Now What? (Fr. Caleb)

I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from
now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and
those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who
rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though
they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though
they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing
away.
1 Corinthians 7:29-31

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There was a book that I read in high school that I wouldn’t necessarily
recommend now, but was nevertheless formative for me then. It was Francis
Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? and it is that title question which has
stuck with me over the years. “How should we then live?” The question is not
a random curiosity, but comes as a response to a specific event. Something has
happened, so what do we do now ? Seriously, you can think of the entire
existence and experience of the Church across the ages as amounting to one,
big, “now what?” in light of the mystery of faith: Christ has died. Christ is
risen. Christ will come again.

​Today’s epistle reading is a small part of Paul’s answer to that question, so
with that in mind, I want to explore his answer from two angles. First, for the
Corinthians who originally received this epistle, what does Paul’s answer say
about the event or events that prompted the question in the first place? What
did these commands mean to them? Second, when we ask the question in our
own day, two thousand years ahead of those Corinthians, how does Paul’s
answer engage with our lives and our world?

Let’s start with the Corinthians. In the earliest days of the Church, the event of
Christ was still in very recent memory. Those Christians lived in the aftermath
of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord. United together in
little communities, little outposts of the Holy Spirit, the early followers of Jesus
committed themselves to figuring out just what had happened. What they had
to work with was minimal. And life was not easy for them. Persecution was
rampant and intensifying, and because of that affliction, many assumed that the
return of Christ was just around the corner. Any moment now. “The appointed
time has grown short.” And if that’s your assumption, the series of Paul’s
rather paradoxical commands somewhat make sense. To deal with the world
as though you have no dealings with it. Because quite literally, ain’t nobody
got time for that. It’s like when mom tells you that company is coming over in
15 minutes and your room is still a pit. Time to clean as though not cleaning.

But even this account is incomplete. It was not as though Paul was advising
the early Christians to just sit back and kill time until the Savior returned.
Again, there is good reason to believe that they were entering a time of
intensifying persecution, as well as famine and social unrest. The destruction
of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 alone would have sent shockwaves all
through the fledgling communities of Christians across the Roman world. And
read with this in mind, many of Paul’s directions, both here and elsewhere in 1
Corinthians, take on the appearance of urgent pastoral care. As one
commentator I read put it:

Paul’s concern seems to be less with preparing the Corinthians for the
end of all things than with sparing them from the greater pressures and
worries that would afflict those whose embeddedness in the collapsing
order was exacerbated by marriage or many possessions.

In other words, the more you have to lose, the more you have to lose when the
crisis comes. Paul is declaring a sort of state of emergency for the Christians in
Corinth. “Everyone stay put,” he seems to be saying. Or, as he puts it earlier
in the chapter “let each of you remain in the condition in which you were
called.” After all, “the present form of this world is passing away.” But again,
Paul is not simply talking about the end of the world as such; he’s looking
around with everyone else and seeing the impending collapse of everything
that is established, familiar, and predictable. There’s a big difference. As an
analogy, while the world didn’t technically end on 9/11, it is certainly true to
say that a world ended on that day. The world as we had come to know it. We
should therefore read Paul’s warning here materially as well as spiritually: the
present form of this world is passing away, so prepare yourselves accordingly.

Paul always seems to be working in two dimensions at once: there’s the
spiritual or theological dimension where the event of Christ is in a certain sense
the final end of history. And then there’s also the immediate, material
dimension where Christians find themselves in the world of the present,
possibly undergoing hardship and suffering. The genius of Paul is that he is
able to see both dimensions intersecting one another.

But history moves on. A present form of the world passes away only to be
replaced by yet another form. And now, two thousand years later, we’re left
with these commands but without necessarily the crisis which initially invoked
them. What we have here is an exercise in pastoral expediency by Paul in light
of an impending apocalyptic crisis. But once the immediate crisis subsides,
that pastoral care becomes the grounds for a radical critique of the existing
order.

It is imperative that we recover this radical critique. Because these days, we
have a hard time really seeing the contingency and fleeting-ness of our present
structures. Someone once noted that our fascination with end-of-the-world
disaster films -- 2012, The Day after Tomorrow, San Andreas, etc. -- is actually
a sign of our inability to imagine a world other than this one. There is no other
world than this one, so all it can do is slide into the Pacific. But we have to
resist this conflation of our society with the world as such. There is a
distinction between the two, and it’s right there in the middle of that distinction
that the Christian life is lived. The theology is all there. Jesus inaugurated the
kingdom, setting in motion its gradual establishment through his body on earth,
the Church. It is a Kingdom that is not of this world, he told Pilate, which
means that it operates by laws that seem completely absurd. Take Paul’s
instruction to buy possession as though we have no possessions. What on earth
could that possibly mean? Particularly in a society such as ours that turns
everything into a commodity to be bought and sold. Here, we don’t just buy
possessions, we construct our very personalities with them. For us, this is just
one of the radical possibilities of taking Paul seriously. To make appropriate
use of things while detaching ourselves from the false reality in which they
bind us.

I hope you can see that this has very little to do with the common stereotype of
Christians as being so concerned with the spiritual world to come that they lose
sight of the real concerns of this world. There’s no escapism here. The point
of today’s epistle is a paradox: the people who really accept the impermanence
of the world as it presently appears are the people with the most realistic
perspective on the world. But there’s a catch. The world doesn’t particularly
like the reminder of its impermanence, and it demands our conformity. So to
take up the task of renouncing the world is a subversive act.
​
The ethic that arises from today’s epistle is one that subjects us to live as
though we are on the cusp of the end of the world, because in a way, we really
are. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We live between
the second and third of those claims. What that means is that the entire world,
with all of its societies, cultures, and economies, has been cast from its
pretenses to absolute authority. All the present structures and institutions of
the world around us are fleeting, secondary, temporary because Christ is the
only thing that’s not fleeting, secondary, or temporary. Prepare yourselves
accordingly. Amen.