Sermon January 28, 2018

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists,” and that “there is no God but one.” Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. “Food will not bring us close to God.” We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. 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.

Mark 1:21-28

They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

Liberty.

From our childhoods,

we Americans are taught that liberty is our greatest possession.

We have it as a gift from God.

Men and women have died for our liberty.

Patrick Henry is said to have proclaimed,

‘Give me liberty or give me death!’

Interestingly enough,

Patrick Henry did get his liberty from Britain,

but died believing that he was not free.

He was vehemently against the United States Constitution of 1787

because he believed it infringed too much upon liberty.

It’s also a great American tradition to argue about what liberty means

and be convinced that the system we live under now is not real liberty.

As we have heard the past few weeks,

the Corinthians were also very interested in liberty.

Not political liberty, but spiritual liberty.

Our section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today

Paul admonishes them about behavior regarding food.

This section of Paul’s letter makes little sense to us today,

but with a good study Bible we can begin to understand.

Very simply, the problem was this.

Many of the Corinthians would be invited by their pagan friends

to a convivial meal,

at which some food was offered in sacrifice to a pagan god

and the rest of it used for supper.

The Corinthian Christians knew that the idols were not real,

and so they reasoned that they were free to go to these meals

because they knew they were not really sacrificing to any god.

If they believed the gods had power,

then it would be wrong.

But since the gods weren’t real,

they could keep this knowledge to themselves

and in the meantime stay in good with their pagan friends.

Their knowledge of the truth

made them free to do what they wanted.

  

It seemed to make sense,

but Paul had a different view.

Paul wanted to make the point

that they were indeed free,

but they were to use their freedom in love,

specifically, love for their Christian brothers and sisters

who had until recently believed in the pagan gods.

Paul was concerned that if these people,

just coming into the church,

would see the already established believers

participating in these rituals,

it would perhaps bring them back into the world of sacrifice to idols.

Perhaps they would then believe that the God of Jesus was one among many,

instead of the only God.

While Paul grants the Corinthians their liberty,

he urges them to temper their liberty with love.

Indeed, love should guide liberty.

Liberty, freedom, is only good in Paul’s view

insofar as it can be used for God.

The great gift of freedom in Christ

is that Paul could freely give up his advantages

for the sake of God and others.

This is a very different view than many people have.

For them, liberty and freedom

means primarily self-assertion against others.

When I read books about the great wars of the twentieth century,

I am more and more grateful

for the political liberty we enjoy,

including the relative freedom from government.

However, I am also mindful that being free in a political sense

can be injurious to my spiritual health,

if I forget that true freedom is found in submission,

not submission to the power of others,

but submission to God’s power.

Paul would say that we are not truly free

until we are obedient to God,

acting out of love for our neighbors,

and Martin Luther would say the same thing.

He stated this paradox:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none;

a Christian is a perfectly dutiful slave of all, subject to all.

A truly free person in Christ

is able to freely renounce advantage and self-assertion

in order to do God’s will in whatever situation.

And yet it is not in our power to make ourselves free.

We say that whenever we make our confession.

We say, ‘we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.’

It is the unclean spirit of self-assertion and self-preservation

which keeps us in bondage,

the unclean spirit who would dominate our wills

and keep us curved in upon ourselves.

We need liberation from the outside,

and this is what we see in our Gospel lesson.

We see Jesus beginning his work of liberation among the people.

It is a work of authority and power.

He comes into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day

like a whirlwind,

like a superhero,

teaching what is right and true,

and with a word silencing the unclean spirit.

He frees the afflicted one to stand before him,

to be able to praise God,

which he could not do when the unclean spirit possessed him.

Instead of being possessed by the spirit,

he is possessed by Jesus.

And this possession makes him truly free.

Our political freedom gives us certain rights against others,

but our spiritual freedom in Christ gives us the right to be with Christ.

Can we assert our freedom from others

and at the same time be free in Jesus Christ?

Paul says no.

In fact, when we use our freedom against others,

we sin against Christ,

for Christ died for others.

All of us will be able to easily identify

how others offend against this principle,

how others misuse their freedom.

However, we do not hear today’s lessons

primarily to use them against others.

We must hear it upon ourselves

before we can identify it in others.

Jesus says in another place,

‘Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye

and not see the log in your own eye?’

Perhaps it was this very teaching with which Jesus

held the congregation in that synagogue spellbound,

that very spellbinding which liberated.

This teaching is a teaching of authority and power.

It exorcises the unclean spirit of judgment and contempt

which would dominate our hearts.

It is in hearing the word of Jesus that we know true liberty.

And this liberty can never be taken away,

for there is no condition in which we can exist

that we cannot freely serve the other.

It is this liberty that Christ gives us,

for the same Christ who died for others

also died for us,

that we might be free indeed.  

Sermon January 14, 2018

Sermon Text: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
6:12 "All things are lawful for me," but not all things are beneficial. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be dominated by anything. 6:13 "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food," and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 6:14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 6:16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, "The two shall be one flesh." 6:17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
6:18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 6:20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

‘Love God, and do what you want.’

This was a saying of St Augustine, who lived from the year 354 to 430.

But the church in Corinth,

brought into existence 300 years before Augustine,

might have liked this statement a lot too.

Paul founded the church in Corinth,

and he had some problems with it.

Corinth was a Roman colony far out in the backwaters of Greece.

It was a former military colony.

It had, if you will, a reputation.

Sin City.

It was like the Las Vegas of the ancient world.

Paul founded the church in Corinth,

and then left to found other churches in other cities.

But the Corinthians were problem children.

He had to keep writing letters back,

telling them to get their act together.

The Corinthians really missed the boat on some things.

They had some what we would consider interesting opinions.

One of these was that because they were spiritual,

because they had been given the Holy Spirit

and could do all sorts of interesting things like speaking in tongues,

that the things of the body didn’t really matter.

Maybe they were misled by the teaching

that the food laws that the Jewish people had lived with for years

didn’t apply to those who were in Christ.

They had all sorts of statements such as ‘All things are lawful for me,’

and ‘Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food,

and God will destroy both one and the other.’

And so they believed that they also might satisfy other hungers as well,

even to the point of patronizing the temple prostitutes

that the other Corinthians patronized.

After all, if they were free in spirit,

what did it matter what they did with the body?

This was not a body-affirming spirituality,

it was a body-denying spirituality,

which manifested itself in body-affirming behavior.

Did you get that?

The body and the things of the body were not important,

they didn’t really matter,

it’s what was inside that counted.

We’ve heard that statement, right?

And it’s true, but sometimes true statements can lead us astray.

Christianity has often been misunderstood as a body-denying spirituality,

especially by some Christians.

But this is not true at all.

Christianity has a body-affirming spirituality.

This means that the spirit is not divorced from the body,

and everything the body does counts,

the body has everything to do with the spirit.

This is true because of the incarnation.

For God himself loved the world so much

that he himself took flesh.

He himself adopted the bodies we wear.

The Son served the Father in the body,

and gave his body on the cross for our sakes.

Again, true statements can sometimes lead us astray.

We know that our bodies belong to us.

‘It’s my body.’

And this is true.

It’s true because our bodies

should be free from violence, from coercion,

from control by other human beings.

And this is most clearly seen today in sexual matters.

Indeed, the #me too movement has come about

because too many people have used other people’s bodies

as objects for gratification, to show their power,

and our bodies should be free from that, because it affects the spirit.

Well we might think

that St. Paul himself would have understood us,

that in focusing on the Corinthians’ sexual lives

he was not being prudish or prurient,

but articulating a truth,

that what people do in the body has much to do with their spirits?

And that God does not desire people to do violence to another,

or to coerce another, or to control another?

But as I have stated,

in another way our bodies are not our own

to do with as we please,

but instead they belong to God,

and we are to freely do as he pleases.

God does not coerce or control us,

instead he calls us to glorify him in our bodies,

as St. Paul says.

In baptism we have been made members of his body,

that is, our bodies are extensions of his body.

We are to freely do what he did.

And through our bodies he does what he does today.

He serves, he forgives, he encourages and blesses,

he feeds others, he himself prays, he himself gives bodily comfort and sustenance.

Martin Luther says,

‘Creatures are only the hands, channels and means

through which God bestows all things.’

This is how we are to be with our bodies.

To do no violence, to avoid coercing another with word or deed,

to not control another,

but instead to use our bodies to bless others.

The negative, what we are not to do,

needs to be balanced and perhaps overbalanced by the positive.

If I were to have you take away something from the sermon,

it would be what St. Paul says,

‘Glorify God in your body.’

We are to glorify God by what we do –

in how we eat: we do not live to eat but we eat to live.

in how we speak: to build up and not tear down others.

in how we behave: not to control others but to bless and comfort them,

never denying them their selfhood.

We are to glorify God with where our feet take us, what our hands are set to,

what our eyes look at and our ears hear,

with how we use our time and money.

It may well sound hokey,

but when we ask ourselves,

Does this glorify God?

our actions might be different.

If you disbelieve this,

think of those who are manifestly evil in the world,

and then ask yourself whether things would be different

if they honestly asked themselves the same question.

If the answer is yes,

then perhaps we should ask,

If it’s true for them, why isn’t it true for us?

Augustine said, ‘Love God, and do what you want.’

This is what that means -

When we love God, we desire to glorify him.

Then our freedom becomes not a freedom from,

but a freedom for,

freedom to glorify God, freedom to serve others.