I did read Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, but I also held the December 2006 issue of U.S. News and World Report in my other hand. Paul wrote, in his first century letter, about the foundational relationship between the bodily resurrection of Christ and the ongoing hope, and faith, of Christian people. Then U.S. News and World Report told of Gnostics across the centuries that have tried to rationalize or spiritualize the resurrection away.

Yes, I read the Sermon on the Plain from the Gospel according to Luke. I am still wrestling with the echoes of its curious sense of blessings and woes but I can hear, running behind it like background music, the message of an article in Yale Alumni magazine titled "When Good People Do Evil". In that article I read about people who, so they thought, delivered possibly fatal punishment to others at the urgings of an authoritarian leader who seemed to care more for abstract principles than the actual well-being of people in his charge.

Then there are the various newspaper clippings my mother had sent me. They recount, with varying degrees of accuracy, the fighting that is sweeping like brush fires across the Dioceses of the Episcopal Church over property, power and principles. There is no shortage of hot wind here, or in other parts of the Anglican Communion. It has been blowing in all directions with enough strength that even an ocean has not been a sufficient firebreak.

In a couple of days as many as 38 heads of National Churches, including our Presiding Bishop will gather in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for the meeting of the Primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Perhaps they will sit down together. Perhaps some will not even come. Both the gender and the theology of our new Presiding Bishop are a challenge to some, and for the first time ever two other Episcopal bishops from the US have been invited to accompany the Presiding Bishop. Clearly others see us as fragmented already. "Who speaks for the Episcopal Church and what is central to its identity and mission?" they are asking.

Blessed are we to live in such a time.

Am I nuts? Why would I say such a ridiculous thing?

Because everything that isn't solid will be blown away; because light reveals, even if the light is coming from the fire of a conflagration; and because every argument and every belief rests on a foundation and we are being challenged to reexamine and rediscover ours.

Those who dig down, who do the difficult work of uncovering and examining that which lies below the surface will discover what has Gospel strength and what is so much fluff that is attempting to pass for adequate building material.

Does that mean that our foundations have not just been shaken, as Paul Tillich claimed years ago, but may have in fact been washed away from under our feet when we weren't paying attention? I think not.

Our hope for salvation is still in Christ crucified and resurrected as a sacrifice and a sign for the whole world - our salvation does not spring from our attempts at right actions, nor our intellectual understanding, nor even from our attempts at greater virtue. If we assume for a moment that Christ has in fact already saved us from the ultimate power of sin and death, imminent destruction is no longer a pressing threat and the question becomes "how then shall we live?"

We cannot substitute either our fears or our desires for the guidance of God. We cannot bruise and bully those who feel differently than we and then somehow feel righteous about it. In fact the whole way forward has very little to do with our feelings.

Jeremiah made it clear that feelings are not a sufficiently strong material on which to rest one's religious convictions nor are emotions adequate to the task of being the sole arbiter of our moral or ethical understanding. "The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse- who can understand it", Jeremiah tells us. He uses the analogy of a tree planted by water to illustrate that we must be grounded in God, rooted in something other than the devices and desires of our own hearts or we will go astray, become anxious and cease to bear fruit. This is as true for a nation, or an entire denomination as it is for an individual.

Feeling good is not always the same as actually being good. Anger, for example, can be quite satisfying- the piquant thrill of righteous indignation is addicting. Who doesn't love to feel that their position is the righteous one? It is even more glorious if a noble battle can be had in front of cheering spectators. But being angry and being right is not the same thing.

We cannot avoid lapsing into anger from time to time when we feel frustrated, misunderstood, or unable to control events. But we can decide how we will act in the midst of our discomfort and discontent. As it says in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, "Be angry, but do not sin."

Just as feeling good is not always the same as being good, feeling good is also not always the end result of have done the right thing. I cannot imagine that the Cross has anything at all to do with feeling good, but it is the instrument of our salvation.

Obviously we cannot look only to what feels good to determine what leads to health and holiness. Jeremiah is absolutely clear on this point, and he does not state it as his opinion but as God's announcement: "Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord." The ills chronicled in the magazine articles I read can be summed up as the result of having put something other than God in the place of ultimate concern- a case of giving our loyalty to lesser things that can neither bear the weight nor save our souls.

So how do we turn to the Lord? Where is blessing to be found? Psalm 1 says "Happy are they whose delight is in the law of the Lord." This statement encourages us to de-center our means of discerning questions like "What is valuable?" and "How should we move through this life?" and "What is the work to which God may be calling us, now?"

The first chapter of Rick Warren's book "The Purpose Driven Life" is called "It All Starts With God." In the first few words Warren sets things in their appropriate context He writes: "It is not about you. The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness…if you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God."

That is our task and our charge. That is the way to righteousness and holiness. Everything else is hubris. A life that is built on scrabbling for wealth, power and prestige is doomed to go down to dust and to have nothing of worth at the end. But a life that has as its foundation the desire to know God and to do God's will is a life that is growing in beauty and truth and will be full of hope, even in the midst of conflict. This is as true for a church as it is for an individual.

Let us pray for God to meet at us the foundation of our faith and be the repairer of the breach. Let us pray for our society and for our church:

Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your son, our Savior. Amen