Epiphany 4B, 2012

“No Stumbling Blocks in Church” , A Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

But take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak. (1 Cor. 8:9)

It is a busy weekday in the Greek city of Corinth circa 54 CE. In the temples of Apollo and Mithras, and of the Emperor and his family, devotees bring animals to be sacrificed ritually upon the altars, an offering to the gods in thanksgiving for blessings bestowed or for healing or for prosperity and good fortune. In the synagogues the Jews gather three times a day for their daily prayers. In the Jewish sections of the city, the market teems with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and meat butchered according to the dietary laws of the Jewish Torah. The Jewish Christians gather for daily prayers before going to their respective jobs, and on Sundays gather early in the homes of some of the more prominent of their members to share a meal, and enact the ritual of the Lord’s Supper, breaking bread and blessing wine and “sharing in the Lord’s death until he comes” before dispersing to their varied occupations. Paul is a tentmaker, and when he’s not preaching or spreading the gospel of the Risen Christ to any who will listen, he is busy making and selling tents to keep himself afloat.

The Christians are a growing sect within Judaism in this busy metropolitan Greek city under Roman rule. Paul is an effective evangelist, pulling in many new converts from those devotees of Apollo or Mithras or the Emperor. Word has it that the Christian community is suffering from some internal discord and Paul is kept busy instructing them in appropriate behavior towards one another, particularly those who are new to the Christian faith. Apparently, many Christians in Corinth routinely buy and consume the meat leftover from the sacrifices at the temples of Apollo and Mithras and the Emperor, as that meat is plentiful and tasty and readily available in the town market. Some among the Christian sect seem offended by this practice, while others see no reason not to eat the perfectly good meat especially as it is affordable and easily procured on a daily basis. They could care less that it was offered on some so-called “religious” altar, since they are so firm in their commitment to the One God whom they worship and the Lord Jesus Christ from whom they take their name. To them the meat is simply food, not something with any religious significance whatsoever.

On the other hand, there are some new Christians, recently converted from the Greco-Roman religions, who are reluctant to eat this meat because they recognize it as meat that has religious significance in the traditions of Apollo and others. Now that they have converted to the new Christian religion they find themselves feeling confused and torn as they remember with some fondness the religious rituals and practices of their youth, even as they embrace this new religion and its ritual of the bread and wine. The growing Christian community has had to contend with a number of issues with respect to converts. It has been decided that non-Jews who convert to this sect don’t have to undergo circumcision, but the issue of what to do about food offered to the Greco-Roman gods in the holy temples continues to cause considerable controversy. Apparently, members of this new sect have nearly come to blows on this thorny issue. Paul is twisting himself into a pretzel to try to bring the warring sides of this controversy to the table in some amicable fashion. On some days he’s more successful than on others. The Corinthian Christians are a conflict-ridden bunch and they don’t seem particularly eager to come to the dialogue table and resolve their differences. Those who see no problem with eating the meat sacrificed to Apollo do not see any reason to incur extra expense or go to greater lengths to acquire kosher meat, just to appease the new converts who are uncomfortable with the ritually slaughtered meat. They either don’t care or don’t recognize that their cavalier attitude to the ritual meat is causing significant pain to others in their Christian community.

Fast forward 2000+ years: The Christian community in the Northern Hemisphere is now the majority religion in a pluralistic environment where there are people from many different religious traditions living side by side in a bustling 21st century society. In the United States, a recent Gallup poll finds that fully 82% of people call themselves Christian, although a huge percentage of those people do not actively practice the religion. The numbers of people who designate themselves as “unaffiliated” has risen dramatically in the past 50 years, and secularism pervades the culture. Materialism and nationalism are heavy influences on the value systems by which most people live and the spirit of rugged individualism is pervasive in American culture.

While the Christian religious tradition is the religion of the empire, Christianity itself is now widely diverse, having split into hundreds of different denominations as conflicts like that early one in Corinth ultimately led to separation and division when warring factions simply could not come to agreement on the many issues that divided them. The older, “mainline” Christian denominations are in decline, struggling to retain members and desperate to determine how to attract new members. By and large, the younger generation of adults, those in their 20s and 30s are absent from Christian churches, particularly those in the mainline traditions. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has become a significant political force in the United States in the past thirty years, and many of those churches are thriving, often buying into the cultural embrace of materialism and nationalism, preaching a “prosperity gospel” that encourages the quest for wealth and affluence as signs of God’s favor.

In Corinth the controversy over food sacrificed to idols tore the community apart. In 21st century America Christian communities struggle over different issues of inclusion and religious practice, such as:
 Should the church help undocumented immigrants working in the local community when they are threatened with arrest or deportation and should Christians work for immigration law reform to protect those undocumented workers?;
 How can the Christian community atone for centuries of complicity in racism and become an active force in eradicating racism within its own ranks and in the communities where the churches do their ministry?
 Should the church exercise its tradition of radical hospitality by reaching out in friendship to Muslim brothers and sisters at a time when Islamophobia is rampant in the culture and popular media, creating a climate of hate and mistrust that is damaging to the larger community and to national security?
 Should gay and lesbian people be ordained and should their relationships be blessed by the church?;
 Is it permissible to offer communion to unbaptized people, is it permissible to offer grape juice along with wine at communion, how can we introduce inclusive language for God into our liturgy?

In the church at Corinth, Paul confronted a controversy that at its core was about behaviors and attitudes among those in the Christian community that were likely to tear at the fabric of Christian community and that might get in the way of some believers being able to maintain their connection with God. Paul encouraged the Corinthian Christians to behave in ways that provided a safety net for the weakest among them, admonishing those who were more mature in the faith to make space for those who needed more help to live into their Christian faith with integrity. Paul reminded them that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up” encouraging them to act first out of love and not to get too hung up on what they thought they knew, or understood or believed. Paul firmly believed that love would be the glue that would hold the diverse body of believers together, not agreement on doctrine or theological propositions of one kind or other. For Paul, it was more important that Christians be loving than that they prove to themselves or anyone else that they were right.

Paul begins his preaching on love in this part of the letter, and he goes on to write an outstanding hymn to love a few chapters later. The love of which Paul speaks is not a sticky sweet, fuzzy Hallmark card kind of love by any means. Love, as Paul understands it, is love that takes us to the cross, that calls us to sacrifice our own ego, our own impulses, needs and desires for the good of God’s kingdom, so that we become compassionate lovers of humanity in our broken world. We are called to love even those we dislike, those who repulse us, those who push our buttons and drive us crazy. When human conflicts erupt it is important for each of us to remember “it’s not about you” and then to take the conflict into our prayer time, offering ourselves and our adversaries to God’s grace and wisdom. In Christian community rugged individualism has no place. Personal freedom and liberty is tempered by the command to love the neighbor.

In Christian community and in the world beyond our church we are called to take people as we find them, to love and nurture them as whole people of God, respecting the dignity of every human being in their full humanity. Paul is quite clear with the Corinthians that believers in Christ are to bend over backwards not to become a stumbling block to the weak. If something we say or do gets in the way of someone else’s relationship with God, we need to think twice about what we’re doing. My guess is that if Christians throughout the ages had listened to Paul’s advice more closely we might not be suffering the decline in attendance that we are seeing in our modern church. Our contemplative tradition is full of spiritual practices that we can each take on, practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, intercessory prayer, regular self-examination and confession, the Jesus prayer, that help us become the kind of loving Christians that Paul envisioned. Sadly, Christians have all too often become stumbling blocks to others and to themselves and the result is fractured community and declining participation.

Life in Christian community will always be fraught with controversies and conflicts. It is inherent in our humanity. How we handle conflict and controversy is what marks us as faithful disciples of the Risen Christ. Paul gives us a good measuring rod – “Take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.” The highways of life’s journey are full of stumbling blocks. Our baptism calls us to get out on the road and join the crew removing as many of those barriers as we can so the love of God in Christ can flow freely into our broken world through us and through our way of loving in the world. Amen.