Minister: Marv Vose
I Corinthians 8:1-13I had called up a young couple to invite them to our house for dinner. I got the husband on the phone and we were having a nice conversation. It turned out that they would be able to come for dinner. We had agreed on a time and a date, when I asked if they were adventurous in their eating habits. You know how it is. Some people love hot, spicy food. Others would prefer just meat and potatoes without salt or pepper. So just to make sure, I asked if they were adventurous or not. And there was a kind of pause on the other end of the line. Finally he said, "Well, my wife has never eaten meat. I have tasted it, but that was a long time ago. As a practice neither of us eats meat."
That was not exactly what I had expected. But then I realized that for religious reasons, they did not eat meat. They were both Seventh Day Adventists.
So what was I going to do? I suppose I could have done lots of things. I could have said, "Well, if that's the way you are going to be about it, you can just forget that invitation to dinner!" I could have said that. Or I could have tried to belittle them or talk them out of it. I could have said something like, "That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard of! Everybody knows that there isn't any problem with eating meat." If I had said that, they probably would have decided they didn't really want to have dinner with us. Or I could have been sneaky. I could have put some meat in their dinner for the evening, all ground up and then after dinner surprise them with that information. And said, "You see, that meat didn't hurt you at all!"
I would guess that all of us have been confronted with a similar situation from time to time and those situations are becoming more and more frequent. It's because we now live in a pluralistic culture. The day when everyone was a Catholic or a mainline Protestant is gone and we are struggling with how we related to those with faiths that seem very different to us.
In Great Britain, the Queen is charged with the duty of defending the faith. That is part of her job. Now what that word "faith" means is the Church of England. It is the faith in England. But Prince Charles has said that if he becomes King, he will be the defender of the faiths. Plural. Not just singular. That is the kind of change that we are dealing with in our culture and in our world. It is a world of pluralism.
Your experience of that may be varied. Maybe you had to deal with trying to buy Christmas presents for the grandkids, whose parents don't celebrate Christmas. What do you do in that situation? Or maybe it was dealing with an in-law of another faith. Or what about that nice Mormon family who lives just down the street? They seem like such nice people.
Or maybe it was right here at Sunrise. You have wondered how those people on Saturday night could really worship with such loud music or those people at the Taize service? What is that anyway? Some years ago, we did an experiment with lots of different styles of worship. Taize was one of those. The best comment was from a lady who said, "My husband always goes to sleep in church, but in that Taize service, he went to sleep faster!"
Or maybe it has been a theological issue that you struggled with. Abortion or world hunger, or pacifism or alcohol or smoking or human sexuality or some other issue. What do you do?
Those issues are similar to the issue presented in the scripture for today. In those days, the people were very superstitious. They were even more superstitious than today. They believed that demons were everywhere. Everywhere! You had to constantly be on the look out for them. And they loved to live in meat! So you had to watch the meat. And because meat was so dangerous, it was almost impossible to get meat that hadn't been sacrificed to some idol or blessed in the name of some god. It was the way people protected meat. Remember, this is before refrigeration!
But what about these new Christians who had just recently been worshipping those idols? They didn't really want to eat that meat that had been sacrificed to the idols. It gave them pangs of conscience. And their faith was still fragile!
But there was another group that was more mature in their faith. It didn't bother them to eat meat sacrificed to idols. They knew there were no other Gods than the one true God and so they didn't mind at all eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. They knew the idols were not real. Those folks had written to Paul for advice. They were essentially asking, "What are we going to do with these dummies who are afraid to eat meat?"
And that is the real questions, isn't it? What do you do with those folks? How do you act towards them? How should the spiritually mature treat the spiritually immature? How do we live in a pluralistic society?
It is such a challenge because we know we are right. We know what has changed our life. We know what has given us meaning and fulfillment. If it works for us, it should work for everyone else. Isn't that our attitude?
Did you hear about the atheist who sued to have Christmas and Easter eliminated as holidays? Yes, he went to court, because it wasn't fair. Atheists don't have any holidays, he argued. But these Christians get holidays all of the time. But the judge threw the case out. He ruled that atheists do have a holiday. The atheist was furious! He asked the judge, "Just went do we have a holiday?" And the judge replied, "Every April first-April Fool's Day!"
So when you are convinced you are right, that you have the keys to the kingdom, how do you deal with other Christians who have very different approaches. How do you deal with folks who are at different places in their spiritual journey? How do you deal with folks who values things about the faith that are different from your priorities?
Here's what you don't do. Paul leaves this out. His silence can be as eloquent as what he says. You don't try to educate those poor dummies. He is NOT suggesting that you hold a seminar entitled How to Eat the Meal of Idols and Enjoy It. He doesn't even say anything about how to get them to grow up into Christ. He turns around the question and actually accuses those who ask the question of lacking love and understanding. Now that is a nasty turn, isn't it?
My guess is that Paul left it out because of what he says about knowledge. Paul recognizes that Knowledge is very, very important, but it has its limits. Too often knowledge puffs us up instead of building up the body of Christ. Sometimes our supposed knowledge is illusory. Sometimes it is simply dead wrong. Sometimes our knowledge is simply too limited. We don't know enough.
My guess is that Paul didn't suggest a seminar on meat eating, because he knew how it would make those simple people feel. It would feel like a put down. They would feel like second class Christians. It would make them feel like they were on the "outs" with God. To say you are going to straighten someone out assumes that you know what is going on and they don't. To be rejected in that way is a very powerful kind of thing, but it doesn't usually change things for the better. Usually it just pushes people away or creates a wall.
A man decided to conduct a study of churches across the country, so he flew to San Francisco and decided he would work his way East. The first church he visited had a golden phone with a sign above it that said, "$10,000 per minute." Well, this intrigued the man, so he asked the pastor what that was all about. The pastor informed him that this phone was a direct link to God. All you had to do was pay the price.
The man was fascinated by this concept and so as he continued to visit churches for his study, he started to look for more golden phones. And sure enough, at every church he visited he found a golden phone with the same sign; "$10,000 per minute."
Finally he arrived in Colorado and visited a church, found the golden phone, but the sign read "25 cents per minute." The man was shocked, so he asked the pastor about it. "All the other phones said $10,000 per minute, but yours only costs 25 cents. Why is that?" The pastor smiled and said, "In Colorado, it is a local call."
We know we are closer to heaven, but we can't shout that too loud! We don't want to put other people down. Paul doesn't want us to inflict that on anyone.
What he does say is that you have to care more for those simple souls. You have to care more for the spiritually immature. You have to go to great lengths to include them. He even went so far as to say that you have to give up some of your own personal freedom for the good of the group. He understood that the mature Christians knew how silly it was to be worried about eating meat, but what about the other folks? If you actions get in their way, is it worth it? Is your freedom worth more that the maturing of others? Paul says "no."
We have a hard time hearing that! Our culture values personal, individual freedom so much that we put up with orange hair on punk rockers and ugly black on Goths in the name of freedom. We tolerate things on TV and the media for the sake of free speech and the First Amendment.
But Paul says that sometimes our exercise of our freedom can be damaging to the whole. And if it is, it isn't worth it. Our individual freedom has to take place to the good of the whole.
Now this doesn't mean that we have to believe what other people believe. It doesn't mean that we have to become spiritually immature. It doesn't mean that we let those folks walk all over us. Paul was adamant about not following parts of the law.
What we have to do is to be willing enough to care about people to include them. Even if they exclude us, we have to work on including them. That's tough. I know it is. It is really hard. But that is what Paul is talking about.
Edwin Markham, an American poet, put it to verse. This is what he said.
"He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!"
That is really hard to do. Really hard. But guess what? The only reason we are in the circle is because Jesus was willing to do what was hard and draw the circle big enough to include us! We may be spiritually mature, but we haven't always been that way. But Jesus included us. And we may be spiritually mature, but you know what? I don't know everything yet. In fact, I can tell you this, there are some things that I am wrong about. My tiny little brain and feeble soul are simply too small to be able to comprehend God and God's grandeur. But Jesus has been drawing that circle big enough to include me for a longtime.
And it works. There is incredible power in being included. Paul knew that. Jesus knew that. When we are included and accepted then we can grow and develop. We can become more and more the people that God longs for us to become.
It works for us and it works for others. Sometimes it takes a long time, but it does work. I got a letter from a lady who used to teach a Sunday school class at a church I served. She was a certified schoolteacher, but because of personal problems, she had difficulty finding a job in the teaching profession. But we decided to take a chance on her and let her teach in the Sunday school. She wanted to teach so badly, so we let her. We kept a close eye on her, but we let her teach. She loved the kids. That much was clear. And after a while she won them over, in spite of her personal problems. Her concern for the children shone through and she did a good job. While it was going on, I suspected that the class was helping her as much as she was helping them. But I never knew for sure, until I got her letter.
She talked about the class and what it meant to her. She talked about her personal problems. There were even more than I knew about. And she talked about the church. She called it her "source and strength." Pretty strong words.
You see, she had found a place where she belonged, even with all of her problems and because of that, she had found the courage to tackle those problems.
So how should the spiritually mature treat the immature? How should a Christian treat an atheist? Paul's focus was on caring and inclusion. How should a cowboy treat a vegetarian? The cowboy should invite the vegetarian over for dinner, and serve a nice, green salad for dinner. Even if he doesn't like salads.