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More Important Than Being Right
a sermon based on 1 Cor. 8:1-13
by Rev. Cindy Weber

When you grow up Baptist in the South, you learn as a young child that there’s not much more important in life than being right. I know. I used to be right about everything. If you didn’t believe it, you could just ask me. When I was in high school, the one real live atheist in our school wrote something like this in my yearbook: Cindy, you have offended me. You think that your way is the only way. You need to understand that there are different ways of looking at the world, etc. I didn’t let it bother me, though. Because I knew I was right.

Looking at this morning’s scripture reading, I’d guess that the church of Corinth was made up of good Baptist folks who, like me during my high school…college…okay, and seminary years, weren’t just always right, and didn’t just know that they were always right, but also let everyone else know that knew that they were always right.

The issue was eating meat sacrificed to idols. Not an issue that’s on most of our front burners today, to be sure. But one that was obviously a BIG DEAL at the time. N. T. Wright says that Corinth was a thoroughly pagan city. This did not, of course, mean merely that most of the inhabitants went from time to time to worship at pagan shrines and temples. It meant that the world view of the entire town was dominated by pagan assumptions, that the visual appearance of the town was dominated by pagan symbolism, that the normal mind set of the average Corinthian was dominated by pagan ideas, pagan hopes, and pagan motivations, and that the normal life style was dominated by pagan practices.

And one of the ways that this played out was in just about every meal that they ate. The next two chapters of Paul’s letter deals with the various levels of this issue – there was private sacrifice, where the worshipper would offer the animal at the temple of the god, and after a token part, sometimes just the hair off the forehead, was burned on the altar, and the priests got their part, then the rest of the meat would be given back to the worshipper, who would throw a banquet, sometimes right there at the temple. So most of the social occasions involved sacrificial meat. There was public sacrifice, sacrifice offered by the state, in other words, and once again, once the token part was burned on the altar, and the priests took their cut, the meat was sold in the market. Some commentaries that I read said that almost all of the meat sold in Corinth had been sacrificed at one time. And to complicate matters further, even that meat that had not been sacrificed had probably been dedicated to a god before being slaughtered. This was due to the ancient belief that evil spirits gained entry into the body through eating food. And so the people would dedicate the meat to a good god that could put up a barrier against the evil spirits (William Barclay).

Now some of the Christians at Corinth thought that all of this was a lot of baloney. Christ had set them free from such superstitions, and they felt that they could eat whatever they darn well pleased. But some of the other Christians instinctively felt that it was wrong to eat meat offered to idols. It was too connected to their former lives.

What this meant for the ‘weaker’ Christians, since just about all the meat in the city had been sacrificed or dedicated, was that they were pretty much vegetarian. And you can see, those of you who are carnivores, you can see how it would be downright painful to give up meat at all, much less for a stupid, wrong, no way this makes any sense at all, reason. You can see why the set-free Christians, who had already figured all of this out in their heads, were looking down upon the ones who hadn’t.

Enter the Apostle Paul. Now Paul, the Big Daddy of [continue]