I grew up with the Star Wars movies (the original trilogy, thank you), and then acquired some Star Trek fandom in college, so I have a warm spot in my heart for a fair amount of technobabble.
You know, the sort of thing where the ship appears to shudder and someone shouts: “Commander LaForge, we have a failure in the spatial subharmonic particle conduit!”
And then they talk about how they’ll route the positronic flux through the neucleonic plasma conduit (or something) instead, but have to replace the metaphasic generator before they can go to warp again.
Listening, you get what you need to know to move the plot along – something’s wrong, we have a temporary fix, but there’s going to be more trouble before the end of the episode – but the dialogue itself is, well, nonsense. Recognizable-sounding words that mean something to the characters in the drama, but are complete babble to real people.
Dropping into Paul’s letters on a Sunday morning can be a lot like that. Dense spiritual or theological language that means something important to Paul, words we recognize, but the subject matter – and some of the vocabulary – is far enough removed from most of our day-to-day lives that none of us can be blamed for not being able to tell what Paul is actually talking about – even if we get enough to move the plot along.
But sometimes the babble effect means that the main point of the plot gets lost.
Now, maybe you’re one of the folks for whom Paul’s message came through perfectly clearly when Joan/Peter read it to us this morning.
But in case you don’t have the Social and Religious Customs of First Century Corinth translator handy, I can tell you that this morning we heard Paul offering his unvarnished opinion on whether Christians can legitimately eat the meat which was available in the local market because the animals had been sacrificed to one of the locally important gods.
And…that’s where everyone in the city buys their meat.
Christians know that there’s only one God, yes, who we know through Jesus. So is eating meat that “belongs” to Apollo worshipping Apollo, or not?
Paul has a personal opinion on the issue (we know those gods aren’t GOD, so of course eating their meat isn’t blasphemy and idol-worship), but his main point is that the issue here is not really whether you eat meat or not – the issue is not really food – it’s love.
Love of God, love of neighbor – particularly, love of your siblings in Christ.
In fact, whatever the issue his friends at Corinth are bringing him – idol meat, lawsuits, speaking in tongues, other people’s family relationships – the issues, questions, anxieties, and problems facing the congregation in Corinth are never the real issue for Paul. The only real issue is love.
Love of God.
Love of neighbor.
(And also the transformative resurrection of Christ from the dead.
But even that, when Paul comes right down to it, only matters because it reveals the overwhelming love and grace of God.)
What matters – what only, ever, matters, at the end of every one of Paul’s detail-filled, run-on theologibabble sentences – is love.
Love of God.
Which, when the rubber meets the road, is also love of neighbor.
Especially the neighbor who is your sibling in Christ, your fellow believer, the amazing – or amazingly annoying – person in the next pew.
Facing persecution and the death of your community? Keep your focus. What matters is love.
Got your hands on the most amazing prophecy ever? Whatever. What matters is love.
You’re cranky because your sibling in the next pew is criticizing your decision to go to a party at the temple of Aphrodite? Listen up, friend, you may be fine with that spiritually, but what matters is love.
In this particular case we heard about today, the action of love is to stop eating the meat that’s not hurting you if there’s any chance it’s going to hurt your sibling.
Sort of the same way that when one person in my family tested high on the cholesterol charts, we all stopped eating beef and butter at our shared dinner table.
There are folks in the congregation at Corinth who know just as well as you do that Poseidon isn’t real and our God is the all and only God, but for whom indulging in a steak off of one of Poseidon’s bulls still deeply and truly would mean supporting the worship of Poseidon. Eating that feels like having to tell a lie – a very important and spiritually damaging lie.
And if your sibling has to wrestle through that painful lie with everyone in their social circle who sees you – known to be a worshiper of Jesus – indulging in a Poseidon steak…. Well, just cut it out.
Love means actions – means not doing things that cause a family member, a fellow believer, pain – more than love has ever meant feeling kindly toward someone.
Love – the love that’s the only thing that matters, the love of God and neighbor that’s the only issue ever – love is an action verb.
Love is our choices to do what builds other people up.
What builds the community up.
Whether that’s going vegetarian to protect the conscience of the person in the next pew whose uncle is giving him crap about the leaders of his little “one God” sect “worshipping” beef from Poseidon’s altar,
or giving up your Saturday morning plans to make sure hungry folks get a decent lunch,
or showing up for a project or event to make sure a few people don’t have to get it done all alone,
or introducing yourself to someone for the third time to make sure no one is standing alone at coffee hour even though you’re embarrassed you can’t remember their name.
Love builds up,
shows up for relationships so reliably that you know you’re never going to be left with no support in trouble, or no companions in joy.
Love builds up,
always saying the thing that gives courage and hope,
always choosing to let go of the complaint or argument that pushes friends apart.
Love builds up,
looking for opportunities to be generous, selfless, encouraging, forgiving, kind,
and acting in those ways, every chance we get.
I know Paul’s friends in Corinth needed to hear that.
(if) You read his whole letter, it sounds like they were having a lot of struggles, anxiety, and stress about how to be a good church, a strong and welcoming community, a beacon of hope and faith in a time and place when it really wasn’t easy to be church, to be Christian.
And I know I need to hear it, we might need to hear it, now.
Because you and I live in a time and place when – in different ways and for different reasons – it’s not easy to be church, to be Christians.
We are facing some challenges to the ways we’ve known how to be church – changes to our budget and program that we’ll talk about at the annual meeting today, and also changes in the way the world around us supports or challenges us in our faith. And any of that could raise our anxiety about how we, how Trinity, will be a good church, a strong and welcoming community, a beacon of hope and faith.
And I suspect, if Paul sat down at our annual meeting today – if he talked with us about what’s in our budget and what’s not, and anything else we’re worried about, or excited about this year - in our individual lives as well as in our church life – I suspect he’d have a definite opinion (Paul always has a strong opinion) – but I suspect he’d also say to us: it’s not the budget that’s the issue. It’s not the programs or the dollars or the worries or the excitement. None of that’s the issue. It’s love.
Love of God.
Love of one another.
Focus on love.
Because love builds up.
Love of God builds our spirits stronger as we find ourselves known and embraced by the power and presence that gives us life.
Love of one another builds our hearts and our community, generous and hope-filled and patient and encouraging and rejoicing in our life together.
Love builds us up.
Love addresses every crisis; love makes the ordinary matter.
Love is where we begin our story, and where we end.
And no matter how technical the dialogue gets in the middle, no matter how complicated, tense, or boring the plot, no matter what else is at issue,
love is only point we cannot miss,
the only word we really need to understand.
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