This is the sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Monocacy Valley Church on Sunday, January 28, 2024, drawing from 1 Corinthians 8:1-13.
Now that we’ve been together for a few weeks, you might have noticed that I like to have a little more fun with my sermons. Truth be told, I love to weave jokes, references, and other unexpected little bits into my preaching - if there are any die-hard Star Trek fans in today, you might have already noticed the sermon title with a bit of a giggle - and yes, I’ll admit, cracking jokes mid-sermon does get me into a bit trouble once in a while, but it might surprise you to hear that humor is actually a really important teaching tool!
Humor isn’t just fun, after all. Humor is unpredictable and chaotic, which makes extremely effective at breaking through our expectations, knocking our hearts and minds out of old ruts and tricking us, with a bit of a lighthearted chuckle, into seeing things in an entirely new light. It forces us to think differently which, we have to admit, is exactly what we need in our church lives these days.
Why don’t I give you an example?
By virtue of that mildly annoying condition where pastors also have to use money for the purchase of goods and/or service, I have a part-time job as a professor in the writing program at a local university. Now when I’m teaching in these writing classes, I tend to make jokes constantly, and one of the main reasons I do that is because students - like most of us, really - don’t really listen, at least not in the way we expect. Rather, most students will make predictions, assumptions about what the teacher is going to say, based on what the teacher has just been talking about. So if you’re teaching an English writing class, and you start by talking about nouns, and then verbs, it's a pretty safe bet that what's coming next is probably going to be adjectives, isn't it? Maybe prepositions, or the definite article if you're feeling fancy, but at the very least, it'll be some basic part of speech, right?
A leads to B, leads to C…that’s the secret to an easy-to-follow lesson. And sure, you could do that; there’s plenty of soporifically successful teachers out there who never deviate from the predictable, formulaic lesson plan for their entire careers, after all. So you move from nouns, to verbs, to adjectives, and the students in the back will yawn, the three disturbingly focused students in the front row will take notes, and everyone in the room will have basically forgotten about all three things by the time the bell rings. The lesson will have been successfully completed, but no one will have remembered a thing.
But if you wanted them to remember the lesson, if you wanted it to really stick in their heads, you wouldn’t go from nouns, to verbs, to adjectives…
…you'd go from nouns, to verbs, to circus clowns.
NOBODY expects circus clowns! Especially in the middle of a grammar lecture!
Now all of a sudden, everyone in the room has to pull the mental equivalent of a 3-gear change at highway speeds. They're frantically trying to figure out just how the heck we wound up here, pouring through their notes, hanging on every word looking for a clue about just what in God’s name circus clowns have to do with nouns and verbs. The more you talk, the more their minds start filling up with with this baffling image of a circus clown which is becoming clearer and more distinct the longer you go on talking about about this wildly and absurdly unexpected thing. The more you talk, the more they try to figure out just why you're talking about circus clowns, the more closely they listen, trying to grow this image in their minds as they desperately try to connect circus clown to nouns and verbs, never noticing that you’re talking about the clown’s big, red, nose, or his floppy, yellow shoes, or his pasty, white makeup, or any of the dozens of brand-new adjectives that have now broken through their boredom because you drove right through the walls of their expectations in a tiny, old, neon green and hot pink, honka-honka clown car!
Of course, as someone who is both a pastor and a teacher, when I saw today's passage from 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 in the lectionary this week, I recognized immediately what the good folks behind the Revised Common Lectionary were doing here when they put today’s passage down in order.
You see two weeks ago, we started our conversation together with a lesson on verbs, so to speak, with the well-known and comfortable stories of Samuel’s calling by God in the temple and Nathanael’s calling from beneath the fig tree by Jesus. We spent time together with these passages, and we explored what’s involved with actively listening to the voice of God; not just saying “I’m here, Lord,” but doing the hard, wide-eyed and terrifying work of sitting through the long hours of the night wrestling with the uncomfortable truths that this voice brought to us after we started listening. We learned about the importance of standing up from our comfortable places under our own vine and fig tree, and really listening when God calls us out for the ways in which we may have been protecting ourselves from our fears and insecurities by painting others as unworthy instead.
And then last week, we continued that conversation by taking a gentle boat ride with Jonah, Simon, Andrew, James, and John. We learned about what comes after the listening, after we stand up from our comfortable spots under our fig trees and set about the surprisingly complex task of walking along the path of Christ. We learned about how walking isn’t a simple act at all, but something that requires millions of little course corrections, and an ability to be constantly responding to a world that seems to change with every step you take not because the world is unstable or uncertain, but because every step we take following Christ changes our perspective just a little, allows us to see the world around us a little differently, and requires us to re-think our path forward in light of new terrain, new obstacles, and a better understanding of where Christ is, and where Christ is moving in the world.
So today, when we settle down in our pews ready to take on the great big book of the Word of the Lord once more, we come with the expectation that whatever God has for us today it’ll probably be in line with what we’ve heard in the last two weeks, right? We did listening, standing, and walking…maybe today we’ll be talking about…I dunno….seeing God, perhaps? Maybe….smelling the Holy Spirit? Well whatever it is, it’s probably gonna be something about the physical and mental tools we use to continue in our shared journey of following Christ out into the world, right?
Listen now for the word of the Lord:
Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that "all of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him. Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that "no idol in the world really exists," and that "there is no God but one." Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth--as in fact there are many gods and many lords--yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.
"Food will not bring us close to God." We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.
…what kinda white-makeup-wearing, red-nose-having, honka-honka clown-car nonsense was that? Idol sacrifice and dietary requirements? What? How did we wind up here, of all places?
Alright. Ok. Maybe if we dive into it a little bit, we’ll find the connection, right? I mean, this has to mean something. There must be some kind of message here for us today, otherwise I would have certainly just skipped this text and picked a different one!
Well, let’s look at the context for a moment. I'll admit that the sacrificing of food to idols isn't really something we have to deal with all that much these days. We don't pop down to the grocery store, and look for the non-sacrificial lamb right next to the organic produce or the non-gmo milk or whatever. Obviously, the mechanics of “how to deal with idol sacrifice at the store” probably isn’t going to be the part of today’s scripture that has any relevance for us, so let’s talk about just what is going on here, exactly.
This whole part of the Bible - not just first and second Corinthians, but pretty much everything in the New Testament other than the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation - are what we call epistles. Basically, they’re just letters. We’re not reading something that Paul put down for posterity here, something he intended to be read as a whole and complete theological text for the next several millennia; we’re reading his mail. And like any letter, what he’s writing here didn’t come out of nowhere; he’s writing in response to what he’s heard has been going on in this specific church, a church in which great divisions were happening over some of the smallest, most incidental issues of everyday life.
So this is why 1 Corinthians is just Paul writing about issue, after issue, after issue; first divisions in general, then theology, then the issue of little cliques arising from people picking their favorite teachers, then wealth, sex, lawsuits, marriage, and finally eating food which has been offered to idols.
At the time in Corinth, a lot of the food one might find in the markets had, at some point before making it to the market, been used in a ritual process of “sacrifice” to one of the idols in the temple. Of course, much like pastors with part-time jobs at the university, the temple still needed to find a way to make ends meet, so once someone had performed the ritual “sacrifice” of food to a particular deity, the temple staff would quietly take that offering out the back, walk it over to the market, and sell it back to the community for a tidy little profit, with the proceeds going to fund the temple establishment. As a result, a lot of the food in town had, at some point, passed through the temple at one point or another; it was just part of life in that time and place.
Of course, if one was truly dedicated and extremely meticulous, it would probably be possible to separate the sacrificed food from the non-sacrificed food in the market, to trace the specific history of every item you bought, but that would be a LOT of work just to make sure that nothing touched your sensitive Christian tum-tum which had been involved in the rituals of those outsiders, those nonbelievers out there in the broader Christian community.
And it was here that the community began to fracture, where divisions started to form among them. On the one hand, you had those in the community who felt that the whole “you shall have no other gods before me” thing left absolutely no room for interpretation, so the question of eating anything that had been even peripherally involved in a temple sacrifice was a no-brainer. To them, every part of their religious experience was a black-and-white binary; a rule that you either followed or you didn’t, and if you didn’t…then that made you an outsider, an apostate; a sinner.
And once you’ve decided that someone is a sinner, the bonds of community have been well and truly broken, perhaps irrevocably.
On the other hand, you had those in the community who were a bit more flexible on the issue, who figured that it was just part of life in the community, and that as long as it wasn’t hurting anyone it wasn’t really worth bothering over.
(Of course at this point, the story of Peter’s vision in Acts 10, where God says “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” hasn’t become common knowledge yet, so that’s not gonna help here!)
Now we know who Paul is here. Paul is a former Christian hunter, one of the most legalistic of the already extremely legalistic Shammai school of the Pharisees - the same ones Jesus spent his whole life in conflict with. And while he has had his conversion experience - changed his course with some of that sweet, sweet metanoia we talked about last week - he’s still fundamentally the same black-and-white, legalistic iconoclast he ever was; he’s just on a different team now.
So you might expect that Paul would immediately side with the legalists in Corinth, and talk about how important it is to follow God’s rules and laws to the letter, to make sure you are perfectly in keeping with the black and white of what God has put down in the good book, and to never stray from that straight and narrow path. You might expect a lesson on the importance of not contributing to the systems of other Gods, or the sanctity of our God above all others. You might expect a lesson in theology here, a kind of navigational guidebook; rules of the road while we follow God down that righteous road. Clear-cute guidelines that tell us what - and therefore who - is, and is not, following God correctly.
You might expect that of course, but like a clown car honking unexpectedly over the horizon, here comes Paul with the last teaching you would expect from him.
Idols aren’t actually real anyways, so how could this possibly matter?
And like an English teacher bent on confusing his students into hilarious learning, Paul takes advantage of their momentary shock to move the conversation away from the issue of idols entirely, and to re-focus it on what was always important in the first place; loving and caring for others.
Everyone, both then and now, goes into the teachings of their faith looking for a black and white, binary ruling on what is and isn’t right. We all set out in search of criteria for judgment, a checklist we can universally apply to determine just who belongs among the ranks of the faithful. At our heart we’re all legalists, all looking for an easy answer to what is and isn’t wrong, something that can endure unchanging for all time. We want to draw the line in the same place that our parents did, and their parents before them, because we just can’t handle the thought of right and wrong being flexible or changing.
It is terrifying to imagine a world where what was wrong yesterday is right today, where what is right today might be wrong tomorrow. We all live in fear of of the ridicule of future generations who live their whole lives in terms that our parents would have called ungodly.
But that fear is the exact thing that Paul was speaking against here, the exact thing he was trying to direct the Corinthians away from.
Right and wrong were never about following a specific canon of rules; the definitions of righteousness are not, and never were, the quality of our adherence to rules or commandments.
Right and wrong are determined by love. Our love for one another as a living, breathing, and ever-growing expression of our love for God.
This is why Paul doesn’t approach the issue in terms of theology, or the commandments of Almighty God, but in terms of context, and the effect our choices have on the people around us. It was never about whether it was ok with God for them to eat this food: “We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.”
Love is not made certain in a court of law. Love is not nailed down with words, lashed to the floorboards of time with arguments, or debated into a frozen statue through the razor-thin margins of legalism.
1 John 4 tells us that God is love, and love is a moving target. What we need to do in order to be loving changes because we change. With every step along the journey with Christ, our knowledge of the world shifts and grows, our understanding of the people around us grows and matures, and we are exposed to entirely new and interesting ways to be loving, and just as many ways to fail to be loving, and be a stumbling block instead.
The measure of a man, the measure of all of us, isn’t in how tightly we hold to the way, but in how flexibly we are able to move in our unending pursuit of God’s pure and perfect love. When we break bread with the starving, what does it matter if others before us used this food to venerate their idols? When we sit down at table with those who live in terror because a lifetime of religious legalism has made them afraid of the judgement that might befall them should they touch something once offered to an idol, what harm does it do for us to take a moment to ensure that their fears are comforted instead?
Each and every one of us is a unique and wonderful person, and each and every one of us has unique challenges and unique needs. So with every person we meet, the needs of compassion and the requirements of love change too, and our calling isn’t to insist that all these others hold firm to our own understandings of what’s right and wrong, but to hold firm to the one and only fixture of our faith - love - and change ourselves to make sure that this love, God’s love, is what is shining into their lives through our words and our deeds.
My friends, following Christ is no simple thing. We begin by being tasked with the hard work of listening to God, struggling through the long, dark night as we wrestle with the uncomfortable truth that God called us to hear. We rise from our places of comfort, standing up from under our fig trees and starting off on the journey to follow God. We change our course constantly, because every step of the way gives us new information about the world around us, illuminating the path towards Christ in unexpected and new ways.
And as we plan our next steps, as we discern just how to follow Christ down that long and righteous road, we don’t do it by looking for hard and unbroken lines that point us only in a single, limited direction, but by listening for the sound of God’s unfailing and impossible love, honka-honka-ing over the horizon like a completely unexpected clown car, plowing through our expectations, our biases, our prejudices, and every unchanging binary we’ve ever clung to out of fear or desperation, and showing us - often with a good chuckle or two - that those things in life which are different or unexpected, those things which make us feel uncomfortable, off-balance, or even a little bit pressured, those things that ask us to question everything we thought Christ Jesus was teaching us; these things are the real and true measure of how we are called to love others just as God loves us.
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