Built to Be Together

      All of us have been the outsider in a room. You sit down at a table where the everyone else seems to have thirty years of shared history, and the jokes land and you smile half a second late. You start a new job and the first meeting runs entirely on acronyms nobody thinks to explain. Nothing unkind is happening, the words simply were not aimed at you, and while everyone else enjoys the conversation you are quietly doing the arithmetic of whether you belong. Anyone who has visited a church for the first time knows the feeling, standing a beat behind everyone else, hearing a prayer about being washed in the blood, catching the word the room says back without knowing what it meant.
      This Sunday we come to 1 Corinthians 14, the last stop in an argument Paul has been building for three chapters and the last sermon of this series. In chapter 12 he established that one Spirit hands out many gifts to one body, and that the body cannot spare a single member. In chapter 13 he gave us the criterion, the more excellent way, and told a gifted and competitive church that without love their most impressive abilities amount to noise. Chapter 14 carries that criterion into the room where they actually met. He opens by refusing a split we make all the time: "Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy." Chapter 13 was never an argument for wanting less. It was an argument about what we want the gifts for.
      The Corinthians had made tongues the marker of spiritual arrival, which is not hard to understand, since most of them came into the church out of a religious world where ecstatic speech was taken as proof that a god had hold of you. Paul does not suppress the gift. He says he wants them all to speak in tongues, and later in the chapter he tells them not to forbid it. What he does is relocate it. The one who speaks in a tongue speaks to God, and no one understands him. The one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. One builds up himself and the other builds up the church, and that single difference decides which one belongs in the middle of a gathering.
      The word running underneath the whole chapter is the word for construction and building up. Paul uses it six times in twenty-six verses, and he has already told this church what the building is. "You are God's building," he wrote back in chapter 3, "God's temple, and the Spirit dwells in you." So when Paul asks whether something builds up, he is not asking whether it was inspiring or whether people enjoyed it. He is asking whether anything got added to the structure God is raising. That is a harder question than the one most of us ask on the drive home, and I include myself in that. It moves the measurement off my experience and onto the person sitting next to me.
      An honest question surfaces about here, and I would rather raise it myself than leave you sitting with it. We do not speak in tongues on a Sunday morning. So is Paul solving a problem we do not have? The gift is not what he is finally after. Any time we speak in the gathering in a way the person beside us cannot follow, we have reproduced the Corinthian problem in different vocabulary. We have our own version of speech nobody can use, and it sounds like the shorthand we picked up years ago and stopped hearing ourselves say. A visitor cannot tell the difference between a language he does not know and a sentence in his own language that quietly assumes ten years of church behind it. Both leave him standing outside the conversation.
      Paul argues the point from sound, and the illustrations are deliberately ordinary. A flute that gives no distinct notes leaves you with noise instead of music, and a bugle with an unclear call leaves the army sitting in camp. He never suggests the Spirit is absent from the speech. The trouble is that the meaning does not arrive, so the words go into the air, and air was never the point. His test for whether the meaning arrived is the smallest word in the service. If you give thanks with your spirit, he asks, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say "Amen" to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying? A man who cannot follow you cannot agree with you. Your prayer may be entirely genuine, and Paul grants that it is, saying you may be giving thanks well enough. But the other person is not built, and that is the verdict he cares about.
      Then Paul puts himself under his own rule before he puts anyone else there. "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue." He claims the very gift they were competing over, claims more of it than any of them, and then sets it aside in the assembly for the sake of five words somebody can actually use. Being understood costs the speaker something, and that cost is the form love takes when a church gathers. I feel this in my own work before I feel it anywhere else, because the man with the microphone is the one most able to speak into the air, to be interesting for forty minutes and leave a room unbuilt.
      Paul then quotes Isaiah 28. Isaiah had been teaching the priests and prophets of Judah, and they mocked his instruction as baby talk, precept upon precept, line upon line, the way you would imitate someone talking to a toddler. God answered that if they would not hear plain words, He would speak to them by the lips of foreigners, meaning the Assyrian army whose language they could not understand. Speech you cannot follow was the sound of judgment falling on people who had refused speech they could. Paul applies that pattern to a church whose gatherings had become unintelligible, and it explains what he says next. If the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues and outsiders walk in, they will say you are out of your minds. The word means raving, and it is exactly what a Corinthian visitor would have said about the temples down the street.
      Set against that is the other room. "But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and falling on his face he will worship God and declare that God is really among you." Both of those verbs come out of the courtroom. He is exposed and he is examined, and what the examination turns up is the part of himself he had not planned to bring in with him. I do not want to soften that into a general welcome, because Paul does not. The man hears ordinary people speaking plainly about God, his own heart gets described more accurately than he could have described it, and the only thing left to do is go face down. What he says on the way down is not that the service was excellent. He says God is really here. Nobody in the room was aiming at him. Paul never tells the Corinthians to redesign their meetings around visitors, he tells them to build one another up in words people can follow, and a stranger who walks into that will be taken apart by it. He is not converted by a program pointed at him. He is converted by overhearing a body being built.
      We started this series in Acts 2, and the two rooms belong next to each other. At Pentecost the Spirit fell and the crowd outside heard the mighty works of God each in his own language, and three thousand people were added that day. In Corinth the same Spirit was at work in a room where an outsider could not follow a word of it. The gift had not changed, the aim had, and the aim is what Paul is trying to get back. So the question for us on Sunday is not whether we are gifted, because we are. It is whether anyone was built, and that question has ordinary answers. It looks like sitting next to someone you have never met and quietly telling him what we are doing and why. It looks like praying in words a guest can follow. It looks like staying for the conversation after the service, because the person you were gifted for is standing three feet away. Come Sunday ready to ask it of yourself. We were called out, gathered in, and handed gifts, so that when we assemble the love of God gets spoken plainly enough for the person who came in the back door to meet Him.