Handled With Care

1 Corinthians 1:10-13

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• there be no divisions among you
• united in the same mind and in the same purpose
• I belong to Paul... I belong to Apollos... I belong to Cephas
• Is Christ divided?

Applying the Word to My Life:

My friend Mike and I had spent months getting ready to sell fireworks. Iowa had just made them legal again. We had done the research, lined up a location, figured out what we needed, and now had about two weeks to turn an empty space into a working store. The order I was about to place was the biggest commitment we had made yet.

Then, the day before I was supposed to place it, I found out layoffs were coming at work.

I remember standing in my garage that night trying to decide whether this was the dumbest possible time to take another risk. I did not know how bad things were going to get at work or whether I would even have a job in a month, and suddenly I was much less certain that we could pull off everything we had planned.

Mike and Stacey talked me through it. They could not fix the layoffs or tell me what was going to happen, but they reminded me of something fear had already started making me forget: I was not doing this by myself. So we placed the order and went to work.

The next few weeks were furious. Mike and I worked long nights building the store, getting inventory in place, and figuring things out as we went. When we opened, we were among the first people legally selling consumer fireworks in Iowa in almost eighty years — the state had banned them since 1938, after a fire took out two and a half blocks of downtown Spencer. At first sales were slow enough that I started wondering whether we would do much more than break even. Then larger competitors started opening and I got nervous all over again.

Through all of it, Mike and Stacey kept reminding me that the whole thing did not rest on my shoulders. By the end of the season, things had gone well enough that I was making an emergency run to Missouri because we were running out of product.

Looking back, the hardest part was not really the work. It was what pressure did to my vision. Fear narrowed everything until the business, my job, and every decision seemed to rest entirely on me. If that had actually been true, I probably would have quit before we started.

Paul sees something similar happening in Corinth.

The church is splitting into camps: "I belong to Paul." "I belong to Apollos." "I belong to Cephas." On the surface it sounds like an argument over favorite leaders, but every faction does the same thing. It takes something larger and makes it smaller. Pick your camp, and suddenly you do not have the whole Church anymore. You have the people who agree with you.

Division always promises a safer circle. What it actually gives us is less of the Body to lean on.

The Church remembers Cornelius and Cyprian today because they faced that temptation when the stakes were much higher.

During the persecution under Emperor Decius, many Christians broke under pressure. Some denied the faith or participated in pagan sacrifice to save their lives. When the persecution eased, the Church had to answer a painful question: what do you do when people who were supposed to remain faithful fail badly and then want to come back?

A Roman priest named Novatian had a hard answer. Some failures, he believed, were too serious. The Church could pray for those people, but it could not restore them to full communion.

Pope Cornelius disagreed, and so did Cyprian, bishop of Carthage. Neither man pretended the apostasy did not matter. Returning required repentance and real penance. But failure did not mean someone had ceased forever to have a place in the Church.

Cyprian threw his support behind Cornelius and wrote On the Unity of the Catholic Church, arguing forcefully for the unity of the Church. Novatian eventually allowed himself to be set up as a rival bishop of Rome, creating exactly the kind of smaller, supposedly purer church Paul had warned against. Cornelius and Cyprian chose the messier answer: keep the Church one, leave a road home, and do not solve the problem of sinners by building a Church without room for them.

That unity cost both men. Cornelius was driven from Rome and died in exile. A few years later Cyprian was executed during another persecution, still bishop of Carthage. Neither believed the Church was supposed to survive by cutting away everyone who failed, and neither lived as though Christians were meant to carry the weight alone.

That is what I remember when I think back to my garage. Pressure had convinced me that everything rested on me, while two people I loved were standing right there saying otherwise.

Pressure still does that. It can make me retreat into myself or into a smaller group of people who think like I do, vote like I do, worship like I do, or agree that I am right. Paul will not let me call that unity.

The Christian answer is harder and better: stay with the whole Body. Let other people carry something. Leave room for repentance. Leave room for people who failed. Leave room even for people who make the Church more complicated than I would prefer.

Christ did not give me a faction. He gave me a Body.

Sometimes the only way through the pressure is to remember that somebody else is carrying part of the weight.

My Response for Today:

Today, when pressure starts narrowing my world down to just me and my people, I'll remember that Christ gave me a whole Body to stand with.

ABOUT POPE ST. CORNELIUS

• Name: Pope St. Cornelius
• Lived: c. 210-253, Rome
• Feast Day: September 16 (shared with St. Cyprian)
• Patron of: traditionally invoked against earaches, epilepsy, and fever, and as a patron of cattle and domestic animals
• Title: Pope, Martyr
• Read more: Franciscan Media, Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent)

ABOUT ST. CYPRIAN

• Name: St. Cyprian of Carthage (Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus)
• Lived: c. 200-258, Carthage, North Africa
• Feast Day: September 16 (shared with Pope St. Cornelius)
• Patron of: North Africa
• Title: Bishop, Martyr, Church Father
• Read more: Franciscan Media, Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent)
• Selected Writings: On the Unity of the Catholic Church — his treatise defending Church unity against the Novatian schism, directly referenced in today's reflection