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Sermon for Epiphany 4, Year B, 2000

Episcopal Church at Princeton

Reading: 1 Corinthians 8:1b-13

Meat,
and idols.
That's what tonight's epistle reading
is all about,
it seems.

And you know, there are some things
we come across in the bible
which seem so far removed
from our everyday life
that you wonder why on earth
they are included
in our readings.
This
is one of them.

I mean,
have you ever stopped to think
about food offered
to idols?
I suspect not. It's hardly the sort of question
which leaps into your mind
as you walk across campus
towards the eating clubs.
And its not a question most of us have had to face,
unless, of course,
we've been traveling in a country
where
piles of fruit
mount up in front of stone gods
and temple walls
are splashed with the blood
of unlucky goats and chickens.
It's not something
we usually
think about.

So, you might justifiably ask,
what on earth are we reading this for?
Why, out of the 1500 or so pages in the bible
do we end up reading this one?
What on earth has this got to do with us here in Princeton?

Although, I must admit
that if you're like me
you didn't even get as far as those questions.
Habit means
that the Old Testament reading
and the psalm,
and New Testament reading
just drift past
and you only really wake up for the gospel -
largely because by then we're standing up.

But today I want you
to think a bit more about the New Testament reading,
to think about what it is saying and why
because I think
it gets at something
that is really important
for this community.

Reading the bible
isn't always as easy
as some would have us believe.
We can pick it up
and flick through the pages,
looking for the familiar stories
of Daniel in the lion's den,
and Jonah and the whale,
and Noah and his great big ark.
But not every page
has a bedtime story.
Because this thing
is far more
than a story book.
It has prayers
and it has lectures,
cries for help
and dire predictions.
Some of it
offends us,
some of it
comforts us,
and some of it
confuses us.
And some of it
seems pretty much
irrelevant.

And some of it is.
(Irrelevant, that is - You may not know, but way back in the Old Testament,
there are instructions about how far outside the camp to dig the toilets.
Useful for camping trips, but not much else, if you have indoor plumbing!)
But an awful lot of other stuff
looks irrelevant
on the surface,
but if you dig a little bit deeper,
you can discover
some really important principles.
And if you look around the edges,
what comes before and afterwards
it might just begin
to make sense.

So when we come to today's reading from 1 Corinthians,
we have some decisions
to make.

Do we talk it at face value
and throw it aside as irrelevant?
Do we take the final phrase by itself,
the bit about never eating meat,
and see this as an argument
for vegetarianism?
Or do we dig around a bit
and try to see if Paul
is really trying to get at something else?

The last couple of weeks
we've been reading bits
of Paul's first letter
to the Corinthians.
We read part of that letter
around this time
every year.
It's a letter to a church
over in Greece
and the church is in trouble.
Not big trouble,
they're not about to close down or anything,
but more the sort of trouble
that any of us
could find ourselves in.

You see,
they've heard the news about Jesus,
they've discovered the sacraments,
they are meeting together for worship,
but something
is just not right.
They keep getting themselves tangled up
with issues like sex
and power
and money.
They are symptoms
of something bigger.
And 1 Corinthians
is the letter the apostle Paul writes
to try to sort that something bigger
out.

Way back at the beginning of this letter
Paul talks about knowledge.
The Corinthians
like us
are hung up on knowledge.
They want to get it right,
to understand,
to develop, if you want to put it the way I hear people talk about it round
the
academic scene,
an "intellectually coherent faith."
To put together this piece
and this piece,
and this
and this,
until what they end up with makes sense,
a solid,
defensible
philosophical system
which makes sense of the world, of God,
and of their own lives.

And they work really hard
to get it right.

But there's a problem.
You see,
they get it right up here...
and then somehow
what they think up here
doesn't quite jell with what some of them feel,
and with what others of them do,
and they end up
in a muddle.

And this is where the reading today comes in.
It seems like there are two groups in the church. One group
has got it all together. Reason rules. They know what they believe
and they live accordingly. God is the only God,
therefore idols have no power,
therefore they might as well eat the meat on sale at the temple market.
No superstitions, no fears.

The other group
is not quite so sure.
They know what they believe, and they're pretty sure
that the idols have no power,
but somehow eating that temple meat
feels like they're buying back into the whole idolatry thing
they've just cut loose from.
And they feel like
they're being dumb
when they ask questions about it all.

So who is right?
Neither, says Paul.
Sure, the ones hung up about the meat
don't really need to be, but that's not the point.
What they feel, their uncertainty and their fear, matters.
And the ones who have their heads together
are right
except that they've missed the point. They've forgotten
that at the very heart of the Christian gospel
is not knowledge,
but the all embracing love
of God.
This is a community, he says. A community of love.
And in a sense
it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong: what matters
is that everyone is safe here,
safe within
the love of God
lived out
in the people of God.

We've come a way
from meat and idols.
But let me take you a little further.

Now obviously, those are the two extremes, they're caricatures.
But which of them
sounds most like you?
Maybe you have it all figured out,
your head is what drives you. Logic and reason
is what really matters.
Maybe you are having a tough time
working out this faith stuff,
and as soon as you get one bit figured out
another leaps out at you.
Maybe you're a mixture of the two.

I have to admit
that I tend to be
in the first category.
I liked
doing mathematical proofs at school.
I buy
those books of logic problems.
I collect facts
like other people collect stamps.
And I can rip an argument
to shreds
with my red pen.
I don't like uncertainty,
and if you ask me
what I'm feeling,
my first reaction
will be to tell you
what I think.
And if you talk about something I don't know about, as a newcomer to this
place, say about house parties,
I'll probably just pretend
that I know what you're talking about.

And I suspect
I'm not alone here.
Because those are the things we value. Those are the things
that got you all into Princeton.
We're expected to be knowledgeable
to reason things out
and not ask dumb questions.
We're supposed to be confident
and successful.
And you all are incredibly competent. I keep being amazed at you, amazed in
a good way.

But you know,
sometimes
I don't feel like that.
Sometimes
I have really dumb questions.
"Why do you stand when I'm used to kneeling to pray? Why do some churches
have white wine when its supposed to be Jesus' blood?" etc.
Sometimes
I'm not so sure.
"Am I good enough to finish this degree?
Will anyone want to give me a job?"
And sometimes, when I'm most miserable, and can't even work out why except
that life seems just way too hard,
all the logic in the world
has nothing to say.

And that's when
we need to hear Paul's advice - not about meat and idols, but about
being a community, working to become a community
where there's room for all of us,
the ones who have it all together, and the ones
who aren't so sure - even when that's
pretty living out some pretty different values
form many of the people around us.
Working to make a place
where we are safe
no matter who we are
or what we bring with us.

Here, it's okay
to be confident and knowledgeable.
But here, its just as okay
to ask dumb questions,
to feel unsure.
to not have it all figured out.

Because what makes us the church
is not who we are
or what we know,
but the incredible love of God,
which we're called to live out,
the incredible love of God,
which reaches out to us
and makes a safe place
for every single one of us.

Amen.

Raewynne J. Whiteley
30 January, 2000