I don’t know if you remember that dreadful expression ‘non-U’. You don’t hear it very much nowadays, but 30 years ago it expressed the way the English middle classes tried to define themselves socially. There was even a poem by John Betjeman (who else?) called How to get on in Society, which listed all the things to avoid if you wanted to be ‘U’ rather than ‘non-U’:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norma, as cook is a little
unnerved.
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes and I do
like things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet? The frills round
the cutlets can wait,
Till the girl has replenished the cruet, and switched
on the logs in the grate.

Such social nonsenses are only one of many ways that we try to distinguish between ourselves as humans. In a world where meaninglessness always threatens to engulf the thinking person, we try to build our personal security by creating human hierarchies: hierarchies that give us a distinct position – a position which is a little above most other people, so that we have a sense of being superior to the people who are not quite like us. That was another of those dreadful expressions: ‘N Q O T D’ (Not Quite Our Type, Dear). But it isn’t an attitude confined to social snobbery. You can detect it in any social setting, any group of friends chatting in the pub. The line will be drawn anywhere and according to any criterion, so long as it leaves me and people like me secure and slightly superior to others. It is particularly pervasive in the spiritual realm. Have you heard somebody say, “It’s not quite my type of church”? My type of people don’t go to a church like that - the people there are not quite like us, socially, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. And because they’re not like me, they are by implication a little inferior.

Now the background to 1 Corinthians is spiritual superiority. The church at Corinth could be described as ‘lively but rather conceited’. They saw themselves as a cut above the rest. And that elitism lies at the root of all the different topics covered in this long letter. And, as far as Paul was concerned, it was a very serious spiritual problem – one to which I would suggest we are all prone: because we all like to think of ourselves as pretty much what we should be, while others are ... well, others. And that sense of being basically OK and a little superior to others is very dangerous when it comes to knowing and understanding God.

Now, 1 Corinthians is a real letter. Paul had started the church in Corinth (Acts 18:1-18), and he had been corresponding with them (see 1 Cor. 5:9; 7:1), but he was not happy with the way that church was going. He wrote the letter from Ephesus about 54 A.D. It is a great pity that Paul’s letters ever got to be called ‘epistles’. They are real letters. They were not written to add to the stock of 1st Century Jewish literature.

Consequently, reading a letter like 1 Corinthians is like that tantalising experience of hearing only one side of a telephone conversation – when you hear “Did he really? And what did she do about that?” and you long to hear the other side of the story. I was once listening to my cousin talking to her husband back in New Zealand about their eldest son when she said, “He must be the only boy in the school who’s ever punched the headmaster.” I couldn’t wait to hear the rest of the story (which was not as serious as it sounded, I’m glad to say).

But with 1 Corinthians we are not able to hear the whole of the story. We only hear Paul’s side. New Testament scholars earn their Ph.D.s by speculating on what was going on at Corinth. But, at the end of the day, it is only speculation. We do not know for certain what they were saying, but we do know what God was saying through Paul to them. And he is saying it to us too, if we are not too proud to hear it.

Glance at the text. The letter begins in the traditional manner of the ancient Greco-Roman world. The writer (verse 1) to the recipient (v. 2), greetings (v. 3); and then a prayer of thanksgiving (vv. 4-9). But Paul has both Christianised that traditional form, and in this particular letter he has also subtly slanted it to lay the basis for what is to follow in the rest of the letter.

He brings out three emphases: that it is all a gift; that it is not all over; and that it is all about Jesus.

1) It’s all a gift.

Paul keeps stressing this, as the letter begins. ‘Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes’ (1 Cor. 1:1). Paul’s role in the Church as an apostle is not something he has earned or deserved, it is ‘by the will of God’. And so for the Christians in Corinth: ‘To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy ...’ (v. 2a). Now that ‘called’ there doesn’t mean invited, it means summoned. It is an effective call, like when the army issues ‘call-up’ papers in a time of war. And Paul reminded the Corinthians that they have been saved by God on the same basis as everyone else: ‘... together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours’ (v. 2b). These Corinthians are not as different from other Christians as they might like to think.

All of us actually come to God on exactly the same basis – and it’s the basis of grace: something that we don’t deserve that is given to us, because of the love that God has for us. Look at verses 3 & 4: ‘Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.’ It’s striking that Paul begins the letter, which is going to be highly critical of these Corinthians Christians, by thanking God for them. His criticism of them and his thanksgiving for them do not exclude one another. And there is much, I would suggest, for you and me to learn from that. If we can learn to be genuinely grateful to God for one another in the Church, all our relationships will be transformed.

You may know that Management Skills experts teach that the good manager must habitually encourage five times as much as he or she criticises, if a staff member is going to be able to accept and act upon that manager’s criticism. But Paul isn’t actually being devious, or manipulative here. This isn’t flannel at the start of 1 Corinthians. Indeed he doesn’t actually praise the Corinthians themselves in this, does he? But he makes it clear that all his dealings with the Corinthians are within the framework of gratitude for God’s grace. He was thankful that God had dealt with them and was dealing with them.

In fact, he was thankful for the very things in the Corinthian church which also caused him grief: ‘For in him you have been enriched in every way—in all your speaking and in all your knowledge— ...’ (v. 5). It is that speaking and knowledge that Paul is going to argue with them about later in the letter. But it all originated in God’s gift to them: ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ he’s going to ask them in chapter 4.

So first he is grateful to God for them. And why? ‘... because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you’ (v. 6). What Paul means is that when he came to Corinth and started talking about Jesus Christ, they got converted. His testimony to Christ was confirmed by their conversion. And that conversion was what, in the terms of verse 5, enriched them in every way.

The Corinthians may have thought that they were developing into rather special Christians. Paul is saying that at the moment of their conversion they were enriched in every way. They’d had it from the outset. And this enrichment is to do with our relationship with God: having our sins forgiven, being accepted by God, being adopted into God’s family, receiving God’s Spirit into our hearts – all of which are true for each one of us the moment we are converted. Those things happen, and we are enriched in every way.

There may be some of us here this morning who do not yet know quite what I’m talking about when I talk of those riches. There may be others who are gradually discovering them; and discovering that they are true for them individually. But those riches are beyond anything that this world can offer.

I don’t know if you have ever attended a child’s first birthday party. I have noticed that there is a feature common to all such events. The doting parents and other relatives have carefully wrapped a number of expensive squeezable and suckable toys, chosen to delight the infant – along with one or two Beatrix Potter and Bunnykins dishes. But at the moment of present opening, the one year old is far more interested in the wrapping paper than in the presents. You think to yourself Why on earth did I bother to get that costly contrivance – which, when sucked, produces the noises of twelve distinct farmyard animals – when the little darling would evidently have preferred a piece of crumpled wrapping paper? As humans we are like those infants when we seize so tightly on to the riches of this world and pay so little attention to the riches that God offers us.

I wonder if this day is the moment for you just to consider what really matters. What do I really value? Am I playing with the wrapping paper? Or am I reaching out to the things that matter (that we all know in our hearts really matter)?

And notice that these greatest riches of all cannot be earned. They can only be accepted – with gratitude. It’s all a gift, wrote Paul, as he tried to re-focus these Corinthians’ attention off themselves and on to the God who’d given them the gift. It’s all a gift: we can’t take the credit for it. He also wanted to direct them off the present and on to the future – which explains the paradox of verse 7, and leads us on to our second point.

2) It’s not all over.

‘Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed’ (v. 7). It is not all over, writes Paul. It’s not all here and now. While they lack no spiritual gift, they are still waiting eagerly for God to do something He has not yet done. ‘Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (vv. 7, 8). The tension between the present and the future – what we already have now as Christians and what we do not yet have – is inevitable when a God who is outside time deals with His creatures who are inside time.

This is a very difficult thing to get our heads round. There is no past, present or future for God. But when He acts outside time, we experience His action inside time in terms of those three tenses. The Christian has been saved, is being saved, and will be saved. God’s eternal action outside time is experienced by us inside time in terms of tenses, which are meaningless to God.

People today do not like the idea of waiting for the future. We’ve made the present so comfortable that we cannot bear the thought of our own deaths. Moreover, the prospect of some possible future environmental doomsday ahead makes the future threatening for us. Today’s attitude to the future is captured classically for me in the Gary Larson cartoon which depicts two fishermen on a lake viewing a nuclear holocaust in the distance. One fisherman is saying to the other, “I’ll tell you what this means, Norm. No size restrictions and forget the limit!” I think you probably have to be a fisherman fully to appreciate Larson’s sense of humour, because that cartoon shows an understanding of the fishing mentality as well as the contemporary world view.

But the Christian hope is a future hope. We do not dread the future. It’s not just a present hope. It’s the hope of seeing God face to face; and of Jesus’ return to this earth. A here-and-now Christianity will always disappoint, because sin is not finally dealt with in the here-and-now. There will always be a certain frustration in the present. And the person who does not feel it is less sensitive than he or she should be to the presence of evil – in our own hearts, and in the world we inhabit. This world is a wonderful place, but it is a flawed place. We are meant to long for something more.

It’s a bit like air travel. You pack everything, you get everything ready, you check it: the ticket, the passport and everything. You hurry and rush to get to the airport on time. And then what do you do? You wait. You always wait, don’t you?

We have all we need, but we have not yet arrived. The Christian is ready, but waiting. Longing for a future, eagerly waiting for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. Let’s just read again verses 7 and 8: ‘Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Well, we are not yet blameless, but on that day those who trust Jesus will be. Some of us may be just clinging on to that hope as we are so conscious of the ongoing presence of sin and moral failure in our own lives and the tragic circumstances of our world.

Look at verse 9: ‘God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful.’ Is it easier to turn an enemy into a friend or to invite a friend home? You see, God did the hard part when He called me into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, in my second term at university, many years ago. He turned me then from love of self to love of Him; from being besotted with the wrapping paper of this world’s riches to reaching out for the riches that He wants to give us. And if He could do that then, He can see me safe home now.

3) It’s all about Jesus.

You really can’t read these verses and miss that. He’s mentioned 9 times in 9 verses. Glance back over them. I won’t read any one of them to you because Jesus is there in every one of them. Everything God has done, or will do, for the Corinthians is done expressly in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Corinth was a big place in the ancient world. It may have had a population of up to 600,000 people – with a high degree of material prosperity and a low degree of moral life. It had a huge temple to the goddess of love, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite and the Romans called Venus. In fact there was an expression in the ancient world, ‘to Corinthianise’, which meant ‘to fornicate’. It may well have been a bit of a moral rubbish tip.

But the message of Jesus Christ caused a beautiful flower to spring up and blossom on that 1st Century rubbish dump: the Church of God in Corinth. That church probably wasn’t large, and it was far from blameless, but it was the work of God and it has long outlasted the worship of Aphrodite that dwarfed it at its birth. Jesus is like that. He is the same yesterday, today and for ever. Before Him all human glory fades into insignificance. The gross sensuality of our own day, the materialism that we see all around us and that grips our society, that obsession with pleasure and power and sensation and selfishness which characterise our culture – all those things dwarf the Church today. Do you sense that? Do you feel how small and pathetic the Christian faith is in the face of the way our culture is and is going? But they don’t dwarf Jesus. They are not too strong for Him. And the Christian faith is all about Him, and about learning to accept with gratitude what He has done for you and for me.

Have we learned to do that? To accept with gratitude that it’s all a gift – everything we have is given to us and we don’t need those distinctions, those hierarchies of U and non-U or whatever they might be in our lives, to bolster our fragile self-esteem and security. God gives us meaning and purpose and value.

He gives us a future. It’s not all over yet. There is much, much more to come.

And it is all in Jesus – that is where God meets us and deals with our sin, and keeps us safe to the end. ‘God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful,’ writes Paul to us