Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them, take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

They were hungry, so they ripped meat off the bone with their dirty hands and shoved it in their mouths.  Food scraps were scattered across the table.  No forks, spoons or individual cups.  Cider pots were passed across the table to the person who wanted a drink.  Sounds like a typical dinner across the street at the Fiji house on steak night—right.  I should know.  I participated in many.  But actually, it’s a description of how people ate in the year 1650.  It comes from a book called “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.”  In addition to describing such lovely colonial table manners, the book explains how choices about food shaped cultural and political identities back in the earliest days of our country.

You’ve heard the expression, “You are what you eat.”  Well, this idea applies to entire countries as well as to individual citizens.  Decisions about which crops to grow and what food to eat had an impact on regional identities in colonial times.  Take the Pilgrims for instance.  They quickly found that there was a problem with the Massachusetts soil—it would not grow wheat, a fundamental crop for proper English families.  Corn was much better suited to New England soil, but back in their homeland corn was something that you fed to pigs.  In time, with starvation always a possibility, the Puritans began to copy the Native Americans and grow corn, and after a while they even began to like it (I’m glad they went with it personally, I like corn).  But when colonial leader John Winthrop visited London and made the case that corn was completely fit for human consumption, people looked at him as if he were recommending that they eat dog food.  Winthrop returned to Massachusetts and began to realize that his people weren’t as English as they used to be.  The British peoples scorn of colonists’ decision to rely on corn as a staple in their diet added to the distance and enmity that would, along with many other things, lead to revolution.

What you eat and how you eat it can sometimes define a person for right or wrong.  You are what you eat.  It’s as true today as it was in Colonial America or for that matter in the Corinthian church of the first century.  In I Corinthians, the apostle Paul addresses the critical question of whether or not Christians ought to eat food that was sacrificed to idols.  In his response, Paul gives the church in Corinth instructions in the proper table manners that they need as they sit down as one community together—appropriate behavior for the family meal.

Now it’s important for us to realize that idol-meat was found all over the city of Corinth.  You see the people in Corinth, as a part of their gentile and pagan rituals, frequently sacrifice an animal to a Greek god or goddess, burn some of the meat on an altar, and then eat some of it in a ritualistic meal.  Then, and here’s the issue, the remainder of the sacrificed animal was sold to a local meat market, which then turns around and resells it to the public.  It’s kind of gross, but economical—you can probably get a pretty good deal on slightly used idol-meat.

The prevalence of idol-meat poses a problem for Christians of Corinth who don’t want to be associated with meat sacrificed to a Greek deity.  You see many of these early Corinthian Christian converts still think of idols which they formerly worshipped as having potency—that is the power to taint or defile meat.  Thus given their choice, they won’t ever eat such meat, but, as I mentioned, it’s tough to avoid, since it can pop up at the local market, or at a neighbor’s dinner party, or at some important civic festival.

So what’s a Christian to do?  Well Paul begins by reminding the Corinthian church that “no idol in the world really exists”—that is they are not alive or real in any physical or spiritual sense.  They have no potency or power over anything.  Therefore, meat that is offered to an idol is really offered to nothing more than a block of wood or stone.  Paul says, “There is no God but one…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, our one God, from whom are all things, has power even over food that has been sacrificed to idols.  So all meat is the same, sacrificed or not, it all is part of God’s creation which is good.  As a person who enjoys a medium-rare rib-eye from time to time, this is real good news.  As the ad campaign says, “Beef it’s what’s for dinner!”   

Problem is, not everyone has this knowledge or perception.  Part of the Corinthian church is going to continue to see eating meat sacrificed to an idol as an act that defiles the soul—no matter what Paul says.  Like British aristocrats who look at corn and think “pig food,” there are Corinthian Christians who will continue to look at idol-meat and think “pagan poison.”  Eating sacrificed meat themselves or seeing those they love partake of it will become a spiritual stumbling block for them.  Therefore, according to Paul, the most loving course to take is for the Corinthians to do their best to avoid eating idol-meat—particularly around those brothers and sisters that it offends.  He recommends these table manners not out some sort of misguided religious piety, but out of love.  He knows that there is really nothing poisonous to the soul about idol-meat, but as a compassionate person he doesn’t want to do anything to cause a brother or sister to stumble.  “If food is a cause of their falling” concludes Paul, “I will never eat meat.”  Paul’s refusal to eat shows that he is both compassionate and values love above knowledge.  More than anything else, he wants to behave in a way that nourishes, strengthens, and builds up the Christian community.

What a different church we would be if everyone followed Paul’s example.  What a more hospitable and compassionate community we would be if we only used Paul’s table manners when sitting down at a family meal together.  Think about it.  Instead of fighting over political positions, we would put our passion into outdoing each other in love.  Instead of picking on our theological opponents, we would put effort into picking up any person who has stumbled and fallen.  Instead of judging people who have different racial, national, cultural or sexual identities, we would work on tearing down walls of separation and ignorance and seek to truly know those who are different from us.

That’s the kind of behavior that you want around your dinner table—isn’t it.  “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” says Paul.  He knows that knowledge can lead to a certain puffiness or arrogance but love inspires compassionate attitudes and actions that succeed in building up the church.  By focusing on the way of love, we can become a community in which people of different views can actually get along—and even more than that—learn from one another and grow together into a new creation.  One of my favorite authors a Lutheran pastor named Walter Wangerin, Jr. writes, “Every time you meet another human being you have an opportunity.  It’s a chance at holiness.  For you will do one of two things, then.  Either you will build him up, or you will tear him down.  Either you will acknowledge that he is, or you will make him sorry that he is—sorry at least, that he is there, in front of you.  You will create, or you will destroy.  And the things you dignify or deny are God’s own property.  They are made, each one of them, in his own image.”

In this teaching, Paul is calling us to focus on building relationships of mutuality and love and to focus our energy on the principles and values we share, such as, our common proclamation that Jesus is Lord and Savior of all.  These are the table manners we need to practice if we’re going to be able to sit down and eat as one family of faith.  These are the qualities that a church community has to embrace if it is going to avoid letting well-intentioned differences of opinion turn into passionate food fights.

When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they assumed that the best food to eat was the food they had always eaten.  They had grown up with wheat, so they felt strongly that wheat was what a good Christian family was supposed to eat.  But wheat-eaters starve in New England—the soil simply won’t support it.  So the Pilgrims had to focus on corn, and they found that this new food enabled them to survive and even thrive.  So, what are we going to eat around our Christian dinner table today?  The food we have consumed in the past, the stomach-turning wheat of fear and judgment?  Or are we going to adapt to the new corn of strong relationships rooted in love and shared values, such as, proclaiming the Gospel and reaching out to those in need?

God wants us to be well nourished as a community of faith, and strong enough to do his work in the world. God knows that we are what we eat, and our choices about food shape our identity as a people of faith.  That’s why he gives us Jesus, the Bread of Life.  That’s why he offers us the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  God wants us to be healthy and satisfied and strong.  If we will eat our fill of these, surly we’ll be minding our manners.  Amen.

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