On Not Wounding a Weak Conscience

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

4^th Ordinary

January 28, 2018

William G. Carter

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.

I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to get to church today! I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to hear what Paul says about eating food dedicated to idols. Well, maybe not.

A scripture text like this reminds us of the distance between then and now. This is an ancient text, a letter between an itinerant preacher and one of the congregations he began. And we can feel the distance between their situation and our own. Perhaps a few of us couldn’t even follow what that passage is about.

Would it help to hear that the topic they discussed was not Paul’s idea? It was the Corinthians’ idea, not his. They brought it up, and they did so in a way that revealed some of the problems in that church. Every church has a know-it-all, it seems, the resident expert who seems to be there to set everybody else straight. That happens in any human organization, so it can happen in a church.

Well, the Corinthian church had a number of know-it-alls. They tried to outdo one another in bragging about how much they knew. The evidence is in the English text, which captures the situation exactly: all the know-it-alls were throwing their wisdom at one another, if only to prove they were smarter than the next one. They had moved beyond having a reasonable conversation to hurling slogans. Slogans! You can’t have a conversation with bumper stickers. It’s hit and run.

First slogan went like this: “All of us possess knowledge.” Next slogan was this: “No idol really exists,” that is, there is no such thing as a replacement for God. Then the next genius clears his throat to declare, “There is no God but one.” He wants to sound smart and pious.

Then a fourth person tries to ace them all, to say, “Food will not bring us close to God.” I think his name was Captain Obvious, and clearly he was not a Jew keeping a Kosher diet.

You know what they are doing? They are squabbling in that church. Rather than deal directly or wisely with the conflict, they hurl words at one another - - and they miss one another in the ways that count.

So Paul responds by quoting these slogans and weaving then into his response. It’s masterful. He feeds them off their own plate and invites them to eat their words. Back in chapter one, we knew this was going to happen. In the opening words of the letter he says, “You Corinthians are so full of speech and knowledge.” (1:5) He was winking at them, maybe even kicking them.

Does it help to know that this is his way of intervening in a conflict? Maybe so, maybe not.

Would it help to know that there’s more to the issue than first appears? You know how it is. The lady raises her voice that the sidewalks aren’t clear; what’s really going on is she is afraid of falling. The man over here complains how he can’t hear the little girls at the microphone; actually he is losing his hearing, or he is ambivalent about kids leading worship for adults.

My favorite squabble, of all the squabbles in my career, was the forty-five minute argument at a session meeting on whether they should serve fresh brewed coffee or Folger’s crystals at coffee hour. Forty five minutes! I blew a whistle, tried to shut it down. They said, “You’re only the pastor, be quiet!” I came to realize the argument wasn’t about coffee at all.

On the face of it, the Corinthians faced a small matter, especially compared to all the other dramas going on in that congregation. This issue was whether or not a Christian could eat steak that had been dedicated to Zeus, whether a church family could eat lamb offered in a sacrifice to Aphrodite, whether or not the chili cook-off could include venison consecrated to Venus.

So some of the know-it-alls said, “There’s only one God. Pagan idols are stupid. Get over it.” But Paul knows something more is going on.

As scholar Ken Bailey tells us, all the pagan temples in Corinth had their celebrations. Sometimes they would get a lot of meat and offer it up to their favorite Greek god or goddess, and later it might be discounted, and it might be the only protein that impoverished family could afford.[1] There was some economic justice behind the question.

Plus there was the bigger issue, which still remains with us: how do Christians make their way through a pagan society? How do you shop at an indifferent marketplace when much of the stuff for sale doesn’t reflect your values? As Bailey asks, “Do you accommodate yourself to that world, and to what extent? Do you blend in or stand apart?”[2]

Bailey, as you might remember, was a Presbyterian missionary in the Middle East for thirty years. He had the same experience when he retired from Beirut, moved back to western Pennsylvania, and walked into a Walmart for the first time. It all seemed so pagan.

Does it help to hear this small matter is bigger than it seems? Maybe, maybe not.

Would it help to know that Paul addresses all of this as a good pastor? Some of you may have been told you shouldn’t like the apostle Paul, that, for instance, he gives first century advice to first century women ... probably because he lived in the first century. Or that he still struggled as a Jew to make sense of how God was calling him to speak increasingly to a world of Gentiles? It was awkward.

Paul was given the task of proclaiming a Messiah to a Mediterranean world that wasn’t looking for a Messiah. He was “under obligation,” he says – “under obligation” to proclaim the crucifixion of Jesus is the power of God – and to say it to an empire that worshiped the kind of power that used chariots and iron spears.

And what he is doing is offering his best thinking to matters that otherwise seem worldly and mundane. “Brother Paul, can we eat meatballs dedicated to Mars, the god of war?” Or: can we eat chicken wings dedicated to the god of the Eagles?

And do you remember how he responds? By reminding them of the creed: “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.” In other words, think big!  Think as big as God!

If in your Christian conscience, you find the pagan world confusing, if not downright dangerous, remember God, the One God, the real God, the big God! God made all of this, even if the world has forgotten its origin,  even if the people of the world have grown indifferent to their single Creator. So there is one God, source of all life, maker of the beef for your chili dogs and the shrimp for your gumbo.

Take these matters that seem so trivial – and use your very best Christian thinking to find a way forward!

One year, I was proud of our confirmation class. Every class is smart, and this class was exceptional. They asked tough questions. They wanted real answers. I was so impressed, in fact, that when the day came for them to meet with our elders, I said, “Ask these elders whatever you want.” The elders looked at me, like, “Hey, why are you doing this? We didn’t have to endure you in class.” But I said, “Give them the best answers you can,” and I was proud of our elders.

First question, out of the gate: “Who was Jesus, really? Was he God or was he human?” The elders looked stunned, but slowly they rose to the occasion. Next question: “If Jesus is alive, where is he right now?” One of the shortstops fielded that ground ball. Then another: “Why is there so much suffering in the world?” I thought that kid might get a ground rule double on that one, but an elder took a stab and caught the ball.

Then came the question from a 14-year-old that I knew was coming: “Why can’t we drink wine for communion?” One of the confirmation parents was an elder, and she started getting red in the face. “Now, wait,” I said, “let’s give them an honest answer, rather than simply say ‘You’re too young for wine.’”

The elders thought for a minute and one of them said, “Communion is when we affirm Christ gave his life for us, and that his Easter life is now in us, so we don’t want to cheapen it by thinking it’s a drunken party.” I was so impressed, I wrote that down. And another said, “If we aren’t drinking wine in church, why start now? It’s not our practice.”

Then somebody else said, “In our Book of Order, it says if you serve wine (and you can), then you must serve grape juice as an alternative in order to be sensitive to those who have a problem or an addiction to alcohol.” And the kid said, “Really? I didn’t know that; what a nice thing to do.” All of them got an A+ on that exam.

It’s not only about being right. It’s about being kind.

So the apostle Paul gives his counsel. “If eating creates a problem for somebody around you, you don’t have to eat. As followers of Jesus, you are free to eat (or drink) whatever you wish, but don’t use that freedom to destroy the soul of another person for whom Christ has died.” Because that’s the issue for the Christian community we call the church. We look to God, the one God, the true God, the big God – and we pay attention to one another.

Remember what Paul says a few chapters after this? “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. (Love) does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful… love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love does not cease.” (13:4-8)

We don’t live for ourselves; in love, we are subject to one another. This is how we live. We help one another. We watch out for one another. We work for the good of all. We pay attention to one another. And we are only as fast as the slowest person among us. Love binds us to regard each person, and wait for each one, that we might travel together toward God’s kingdom.

As football fans know, next week nobody will be waving Terrible Towels. For those of you who are not football fans, these are the gold and black terrycloth towels that Pittsburgh Steelers fans wave whenever their team takes a breath, and the Steelers didn’t make it into next week’s big game.

The Terrible Towel was the idea of Myron Cope, longtime Pittsburgh broadcaster, who died ten years ago. Myron cooked up the idea in 1975, and it really caught on. Every year, over a half million Terrible Towels are produced to be sold for about $7 dollars each. 

What a lot of people don’t know is Myron Cope donated the trademark for his towels to the Allegheny Valley School. That’s a network of homes for people with severe disabilities. Myron could have made millions on the Terrible Towels, but he donated all the proceeds to the school, because he was grateful for what that school did for his son Danny.

You see, Danny is a resident of one of the Allegheny Valley facilities. He is now 50 years old. He has never spoken a word, and has severely limited reasoning abilities. Whenever the Steelers play and their fans wave their Terrible Towels, Danny may not understand any of it.

But that’s all right, because what really matters is that his father never ran too far ahead of him. And that is the measure of love.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Kenneth E. Bailey, Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011) 239.

[2] Ibid. 229.

Free, Like a Single Person

1 Corinthians 7:20-35 (29-31)

3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

January 21, 2018

William G. Carter

The first issue today is deciding where to begin the reading in chapter seven.  The lectionary reading says verses 29 to 31, but those are the concluding verses of a paragraph. The paragraph begins with the words, “Now concerning virgins,” and I’m not sure we want to begin there. So we back it up for verses to verse 21, and discover Paul is talking about slavery. Well, that’s a little awkward. And then if we back it up one more verse, to verse 20, we discover that is really the theme verse. So let us attend to the reading:

Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.

Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever. For whoever was called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human masters. In whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, there remain with God.

Now concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and unhindered devotion to the Lord.

I wonder if Paul ever dreamed that his correspondence would end up in the Bible. He traveled around the Mediterranean world, preaching the Gospel and planting congregations. After he Paul would start a church in a major city, give them the basic teaching, get them up and running, and then move on. Sometime later they tracked him down to ask, “Hey, what about this?” Sometimes we forget that Paul wrote his letters to offer practical advice

It was inevitable he would go to Corinth. Corinth was a port city in Greece, not far from Athens. Paul struck up a friendship with a married couple, Priscilla and Aquila, two exiles from Rome who were ordered to leave because they were Jews. They worked together. Paul preached in the synagogue each Sabbath, declaring that the Messiah had come, and it was Jesus. It went well, then it didn’t go well, and Paul moved on. He was there for a year and a half. He left behind a congregation that got a new preacher, but that preacher didn’t have all the answers.

When Paul was among them, they heard him preach about the end of the world. It was an idea right out of the Jewish scriptures. The Day of the Lord will come. God will appear as the final judge. All the world’s wrongs will be righted. Every human tear will be wiped away. Every human institution will come to an end, and the faithful will greet the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s going to come in the twinkling of an eye. It can happen at any moment. Keep your lamps trimmed and burning. Watch for the Lord. Do his work while you wait. This is what Paul preached. Then off he went, floating across the sea.

To the Corinthians, that was good news. They lived in the afterglow of that sermon. And then, one of the Corinthians ambled up to another in coffee hour on week. He said, “You know, Demetrius, I’m still remembering everything Paul preached to us. He said the Lord will come at any time. But here’s my issue. I’m engaged to get married next month to my fiancé Junias. If Jesus is coming back at any moment, do you think we should go ahead with the wedding?”

Demetrius looked at him, and said, “Andronicus, what do you mean?”

Andronicus took a swig of his coffee and said, “Well, I was thinking. If the Lord is at hand, why get marred? Why spend all that money on a priest, a caterer, florist, and a band if the end of the world is near? For that matter, why get married at all? It seems like marriage is an earthly institution, not a heavenly one. What do you think?”

What do we think, indeed? I’ll bet some of us haven’t thought about that. At a Christian wedding, the couple says “until death do us part.” We can assume “death” includes the end of the world. In heaven, every married person becomes a free agent once again, just like all the single people. Presumably all of us will be too busy singing in the choir to be married up there. At least, that’s always been the New Testament view.

One time, some people tried to trick Jesus on just this issue. They asked him about a hypothetical woman who kept being married after one husband after another died. “In the resurrection,” they cajoled him, “whose wife will she be?” Or to put it in a first-century context, whose piece of property will she be? Jesus gave a heavenly answer: the resurrection is so much more than what we know down here. In this age, some people marry; in that age, the coming age, God’s ways are so far beyond human institutions such as marriage. (Mark 12:18-27)

Now, the Mormon Church sees it differently. The Mormons believe that if you get married down here, you will still be married up there. When a divorced woman heard that, she said, “I knew there was a good reason why I’m not a Mormon.”

Well, back to Corinth: Marriage, Singleness, and the End of the World – those were some of the hot topics at the Corinthian coffee hour. Demetrius and Andronicus, our hypothetical Christians, wanted to know. As best we can tell, that’s why Paul wrote this section of the letter – to answer their concerns.

As far as we know, Paul never married. Just as well, I suppose; we can’t imagine who might ever want to married to him. But he did try to answer as faithfully as he could. Three times, he gives the same advice: “I’d suggest that you stay the way you are.” The return of Christ will sneak up on us. It will break in like a thief in the night. His reasoning went like this: don’t invest yourself in the present order when the end of all things is at hand. Don’t spend a lot of energy building something that it not going to last.

For Paul, his first impulse was to say, “Andronicus, cancel the wedding. Jesus is returning at any moment.” If you are single, stay the way you are. If you are married, remain married, but, well, on the other hand, uh, well . . . and then his circuits begin to fizzle.

No sooner does Paul say all of this when he realizes he had better qualify what he says. He remembers Junias with her dark pretty eyes, and how she lights up with joy whenever Andronicus walks into the room. Surely he cannot oppose a couple’s happiness, especially when we don’t really know when Jesus will actually arrive. He remembers that couple, remembers how much they love one another, and how can he speak against that?

Paul knows what all of us know. It takes a lot of energy to be married. It’s not easy to love, much less to remain lovable. I still chuckle over the television commercial. A wife is trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror. She asks the fateful question, “Does this outfit make me look fat?” Immediately he says, “Do you think I’m stupid?” Marriage has its share of landmines. One false step and something could blow up.

But singleness is no piece of cake either. It’s different for everybody. Some who are single are content to stay that way; any kind of relationship would be a complication. Others grow weary of preparing meals for one, and wish they had somebody with whom to share their lives. And then there are those who become single, by divorce or death. That is hard too. Single people misfire as much as married people do. There is no advantage to one situation or another.

Maybe all of this begins to dawn on the apostle Paul as he’s writing this letter. His reason is awkward. Hopefully, even though the ink was already dry, he realizes he made an awkward move. Before he talks of marriage in this chapter, he was talking about slavery. Marriage and Slavery. Oh – I know, for a few of us, we might think, “What’s the difference?” But listen to this: in this piece of his writing, Paul comes as close as he does anywhere of pointing to a day when people will no longer be slaves to anybody else – the day of the Lord is coming, he says. Christians are called to live as free people. Speaking of the liberating love of Christ, Paul says, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human masters.”

Meanwhile the Corinthian church wanted to know: if we are Christian, should we be married, or should we be single? Here is Paul’s best answer: whatever sets you free. “The present form of this world is passing away,” says Paul. “I want you to be free from anxieties.” What he says to all married and single people is this: I want you to be free to love and serve the Lord.

Whether single or married, that’s a central good issue for all human relationships. Do our situations set us free to love God and neighbor, or do they restrain us? Do they point us toward Christ, support our Christian walk – or do they sidetrack us with lesser concerns?

A good marriage can be the smallest form of Christian community. Two of God’s children work out their faith through the life that they share. Every day there are opportunities for encouragement, trust, and love. Everybody who has been married also knows it is the school for learning patience and the workshop for practicing forgiveness. A good marriage is one that brings out the best in each person. When it’s working well, two people become better human beings. And there is nothing to build deeper intimacy than a faith that is shared.

I’ll never forget bursting into my parents’ bedroom one evening when I was a little kid. Yes, I should have knocked – there they were, on their knees beside the bed, saying their prayers – and I heard them praying for me. Of all the things I might have seen, that was so embarrassing, so deeply personal. It left an impression I have never forgotten. They shared Jesus in common. It shaped everything in their life together – and together they were free to follow as his disciples.

Those who are single can also be free, in much the same way. Some years ago, the writer Kathleen Norris spent extended time in some Benedictine monasteries. She struck up a friendship with some nuns, and one day she got up the courage to ask them about celibacy. Kathleen is a Presbyterian like most of us, and she was always curious about nuns, but never knew how to ask.

One nun said, “In my singleness, I learned to accept my need for love, and my ability to love, as great gifts from God. And I decided to express that love by remaining single in a monastery . . . My primary relationship is with God. My vows were made to another person, the person of Christ. All of my decisions about love had to be made in the light of that person.”[1]

Norris discovered that the word that these single women used to best describe their lives was “freedom.” They were free to keep their energies focused on ministry and communal living. They were free to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them. Another nun said it this way. “We’re not making babies, but we can make relationships.” And they are relationships where life is given as a gift to others.

We can be married, or we can be single – but the apostle Paul invites us to this kind of freedom. Thanks to Jesus Christ, “the present form of the world is passing away,” he reminds us. And in its place, he dreams of a new creation that is completely filled with love for God and neighbor. That is really the issue – and whether we are single or married, this liberating love is the end and destiny of the entire Christian life

(c) William G. Carter

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[1] Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) 251.

Not Your Own

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

Ordinary 3

January 14, 2017

William G. Carter

“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.“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. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 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! 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.” But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 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? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

When we read the letters of Paul, we are quickly reminded how the church had to make its way on the frontier. Many cities and civilizations were well established. Yet the gospel was completely new, even strange.

Nowhere was this more awkward than the affluent city of Corinth. Situated as a port city in the southern part of Greece, the merchants enjoyed great wealth. With a strategic location for the travelers of the world, Corinth was a crossroads of world cultures and an intersection of new ideas.

At the top of the mountain overlooking the city was a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. If you were looking for love, Corinth was a city that was prepared to meet your temporary needs. The temple employed about a thousand specialists (let's call them "love merchants"). Their commerce was blessed in the name of Aphrodite. If you get my drift.

The Apostle Paul landed in Corinth around the year 42 or 43 AD, and stayed for a while to preach the gospel. He made some friends and worked very hard. After a while, he built a congregation of about fifty souls. Then, as now, building a church was a difficult enterprise.

It's difficult because people have long established habits; the news better be pretty good on a Sunday morning for them to give up their blessed weekend. It's difficult because Paul preached the gospel from the traditions of Israel, proclaiming a Messiah to people who weren't looking for a Messiah, teaching the Ten Commandments to folks who had never thought of disciplining their lives.

It’s difficult because the Christian faith point to central mysteries that demand some mental work. If there was common sense in the message Paul preached, the Corinthians could lean forward and nod in agreement. Yet for him to speak, for instance, of a crucified Messiah, it sounded almost as foolish as the notion of a resurrection.

Nevertheless Paul made some traction. He established a congregation. Then he moved along. That was his custom: go to a major city with a lot of international traffic, start a congregation so the faith can pollinate and spread, and go somewhere else.

It was a good plan for starting churches, but tough for sustaining them. In Paul’s absence, questions bubbled up. The church says, “We know you didn’t have time to tell us everything, so what about this? What about that?” Five or six years after Paul departed, they sent their concerns in a letter. Somehow it gets to him and he responds. What we have in the letter we call First Corinthians is part of his response. It’s the second half of a conversation that we haven’t heard.

Yet we can piece together many of their concerns. Apparently one of the concerns is freedom. They heard Paul say, “We are free in Christ.” Thanks to Jesus, we are not bound to the status quo. We don’t have to do whatever everybody else around us is doing. We can claim a different set of values. We can live a different way. Thanks to the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are free.

The Corinthians heard him say, “We are free,” and breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, that’s all they may have heard him say. We are free. I am free. And if that’s all you hear, it resonated with a long-established principle that still guides a lot of people in our own time and place. And here is the principle: that I can do anything I want. That I am free to pursue my own desires. That I am under no restriction about how I wish to live my life.

When my sister and I were teenagers, we were sitting on the couch one night watching a beauty pageant. One of the contestants declared, "I am my own person, I think for myself, I am responsible for my own dreams, and I am sufficiently empowered to pursue them."

My sister said, "Wow! She's got it together. I bet she's going to win." Indeed she did.

The idea sounds so enticing, that "I belong only to me," that "whatever I want to do, I can do." It sounds like freedom, but it’s something else.

This is the point at which the Apostle Paul enters the conversation. The word in the air is that “all things are legal for me,” a wonderful liberating freedom, and Paul quickly adds, “That doesn’t mean that all things are good and helpful.” You hear the difference?

He goes on: “Yes, all things are lawful, but some things dominate us, enslave us.” Think of the kid who starts smoking and then can’t give it up – that’s enslavement. Think of the man who loves good food and can’t get enough of it – it dominates him. Think of the person who takes a quick peek at a naughty picture, or puts a bet down on a card game, or kisses somebody they don’t even know. They felt free to do something, and then it builds, and grows, and takes over.

Is that freedom? No, it’s another form of enslavement. A lot of addictions begin with a supposition of freedom: that we are free to do whatever we want.

I’ve been a pastor long enough that I’ve heard the stories. The happily married man who fell into an internet chat room and couldn’t get out. The woman who did some babysitting on the side, and put the money on lottery tickets. The business man who took trips and ended up in places his family didn’t know about. All of them free, or so they thought, until all of them were enslaved.

That’s what Paul is warning his people about.

Ten years ago this spring, my dad and I took a tour of biblical sites in Greece. We spent a whole day in what’s left of Corinth. It is an astonishing place. Over there was the port, on the isthmus of Achaia. Over here, the market place, where goods, services, and news of the day were traded. And up there, the mountain that once housed the Temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with a thousand of her servant in shacks going the whole way up the hill.

Our travel guide said, “Maybe the best way to explain Corinth is to tell you it was a sailor’s town.” At that, my dad began to blush. Out of high school, he had served in the navy. He knew what it meant to go ashore in a foreign city, a place you had never been to, a place you would never see again, a place where secrets would be kept and all pleasures were available for a price.

I said to my dad, “Did you ever go to a sailor’s town?” He was a pretty righteous man, so he blushed and sputtered a bit. Then he said, “Not me, not in that sense, but a lot of my ship mates did.” And the inference was the shore leave didn’t turn out well for most of them. As Dad went on to say, in his own modest way, they kept a lot of penicillin on the ship.  

“All things are lawful for me,” says the apostle Paul, “but not all things are beneficial.” “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.”

It’s like the kid who goes into the shopping mall for the first time with a twenty dollar bill. Grandma sent it in a birthday card – twenty dollars! They can do whatever they want with it. They are free to spend it however they wish. Where to go first? Candy store? Clothing store? Get the ears pierced? Get something else pierced? Inevitably they discover most things they want will cost a lot more than twenty dollars, so they can’t wait to come back with more money and get whatever they want. They are free!

That kind of freedom is only an illusion. She is not “her own person.” She is merely a consumer. The consumer is that sub-class of the human species that believes that purchasing gives them purpose, that acquiring the external object will fill the hole in their own souls, that if they can only get more toys they will be content. It’s not freedom; it’s another form of slavery.

To this mindset, the apostle Paul speaks a Christian truth: that we don’t belong to ourselves. We belong to Christ. We are free from living like the rest of the pack because we belong to Christ. We are liberated from the need to consume other things, or consume other people, because our value comes from the love of Jesus, “who bought us at a price.”

In this passage, this is how he refers to the death and resurrection of the Lord, how it has both freed us from sin and death, but bound us to the One who truly gives life. “He bought us at a price.” The language is from the ancient slave market, where redemption meant purchasing a slave in order to set them free. That is the meaning of redemption.

So how should we live as free people? Paul says, “Glorify God with your body.” What a radical thing to say! Some people have always thought religion is supposed to free you from the baggage of flesh and blood, that somehow the liberating ideas will lift us out of our carcasses and closer to heaven. Absolutely not, says Paul. True faith begins by inhabiting our own skin, by walking on our own feet on the land where everybody else walks.

After all, we just celebrated Christmas, the stunning revelation that the Eternal God who is Spirit was found in a human baby named Jesus. The Word took flesh. God spoke in human words. In the human touch of Jesus, God healed aching human bodies and fed human stomachs. The word “spiritual” does not signify something amorphous. St. Athanasius put it this way, “God sanctified the body by being in it.”

Or as the apostle Paul declares in this word to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” By the way, Paul, which comes from God? Our bodies or the Holy Spirit? And the answer is “both.” Because we belong to God, for we’ve been adopted as the children of God. And what we do with our bodies is a reflection of God’s Spirit working in us and through us.

So the youth group kids said to their grandfather, “Grandpa, you have to stop smoking. Your lungs are a temple of the Holy Spirit.” And the mother can say to her teenager, “Please stop eating so much junk food; your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” And the apostle Paul could say to all the Corinthian sailors who were wandering up the hill, “Knock it off; our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit.”

It matters what we do with our skin and bones, it matters what we speak with our tongues and how well we take care of our feet. It matters if our A1-C is too high, or our blood pressure is too low, or if our PSA isn’t staying level. It matters if we don’t get enough exercise, or if we fill our blood stream with addictive substances, or if we intoxicate our minds with too much cable news. Our bodies matter, because our lives matter, because God can work to redeem the world through our bodies.

We know this to be true. In the name of Jesus, we do not feed the hungry by wishing it so; we prepare them meals. In the power of God, we do not comfort the grieving by praying for them from a distance; but by taking their hands and listening to their broken hearts. In the communion of the Holy Spirit, we do not correct the world’s injustices by merely thinking about them; we speak up with our tongues, organize up with our minds, step up with our feet, and push up for change.

Paul remembers his people and says, “You were bought with a price.” Look at the cross and consider the extravagant price!

And when it sinks in how much God has loved us to claim us as God’s own, it will make perfect sense to glorify God with our bodies.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Among the Wild Beasts

Mark 1:4-13

Baptism of the Lord

January 7, 2018

William G. Carter

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’

 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

We baptized a little boy named Henry last Sunday. His family was here. His church family was here. And all the elements of a true Christian baptism were here.

·         There was water: nobody gets baptized in the church without getting wet, and the preacher made sure Henry was good and wet.

·         There was the Word of God: first read from the scripture, then preached from the pulpit, and then pronounced by Henry’s grandfather as he presented the charge: “You belong to God,” I heard him say.

·         The Holy Spirit was here. We trust that as truth; a baptism is more than a social occasion, it’s a holy event, holy because of the presence of God.

So I asked our church administrator to inscribe Henry’s name in our book of records. “Henry Allen Taylor was baptized on December 31.” And that was that.

Well, not so fast. The baptism was done, but it was only the starting place. Now the Christian life begins, and there are going to be some bumps along the way. That’s how it goes for any of us, because that is how it went for Jesus.

As we heard a minute ago, Jesus went to the Jordan River to be baptized. It is his first appearance in the Gospel of Mark. We don’t know anything else about Jesus before he shows up at the river. We won’t know for three more chapters that he had a family. We won’t know until chapter six that he was known to be a wood cutter. We don’t know that Jesus came from a small town in the hill country of Galilee, way up north, far from Jerusalem. His home town was Nazareth, where he was raised, where everybody knew him and he lived a normal life.

As far as the Gospel of Mark cares, the life of Jesus begins when his head is covered with water. That’s when there were signs that God was up to something. Maybe nobody else noticed, but Jesus had a powerful experience. As he came up out of the water, he saw the sky rip open, he saw the Spirit come down on him like a dove. He heard the Voice from heaven: “You belong to me. You are my beloved, and I am delighted in you.”

These were not new words. They are lifted from the treasury of Israel and inscribed in the psalms. If all we remembered from this morning worship service were these words, it would be sufficient. God says, “You belong to me. You are beloved. I am delighted in you.”

But as we heard, that affirmation from God is not the end of the story. Jesus has to make his way forward after that spiritually rich moment. He has to live after the water dries off. By the third chapter of Mark’s book, we know it is going to be a bumpy road.

Not everybody wants to believe that. They think if they belong to God, if they respond to God’s holy claim on their lives, that everything else will go well, that the road ahead is easy street.

After all, didn’t we hear the promise spoken during little Henry’s baptism last week? “God gives us new life and guards us from evil…” And what is the prayer that we say all the time? “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

And we know why we declare the promise and say the prayer: because evil is real and temptation is all around us.”  I don’t need to tell you that; you already know it. And I don’t need to offer any illustrations; they would only make the sermon longer.

So just as soon as Jesus is baptized, he is tempted. It goes on for “forty days.” That’s a biblical euphemism for “a good long time.” It happens in “the wilderness.” That’s not a specific area, so much as a “desolate place.” It’s the lonely spot, the isolated location, the abandoned land where you have to work out the struggle.

Satan is there, not with a pitchfork and red pajamas, but in a business suit and a power tie. He is looking respectable and sounding helpful, because that is how temptation always comes. As Fred Craddock once said, “No self-respecting Satan would approach a person with offers of personal, social, and professional ruin. That is in the small print at the bottom of the temptation.”[1] Jesus is going to have to see the small print and do the hard work of sorting out the right thing to do.

And if that weren’t trouble enough, the Gospel of Mark says, “Jesus was with the wild beasts.”

First time somebody heard this in a Bible study, they said, “Oh, it’s like the prophet Isaiah once declared, the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the lion and the fatling together.” No, not exactly. The Greek word for wild beast signifies an animal with teeth, a snarling, hungry animal that can do real harm. You know, lions and tigers and bears. We cannot minimize the danger, simply because Jesus is baptized and belongs to God.

But here’s the thing. While Mark doesn’t specify the GPS coordinates of the “wilderness,” most folks of that time would generally know where the barren landscapes were. The tour buses still point them out. And according to the wildlife biologists, there probably weren’t lions and tigers and bears nearby.

No, these were another kind of wild beasts. If not literal, they were certainly symbolic, and they were real. Mark may be suggesting the kinds of beasts that all of us have to contend with, even if we never go to wild frontier or the zoo.

A lot of us know the well-worn but still helpful tale of the Cherokee chief teaching his grandson about life. “There’s a fight going on inside me,” he said to the boy, “a fight between two hungry wolves.”

One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

That struggle of good versus evil is always with us. It is as old as the Garden of Eden, and as new as the latest Star Wars movie. We never outrun it.

But two things to learn from the Bible story we have heard today. First, Jesus goes into the wilderness because the Holy Spirit of God pushes him into the wilderness. Actually the verb is more forceful than that: the Spirit hurls him into the wilderness. He must go, and he must work through what it means to belong to God and not to belong to evil. It is the inevitable struggle, and if Jesus can’t face it, he will not be able to relate to us in our struggles, nor will he be qualified to save us in our weakness.

And the second thing to note is that, even though Satan is suggesting temptations, even though the wild beasts are lunging to claim his soul, Jesus is not alone. The Spirit of God that sends him to face temptation is also sending the angels to feed him, to sustain him, to provide him with daily bread, clarity of vision, and courage to do what’s right.

He is not alone, and neither are we. Even in those moments when God’s whisper of affirmation is a faint memory, even after the water of baptism has dried up, we can still ask for help. Whether the angels come in visible form or stay unseen, they are with us.

For God has already declared, “You belong to me. You are my beloved, and I am delighted with you.” As we come to the Lord’s Table again, we affirm that it’s all true. We can step out of our own struggles for the moment, take in the presence of Christ in bread and cup, and find the strength to keep going on the journey.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Fred B. Craddock, “Test Run,” in The Christian Century, 22 February 2003, p. 29. Retrieved from http://www.religion-online.org/blog/article/test-run-mark-19-15/