Level Ground

1 Corinthians 1:13 - "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"

There’s a small patch of ground in north London, about four acres in size, tucked between Old Street and City Road in the borough of Islington. It’s called Bunhill Fields. The name probably comes from "Bone Hill," because for centuries before the cemetery was formalized, the bones of the dead from St. Paul's charnel house had been dumped on this rise of land just outside the City's wall.

From 1665 to 1854, Bunhill Fields was London's principal burial ground for dissenters. If you wouldn’t conform to the Church of England, you could not be buried in an Anglican churchyard. Bunhill Fields took you anyway. Roughly 123,000 burials over those two centuries. The ground was never consecrated by an Anglican bishop. It didn’t have to be.

Walk through it today and the names that come at you are extraordinary. John Bunyan lies in the central paved area, the Baptist tinker who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress while imprisoned for refusing to stop preaching. A few feet from him, Daniel Defoe, the Presbyterian-leaning author of Robinson Crusoe. A few feet from him, the mystic poet William Blake, who fit into no church neatly at all. Isaac Watts, the Independent hymnwriter we still sing every Sunday. Susanna Wesley, the matriarch who raised John and Charles. Thomas Bayes, the Presbyterian mathematician.

These men and women would have argued sharply with one another in life. They disagreed about baptism, about predestination, about the sacraments, about whether the inner light or the outer Word was the final authority. They weren’t theological neighbors. Some of them would have refused communion at the same table.

And they all share the same four acres of ground.

There’s a phrase the church has used for a long time when it talks about the cross. We say the ground is level at the foot of the cross. We mean it in the most fundamental sense: every human being who enters the kingdom of God comes the same way. No one walks in upright. No one walks in carrying credentials. We come in through the door of our own bankruptcy, hands empty, asking for mercy from the only Person who has any to give.

When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:13, "Was Paul crucified for you?" he’s asking the Corinthians to remember that level ground. Their slogans had created a hierarchy. The "I follow Paul" people felt deeper. The "I follow Apollos" people felt smarter. The "I follow Cephas" people felt closer to the apostolic line. The "I follow Christ" people felt above all of it. Every party had quietly built a step up for itself.

Paul takes the steps away.

Here’s the part of level ground we mostly miss. We hear that phrase and we hear comfort. Whatever you’ve done, however bad your week was, however many times you’ve failed, the cross meets you on level ground. That is true, and it is precious. But the cross does something else as well. It also lowers the person who has been quietly standing taller than everyone else.

Level ground doesn’t just lift the broken. It humbles the right.

And if we’re honest, most of us are far more comfortable being lifted than being lowered. We love the doctrine that says we’re loved exactly as we are. We’re less comfortable with the doctrine that says the person we’ve been looking down on is loved exactly as they are too.

Who in this church have I been standing taller than? The brother whose politics I find embarrassing. The sister whose parenting choices I quietly judge. The family whose worship style strikes me as shallow. The leader whose theology I think is muddled. The visitor who doesn’t fit my picture of what serious Christianity should look like.

The cross doesn’t let me stand over any of them. Bunhill Fields preaches it without saying a word. Bunyan and Blake and Watts and Wesley and Bayes argued in their lifetimes about things they thought mattered enormously. The same earth holds them now, and the differences they once defended no longer rank the bodies.

The cross is doing the same work in the church right now that the soil is doing for the sleepers at Bunhill Fields. It is leveling us in front of God, not by erasing our differences but by taking away the right of any difference to make us look down. Jesus was crucified for the brother I find difficult. Jesus rose for the sister whose camp I think is wrong. The blood that purchased my place purchased theirs at the same price. There are no spiritual VIPs. There is only the ground at the foot of the cross.

Today: Set aside five minutes for silence. Sit before the Lord and ask Him to show you who you’ve quietly been standing taller than. Let Him bring the person to mind. Let Him bring the camp, the position, the way of being right that has been functioning as your step up.

When you see it, don’t defend it or explain it. Lower it. Let the ground go level under your feet, and notice the people who’ve been standing there beside you the whole time.

Prayer: "Father, You meet us all on the same ground at the foot of the cross. Forgive me for the quiet steps I keep building underneath myself, the things that have made me feel taller than my brothers and sisters. Make me a person who knows I have no rank in front of You. In Jesus' name, Amen."

-PK