Not What You Know, But How You Love

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Sermon/Rector's Annual Address

Okay, you don’t have to raise your hands or anything, but how many of you kind of glazed over during the reading of the epistle. Not to demean Pete’s fabulous reading, it’s just: who cares about who’s eating meat in front of who, Paul? Why are you talking about this?

Well, because it was actually a serious issue in Corinth. There are some new Christians in the church there who are still struggling with how their former life has taught them to believe. In that time, the main religion was one of worshiping many gods: gods of a particular trade, gods of a particular family, gods representing their political leaders. It was common, indeed socially and civically expected, for Corinthians to gather and celebrate these gods by sacrificing animals and eating the meat together.

These gatherings were also a place where merchants networked, where political decisions were crafted by the powerful, where business of all sorts took place. If those Corinthian Christians in high standing—and there were some—couldn’t attend these gatherings, then they might miss out on opportunities. And, let’s not be naive, it was wealthy and powerful converts who funded the early Christian communities, who enabled Paul to travel and teach.

Now we don’t have the Corinthian church’s initial letter to Paul. It’s been lost to time. But Paul seems to quote that letter in his response to them: “All of us possess knowledge,” the Corinthian Christians said to Paul, defending the practice of eating meat offered to idols. They go on to say, again quoted in Paul’s letter: “we know that no idol in the world really exists” because “there is no God but one.” And so, they argued, it doesn’t matter if they eat the meat because to them the meat has no special meaning. It’s just food.

“You’re right,” Paul responds. “Because there is only one God, that meat is meaningless.” He takes care to affirm these Corinthians to whom he’s writing. “You are free to eat whatever you want,” he tells them.

But, he says, “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” Now by weak, Paul doesn’t mean spiritually deficient. He means people who have not yet had the chance to build up their faith. This is still a new way of believing, one that is very much on the margins of Corinthian society. The belief in those many gods, and in their presence in the meat offered, is still ingrained in some of these new converts. However they’re promised by Paul and their church community that the meat doesn’t mean anything, it’s still hard to let go.

It would be like if some new and wonderful power that we trust, that we believe in, swooped in and told us that green now means stop and red means go. That might be true now, and we trust that there’s a good reason for it, but it would take some getting used to.

So, Paul says to the Corinthians, it is in fact meaningless for you to eat meat offered to idols. But if a new follower of Christ sees you, and they haven’t had the opportunity to build strength in their faith yet, they might be challenged, confused. It might set them back in this new, budding faith of theirs.

So even though maybe you yourself have internalized that red now means go and green means stop, it’s probably best not to blast through red lights for a while, to maybe slow down, because people are still learning, and we want to keep everyone safe.

“All of us possess knowledge,” Paul says, affirming the Corinthians, but "knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

I’ll give another example. Many of us are perfectly capable of drinking alcohol in moderation. We have a glass of wine with dinner. We meet friends for drinks. Alcohol, like that meat, is a relative neutral in our lives. But we may have a friend who has struggled with drinking. They’ve lost jobs, their family is on the brink of falling apart, and one night they find themselves lucky to be alive after wrapping their car around a tree—which finally leads them to getting help. They’ve been going to AA and just got their red chip: a month of sobriety. And they ask if you want to hang out.

Do you invite them to meet you at a bar? After all, alcohol is neutral, right? It’s not the alcohol that’s the problem, it’s the way a person uses it. That’s what you know. And technically, you’d be right.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Love would ask you not to put your friend in any environment that might challenge their sobriety, even if that same environment would be perfectly fine for you. After all, they’re still growing into this new way of being.

“Therefore if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” Paul is telling the Corinthians, telling us: faith is not about what you know, it’s about how you love.

Now I don’t mean to brag, but…I think that could be the motto for our St. Luke’s community.