Welcome to the season of Epiphany! This week we are starting a period of time when we will be reading through a book of the Bible in our Sunday lectionary lessons. That book is Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I won’t be using the Corinthians readings as the primary texts for my sermons, but I figured they formed a pretty good basis for a newsletter series. So for the next few weeks before we get into Lent, we’re going to take a look at Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. 
So to start us off, here’s some Corinthians facts:
Corinthians is possibly the earliest written book of the New Testament. Believe it or not, the New Testament isn’t ordered from earliest to latest (it’s actually ordered, Gospels & Acts –> Paul’s Letters to Churches (Longest to Shortest) –> Paul’s letters to people (longest to shortest –> Letters from other people (longest to shortest) –> Revelation). Revelation, the end of the the New Testament, is probably one of the last written books, but Matthew is almost most certainly not. Instead, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was probably one of the earliest Christian documents that ended up being considered Scripture. It was likely written around the early 50’s AD, about 15-20 years after Jesus’ death.
Paul was writing out of necessity to a messed up local church. While the opening lines of Paul’s letter were all about thankfulness for the Corinthians, he quickly gets into addressing the problems that pop up in their church that were getting so out of control that it was likely that the church might split. The Corinthians were following different doctrines and weren’t all confessing the same truth. This would have been like someone going to a Methodo-byterian church and trying to figure out what was being taught. Another, possibly related problem was that the Corinthians were smart, but their smarts got in the way instead of being used for good. Additionally, the Corinthians were having some extreme issues with licentiousness including sexual sins, substance abuse, and gluttony. Moreover, the Corinthians were dividing themselves along socio-economic lines instead of engaging with one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. In some ways, the Corinthians present to us a microcosm of some of the most prevalent problems that exist in the Church even today.
First Corinthians is the only epistle that includes Jesus’ Words of Institution for communion, and contains much of the theological content of how we celebrate it. Again, the church of Corinth was sort of a dumpster fire, and so Paul needed to address many practices of the church with them in a corrective way. One of those was the practice of communion. From First Corinthians we not only get a recording of Jesus’ Words from the night in which He was betrayed, but Paul also goes into detail about taking the sacrament worthily and how communion is a ‘communal’ (imagine that) rather than an individual experience.
We’ll get more into Corinthians next time. In the mean time, if you have a chance, flip open to First Corinthians some time this week and take a look at the book. You can scan it overall (I usually read the headings if I’m doing that) or you can just take a look at the first few chapters. Either way, you’ll start to see a picture develop – and that picture is the picture of God’s corrective truth for His Church but also His grace and patience with sinners like us.