Epiphany III: A Look at Corinth

By the first century, the city of Corinth was a beehive of activity.  It had great ethnic and cultural diversity and a significant Jewish population.  Thanks to Saint Paul, it also had a fledgling Christian community.  Paul's first letter to the them was intended to answer questions that were arising and deepen their theological understanding.  (I imagine Paul would have fainted dead away if told that this little letter would end up having weight equal to Torah in a Christian bible centuries later.)

To understand our pericope [1 Cor. 12: 12-31a]  you need to know that the early Church found itself in a holding pattern.  People still believed that Jesus would make a personal, physical return to the earth to close the age.  That meant two important things.  First, there would be no need for Christian scripture because there would be no future generations to evangelize.  Second, there was no need for ordination, for holy orders, for structure in the Church, because there would be no future generations to pass on authority to.  Therefore, as we have read, people simply discerned their talents, if you will there charisms or spiritual gifts, and then exercised them as best they could.  If you believed that you were called to preaching, you went ahead and preached as best you could.  If you had sensed a call to lead in a congregation, you did.  Some traditions have restored that chaos!   (Remember that, while Saint James's church in Jerusalem was a prototypical model of our bishop-priest-deacon paradigm, Paul who was from the diaspora just founded little synagogues, where the customary leadership consisted of seven old men, with one chairing.)  

With the end of the expectation of an imminent second coming of Jesus, the church wrote books called gospels to pass on the story, each with a different take on Jesus and the faith.  And in that subsequent age,  the Church stabilized around the three holy orders.  The deacon serves as a model between the church and the world, is ordained by, and reports to, his bishop.  A priest can do all sacramental activity of a bishop except one: ordination.  A bishop has the fullness of the ordained ministry.  With the new modelling, calls to ordained ministries are heard, tested, then affirmed and given the necessary education and training by the Church.    That does not mean for a second that only ordained people have a call.  On the contrary, all Christians are under a call.  Some of them  without ordination serve in professional ministry: our monks, nuns, and lay pastoral staff come to mind.  But every baptised person is under a call.  We call the process of identifying it discernment.  Just as the Church investigates discernments to all he ordained ministries and to the non-ordained professional, so discernment is needed by everyone.  Search your heart, prayerfully asking God to help you find your calling in parish ministry or out in the community, as an ordained person or as laity.  As Saint Paul says, it is all about building up the Body of Christ in which there is an equal, diverse, and interconnected network, in which every single member has a significant role to discover and fulfill.   Excuses will not be accepted.  Moses and Jeremiah both plead poor speaking ability and being too young.  No sale.  Saint Paul was short, bowlegged, and stammered.  That didn't stop him.  He just hired Barnabas to be his mouthpiece.  Give yourself to God, God will show you the way.