Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 01.29.12
In the Williams family household, there are times certain songs or videos get caught on endless cycling loop. They just happen to capture the feel of the moment, and so we have to watch them and listen to them again and again and again.
Years ago, when the boys were small, that loop seemed to involve endless replayings of Thomas the Tank Engine videos. This was when the floor of our basement looked like the Magical Island of Sodor after a major earthquake, overpriced wooden tracks and bridges and trains strewn everywhere. There was a blessedly brief period when we were subjected to the endless singing of Elmo, that little red brand icon whose rise to total dominance over Sesame Street was as brutal and controlling as the rise of Sauron in Mordor. There is no place for Oscar the Grouch or SuperGrover in a land dominated by the unblinking eye of Elmo.
As my sons age, their tastes have fortunately grown closer to their parents. And so their latest obsession, the movie/comic/video game Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, well, it’s actually kind of, like, totally epic. The film, in the event you’ve not seen it, involves a young Canadian slacker, who lives a listless and aimless existence. In order to go out with the girl he’s fallen for, he must first defeat her seven evil exes in mortal martial arts combat. So, yeah, it’s exactly like high school as I remember it.
Perhaps my favorite is Evil Ex-Boyfriend Number Three, a bass-playing hipster Adonis by the name of Todd. What makes Todd particularly difficult to defeat in mortal combat is the fact that he is vegan. As his girlfriend puts it, “Being vegan just makes you better than most people.”
My boys find this particularly amusing, because it’s a great way to poke fun at their vegetarian dad, the sole non-carnivore in the family. I have many reasons for my vegetarian diet. It tends to be healthier, although given that a diet comprised entirely of Mountain Dew and Funyuns would be vegetarian, that is not always the case. It’s better for the environment, as a vegetarian diet takes one-tenth the amount of acreage to support. It also reduces the amount of suffering you inflict on the world. There are lots of reasons to be vegetarian.
But there’s a challenge we vegetarians face. In our eagerness to let the world know all of the wonderful reasons to be vegetarian, vegetarians can easily become really remarkably annoying people. Seeking to do right and to be right with the world can easily morph into self-righteousness and arrogance. You look out at those who just don’t get it, who lack your depth of awareness, your intelligence, your just-plain-betterness, and your sophistication. You turn up your nose disdainfully at their obvious inferiority.
This problem also manifests itself among owners of hybrid automobiles and committed users of Apple products.
Perhaps it’s because I have those three strikes against me that I find the Apostle Paul’s discussion of a form of early Christian vegetarianism so appropriate. Here, though, what’s worth noting is that the smug folks weren’t the vegetarians. They were the carnivores.
The issue for early Christians who chose not to eat meat was not that they were concerned about cholesterol, or that they were worried about the state of creation. Instead, the issue was consuming meat that had been sacrificed to idols. This generally isn’t a concern when we stop by McDonalds or Red Robin or White Castle, but back in the first century, it was a real thing.
Meat in the highly dynamic, pluralistic culture of the Greco-Roman world was often...well... “used meat.” That meant that before it went for sale in the marketplace, the animal involved had been sacrificed at the altar of one of the almost countless gods of the ancient world. While a small amount of the sacrifice would have been burned, most of the rest of an animal would have been either 1) consumed by the priests/priestesses of whatever god it was sacrificed to or 2) sold to the market as income for that particular temple.
For some early Christians, this was a major issue. They’d just converted to the movement that worshipped Yeshua Ben Yahweh, and they knew that they were supposed to only worship one God. Having rejected all other gods, they were terrified that they might somehow be violating their relationship with Christ and their Creator if they noshed on some BBQ ribs that had been sacrificed to Asherah.
Corinth, being a port town, was filled with temples and altars. It was chock-full of ancient religions and mystery cults. For some of the fledgling Christians in the town, there was very real fear that they might accidentally lose their Jesus connection if they ate pagan meat.
For others, that was just absurd. And it was to those others that Paul directed this section of his letter. Paul was in regular contact with members of the Corinthian church, so he knew how they talked. He knew the sayings that were passed among the smarter Corinthians, the more theologically nimble Corinthians, and more worldly wise Corinthians.
Those sharper souls were convinced they had nothing to worry about, and had summarized their lack of worry into a few pithy phrases. Paul mirrors those phrases back to them in this little section of scripture. “All of us possess knowledge.” “No idol in the world really exists.” “There is no God but one.” “Food will not bring us close to God.”
In reflecting those sayings back to the Corinthians, Paul is not rejecting them. In fact, Paul is showing that he believes exactly the same things. For those whose grasp of the faith was strong, and who understand that from that strength they are free to eat and act and live in ways that stand beyond the grasp of others, Paul says: “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” He agrees, and shows that he shares their understanding of the world.
What he does not share is their willingness to condemn or mock those fledgling Christians who lack the depth of understanding that he shares. He acknowledges that they are “weak,” sure. But what he will not do is act and live in ways that subvert what faith the weak do have. If you love others, you don’t live that way. Possessing knowledge is not enough. As Paul puts it, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”
Though he concedes the “correctness” of the stronger position, he refuses to commit to doing anything other than being supportive and gracious to those who do not hold it.
The task of every Christian, even in disagreement, even when you know you’re right, even when your absolute correctness is utterly and empirically provable to any halfway sentient being, your task is to love and to build up.
It’s a challenge that has faced pretty much every era of the two millennia of Christianity. Lately, that struggle between perspectives has manifested itself in the argument between conservatives and progressives about what the appropriate response of the church should be to same sex relationships. In the Presbyterian church, that argument has been going on for the last twenty five years. This last month in Orlando, a group of two thousand conservative Presbyterians began taking the first step towards creating a new denomination. The Presbyterian Church (USA) seems closer than ever to splitting apart.
Whether the conservatives are the strong in faith and progressives are the weak or vice versa is a matter I won’t take up here. As a Prius-owning vegetarian Apple-phile, my own biases may be showing a bit on that front. But no matter what theological certainty grasps us, no matter what our practice, our call as followers of the Nazarene is and will always be to build up the other.
In our compulsively adversarial culture, that’s a difficult thing to admit. We don’t want to yield. We don’t want to set aside our strength, and seek what grace lives in those we consider weaker than ourselves. That doesn’t mean being silent about what we believe. But what it does mean is never seeking to wound, and never seeking to destroy, and never causing another to fall.
All may have knowledge, but we are called not just to know. Knowledge alone can puff us up, as empty of grace as a Cheez Doodle is empty of nutrition. Instead, we are called to look to all, and to love, and to build up. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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