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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:We are more than halfway through Eastertide and two conversations into our current sermon series, make good choices. And this is a short series, just four conversations in first Corinthians to glean some ancient wisdom for our decision making today. In first week, Jeremy took us through the divisions in the Corinthian community and how Paul encouraged them not to settle into different camps and instead encouraged them to shift their focus toward each other and what they can offer each other in their differences. Last week, we looked at laws and disputes, and Bobby walked us through how the Corinthians handled, not really mishandled, conflict and diversity in their community. Bobby also gave us some great practical tools for discernment.
Speaker 2:So if you missed that sermon, make sure to catch it on our podcast. It's a great one. Next week, we will talk about relationships, and Jeremy will be up here again. And today is a fun one. We are going to talk about food, but also idolatry, individualism, dominance, you know, all the great stuff.
Speaker 2:Who who would think that all that can be connected to something so basic as food? But we all know, food is never basic. Did you know, for instance, that pretzels are a traditional Lenten treat? I learned this this year. Apparently, the shape comes from the shape of arms crossed over your chest in prayer, and they used to be only available during Lent.
Speaker 2:So here's a spiritual practice for your next Lent. Eat pretzels. But joking or not, food is important. It is the most fundamental physical need of the human body, but it is also a force that shapes so much of our personal, communal, and spiritual lives. Food is about history and identity.
Speaker 2:It's about tradition and power and, of course, theology. And some of it comes up in our text for today in one way or another. So we will be in first Corinthians chapter eight, and we will talk about knowledge, interconnectedness, integrity, and freedom. But before we dive in, let's take a moment to pray. Loving God, as we take a deep breath to quiet our minds and connect with our bodies, to be present in this room, in this beautiful day, we make space in our hearts for gratitude.
Speaker 2:We thank you for the blessing that comes to us in the change of seasons, For the sounds of birds in the morning, for the signs of life taking over everything that was dead and dreary all winter, for the buds and the early blooms that awaken us to our own resilience. We thank you for wisdom that finds her way to us in multiple ways, in garden dirt and long walks, in good books and conversations over coffee, in the ancient texts and rituals of community. So as we live in this beautiful change of seasons, may our minds stay curious and our hearts stay present to all the creative work you do in and around us. May we stay present to everything hard and holy that makes up the real stuff of our lives. Amen.
Speaker 2:We start in first Corinthians verses eight one to three. First Corinthians eight verses one to three. Now about food sacrificed to idols. We know that we all possess knowledge, but knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know, But whoever loves God is known by God.
Speaker 2:And you may get a sense here that this is a strange way to start a conversation, now about food sacrificed to idols. It feels like we're jumping in mid thought, and that's because we are. First Corinthians is actually Paul's second letter to Corinthians, which makes second Corinthians third Corinthians. But the point is, what we are reading here is picking up on a conversation that started a while ago. In their previous correspondence to Paul, the Corinthians raised a bunch of issues.
Speaker 2:And one of those was whether it was okay for the followers of Jesus to participate in meals that involved sacrifices to pagan deities. And because of the diversity of backgrounds and personal experiences in this in that community, it became a hot button. The thing is, there are some really good arguments on both sides of the discussion. And so it's pretty fascinating to see how Paul engages with the whole community here. And we will walk through his take on the situation point by point.
Speaker 2:But first, what's the deal with idol food? As a prominent city, a prominent Roman city, Corinth had many temples for Greek gods, for Roman gods, and for the newly minted gods that came from the imperial family. And most of those temples were basically restaurants. Whenever animal sacrifices were made to a statue over God in the temple sanctuary, part of the meat will be burned as an offering by the priests, part would be used for a feast in the special dining halls around the temple, and what was left over would be sold at a marketplace to everybody else. And since there was no real separation between religion and commerce and politics, those temple dinners were a huge part of people's social lives, and, in some cases, even their livelihoods.
Speaker 2:So some members of the Corinthian church, most likely those who had some status in the society, argued for their right to continue participating in those parties. And they've given Paul a list of theological points to justify their position. And the first one he unpacks is we all possess knowledge. The Greek word used here for knowledge is gnosis, and gnosis has this idea of contemplating reality as something permanent and static. If you possess knowledge, your mind has been illuminated, and you've got some special insight into the true nature of things.
Speaker 2:And the Greek or Roman philosophical tradition of that time was steeped in this individualistic way of understanding knowledge. For Paul, knowledge itself is not a problem. He even praises the Corinthians earlier in his letter that they are rich in all kinds of knowledge. What he's concerned about is that their claim on knowledge makes them feel and behave as spiritually superior. So Paul tells them, actually, you do not yet know as you ought to.
Speaker 2:In the Jewish worldview, knowledge is seen as an entry point into a relationship with the reality around you. It is deeply experiential. It includes both your mind and your heart. And if you possess knowledge of someone or something, you are a part of a relationship and not a master of an idea. So Paul, as a wise guide, offers a corrective to his friends in Corinth.
Speaker 2:It is wonderful that you seek knowledge, but without love, true Agape love that builds up a community and pursues the good of your neighbor, your knowledge is incomplete. And in fact, it can be destructive. Now, the issues of idol worship by eating freshly sacrificed meat at a temple party are centuries removed from us today. What is not that removed, however, is our desire to be a faithful community of Christ followers in an increasingly diverse and divided world. And if we are not intentional about what kind of knowledge and what kind of spirituality we cultivate in ourselves and together, we still run the risk of living disconnected and deeply individualistic lives with a mix of some intellectual and spiritual one upmanship.
Speaker 2:But this is not the vision that Paul has for a Christian community. For him, theology is really important, but the life of faith is about so much more than holding the right set of theological ideas. I love how in some other ancient manuscripts of this letter, instead of whoever loves God is known by God, the last sentence reads, but whoever loves knows truly. Now Paul continues to develop his response in verse four. So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols.
Speaker 2:We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no god but one. For even if there are so called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, Yet for us, there is but one God, the father, from whom all things came and for whom we live. And there is but one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. Again, Paul quotes two more of their arguments. An idol is nothing in the world, and there is no god but one.
Speaker 2:So the reason some of the Corinthians do not see an issue with participating in temple parties is that they believe those idols and the gods they stand for are not real. And since those gods do not exist, whatever happens at the table is not worship. And for those who really, really get it that there is only one god, it is just another form of social gathering. Now their second statement, no god but one, comes directly from the central creed of Judaism, the Shema, which means here. The creed itself, which is also a traditional Jewish prayer, comes from Deuteronomy chapter six, where Moses gathers all of Israel to remind them the 10 commandments and how they're supposed to live with God and with one another.
Speaker 2:And he says to them, Shema, here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. But Paul does some creative expansion of the Shema here and adds that there is also only one lord, Jesus Christ. He says to the Corinthians, yes. You're right.
Speaker 2:There's only one divine power in the universe. But let's think a bit more creatively, more relationally, and more ecologically. Let's not only express that God exists, but also talk about how we experience this God, as a creative parental love that animates and cares for the whole creation. And how about we look at Jesus in whom we can fully see how this love acts in the world and moves through it in particular and embodied and deeply interconnected ways? In his expansion of the Shema, Paul actually takes his cue from Jesus.
Speaker 2:The gospel of Mark has a story of how during a theological debate, a teacher of the law comes up to Jesus and questions him about the most important commandment. And Jesus' response was the shema and then adds that the second most important commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. For Jesus, our knowledge and our love of God are inseparably linked to our love for each other. So Paul says to the Corinthians, you are correct in your understanding of the idols, but you've got some work to do about your understanding of community. God is the one who creates and keeps us, and God is the one who calls us to become the keepers of people too.
Speaker 2:Knowing God is not about just knowing that God exists. It is about developing an awareness of our deep interrelatedness with the divine, with creation, and with each other. And in Christ, this interconnectedness is both a given and something that we need to work on. Kendall Vanderslice, a food theologian and a baker, writes that the gospel is a story of meals opening in the garden and ending in a feast. In our scriptures, meals end in death, and meals offer new life.
Speaker 2:The act of eating is central to our separation from God and one another. It is and it is central to the unity we find in the Eucharist. Whenever we share the bread and the cup, we honor this interconnectedness. We rehearse and we practice our story of people who are being made whole together. And yet, our tables can also be places of conflict, and food can keep us apart.
Speaker 2:That is why next, Paul encourages his friends in Corinth to respect the story and the integrity of those who feel differently. So verse seven. But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food, they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god. And since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.
Speaker 2:But food does not bring us near to God, and we are no worse if we do not eat and no better if we do. Again, Paul picks up on another theological idea of the Corinthians. What we eat does not matter because food does not bring us closer to God. And right here, as a masterful host of a party, Paul equalizes both of their friends, the strong and the weak. You're right.
Speaker 2:Food is morally neutral. You're not less spiritual if you choose not to eat pagan sacrifices, and you're not spiritually stronger if you do. What is not neutral, however, is violating your conscience or creating such environments in which one feels pressured to go against their inner compass. Now, in theory, we may agree that food is a matter of indifference. In theory, in practice, we are very attached to our food and what it means to us.
Speaker 2:Let's be honest, we are pretty passionate about what we eat, where, with whom, because our food tells stories of who we are. Cultural anthropologist Eugene Anderson writes that food is second only to language as a social communication system. Food ties us to places and to relationships on the bone deep level. Our recipes carry memories of where we come from and who we have become and who's been part of that journey. And sharing a meal is always about vulnerability.
Speaker 2:It is an intimate act to eat with someone because it is an invitation to be yourself. So our weak ones here are most likely Gentiles who recently became Christian. And even if they mentally agree that the idols they used to worship are not real, every bite of food they would put in their mouth at those parties would be a powerful connection to the past they left behind. And for Paul, the expression of love for these people would be to let them figure spirituality on their own timeline. Change can happen in the blink of an eye and then take years to fully arrive.
Speaker 2:And Paul has been there. Jewish food laws was strict to begin with, but it said that the Pharisees had 229 rules related to food and table fellowship. And observing those food laws gave a way for the Jewish community to maintain and protect their identity in the gentile world around them. And one of the unique things about the early Christian communities was that they intentionally walked away from that separation. There was a healthy respect for Jewish dietary restrictions, but in those house churches, Jews and Gentiles met over meals, worshiped at the table together, broke the bread, and shared the cup.
Speaker 2:It was an embodied practice of their reconciliation in Christ. Eating together meant writing a new story. And as someone who used to live and breathe the Pharisaic tradition, Paul knows firsthand that the full alignment of your beliefs and your practices needs to be approached with care. It takes time for our knowledge to filter through to our hearts. It takes an environment that would support the healing of our outer and inner splintering.
Speaker 2:And it takes a community that is nonviolent and not harsh, where you are free to discern your way without the pressure to live up to somebody else's expectations of spirituality. Now Paul wraps up his response with a word of caution to the strong. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. And this one sentence is Paul's summary of what's at stake in this issue. He uses a complex term here, exousia, which NIV translates as rights, but another primary meaning for it is freedom.
Speaker 2:So the strong Corinthians not only argued that they possess knowledge, for them, possessing knowledge equals freedom, equals rights to participate in those temple parties. They also encourage their weak fellow members to come along to strengthen their spiritual muscles and become free from the superstitions of their former life. And Paul doesn't outright tell them to give up those meals. Not yet, at least. It's coming.
Speaker 2:The prohibition is there in chapter 10. But at this point, he just wants them to consider the impact of their choices on the wider community. And he does it in three ways in the end of this chapter. First, he contrasts their freedom with a stumbling block. And the stumbling block imagery comes from a Jewish metaphor for life as a path that one walks.
Speaker 2:And to place a stumbling block in someone's way meant to intentionally harm that person and put them in danger. Then in verse 10, Paul moves to irony. He says, you are not wise guides in matters of spiritual maturity if your knowledge emboldens the weak to go against their conscience. And to embolden here literally means build up, the same verb that Paul used in the beginning of his argument about love building up. So he tells them that all this building up of others that you've been doing by asserting your own freedom and your rights is very questionable.
Speaker 2:And finally, he again taps into their relational consciousness. Those people are not just the weak who need to get on with the program. They are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died also. They belong to the body of Christ, and to wound them would mean to wound Christ himself. Paul's message to them is this.
Speaker 2:Let your knowledge and your freedom be put in the service of love. Make choices that would take care of your relationships. Before we wrap up, I want to show you a picture my mom sent me a couple of weeks ago on Eastern Orthodox Easter. Here you go. I don't know if you can see it clearly, but it's my mom's dining table with 15 pascas that she made for Easter.
Speaker 2:For context, it's just my mom, dad, and grandma living in the house. And my mom bakes 15 loaves of Easter bread. She was so proud, and I wasn't sure with what emoji to respond. Yay, mom. I mean, clearly, is her love language.
Speaker 2:What you need to know about my mom, who made those 15 loaves of Easter bread, is that she doesn't actually identify as a Christian. My mom is an ethnic Tatar, and she and most of my extended family on her side would identify as Muslim. And one of the things that my mom brought with her when she married my dad, and my dad comes from a Russian family and culture, so what my mom brought was all the delicious tartar food that I got to grow up with. And one of the many things that she came to embrace was the traditions and culture and the foods of her new family. I still vividly remember as a child that whenever my mom mixed dough for bread, she would always say a prayer over it in Arabic.
Speaker 2:And it kind of makes me chuckle to know that those traditional Christian breads that she made were blessed with a traditional Muslim blessing. But I also find it quite beautiful. As was everything when it comes to our families, I wish my mom made some better choices in certain situations. And so much of her journey is is a mystery to me still. But I'm growing in appreciation and gratitude for the ways she has continued to hold multiple parts of her identity in peace And how the choices she has made to learn and to welcome what is different made space for me to make my own choices later in life.
Speaker 2:And maybe this is what we can take from today. Our good choices can and will invite some good choices in others, and all of us will be all the better for it. So as you go into this week, maybe there are some choices that you need to make to take good care of yourself and of your relationships. So take time with them, think through them, maybe make a plan. And if you have a chance to gather around the table, talk about how the food in front of you connects you to your own stories of who you are and what you love and with whom you belong.
Speaker 2:May you share of yourself freely. Let's pray. Loving God, you delight in our stories. You bless us with food and relationships we treasure and protect, and you give us strength to keep healing the world through love. But love is such hard work, and being present to each other in ways we need it does not always come easily to us.
Speaker 2:Would you forgive us any unkindness to those we've been given to love? And would you renew in us the sense of our solidarity and belonging to each other? And as we continue our personal journeys toward wholeness, would you continue to shape us into people of generous welcome? May we listen with curiosity and hold space with care, and may our choices lead to the fullness of life in us and around us. May your grace, peace, and love be ours this week and always.
Speaker 2:In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, we pray. Amen.