I used this introduction last night to get a hearing on Paul’s tough teaching regarding the man having sex with his stepmother in I. Cor. 5. At the onset of the worship time I told people I was going to “stretch their imaginations tonight . . . .so stay with me ’til the end.” Here’s what I did:

You might know Kara and I spent part of this past summer traveling. We worked it out to have time in London on our way to Uganda. On our way back, I spent some time in Paris. While I’m not necessarily in love with Parisians per se, the city of Paris is electric. One of my favorite aspects about being in Paris (in addition to Notre Dame) is the experience of walking through the Louvre. Known as perhaps the greatest art gallery in the world (though workers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC might quibble with me), the Louvre is the gold standard, the best of the best.

As Kara and I walked through the halls of the Louvre, in awe of the sheer age of much of the work (and incidentally, the easy-to-forget youth of our home country), we felt the buzz as we moved closer and closer to the Big Show—the Mona Lisa. I’d heard Sara Barton talk about her disappointment with her Mona Lisa Experience, but I was not to be deterred. As we closed in on Da Vinci’s sixteenth century masterpiece, I could barely see ahead of me. The large room was packed wall to wall. Camera’s flashed, voices spoke in dozens of languages . . . we were coming closer and closer.

Just as I approached the velvet markings, in church we call them sheep herders, boundary markers (the kind you see on television roping off runways for celebrities walking down the red carpet via their que’s) . . . a short man grabbed my arm.

“Excuse me, Monsieur,” he said with a degree of brashness.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Are you a priest?” This is what I get for wearing my black shirt with a white tee-shirt underneath. I thought about explaining non-denominational Christianity and the word ‘minister’ (“technically all Christians are ministers”) to the mysterious French-men. I reconsidered knowing this man’s only orientation to the world was Catholicism. Hence my black and white shirt.
“Yes. I am a priest.” I finally stammered.
“We’ve been expecting you.”
“You have?” All of the sudden I felt as if I was in some sort of version of Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code. Was this a new game show—DaVinci Code Pranks Gone Wild?
“Yes. Come with me.” Now I was getting a bit upset with this guy. Who did he think he was? I could no longer find Kara—we’d been separated from each other in the mad dash to get closer to the Mona Lisa—whose smile was now getting further and further away from me.

I followed the short Frenchmen (his name, according to his work nametag, was Jean-Pierre). Jean led me to an unmarked elevator on the south side of the hallway. We took that down about three levels to an awkward room.

“Wait here,” he said abruptly.

After a few minutes of waiting, he came back with another man. They had a portable table and a large steel box. “We think you will find some interest in the contents of this box. About a year ago, an archaeologist for National Geographic stumbled upon some ancient letters in Italy. They were written in a form of Greek that very few people recognized. After a few months, we were informed by religion scholars that these letters were written in Koine Greek, the Greek of the New Testament. Mr. Graves, I don’t know quite how to say it, but you are holding a letter written by St. Paul himself. This is not a letter that appears in the New Testament. In fact, only a few dozen people have even laid eyes upon this. We believe this letter was written by St. Paul near the end of his life, concerning a person that appears in his first letter to Corinthian Christians. Would you mind looking at it, and telling us what you think? The best we can tell, this letter refers to I Corinthians 5 and St. Paul’s dealings with Christians living in Corinth.”

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I’ve had to explain to several people what I was trying to do (and why I was trying to do it). That is, 1) we only have some of Paul’s letters/correspondence with Corinthian Christians and 2) It’s a precious gift that we have any at all.