Big Deals?

"Big Deals?"
1 Corinthians 8:1-13

I’ve been thinking back through my 40 years of ministry, and the churches I have served.  I’ve been thinking about the ups and downs in each of those congregations.  What were the big issues?  What did I have to deal with, and how did I gain experience along the way?

Most of the issues that I’ve had to deal with in churches weren’t that big.  But the people involved thought they were big deals.

For example, in my first church, there were two semi-elderly brothers.  They co-owned an automobile repair shop.  They were mechanics.  Omar and Wilbur Chard.  They got along fine, but their wives hated each other.  It was awful.  Their gossip about each other was vicious.  Any way they could bring others into their feud, they tried.

Including me.  But I wasn’t smart enough to see it until it was too late.  I was right out of seminary, and I had no idea what I was doing.  And I certainly wasn’t ready for these two women.

Here’s how it went.  Omar’s wife came to my office one day and said, “There’s a question about the women’s group in church.”
I said, “Oh, tell me about it.”
She said, “Well, we can’t decide if we should just be a women’s association, or if we should be affiliated with Presbyterian Women.”

I was a pretty staunch Presbyterian loyalist back then, so I suggested the women’s group affiliate with Presbyterian Women.  If they ever needed support, the Presbyterian Women’s organization could do that.  The Bible studies they put out were first rate, and the women could use those.  There’s a ready made structure, so officers wouldn’t have to invent things on the fly.  I told Omar’s wife all this and she smiled, and thanked me.  Evidently, I had pleased her by my answer.  In other words, she agreed with me.

But Wilbur’s wife wanted to just have a Women’s Association, and leave the denomination out of it.  I did not know that.  Nor did I know about the two women’s feud.  Omar’s wife reported her conversation with me to Wilbur’s wife and told her I was going to organize a Presbyterian Women’s group.

That’s when it all hit the fan.  All of a sudden there were all these rumors about me, and gossip about me, that wasn’t true at all.  For example, I had people mad at me because they heard that I didn’t stand up for the National Anthem at high school basketball games, which was a blatant lie.   But I had no way to defend myself against what was being said all around that small town, nor did I know where all that was coming from.  Of course, I finally found out it was Wilbur’s wife who was starting all those rumors (which she flatly denied) because she was mad about the Presbyterian Women’s deal.  It went down hill pretty fast after that, and I barely lasted two years.

Fortunately, I had some wiser members who came to me and let me in on what was going on and which of these two women were stirring up what.  The real issue wasn’t having a women’s association vs. having a Presbyterian Women’s group.  That was immaterial to the big issue—which was these two women who were using the congregation (and me) to beat each other over the head.  They were the real issue that needed dealing with.

I got some really good advice from a fellow Pastor, for how to deal with the two women and their dysfunctional families, because I was in over my head.  Sadly, none of that great advice worked, and I moved after only two years.  Which was the average stay of all the pastors in that church’s 100 year history.  So at least I hit the average.


My experience in that first church was Paul’s experience at Corinth.  Only his was 10 times worse.  Corinth was a congregation full of feuding people—the rich and the poor, the Jews and the Gentiles, the citizens and non-citizens, and the Christian converts and the converts who still wanted to hold on to some of their pagan practices.  It was awful.  And like what happened to me, Paul got pulled into the middle of it all before he knew what hit him.

One of the issues in Corinth, that some felt was a big deal, was what are you supposed to do with food offered to idols?  Here’s the thing.  A lot of animals were brought into Corinth to be killed on the altars in pagan temples.  It was a huge amount of animal deaths.

So, all those animals, after being killed on the altars, were butchered and the meat was sold in the market place.  It was a great way to get meat at a fairly cheap price.

So the Christian converts, who were really working hard to stay on the straight and narrow, would not buy any of that meat.  To them, it was a slap against God and the life of purity to buy and eat meat killed on a pagan altar.

Other Christians didn’t think it was that big of a deal.  Meat is meat.  As long as it’s fresh and not going bad, who cares where it came from?  They, themselves, didn’t sacrifice the animals on a pagan altar.  They were just buying butchered beef.  They felt, if God was going to look down his nose at them for buying that kind of meat, there was something messed up about Christian beliefs.

People on both sides of this issue were nearly coming to blows.  I remember Christian friends in college who wouldn’t eat in a Chinese restaurant if there was a statue of Buddha there, or Buddhist icons decorating the walls.  To them, it was joining themselves to something that was not Christian, and in fact against Christ.  I just wanted good Chinese food.  I didn’t care.  But some of those friends would look down their noses at me and tell me I wasn’t a real Christian because I wasn’t keeping my life pure from ungodly things.

That’s what was happening in Corinth between people in the church.  But that wasn’t the real issue.  That wasn’t the big issue, in Paul’s mind.  We see that by what he writes in the opening verses of chapter 8.  He doesn’t even address the food-from-idols thing until verse 4.

What Paul addressed in those opening verses was the broken relationships and the fractures in the congregation because of the meat issue.  That, to Paul, was the big deal.  The sense of fellowship and community was being undermined, and that was the most dangerous problem.  Relationships were being disrupted.

There were a couple of things that were disrupting the relationships in the Corinthian church.  The first, highlighted by Paul, is the difference between knowledge and imagination.  Or we might say, the difference between knowledge and opinion.

The word Paul used for knowledge means actual, scientific, verifiable knowledge.  Or it can mean moral wisdom—that is, knowing what is actually right or wrong.

In our culture, all that is messed up.  Right is wrong, and wrong is right.  Up is down, and left is right.  Everyone gets confused.  But as Christians, Paul says God gives us the moral and spiritual ability to see through all the smoke in order to see clearly.

On the other side of that, Paul wrote that some imagine about what is right or wrong, good or bad.  The word he used literally means “to seem.”  It appears you know stuff, but it’s all appearances.  It is more along the lines of, “To be of the opinion...”. So it’s more about one’s opinion, seemingly knowing stuff, but in the end it’s just your opinion.

One of the words we use for this kind of personal or world view is “perception.”  This word has become firmly entrenched in our vocabulary on both sides of any issue.  “That’s not what really happened; that’s just your perception of what happened.”  To say that everything is merely one’s perception is to cloud any possibility for truth or actuality.

Can we ever really know?  Dr. Phil likes to say, “Perception is everything.”  If that is true (which would be the only true thing you could say), how can we know anything?  What is truth if it all comes down to individual perception?

So Paul is saying, in order for relationships to flourish in the church, they have to be built on knowledge and truth, rather than mere opinion, imagination, or individual perception.


Then Paul takes it a step further.  He has just said that relationships need to be founded on knowledge and truth, but then throws in a caution.  He says there’s a difference between knowledge and love.  Or warns against knowledge without love.

First he says that knowledge is always incomplete.  But that’s different from saying you can’t know anything.  No one can know everything there is to know about any one subject—even if it’s about eating meat that came from idol altars, or whether a church should have a women’s association or Presbyterian Women’s group.

I was talking to a Dr. friend of mine who said if he read an article a day that had to do with his field of medicine, at the end of the year he’d be seven years behind in reading all he could have read that was published that year.  That should keep a person humble about how knowledgeable they think they are.

That’s why Paul wrote that the danger of knowledge is that it “puffs up” a person rather than keeping them humble.  If you think and say you are a genius and the smartest person on the planet in an egotistical way, it doesn’t make it so.  To say something like that is to only puff yourself up, which doesn’t serve anyone.  And someone will come along who actually is one of the smartest people on the planet and make you look like an ape trying to learn sign language.

In contrast to that, Paul wrote “...love builds up.”  There’s an understood object in Paul’s statement—us.  In other words, “Love builds (us) up.”  Love is not self-oriented but other oriented.  Love is us oriented.  Love is about building up the community of faith, rather than being self-serving.  Love is concerned with the good of all in the church.

That’s why the two women’s gossipy actions were so destructive to the church in that town.  They were concerned with their own self-inflated knowledge and opinions, rather than with a love that would keep the church from splitting into factions.  About five years after I left, that church split, and the presbytery came in and shut it down.  A lot of it had to do with those two women.  In the end, who won?  Nobody.


So, what are the big deals?  It usually isn’t about the petty squabbles about idol meat or women’s groups.  The big deals are when relationships are being torn apart, and people are not acting out of a love that will build the other up.   The big deals are about dividing and destroying rather than loving and building up.