11.5.2025

I heard something last Sunday that I don't hear very often. I heard people say, “Amen.” Now, I know most of you come from Methodist or other more “high church” backgrounds where you aren’t particularly used to saying it . . . so when I hear it, I’m quite surprised! 

And the parts you were “amen-ing” were the parts about the unity of God’s people. 

Since All Saints services run a little longer anyway, I shortened the sermon, and so I thought this might be a good place to fill in some gaps. The text was the opening verses from I Corinthians: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord[a] and ours: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Paul writes his letter to “the church of God which is in Corinth.” And please notice, it is not the “Church of Corinth.” It was the “church of God which is in Corinth.” For Paul, wherever an individual congregation might have been, it was part of the one church that belonged to God. 

Many of you know my background is in a group that calls itself “the Church of God.” When this movement came into being back in 1880, the early leaders never intended for “Church of God” to be used in any denominational sense —  that would have compounded the problem! They looked at the divisions of the church, and they read all of the calls to unity in the New Testament, and saw an obvious contradiction. These 19th and 20th century preachers looked for a time when everyone would eventually abandon their denominational loyalties and be, simply, the Church of God. 

And for a time, the Church of God was the fastest growing church group in the US. But they got off track. They got tangled up in how they defined things like sanctification and what it meant to be holy (concepts from this I Corinthians text), and their growth ground to a snail’s pace. 

Although they got off track, in this belief they were correct. The Bible teaches that there is only one church and it belongs to God. 

They are not alone in recognizing the contradiction. Someone asked New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, what he thought would surprise the Apostle Paul the most if he were suddenly plopped into the 21st Century. His answer? Our divisions. 

Paul never would have written of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland. He never would have given it a local designation (remember the letter is written to the “church of God in Corinth” not the “Church of Corinth”), nor would he have identified the congregation by a particular communion or sect to which it belonged. To him the church was simply the church of God. 

If we thought of the church in that way, we might be able to concentrate more on what  unites us and less on what divides us. 

The Greek word for church, ekklesia, is a political term. Ek means out of and Kaleo means to call - so we say the church is the “called out ones.” In Greek politics, the called out ones were the full citizens of a town who were called out to meet together in an assembly. As the church, God has called us out of this world to belong to Him — we are His assembly. His church. 

And this was important for the letter of Corinth, because in Corinth there were a lot of Gentiles (non-Jews) who were now members of God’s church. Before Christ, they formerly believed in various gods and goddesses, and lived ungodly lives. But all that had changed, and Paul wrote so that they could see they had been caught up into a movement to bring about God’s gracious plan for the redemption of the world. 

Before they were pagans; now they were saints.

Because “saints” are what makes up the church! The other two theological concepts in our text, “saints” and “sanctified,” have similar meanings to our word “church.” As the church, we are called out from the world. To be sanctified and to be a saint means that we are set apart for God’s purposes. They mean we belong to God in a special way.

Our Old Testament Sunday reading spelled it out: “. . . if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, 6 but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6). Everything belongs to God but those who are sanctified, who are saints, who are holy (all three of those words look different, but they come from the same Greek word, hagios) hold a special relationship to God. 

And, since we belong to God, there’s a reason God called us out (church) and set us apart (sanctified, saint, holy). In quoting Exodus 19:5-6, Peter makes an important change in the verb tense as he explains why we have been called out and set apart. In Exodus, God said “you shall be . . .”  but in I Peter we learn: “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,[d] in order that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Peter 1:16). 

That’s who we are and that’s what we’re called to do. And just as importantly, we’re not alone in this. We’re in this “together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Corinthians 1:2). 

Together. All. Every place. We belong to one church, the sanctified saints who are called out by God. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry