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Sermon - February 15th, 2009
When in Rome...
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: I Corinthians 8:1-13
I think it’s a good day to pick on Paul, the Apostle Paul, I mean. There are times when I just love what Paul writes and other times, well… anyway. We don’t really know what Paul looked like. In our Bible there is no description of him. In an early Christian text titled titled Acts of Paul and Thecla Paul is described as a “man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long.” In 2 Corinthians Paul writes that someone else said, “his letters are strong, but his bodily presence is weak” (10:10). From those descriptions, I conclude, he was not much to look at.
Paul wrote about being beaten, shipwrecked, being adrift at sea, in danger from rivers, robbers, and his own people. He survived toil and hardship, hunger and thirst, cold and exposure, and that mysterious affliction he called the “thorn in his flesh” that many have wondered about. It’s a miracle that he was able to get around at all. But he did. To Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Galatia, Collossae, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Athens, Syracuse, Rome—all those places where the sun is shining.
We know him best through his letters, where he bullied, coaxed, cursed, bared his soul, reminisced, complained, theologized, inspired, and exulted. He kept in touch with the churches he started. No internet, just the most primitive kind of letter-writing.
He was a zealot before he was converted; he was a zealot after he was converted. The change was his focus, not his personality. He called himself “a fool for Christ.” He tells the Corinth Church that to the Jews he became as a Jew, to the weak, he became weak, to those under the law and even those outside the law, he became as one of them—all for the sake of the gospel.
He wrote First Corinthians to who was fighting amongst themselves. They had a reputation of being unruly before they met Paul and when they were converted to Christ, that didn’t mean they instantly became nice. Paul spent a year and a half with them, going over the details of their new life in Christ, a life of salvation and holiness. Then he left them for other places.
However, Paul received the news that in his absence the Corinth church had more or less fallen apart. The church had developed factions, their morals were in disrepair, worship had become a selfish grabbing for the super-natural. They were fighting about beliefs, ethics, and who was right or wrong. It was a mess.
So Paul wrote them this first letter to the Corinthians. It was an affectionate letter, but it was also firm, clear, and unswerving. He told them that even though they were making a mess of things, God was still with them. God had not disowned them. He did not disown them, either. In this letter, he took this newly converted church by the hand and went over all the basics again, directing them in how to work all the glorious details of Gods saving love into their love for one another. He told them that God wanted them to love people they don’t agree with. He told them that God’s idea of community and church was a LOT bigger than their idea of community and church. This was not a brand new message. It was Jesus’ message…story after story Jesus told was about opening the doors between each other and outsiders—not closing them. Christ opened the door and opened it wide. But the Corinth church was a very closed community, a symptom of their in-fighting.
Paul also knew that all the knowledge in the world did not make the path of love and reconciliation any easier to follow. Take the dialogue between science and religion for example. Science is far less demanding of me than my faith. I can believe in the big bang theory of evolution without losing one minute of sleep about how much stuff I own. Understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity does not require me to love my neighbors. Science is science. It tells me how the world works. It does not tell me how to live honorably in the world or how to be a good person. However, the more I study Jesus and the gospels, the more I am inspired and called to higher ground. And that higher ground is the way of love.
Paul was leading these new Christians in the way of love. He was saying that between knowledge and love—love is what is needed to govern their lives, knowledge alone is not enough. He said love is much more important than knowledge because not all of us have the same knowledge, but, all of us have the same love—the love of God. So Paul warned them, beware of being so puffed up with knowledge that you behave in a way that destroys your Christian brothers and sisters. And he uses as an example, a very relevant issue of his day—the eating of food that was offered to an idol. Paul says, “Take care, lest this liberty of yours, provided by knowledge, somehow becomes a stumbling block for the weak.” He is saying: Knowledge without love is a stumbling block—if not to you, then definitely to others.
This is not the only place in the Bible that speaks to our ability to trip ourselves up. We human beings have a gift for messing up our lives—some more than others. Some of us have acquired useful maps that guide us through our decisions and choices in life, maps that include our faith and our knowledge, but very few of these maps are in mint condition. My map has scribbles all over it. There’s dotted lines for the shortcuts. An area is circled where strawberries grow all through the summer. There’s a skull and crossbones over the well that has dried up. My life map is always being revised—one road is a definite dead-end, so I back up and try another. I sometimes just feel my way through messes. And if you have a GPS, that voice is always polite, no matter how many wrong turns you take. Not the voice in my head! People don’t need to get angry with me when I mess up—because I’m already angry with myself. And the voice in my head cuts me no slack at all.
Whether the subject is science or our faith, our beliefs are always challenged by our experience. All the time we are searching for a magical formula that will give us everything we need. All the time we are searching for this illusive thing called truth.
A pastor teaching a Sunday School class walked up to the blackboard and wrote three words across the top of it. Religion, superstition, and science. An engineer in the class objected and asked if the words could be re-arranged. The pastor invited him to come to the blackboard and do that. So the engineer got up and erased the word “science” on the right side of the board and re-wrote it directly under “religion.” He left the word superstition on the left side all by itself. He, of course, was asked to explain what he just did and he said, “Science and religion are both searching for truth. They need to be on the same side. When truth and belief come into conflict, it is better to change one’s belief to fit the truth than to change the truth to fit one’s belief.” All you science people here today can think about that for awhile and see if it makes sense to you. I’ll repeat that statement. “When truth and belief come into conflict, it is better to change one’s belief to fit the truth than to change the truth to fit one’s belief.”
What Jesus and Paul said was what matters when we have knowledge and truth and belief is love, and only love. It was the love of God that created us in the first place to be explorers and questioners and seekers of knowledge and truth. God can handle our questions and doubts and messes. But it takes love to make it at all meaningful. It take love to remove the stumbling blocks in our relationships—not knowledge. It is the willingness to walk in another person’s moccasins. It is love that builds us up. That is what Paul meant when he said, “When in Rome, I do as the Romans do.” That is about love and respect and honor. Paul may not have been much to look at, but he sure did love people. He was full of grace and mercy, The Acts of Paul and Thecla says, and sometimes he was like an angel.
Albert Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
A Jesuit paleontologist, named Teilhard de Chardin said, “Less and less do I see any difference between research and adoration.”
It is love that builds us up, reconciles us, heals us, and cleans up our messes. It is love that heals families and churches. It is love that provides meaning to all relationships. It is love that will heal our planet. Our debates do not need to be about who is right and who is wrong. We need a debate about how all our knowledge can be governed by love.
That’s the message Paul gave to a fighting group of brand-new Christian. You have the gifts, he said. You have the knowledge. You have the facts. You have everything it takes—but if you do not have love, then you have nothing. You have to have love—love is the glue that holds a community together, love is what builds us up. Love is what makes everything, all of this, even the messes we create, meaningful.
Amen.