Choosing the Side of Love
Year B, Epiphany
4
Last week I preached about how important
it is to consider the Bible as more than an old book about people who lived a
very long time ago. It is a book for us
and about us. We are to read ourselves
into the pages of the Bible. And that
worked really well last week when we were talking about how to be disciples of
Christ. It’s a bit more of a stretch
when you look at the readings this Sunday.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is about eating meat that is sacrificed
to idols. Mark’s Gospel tells the story
of Jesus freeing a man from an unclean spirit, essentially an exorcism. While St. John’s and Hampton are pretty
exciting places, I have not once had to tell someone not to sacrifice an animal
to another god, nor have I had to do any exorcisms. It’s hard to read ourselves
into these stories which seem completely normal in the Bible, but irrelevant
for our lives today.
Yet, like so much of the Bible,
there is much more to these stories than meets the eye. In fact, I would venture to say that this
part of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is probably one of the most relevant
things that Paul tells us for our lives today.
To understand why that is true, it might help to know a little about
Corinth and the Corinthian people. At the
time when Paul was writing his letter, Corinth was a diverse and cultured urban
center. Most of the people were not
Jewish. Thus when they became followers
of Christ, they were converting to a very different way of life.
Corinth
was an epicenter of pagan worship. You
go to Hampton to sail and eat crabs. You
go to Corinth to be in a community of people who worship multiple gods and do
it in a fairly big way. The majority of
the people were pagans. While the
Christian community was growing, it was still a small community and one that
was fairly new. There were no cradle
Christians yet. These people were just
learning about Jesus. It was unlikely
that there was a central place for Christian discourse. The various small groups of Christians most
likely lived in different parts of the city and then came together once a week
for common worship. The new Christians
(and they probably did not even call themselves Christian at this point) were
very different from one another. Some were wealthy and well educated. Some were not.
The issue that Paul was addressing
was meat that was offered to idols as a sacrifice. You might wonder how big of an issue this
could possibly be. If you don’t want to
eat meat sacrificed to idols, don’t go to the temple. However, it was not always clear where meat
came from. After an animal was
sacrificed, some of it would be burned, but the left overs were often sold in
the market. And unlike our grocery
store, there were no packages or signs telling you where the meat was coming
from. It didn’t say: “grass fed”,
“organic”, “local” or “sacrificed to idols in the local temple.” People did not always know where their meat
was coming from.
Some
people thought it would be safer to avoid all meat together. That way they could be sure that they were not
inadvertently part of any idol worship, which kind of makes sense. But there were other people who ate whatever
meat they wanted to. They figured that
since these gods weren’t real anyways, what difference did it make if they ate
meat offered to these fake gods—these false idols? This created some tension
between those who were eating the meat and those who were not and were
horrified by those who were.
It is pretty clear where Paul stood
on this issue. He agreed with the
argument that since there was only one God, then it was pointless to worry
about what food is or is not sacrificed to those fake gods. He even complimented the people who had used
that argument- for their knowledge and religious understanding. But he then added that there are some people
who simply aren’t there yet. They might not be as educated. They might not be as worldly, and to them
it’s troubling to see the other Christians doing something that is so clearly
against the rules. He concluded by
asking, is it really worth it to eat meat if you are going to destroy your
sister or brother in Christ?
Some people read this and think that
Paul is warning us not to offend people so as to maintain peace in the
community. A very small part of that is
true. Paul is concerned about the community. For him, the most important thing is not
whether we are right, but how we love one another. Early on in this reading he said, “Knowledge
puffs up, but love builds up.” When he
said this, he was not talking about knowledge in general, but the kind of
religious knowledge that leads us to judge others who do not have the same
knowledge. “Puffs up” means exactly what
it sounds like. This kind of knowledge
inflates our ego, but doesn’t do a lot of good for the people whose lack of
knowledge we might be judging. But
love…love builds the community. It
creates stronger relationships in the community so that no one person is
superior to others.
Yes, Paul cares about the health of
the community. Yet he was not worried
about offending people. Paul said all
kinds of things that were probably construed as offensive. That’s not why he was telling people to
refrain from meat. He was worried about people being led off the Christian
path. Those who were eating meat might
have had a more developed Christian faith, or maybe just another
perspective. But the others for some
reason could not see past the fact that this meat was tainted. Perhaps they still had family and friends who
were pagans and they were afraid that if they ate meat, it would lead them back
to the temple, back to the place they were before they heard about Jesus. Their relationship with Jesus might have been
a little more fragile.
Paul
was not worried about offending them. He
was worried about destroying them. He
wrote, “For if others see you…eating in the temple of an idol,
might they not…be encouraged to eat food sacrificed to idols? So by your
knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed.” Paul was
afraid that the weak believers would be tempted to go back to their old way of
life. They wouldn’t just eat the meat,
they would go back to idol worship and in Paul’s eyes, that would be the end of
their life. So no, Paul was not worried about merely upsetting people. In fact, Paul wanted people to discuss
things, even the hard things. That is
one of the reasons why he wrote all of these letters. It was not just so he could share his
knowledge, but so people would be encouraged to discuss these things.
How is this relevant? There are occasionally times, even today when
Christians disagree. There are even times when Episcopalians disagree. It is usually pretty clear who is right. We are.
Yet even if we are right, Paul is telling us that being right isn’t
always the most important thing. What is
most important is that we love one another and care for one another. We support one another on our Christian
journey. That does not mean that we
shouldn’t talk about the hard things because we do not want to hurt one
another. We talk about the hard things,
but we do that with humility. The church
has condoned slavery, segregation, anti-Semitism, and sexism (just to name a
few). We have been wrong in some pretty
big ways. Odds are, we will be wrong
again. Let’s decide now that we won’t
let ourselves or our community be defeated by pride. Let us choose a side, and let that side
always be love.
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