A number of years ago I was teaching a seminary class on the administration of a church. Part of the material for this class involved the students assessing a number of real world church situations, in which less than pleasant things had occurred. These scenarios were things I had actually experienced and involved everything from excessive gossip, the feeding of feral cats within the confines of the church pre-school, to fights over the remodeling of a parish hall. The students were supposed to come up with ways in which they would deal with the given situation. Some of the student's answers were good and others not so much. In the not so much category there was one student whose answer for everything was catechesis; that is comprehensive religious instruction. In his mind, if you just gave people the right instructions and knowledge about the nature of the Christian faith, there would be no fights within the church. In other words, as long as people knew theology and church history including the resolution of the iconoclast controversy at the seventh council of Nicaea, all manner of things would be well. Or to paraphrase Belinda Carlisle for what it's worth catechism would make heaven a place on earth. Now, he was young and quite pleased with himself and so we should forgive him, even though a certain less than charitable part of me would like to watch his first year in ministry through one of those one way mirrors that you see in mediocre spy movies, because the fact of the matter is people are not always rational actors, no matter how much information they possess. The issues that generally arise in church arise not because of knowledge deficits, but rather for the reasons that they occur everywhere else and that is sin – or as St. Paul puts it this morning, "Knowledge puffs up." You can have all the knowledge you want and things can still go very wrong.
The impetus for St. Paul's discussion today is food, in particular food that has been sacrificed to idols. I assume that most of us these days do not have a whole lot of experience with food that has been sacrificed to idols, although we do seem to have a fair amount of experience with food as an idol. If you don't believe me ask yourself how many TV shows or networks, magazines, online sites and so on are dedicated to food. But I digress. In the time in which Paul was writing, sacrificing animals to a particular deity was fairly common. And as a result of this frequent sacrificing, the priests at those particular temples kind of doubled as a butcher. So you could bring your cow in on the front end and get a nice brisket out the back end. And what ended up happening was that a lot of meat that people consumed came from uncertain pedigree. You didn't know if the ribeye you were enjoying at the neighborhood barbeque had started as sacrifice to Jupiter. And, as a result of this, there came an issue for many who converted to Christianity about how to handle this food that had been used in an act of pagan worship. You see, in these converts’ previous lives the act of eating these products could be seen as an act of worship of a pagan deity or at least a tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of such a system. Now the knowledgeable or catechetical response, to use my previous example, was to say to these people that these other gods did not really exist which meant that nothing really happened in the sacrifice that was offered to them and so eat up. But there was another piece to this, the piece that prompts Paul to say that "love builds up." And that piece had to do not with knowledge, but rather with the spiritual life of the person in question. That is the new Christian who was having trouble eating food sacrificed to idols. And so what Paul is reminding his hearers is that in all things love should lead the discussion and not knowledge. Because the fact of the matter is that even though Paul and many others knew that this was not a real issue, the other fact was that many in the community struggled with this. They felt that in eating food sacrificed to idols they were somehow betraying their new beliefs. And so Paul is telling those in Corinth that there is something they need to do that goes beyond mere knowledge. They need to love and understand those who are struggling.
There is an old expression that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. In many ways I think this is the message of Paul. We can know all sorts of things and often voicing the things we know can be detrimental to our relationships with one another. I mean I know which friends of mine could probably stand to lose a few pounds, but generally speaking it is not a topic of conversation in which I actively engage, because it could potentially be detrimental to our relationship. There are bits of knowledge that can trigger things within us and others that put barriers between us and the person with whom we are in relationship. And even more importantly, which is what Paul is discussing today, we need to be careful when our knowledge harms someone else's relationship with God. Today in the Letter to the Corinthians Paul says that yes food sacrificed to idols is meaningless, it carries no magical juju, but some people's consciences are not at a place where they can understand this and that by eating this meat they would be distressed or confused. So rather than saying that they need to suck it up and go pick up a rack of ribs from the Temple of Artemis, he instead asks for grace to protect these people's conscience and giving them a little room to grow in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ. I mean ultimately he is keeping the first thing, the first thing. And the first thing is not a dining choice, but rather Jesus Christ and so he is asking everyone, including himself, to back off and love those who are not ready for this knowledge, so that they may grow in their love of God without being distracted by a peripheral issue.
As most of you have probably noticed, we live in rather contentious times. If I were to sum up our day and age on one of my more cynical days, I would say that everyone hates everyone else and the reason for this hatred is the other person's fault. And in such an environment we revel in using knowledge as a weapon, to make the person with whom we disagree squirm. But what if we were to disengage from this, what if we were to look at the example Paul sets for us today? What if we made our first priority not knowledge or being right, but rather other people and what is best for that other person? Now please this is not an invitation to throw aside knowledge and go start some neo-luddite commune, but is rather a call to get over ourselves a little bit - to engage with people in a loving and graceful way, understanding their perspectives, struggles and fears.
I remember years ago when I was learning to drive the instructor talked about being dead right. That was being involved in a car crash that was avoidable, but happened because the driver who was in the right did nothing to avoid the accident. An example of this would be entering an intersection on a green light, knowing that there was a car about to run the red light from the other direction. You were perfectly within your rights to enter the intersection on the green light. You also were just involved in a major accident. So much of our acrimony that goes on these days seems to originate from people who are dead right; people who don't care what destruction they cause, but care only for being right. And it is a rather graceless and ugly state in which to exist. But when dealing with real people in the way that Christ calls us to, we have to make sacrifices if we are going to truly and fully love them. We are going to have to put aside things that we may know to be perfectly logical to allow others to grow and flourish in their love of God. And this does not mean that we set aside the truth, but rather that we speak the truth in love. That we first worry about the person and what is best for them.
If it helps you can think about it like training for a marathon. A coach would not expect you to run 26.2 miles on the first day of your training, but would rather build you up to that distance over time, asking a little more each day. When we love other people, we want what is best for them. And what is best for them is helping them to grow in love and service to Jesus Christ. And that is going to look different for different people. This morning Paul would ultimately want the new converts to understand that the other so called gods are not real and for their conscience to not be troubled by them, but they are not there yet. Just as the person who just started training for a marathon is not there yet. Loving someone else is desiring what is best for them and what is best for them may change over time, and so we need to be ready to love and nurture each other in all times so that we may be God's own both now and forevermore.