Knowledge, Love, and Meat [Epiphany 4B - I Corinthians 8:1-13]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

I Corinthians 8:1-13

 

Knowledge, Love, and Meat

St. John’s, Essex, NY

 

My dad didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.  He started working as a carpenter during high school and, by default, that became his career.  It was hard and punishing work.  And the pay was not commensurate with the effort it demanded.

 While he was deeply committed to his work, and excellent at it, and some days even found it rewarding, in many ways my father’s vocation was a struggle.  And that struggle extended to the family’s financial stability.  Money comes in stops and starts for a free-lance construction worker.  And we never seemed to be able to get ahead.  It was a stressful way to live.  And so my dad was always clear that he did not want me, his first born, to live that same struggle.

 He wanted me to be the first Williamson to earn a college degree.  He believed that knowledge could lift me out of the struggles our family knew all too well.  He wanted me to have the opportunities he was never afforded.

 And, of course, I did go to college – a couple of them.  And earned a couple of degrees.  And I think my dad is really proud of that.  Just as he suspected, and hoped, knowledge did free me from the clutches of poverty and struggle.

 And so for much of my young life, I treasured knowledge like one might cherish gold or diamonds.  I read and studied obsessively.  I rarely did anything else during my four years of college.  I lived in fear of not knowing enough, of making a mistake, of being unprepared.  I would start to panic if I was publicly asked a question I couldn’t answer.  I was sure one slip up would expose me as the poor, hillbilly I was.

 And then, late in my college career, I felt a call to attend seminary.  Ironically, God lured me into the arena of the unknowable, the realm of holy mystery.  God called me to spend the remainder of my days standing in front of crowds trying articulate the ineffable.  As a very public Christian, I live every moment of my life believing but never truly knowing.  As Paul reminds us, and the ancient Corinthians, “Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge.”  And so we are destined, at least on this side of eternity, to muddle along, gazing at God with blurred vision.

And, of course, God has the sense of humor, or maybe the deep wisdom, to make communities of earnest people who are more sure than they can ever be certain.  And then God blesses us to muddle along together.  Just as God has done since the beginning of the Church.  A bunch of people with a bunch of ideas and everyone thinks they are right – and God knows we are probably not.

Paul is addressing the first century church in Corinth in today’s epistle.  They are a church in conflict, warring sides in search of the “right” answer, factions jostling over the truth.  Knowledge was very important to this particular congregation; it was a cultural value that had spilled over into their church.  The Corinthians had saying, “all of us possess knowledge.”  And while Paul is far from an anti-intellectual, he makes it abundantly clear that, despite the tremendous energy they had expended on argument, knowledge is not, in fact, the goal of the Christian pursuit.  Orthodoxy matters less than the person who kneels beside you at the altar rail.

The particular question in today’s epistle is not one that we typically debate in the modern Church.  As far as I know, no one is leaving the Episcopal Church because of idol meat.  Although, at this point in our fractious history, I’m not sure I would be surprised if someone actually did.

But though the idol meat controversy has fallen from the current list of Church controversies, that doesn’t mean the debate Paul is addressing is now irrelevant.  Some background information might be in order.

In the first century, Corinth was a prominent city within the Roman Empire.  It was an important center of trade, an economic power.  Not only that, it was a sophisticated city – “the heart of Roman imperial culture in Greece.” And it was famously steeped in pagan religion; it was home to prominent temples of worship, including the temple of Aphrodite. 

As was common in the ancient Roman Empire, the local and imperial deities were woven rather intentionally into practically every aspect of life.  It was difficult, and at times even dangerous, to navigate public life without pledging one’s allegiance to the gods.  Their invisible hands touched everything.  Those who refused to bow before the gods could find their economic fortunes impacted, could find their patriotism questioned, and, in the worst of times, could find their lives threatened. 

And so being Christian in Corinth in the first century was a complicated matter.  It even complicated the most basic things in life, like dinner planning.  Because those pagan gods had their hands even on the meat.  And this, as we know from this morning’s reading, is the complication which it seems Paul was asked to address.  

Here’s what happened: animals were sacrificed to the gods during pagan rituals in Corinth; the extra meat, the meat not required by the gods, was sold in the neighborhood market because, well, why waste it.  And that meant grocery shopping became a complex moral conundrum – and so did dining with your neighbor or ordering take-out. 

Now some of the Christians in Corinth reasoned their way around this problem.  They argued that since the idols and gods did not technically exist, according to their monotheistic theological belief system, the meat was fine to eat.  Other members of the community, especially those who had most recently traded their idols for the cause of Christ, disagreed.  To them, it felt like an unholy compromise.  Turns out: Church conflict is nothing new. 

Conflict has certainly played a significant role in the history of the Church, and, let’s be honest, the history of our diocese, but the truth is: being a Christian is not that simple.  Jesus did not leave us with a tidy set of rules or regulations; he did not give his followers by-laws or canons.  He gave us each other; he gave us people.  And people are a messy lot.  And so our faith has a long history of disagreement – sometimes healthy and productive disagreements, sometimes short and simple scrapes over adiaphora, sometimes the Spanish Inquisition. 

Idol meat is not an urgent issue for us.  But we know that it was a big deal for at least one church a long, long time ago.  But even though the Corinthians thought it was a matter of great importance, I’m not convinced that Paul thought it was.  I think Paul was around enough church people to understand that the meat melee would not be the final argument to plague that community; as long as the church in Corinth had at least two members, they would also have some conflict. 

Paul doesn’t give them a clear-cut answer in his letter; he offers them something far more valuable: he offers them a way to live together.  He invited them to submit their ideologies to the cause of love, to allow their fiercely held theological opinions to drown in the deep pools of holy affection.  Maybe one group was right and the other wrong; honestly, only God knows.  But being right was less important than being together.

Later in this same letter, Paul writes to this conflicted congregation, “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love I am nothing.”  Because nothing matters more than love – not even being right.

Knowledge is good.  I like it.  It is nice to know things, to be able to answer difficult questions.  But knowledge alone cannot create a healthy Christian community; it is love that builds up.  Knowledge cannot fix us or heal us or save us.  But love can.  And love will.