Sermon for Epiphany 4

Sermon for Epiphany 4B   1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Augustana, 2012

Click here for mp3 audio 13 Sermon for Epiphany 4.mp3

 

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

The sermon is from the Epistle lesson for today, Paul’s first letter to the Christians in Corinth.

We’ve not spent a lot of time in the Epistles together and we may not be very familiar with the reasons why Paul wrote this letter to them.  As you can see from our reading today, the understanding we have of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has imminently practical considerations.  Imagine that, what we believe might have some bearing on how it is we should actually live our lives?  I  know, right?  So the issue in Corinth is kind of interesting: Christians eating food that had been offered to pagan gods, quite literally “idol-food.”  I want to explain this not because we have a problem in our congregation or in the wider church with our people eating “idol-food” but because Paul offers a teaching here that is easily applicable to more than just this situation.  We’ll get there.

This “idol-food” refers to sacrificial meat, part of which was burned on the altar, part was eaten at a solemn meal in a pagan god’s temple, and part was sold in the market … for home use.  Now remember, this is very early in the life of the Church and so there is still a very strong influence of Jewish practice on the Church.  The Jerusalem Council early on met over issues like these and decided that it would still be appropriate for new Gentiles converts to the true faith to keep themselves from meat sacrificed to idols.  (Ac 15:29)   From the Jewish viewpoint this “idol-food” was unclean and therefore forbidden.  From their view, no one believing in the One True God would spiritually contaminate himself or his family with such food.  This is the connection: it was an affront to eat meat devoted to another god because it was as if we were saying thanks to that god rather than thanks to the One True God for the food.  What is apparent is that there were two viewpoints among the Christians in Corinth with a disagreement on whether it was appropriate for Christians to eat this “idol-food.”

Paul starts out this chapter apparently even quoting back to them the phrase they had used to justify their eating.  “All of us have knowledge.”  It is as if they were saying, “We believe in the One True God and follow Jesus our Lord; these other gods are false gods so what does it matter if I eat “idol-food.”  It was more than just what food they bought at the market.  We can assume that some Christians of higher social status at social occasions would recline at table in dining rooms near or even in the temples of false gods.  “We know,” they said, that these gods aren’t real.

But Paul gets them right there in their so called knowledge.  What does this knowledge do?  It puffs up.  Paul calls them out for arrogance, but not just arrogance on a personal level, arrogance on a spiritual level.  “I am well catechized enough to know that these are false gods.  I can participate here because I am free in the Gospel to do so.  In fact, I’m a little worried about you Christians who look at the world so narrowly in your fear that you think this might actually hurt us or our relationship with God.”  These kind of “Super-Christians” are boasting in themselves rather than in the Lord.  This is the whole of Paul’s point not just for the Corinthians but for us today.  The love of Christ for the church is not shown in puffed up knowledge but in the love of one who died for the weak.

Paul contrasts the one who thinks he knows God with one who truly loves God.  “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. ³ But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.”  God Himself is the source of our knowledge; indeed, God is the source of our love.  Paul says something similar in Gal. 4:9, “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God…”  God’s knowledge and election of us comes first and enables us to then know and love God.  While you may think you have come to know something about God and have chosen to believe in and love God, it actually was God’s prior action of knowing you and His revealing Himself to you that results in your knowledge of and living in God.

Now of course I say all this at some risk.  I just spent a week at one of our seminaries learning.  As members of a church born at the university, we need to pay close attention here that we don’t use knowledge in the way the Corinthians did.  And in the local church too, that we don’t just expect a certain about of head knowledge to suffice for faith.  We were once a church of the catechism and that was a great strength.  If we return to the catechism as we are now doing, we will once against have a knowledge of the faith that is rock solid.  But we should take heed, lest we fall, because the temptation is to think that once we’ve learned the catechism, we’ve learned it all.  Today, just as it was in Corinth, this is as much a spiritual problem of sinful pride as much as it is a matter of whether what we believe should have anything to do with how we live as Christians.

Gordon Fee had a comment that is especially applicable for us today and provides a way for us to link this reading to the Gospel for today.  “Paul took the power of the demonic seriously; hence his concern that a former idolater, by returning to his or her ioldatries, will be destroyed—that is, he or she will return to former ways and be captured by them all the more, and those eventually suffer eternal loss.” (Fee, 388 n. 62, Lockwood, 289)  Jesus too, took the demonic seriously.  Jesus does not show his authority over the demons just to showcase His amazing power, but He does what He does out of love for the demon-possessed man.  He casts out the demons not even to destroy the demons but to free the man in front of him from the power of the devil.  This was but a glimpse of the full revelation of the heart of God in death of Jesus’ on the cross.  Just as the demons cry out with a loud voice in forced obedience to the authority of the Son of God, there on the cross, Jesus cries out with a loud voice in victory over our enemy, sin death and the devil.  Jesus died to break the stranglehold of sin, death and the devil on you.  Neither Jesus nor Paul want you to ever return to the old idolatries, to trusting in anything or anyone else than the Lord who came to rescue us from such slavery.

That means you have been freed even from self-centered pride and arrogance.  You no longer live for yourself, but for God who has granted you salvation and freedom in Christ.  When you, as a result of God’s love for you, love God, He is also building up the community of God’s people.  And when your focus is thus on God and others in Christ, you will no longer rejoice in your own knowledge but in God’s gracious knowledge of you and those around you who are in Christ.  This is how God shows how to live, by loving us in the cross of Christ Jesus.

Lockwood, in his commentary relates a story from the mission field where new converts in Papua New Guinea found it difficult to rid themselves completely of their old fears of witchcraft and ancestral spirits.  The new Christians there resisted the missionaries’ suggestions to use traditional musical instruments like the kundu drum in the worship services.  They explained that they could not hear these instruments without hearing the voice of the spirits.  Later generations of Christians who never participated in ancestral worship were about to incorporate the drum in worship.  Idol food and pagan practices may seem far, far away to many of us, but Paul’s point becomes clearer if we have in mind someone rescued from practicing witchcraft or the occult, or someone who came out of lifestyles typified by certain forms of music like rock ‘n roll or rap, or even one who used to participate in groups or clubs like the Masons, or even, a recovering addict, prostitute, or alcoholic.  Anyone who was enslaved to any form of idolatry and who wishes not to return to it.  So sure, we all know that “idol-food” is really just food.  But knowledge without love is arrogance.  And Paul is expressing pastoral care for the whole community in which there may be many who cannot eat idol-food as merely a gift from the one true God, creator of heaven and earth.  The old associations from their former lives reassert themselves and they have defiled consciences and they go home feeling guilty because they feel they have participated, at least outwardly, in the worship of a false god.

Part of what it means to live as holy people is preserving a good conscience and keeping others from the burden of a strained conscience.  Paul writes to Timothy, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” (1 Tim 1:5)  If a Christian feels he must refrain from former pagan practices, he is not missing out on anything.  By the same token, any Christian who participates in these meals should not think he is in any way superior.  The guiding principle is love which “builds up” not knowledge which “puffs up.”  True spiritual knowledge should always result in love for the Christian brother, especially the weak.  After all, it was out of love for us who were weak and enslaved to sin, death and devil that the Lord Jesus willingly sacrificed Himself for us all to free us to live with Him forever.  Amen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus.  Amen.