Catholic church’s practices, including the practice of charging people money in exchange for “eternal salvation.” This important and arguably faithful document and Luther’s leadership led to one of the major Christian schisms- one that continues today.

On the other hand, around the same time, King Henry VIII decided to split from the Catholic church because the Pope would not grant him the annulment of marriage he so strongly desired

(He wanted to get married again. To someone else. In the eyes of God and the church and the law. So he wanted the church to declare his earlier marriage ‘unconsummated’, ‘fake’ if you will.)

Incensed at not having his way, he decided to break away and create his own church- the Church of England- a church that, of course, as King of England, he would head, (another church that still exists today.)

This we might classify as a political fight, a fight over which leaders within the church had the power to call the shots and lead the people.

Churches continue to struggle with this kind of leadership conflict.

More often than not, splits in local congregations look like this: part of the congregation loves the current minister and part of the congregation does not. This second part believes that they should not be paying said minister a salary. So they either leave the church or force the minister out (and, often, with that minister, many of their members.)

On a smaller scale, we bicker over who should be in charge of this ministry team or who has too much say in that decision. Sometimes we even cloak personal disagreements in Spiritual language. I’m with Christ, but she, over there, she’s with Paul.

Sound familiar?

Well, in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul warns us where this kind of bickering and infighting leads: away from the call of Christ.

But leaders, we may argue, they do so much of the work! They set the tone! They’re important.

Paul’s letter hints that the Corinthians framed this argument around baptism, worrying about who baptized whom. Perhaps they were saying, this leader (Apollos) baptized so many of us – a true hero!- and we owe him loyalty. He’s our leader.

But that’s a poor argument. We know, as Paul did, that it is Christ in whose name we all are baptized and it is to Christ that we should be loyal.

Baptism is a response to hearing the Gospel, a commitment to Christ; it’s an act of faith by the believer, not by the baptizer.

No, Paul says, as a Christian leader, he isn’t called to baptize. He’s called to proclaim the Gospel.

This call echoes through the ages to us. Both as leaders and as the body, we too, are called to proclaim the Gospel.

And it is the Gospel of Christ, not the Gospel of or against any particular leader.

When we focus on our human leaders, we miss the point and often fail to do the actual work.

It’s difficult not to focus on the leaders. It is difficult in our churches, with Pastors who are leading worship, preaching, visiting, and visioning. Often Pastors can become the flashpoint, the face, and even the content of the conversation.

Our American political system is even worse. So much of the average person’s political energy and knowledge is wrapped up in Presidential politics.

We spend the two years leading up to every presidential election watching a celebrity circus unfold on every media outlet. It’s sadly similar to watching the Bachelor or American Idol, contestants competing for our hearts and votes with a series of public performances.

In some ways, we should not be so surprised that the professional celebrity won this time around, not the professional politician.

This reality tv, social media popularity contest hyperfocuses us on the potential leader in question, not on the content of the issues we care about, not the country or the world we want to be creating.

We’re too busy worrying about who we’re following, to remember that what matters is where we’re going.

We’re spending too much mocking Trump’s combover and angsting over his latest twitter rant, and not enough energy worrying about the world that our current political establishment (including, but not limited to Trump) is creating.

There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of venting, but we must not let it distract us from our larger call.

Already, this administration has frozen all federal institutions from creating new regulations- regulations that keep us safe from pollution and poisons and faulty goods and services. This administrations has rolled back portions of the affordable care act- and Congress is scrambling to dismantle it further.

This same Congress is approving new cabinet appointees as we speak- a Secretary of Education who doesn’t believe in state sponsored education, a Director of the EPA who doesn’t believe in climate change, and an attorney general with a history of fighting to roll back Civil Rights and voting rights.

Because of all this it’s more important than ever that we use our one mind and one spirit to proclaim the Gospel.

And the Gospel is this: Jesus came down to earth as human being and suffered on the cross, along with the most marginalized among us.

This Gospel means that all people have value, especially the marginalized, that all people deserve healing, especially the marginalized, that all people deserve freedom, especially the marginalized.

Some of the signs I saw yesterday did capture the heart of this our Gospel:

One said, “No one is free when others are oppressed.”

Another said, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Perhaps the most hopeful signs I saw were those in the hands of children.

A small girl held one that said: We Want Peace.

An elementary aged kid had one that said: Climate Change is Real.

An eleven year old girl, just on the brink of womanhood, had a sign that read: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

And a little boy held a sign that read: Boys will be Boys, except the second ‘boys’ was crossed out and in its place was written, good humans.

Cindy Estrada, vice President of the UAW, who spoke at the march held here in Ann Arbor, said, “All these signs with all these issues give me so much hope for my children, because I know that they’re going to grow up in this world – in this world, where we’re going to stand for love not hate. But – one last thing – in order for that to happen, everybody needs to leave here today and not just stand up for each other, but you need to go get involved in a group.”

Well, good news, we are already part of a group- we are part of the body of Christ. We are part of this church. Together, we have a powerful message and a powerful voice, if we choose to use it.

Let’s listen to Paul. Let’s let go of our quarrels over leaders. Let’s not allow the Gospel message to be drowned out by witty combover tweets or clever cheeto-themed Facebook statuses.

Let’s not fight over which human should be king. Let’s fight to build the Kingdom of God, the kingdom where all have value, healing and freedom.

The Kingdom where Jesus reigns.

Amen