My fourth-grade Sunday School teacher was named Thelma McDaniel. A no-nonsense kind of woman who didn’t put up with the sorts of “monkey-shines” we children kept visiting upon her orderly classroom. She had that kind of swoopy hair thing that had been fashionable in the late 1950s, but which by the early 1970s had become “retro,” and not in the cool, hip way. She wore cat glasses and smelled strongly—a less generous soul might say “oppressively”—of Eau d’ lilac, the scent that all my childhood Sunday School teachers seemed to smell of.

I don’ remember much of what Thelma McDaniel taught us, except one lesson. She began the class—rather ominously for a fourth-grade audience, it now seems to me—by saying, “You are all sinners.”

We stared back blankly at Ms. McDaniel, not knowing whether she was speaking in a general way or if she had something more specific in mind. What did she know? We all did a quick mental sin-inventory—just to be sure.

“Do you know how I know you’re all sinners?”

I’m sure I didn’t say it, but I remember thinking, “No, not particularly.”

“See this pencil?”

“Yup.”

“You may say, ‘Yes ma'am.’ Do not say, ‘yup.’ Yup is something one says to horses.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“That’s better. Now, the reason I know you are sinners is that this pencil has an eraser.”

Apparently, we didn’t look nearly as enlightened as we should have in the face of such an overwhelmingly obvious object lesson.

“The way God created you, you shouldn’t need an eraser. You need an eraser because you make mistakes. You make mistakes because you’re a sinner.”

Now, I’m pretty sure I know what she meant, but what I heard, what helped inform my conception of God, was, “You’re a sinner. You’re a mistake.”

Ever get any messages like that?

A lot of people think that that’s what Christianity’s about—a hopeless attempt to follow the rules. And to ensure it, the church will supply a sufficient number of disapproving busy-bodies only too happy to remind you that you can’t.

Paul understands this impulse. He has a really tough fight on his hands. He’s long endured aggravation at the hands of the Corinthian church—a church that had seen grievous infighting over leadership disagreements and sexual infidelity.

Moreover, there was division because some people considered themselves to be more important than others—they gobbled up all the food at the church potlucks, they believed their spiritual gifts were more “spiritual” than everybody else’s. Paul’s already given them at least one sternly worded Yelp review.

But this time around, he’s got another problem. It seems that there are those in the Corinthian church who are getting a little self-righteous—at least in Paul’s estimation. Rule-followers. Hypocrites.

He doesn’t come right out and call them that, but Paul’s bias is clear enough, talking about those holier-than-thou types proclaiming themselves to have the truth, when in fact, they only get the fuzziest outlines of the truth—since they see it through a veil.