1 Corinthians 8:1-13

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 the weak brother or sister for whom Christ died is destroyed. But when you thus sin against brothers and sisters and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never again eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.

Sermon Text

            What is the price of living in community with each other? That is the question that we all have to ask as human beings. Society is built on the idea that living together costs something. I live with a family, and I am required to give some things up for their good. I live in a city, so I have to contribute to the city’s wellbeing one way or another. I pay taxes, I serve the community, I do what I can to make the world a better place. There are many reasons for this, but one of the simplest, one that is shared by all people who live as part of a society, is the fact we have concluded it is better to live with some restrictions on freedom for the good of our collective wellbeing.

            The debate comes down to whether or not we should give away this or that and to what degree we owe aspects of our life to those around us. Liberty and duty are always held in balance with one another. The classic example in our country comes down to the right to Free Speech afforded us by the First Amendment held in tension with the ability for our speech to cause harm. You can yell fire as much as you want, but if you do so in a public place where it can cause harm, your right to do so ends as far as the law is concerned. The liberty of speech ends when it becomes a detriment to the collective good of people.

It shouldn’t surprise us that our own faith also runs into this familiar tug and pull between responsibility and freedom. We are freed through our faith in Christ from Sin, as Gentiles we are exempt from ritual and purity laws, and as Methodist we believe we can grow to be truly free of any intentional wrongdoing. Such a large breadth of freedom means that we can reasonably find our life free of a lot of the burdens we might otherwise place upon it. As Christ said, in taking on the heavy responsibility of the Christian life, we are taking on a “yoke [that is] easy and a burden [that is] light.”

Our scripture shows the way that this debate of liberty and responsibility manifests in a fledgling Christian community. The issue at hand is that among the early Christians there were many disagreements about how much of the old life they lived had to be done away with when they found faith in Christ. When you live in a world where your entire community worships a variety of Gods, and does so in a way that every part of your life is injected with religious significance, it can be hard to figure out where faith ends and secular activity begins.

Imagine, if you will, that you work in a shop. The shop has a statue of a God in its doorway, some patron that oversees your craft. Are you still allowed to work there? Does your working there somehow suggest that you are a worshipper of that God? These are important questions for the early gentile converts to Christianity. How should they interact with local holidays? With government? With anything, when most every action has something to do with the Gods you no longer claim to worship.

The particular issue here is addressing “meat offered to idols.” This food was the choice cuts of meat left over after the bones, skin, and fat of an animal had been burnt as a sacrifice to a deity. The remaining meat was expected to be eaten and apparently could be sold in the marketplace under certain conditions. It was good meat, it was meat that the wealthy in a community could afford, but it was also dubious meat. If the meat had already been offered to a God, what did it mean if I took a bit of it? What does it say about me, about my faith?

Some people focus in on the economic aspect of this question, making it a statement about how Paul does not want people flaunting wealth at community meals. I do not buy that interpretation, at least not as the primary issue at hand. I think this is a question of people’s personal perspectives on faith, and the need for us to live among the diversity of those ideas.

I am a person who does not regard much in life as sacrosanct. I do not think that there is any innate power in certain ways of ritual. There is symbolic importance and intentionality in the ways we act out our faith, but they do not change the outcomes. I believe in the power of taking time to celebrate Holy Communion, in lifting paten and chalice, and in using the words of institution. Yet, it is through our faith and God’s grace that Communion becomes the body and blood of Christ, not the specific way we do the ritual. Praying at the altar does not make the prayer more efficacious, but it is a powerful demonstration of our reliance on God. This church is a building set aside for worship, but no room of this building is more sacred than any room anywhere else – except in the significance that we bestow upon it through practicing our faith within it.

Other people do believe there is importance to having very precise ways of practicing ritual. Beyond utility, some argue that there is no validity in a thing unless it is done a certain way. That is a difficult conversation to have in the Church without some inherent conflict emerging. If someone tries to tell me that the baptism of my eventual children is not legitimate because they were baptized as infants and not adults, I will have words for them. In the same way, I take issue with people who try to dismiss any aspect of a person’s faith – as long as the person in question has come to their conclusion honestly, and not through deception of self or by others. I think sometimes we have to stand up to people who bully others on these matters.

Beyond those matters, however, there are questions about if certain things should be done. That is the kind of question that causes more potential problems in a church than anything. If you’ll remember our question series, people asked me several different questions about what a Christian could or could not do. Can they get a fortune told? Can they use tarot? What is the ethics behind X or Y or Z?

There are Biblical clues to those answers, but also enough breadth of interpretations to provide for multiple Christian perspectives. As someone who is not very superstitious, I would argue the only thing a Christian loses in getting their fortune told is the money they wasted on the adventure. Dependency on fortune telling and horoscopes can be a problem, maybe, but there is no magic in cards or the stars or any such thing to be a threat to people of faith. Something that other Christians would disagree with.

More mundanely, people disagree on simpler matters of Christian life. Can Christians use vulgarity? Can Christians drink alcohol? Can Christians smoke? All of these have answers that can be derived from the Bible about limitations and reasons why maybe you should not, but outright bans on any of them are harder to draft. Except, some people are convicted that they absolutely must not do any number of them. The conviction that those people feel, makes it so that they must not be compelled to act on them, even if another Christian may think they have the right to.

If I am comfortable drinking a beer, and another Christian is not, scripture says I am not to pressure them into drinking beer. More than that, it says I should not drink in front of someone who chooses not to, because they may be compelled to break their own conviction by my actions. The act of drinking, something that is morally neutral in moderation, becomes sinful if it is done against our conscience. The moral weight of an action is changed by whether or not we believe the thing we are doing has a weigh to it.

Paul does not agree with those who refuse to eat meat offered to idols, he thinks it is a superstitious leftover of their old beliefs. Yet, he tells the people who have been buying the meat to stop eating it in front of their fellow Christians. Why? Because if someone was swayed to act against their convictions, it would be a sin, even if the act itself is otherwise morally neutral. It is a confusing little paradigm that Paul is establishing, but it established two things the Church must be willing to do.

Firstly, we cannot let ourselves become anti-nomian simply because we believe Christ has set us free from Sin. As Paul says in Romans, Jesus’s forgiveness of sins is not a blank check to rank up further debt with. Instead, we are called to grow in our faith so that even some of those neutral ideas we have – if they are harmful to even one person – must be done away with. Sometimes we must give up our liberty, our freedom from compulsion, to help the faith and livelihood of others.

On the other side of things, those of us with particular hang ups about certain things: Teetotalers, altar theologians, Satanic Panic practitioners, all must be willing to loosen the reigns a little. Those who feared eating food offered to idols were legitimate in their convictions, but they were also not using them as leverage to gain power. Often times, we are not good about this in the modern Church. Our opposition to various things becomes a tool, and rather than seeking a way forward that benefits all people, we let the most restrictive readings of our ethics guide our lives. That is also a grave injustice.

So I ask us all to take into our hands the rope being pulled between liberty and responsibility, hold it in tight tension. Let it move as the Spirit calls us, and not as is convenient. Relent to your siblings in the faith, give up what you would like most, and let what is best for all win out in our practice of our faith. – Amen.