J-Curve Session 35: (Pastor Matt Carter, Chapter 35)
Class Description: Session 35, Chapter 35
Chapter 35: Jesus: The ultimate party crasher
“Next time you have a feast, go out to the highways and byways, and invite the poor, the blind, and the lame; then you will be loving, because these people can’t pay you back, but your heavenly Father will.”
Class Notes:
1. Pp 289-91 How was wealth separating people in Corinth?
2. Climb inside the mind of the weak for a moment. P 291 excerpt “Not slave and free....”
a. Do they at all perceive themselves as being on level ground with the wealthy strong? Has the death of Christ actually produced a body that is unified? What was missing practically?
b. The strong were blind, but blind to what? What were they missing?
c. Do we discern ourselves as the weak or the strong? Do we identify with either group?
3. P 292 Its easy to imagine the impact as Pauls’ letter is read aloud to this house church. The strong look down, ashamed, and smiles spread over the faces of the weak..... It’s Jesus’s meal; he’s the Lord of this feast. But when you mock and exclude the weak who are his very body, it is no longer his feast; it’s a supper for the strong.
a. It’d be easy to read these sentences and insolate ourselves from their indictment. Paul was writing to the church at Corinth, not Elverson. Has it escaped our notice that poor and uneducated people don’t tend to ‘stick’ at Brick Lane? Is that changing? We may not be discriminating as regards the Communion table, but are there other areas where we’re making the weak/poor feel uncomfortably conspicuous?
4. P 293 “Next time you have a feast, go out to the highways and byways, and invite the poor, the blind, and the lame; then you will be loving, because these people can’t pay you back, but your heavenly Father will.”
a. Confession time... I struggle with this. Do you? Why? What does it look like and how might we improve? Anyone actually doing this well?
5. P 293-4 In my opinion, the weakest of those three layers in our churches is the middle one - the leaders. For Christ’s community to reflect his beauty, Christian leaders need to constantly re-enact his death.
a. Ouch! PM, as he’s looking at the American Church, is looking at her pastors and elders as the weakest layer of the diagram on p 293.
i. On a national level, do we agree with his assessment? Why or why not?
ii. On a local level, how are we doing at Brick Lane? Where is this purposeful re-enacting actually taking place?
iii. Where do our pastors, elders, deacons, ministry leaders, or staff have room to grow?
6. P 294 Read 1 Cor. 11:23, 25-26 excerpt. In secular liberalism, abortion “protects” a woman’s freedom of choice. Someone has to die so others can live. Outside of Jesus, it’s always someone else who dies. Someone else is the problem. Our founder’s death lies at the center of our faith. Instead of killing our enemies so we can live he died so that we, his enemies, can live.
a. Does PM’s logic make sense to you in these paragraphs? When community is built up around a shared ideal, anyone who poses a threat to that ideal becomes dangerous. Discuss so we make sure we’re all following him here.
Further down on p 294... Each tribe is ranked internally and in relationship to the other tribes. Paul, the football player, leaves his table, sits with the Goths, and then brings them up to the football table. From the culture’s perspective, he’s destroying the lunchroom. From Paul’s perspective he’s creating the body of Christ.
b. If we perceive ourselves as the strong, we should picture ourselves already seated at the football players’ table. What perceived rights do we tend to hold onto that associating with the weak/poor (read here: someone who smells, an addict, some guy who’s all tatted up or pierced through) might threaten?
7. P 295 bottom: For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:27-28)... Scholars believe that Paul is reciting an early church baptismal formula, “neither Jew nor Greek,... neither slave nor free,... no male and female,” which was spoken as the person was being immersed. You go down into the water as a wealthy Greek landowner and come up one in Christ. You go down as a poor Scythian slave and come up a son or daughter of God. The slave and the landowner are now equals in the one body of Jesus. Our former identities have not only been erased, but replaced with his.
a. This section reminded me of our earlier discussion about Onesimus and Philemon. It’s a picture of the vision of the good we’ve been discussing all along - a true Jesus community!
b. Have you ever looked at baptism that way? How would doing so enrich your understanding of it? How should it change the ways we perceive other believers whom we may look down on?