Idol Food
1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-32

February 1, 2009


I am going to violate all principles of Lectionary preaching by sneaking into next week’s Gospel - alas, before its time! I will pray a few prayers of penance afterwards to make up for it, but next week’s reading, depending on your perspective, adds a humourous or galling incident to our tale.

Mark’s Gospel is exceedingly concise, so barely 20 verses in, John the Baptist appears in time to baptize Jesus in the Jordan, Jesus endures his 40 days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan, and has called his first disciples, did his first round of teaching, and now his first healing, or to be precise, first exorcism. In the Capernaum synagogue a man with an unclean spirit challenges Jesus loudly, knowing exactly who he divinely is. Jesus pulls the unclean spirits out of him and doing so flabbergasts the synagogue crowd and his reputation spreads throughout the region.

But immediately upon leaving the synagogue he goes into the house of his new disciples Simon and Andrew and finds that Simon’s mother-in-law is very sick with a fever. No abracadabra here, he simply takes her by the hand and lifts her up, and she is cured. Then she starts to serve everyone there, and presumably that means food. My goodness, half-dead and still expected to feed the men once you’re back from the grave!

That’s as far as I am going with this one, except to make note that no matter what the situation, miracles, holiness, or the exorcism of demons, food is required. Every United Church knows that there is no church without food. And of course, you do know what we are going to do next? A meal with bread and the fruit of the vine, one of only two sacraments we celebrate here. Food is important stuff and therefore troublesome as well. Inevitably, if food is so critical to our physical and spiritual lives, many societies have developed intricate codes and regulations regarding which foods are appropriate and when and which are not. Issues of what is kosher in our closest case.

The Christians in Corinth, Greece, had a big problem with food, good meat at that. It was one of the oldest problems in human society: you are what you eat.

Religion was big business in first century Greece. Temples were everywhere and when you have a polytheistic faith, then there is always room to grow. Sacrifices were still pretty much the standard order of worship in the ancient world, sometimes grain, for the wealthier animals and the bigger the better. Cattle and sheep were the sacrificial lambs, so to speak.

Yet seldom did they actually have a whole burnt offering, effectively reducing the meat to cinders. Instead, there was a ceremony, a sacrament, and then the uncooked meat was distributed to the meat markets. That is, after the priests received their share of the best meat. Lots of zucchini and tomatoes in my early pastorates, but I don’t ever remember being given a steak for a long time! There were no Christian markets then, everyone bought from the same place. If it’s meat from a temple sacrifice, is it used meat? Cheaper, I suppose.

Christians then would buy some of this same used meat and here was the problem. A lot of time and energy and commitment had been expended upon converting many of these young Christians from a pagan heritage. They were taught that all those many gods simply do not exist and have no power, only the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, God the Father of the Son Jesus Christ. In their old lives, these erstwhile pagans would have bought and eaten the meat sacrificed in the temples as a taste of their gods. By eating it, in a way, they were enjoying the same delicacy as their god. But they had seen the folly of their ways and had renounced such practices, until they saw some of their fellow church members swooping up the bargains at the butchers, and wondered where went their religion! They noticed that it seemed to be the important people in the church who bought up the steaks. They seemed to know it all, and when challenged by these new babes in the faith, they replied that they now possessed the right kind of knowledge and knew that these were merely idols and nothing.

However, not all possess this knowledge, as Paul reminded his Corinthian correspondent. Christianity was still hard to comprehend, and what would it matter to simply have a taste of that old god, comparing, you know?

This sounds a little bizarre, when we are more concerned about what bacteria is in our meat than what church it was in. I’d be careful about letting all those cultured despisers of religion know we were reading this story, because they would ridicule us for sure, “You’re reading about and worried about something antique like that?” Certainly, this is a meaty dilemma that no longer makes cultural sense.

Yet, my mother told me about her youth on the Island and some of the consequences of being a Methodist there. Methodists were one of the anchors in the Temperance movement of the late 1800’s/early 1900’s against the consumption of alcohol that eventually led to that great experiment, the Prohibition. Thomas Welch invented grape juice specifically for Methodist communion services, and unless our Worship committee has pulled a surprise, there’s grape juice under those silver covers on the communion table. And it still is our stated policy never to allow alcohol on church property. Why? We know in our wisdom and knowledge that alcohol is not the Devil’s Drink.

We all know why and that’s why Paul said to the Corinthians, “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.... If food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my sister to fall.”

When people declare that religious faith is purely an individual matter, I utter a sigh at least inwardly. Eating idol meat and drinking something Thomas Welch wouldn’t are just a couple of examples that can be expanded infinitely among those of us sitting here. Isn’t there anybody here who has not denied themselves of something that causes you no harm, but for the sake of another, a child, a spouse, a co-worker, a friend, a disadvantaged and oppressed soul, you will do without.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. We don’t have faith just for ourselves.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan