The Power and Wisdom of God - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Having a spiritual experience can happen in a split second. And trust me, you'll know when you see it, when you feel it. It is essential in understanding this dilemma that we remember who Paul is speaking to. The church in Rome, a complicated convergence of two vastly different cultural communities bound together by a common spiritual experience. To oversimplify and generalize the two, we can do it like drawing the line down the center of the page. On one side, we have the Jews on the other side, the Greeks. I remember being a little girl and my dad telling me, you know, Melanie, there are only two types of people in this world, those who are Greek, and those who wish they were Greek. In Rome these two communities were separated by contrasting worldviews. The Hebrew view of the world was grounded in earthly material realities in which they lived, spiritual truth found only in justice. And on the other side, the Greek view to simplify was asserted that the highest human experience is knowledge. Always seeking to explain why people fall in love like Aeros and Aphrodite. Why night turns to day like Hyperion and why it rained on my wedding day when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Oh, just we don't talk about Bruno, no. This is why in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Paul reduces these two communities to their simplest form in saying Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom. It would be like summarizing the political divisions of our day to say, Republicans demand guns and Democrats they desire taxes, but we all know it really isn't that simple, is it?