Puffed Up or Built Up?

January 28, 2018
Psalm 111     1 Corinthians 8:1-13 (CEB)

Several years ago, I was in a small meeting with some other Presbyterians when one of the men there started complaining about an elder in his church. “On Communion Sundays,” he told us, with more than a little agitation, “he carries the, the whaddayacallit, the wine glass thing for the grape juice?”

“The chalice?”

“Yeah, he carries the chalice around during coffee hour and drinks the leftover grape juice right in front of everybody! Someone needs to talk to him! That’s just not right!”

Well, in the Presbyterian Church, that actually is all right. Some other churches believe that the grape juice or wine is actually turned into the blood of Christ … and thus it is sacred and not to be drunk down by just anybody, as if it were a glass of punch. But in the Presbyterian Church we believe that the grape juice remains grape juice—and the bread, bread—and thus they can be used for just about anything. Some pastors have been known to stuff their Thanksgiving turkey with leftover communion bread.

Now, someone in that meeting explained all this to the man who was so upset, but it didn’t calm him down. “It’s just not right,” he kept muttering. The explanation didn’t make him any happier about that grape-juice-guzzling elder in his church … and it didn’t make him feel any better about the Presbyterian Church as a whole, either.

There’s “right” … and there’s the loving thing to do. And they’re not always the same.

 

Paul wrote about a situation like this in the church in Corinth—sometimes known as the very first dysfunctional church. (Those folks had a lot of issues with each other.) This one had to do with eating food offered to idols. There were apparently a number of people in Corinth who were sure that, as followers of Christ, they should absolutely never eat food that had been offered to the various gods worshiped in the city and others who thought it was okay. Paul took a very pragmatic approach to the issue: it’s not a big deal, he explained, because “a false god isn’t anything in this world … there is no God except for the one God.” So if the idols are figments of our imagination—gods created by human beings—it doesn’t matter if food has been offered to them.

(Not everyone in the New Testament agreed with Paul, by the way. Acts 15, for example, tells us that when James said that gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised, he still said that they were to refrain from eating meat sacrificed to idols. And in Revelation, two churches are condemned for—among other things—eating such meat. This was a very real issue in the first century church!)

But Paul has a much more important point to make about this business of eating meat offered to idols. He recognizes that this is a huge problem for some people. Some people, he writes to the Corinthians, “are eating this food as though it really is food sacrificed to a real idol, because they were used to idol worship until now.” Their entire lives have been spent in a culture that worships multiple gods, that sacrifices meat to those idols, and they may not be able to get past all those culturally-enforced beliefs. As The Message puts it: “An imagination and conscience shaped under those conditions isn’t going to change overnight.” To them, eating meat sacrificed to idols means worshiping those idols.

So instead of showing off that you can eat the meat that’s been sacrificed to idols, Paul says, consider what this may do to the faith of some of your fellow Christians. “But watch out or else this freedom of yours might be a problem [a stumbling block, in other translations] for those who are weak.”

… this freedom of yours might be a stumbling block for those who are weak.

For if they see you eating this meat, they may feel that they can eat the meat as well—but to them eating this meat means rejecting the one true God. So, Paul says, “the weak brother or sister for whom Christ died is destroyed by your knowledge.” Your knowledge. Your “superior understanding.” Your version of the truth.

You sin against Christ if you sin against your brothers and sisters and hurt their weak consciences this way.

 

The elder in that church who paraded around coffee hour sipping from the chalice? His theology was “right”—his knowledge was superior—but I think Paul would say that he was sinning against members of his family. They understood his actions as meaning that he did not believe communion to be holy, and if communion is not holy in the church, what is? The risk there was that by his knowledge, those weak believers for whom Christ died were harmed. A stumbling block was set in front of them.

 

Here’s an example from my own life. Most of you know that I didn’t hear God’s call to the ministry until relatively late in my career: I was 51 when I started seminary. And I had worked in a lot of academic and corporate settings for the three decades before that, and during that time I heard quite a number of four-letter words. I will admit to having occasionally used four-letter words, myself.

Now that I’m a pastor, people who inadvertently blurt out some vulgar language in front of me tend to get red in the face and start apologizing. It really doesn’t bother me (so if you’re one of those who’s used “bad language” around me, you’re forgiven), but I do try in most cases not to use that kind of language now myself. Because there are many people in the church who really feel that vulgar language is a sin against God, and if they hear the pastor using that language, it hurts their faith. It puts a stumbling block in front of them. And that’s not right.

 

Paul talks about this idea of refraining from doing something that we don’t see as a problem at all in terms of our freedom in Christ. Our freedom in Christ is not the right to do whatever we want to do. Rather, the freedom we have because of God’s saving love for us in Christ Jesus is the freedom to serve Christ by loving each other.

Or as Martin Luther put it:

[A] Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
[And] a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.[1]

 

A number of years ago I served a church that went through a huge crisis around the issue of gay ordination. People on both sides of the issue were convinced that they were “right”—that their understanding was the correct one.

Those who felt that ordaining gays and lesbians was the right thing to do said, in effect, that although the church had been interpreting parts of scripture in ways that supported a general cultural bias against gays and lesbians, those ways of interpreting scripture weren’t right. But what others heard was that there is no correct way to interpret scripture—that everything was up for grabs.

Yikes: stumbling block.

On the other hand, those who felt that ordaining gays and lesbians was not the right thing to do said, in effect, that God cannot possibly have called gay men and lesbian women to leadership in the church. And what some others heard in this was that the church does not love and honor all of God’s children… which means that God does not love everyone either.

Big stumbling block.

By insisting that our knowledge was correct (whichever side of that issue people found themselves on), we sinned against members of our family. We became stumbling blocks to each other. By our knowledge, we hurt the faith of others in that church and community.

The same scenario has played out over and over again throughout the country—about this and many other topics—in the church and in the culture at large.

 

We could look at this passage and argue that this issue was easy for Paul because he didn’t have an emotional or intellectual attachment to either side. And most of us do have attachments when it comes to the issues we care about. But Paul was writing to people who felt strongly about the meat dedicated to idols issue … and Paul is writing to us, about our issues, as well.

The issues are not unimportant. But Paul is telling us that they are not the most important thing going on. The Body of Christ is more important.

 

Toward the beginning of this passage, Paul wrote that while love builds people up, knowledge makes people arrogant. Or in the words of the NRSV, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” That puffing up is an inflation of the self—arrogance. That building up is about making the community stronger. The Greek is oikodomeo (οiκοδομεο)—to build a house. In other words, insisting that our own knowledge is the truth (and the only truth) and imposing it on each other—that’s all about puffing up our own egos.

Think of it like a soufflé. It looks really impressive, but the reality is that most of it is nothing but hot air. All puffed up.

But loving each other—including refusing to impose our “superior knowledge” on others when it will put stumbling blocks in their way—loving builds the community. It builds bridges and pylons and support beams. It builds on the foundation of the love of God in Christ.
And when we’ve built those bridges and pylons and support beams …
when we’ve practiced oikodomeo (building the house) …
when we’ve supported each person’s growth in faith and love of God …
then we will have true freedom in Christ …
and then we can discuss our different understandings of truth without destroying each other’s faith in the process. Because it’s important that we work together to understand what is true … but we can’t do that until we are united as the Body of Christ.

We start by supporting each person’s growth in faith and love of God. For Christ died for all of us … and died so that we would be free to love each other.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

[1] Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, qtd. In Feasting on the Word, B-1, p. 304

Listen: Are Your Ears Tingling?

January 14, 2018

1 Samuel 3:1-20

I have always loved the story of Samuel’s calling. As a child, it appealed to me because, hey, here was a kid who was called by God. (Though Samuel was almost certainly much older than the tyke in this picture–probably 12 or more). And the whole confusion in the middle of the night—that’s kind of funny, right?

(It’s actually funnier if you know the meaning of Samuel and Eli’s names. Remember that el is the Hebrew word for God. Sam-u-el means “God has heard,” and El-i means “My God.” Given that, here’s what we’ve got:

Then the Lord called “God has heard! God has heard!”
And God Has Heard said “Here I am!” and ran to My God and said, “You called me?”

The Hebrews loved puns and word play.)

I’ve also been struck by the line near the beginning of the passage that says, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” It feels more contemporary than much of the Old Testament, where it seems like visions were popping up in people’s lives right and left, and God visited them in their homes and walking down the road. How many of us have wondered at various points in our lives why God doesn’t seem to talk to people as directly nowadays as God did in Biblical times. Right? But not in these early days of Samuel. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”

Those first 10 verses, up until Samuel finally says to God, “Speak, for your servant is listening”—they’re kind of sweet. And meaningful for all of us in our lives: When God calls you, what’s the appropriate response? “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

And then we come to the next 10 verses, starting with God saying to Samuel, “I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.”

I didn’t find anything in my research that explained “tingling ears,” but I’m assuming that it was a common turn of phrase at that time—sort of like “being green with envy” or the idea of “keeping an eye out.” It’s not hard to understand, though. Imagine the kind of news that would make your ears tingle (or your hair stand on end)—big news, life-changing news, surprising news. And this thing that God is about to do will make both ears tingle.

And what’s the news? God is removing Eli and all his family from their positions in the temple. Kicking them out. Forever.

I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. … the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.

Blaspheming God—or in other translations, cursing God or “desecrating God’s name and God’s place.” They had been (among other things) stealing people’s sacrifices, meant for the glory of God.

Eli himself had not been blaspheming God, but he knew that his sons were doing it, and he didn’t stop them.

That’s the part that makes my ears tingle. Eli was a good man, a great mentor for Samuel, an honorable and upright priest. But people he was responsible for were doing horrible things, and he did nothing to stop them.

That’s a modern-day issue for a lot of us. We may be honorable and upright people in our private lives, but where is our responsibility when others are doing horrible things?

• When people express racist views at our dinner tables or on social media, what is our responsibility as Christians who say that in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free … no white nor black nor brown?
• When we are aware of sexual harassment in our company or our club … or our church … what is our responsibility as Christians who say that each one of us is created in the image of God?
• When we learn that the U.S. is deporting people without due process—people who are then murdered within weeks of being “home”—what is our responsibility as Christians who have been taught to care for the foreigners in our midst?

Oh, it’s hard to stand up. We might make people mad. We might offend people, some of them people with power … some of them our friends. It could be dangerous for us. And we can’t really believe that the folks in authority could be doing anything all that bad.

Take it easy, we tell ourselves. It’ll work out in due time. All things in moderation.

 

All of this brings to mind for me, appropriately on this Martin Luther King weekend, a passage from King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Here’s what Dr. King wrote:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

This passage haunts me … and convicts me.

the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice

Hm. I like order—and I serve a church in which “order” is a byword—we Presbyterians like to do things “decently and in good order.” Do I prefer order in my own life to justice in others’ lives?

[the one] who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension
to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

Aiee. Like many of us, I don’t like tension, and I know there have been times when I’ve just let some injustice slide because I didn’t want to have to deal with the friction. How often do we confuse that “absence of tension” peace with the true peace that is the presence of justice?

[the one] who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season”

I know I’ve been guilty of thinking, “Oh, can’t they just wait a little longer?” Just wait a little longer for respect, for justice, for mercy. I remember an elderly member of a church that was struggling over the issue of gay ordination. “Can’t they just wait until we’re all dead?” she asked.

 

And God said: I am about to do something … that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.

In what ways, I wonder, does the contemporary Christian Church play the role of Eli? Good at worshiping and praying for peace—a fine, upstanding institution—but really anxious not to get involved in problems, especially problems that could be controversial.

And at what point does God say, “I will fulfill against the church all that I have spoken … for the iniquity that they knew and did not restrain”?

These are things I ponder. Things I worry about. Are we as the church living up to our calling in the world?

For true Christianity is not about people saying, “I believe.” It’s about people acting on that belief by loving their neighbors. It’s about people acting out the love of Christ by caring for little children, by feeding the hungry (as we do here at Good Shepherd) … by risking their own comfort, their own order and tranquility, as they speak up for the disenfranchised … as they call their legislators to protest cuts to children’s health services, Medicaid, Social Security … as they support efforts for justice and peace wherever they find them.

And true Christianity does not give in to fear, knowing that God’s perfect love is the most powerful force on earth—perfect love that drives out fear. When we are following God’s call on our lives, we need not fear, even as the culture around us does its best to make us afraid.

Maybe we’ve fallen asleep. Maybe, like young Samuel, we are not expecting to hear God’s voice in the middle of the night. And yet, and yet, God calls us. We wake in confusion, hearing the divine voice calling us in ways we never expected.

And we know what our response needs to be. Let’s say it together:

Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

Alleluia. Amen.