gate-keeping

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 3 (January 21^st) 2024

 

READINGS        

1 Corinthians 8: 1-13

Psalm 139: 62: 5-12

Mark 1: 14-20

 

 

You may notice that the reading from Paul is not the set reading. I would like to claim that this was because I was working to some sophisticated plan, but in fact it is because I read the wrong date in the lectionary.

It is a strange reading. To make sense of Paul at any time we need to know the context to which he was writing. The new Christian believers there were playing up, and some of them are doing so in quite despicable ways.

Some of us will have seen churches with the old pews reserved for specific donors and verboten to mere hoi polloi. But the nearest to reserved family pews we see now is probably at funerals and weddings, when pews are set aside for those most central to the event at hand.

One of many things that was happening in a very bad way in Corinth, was that the wealthy and the powerful had slipped into habits of pride and arrogant self-preferment. In many ways the superficialities of our passage shouldn’t delay us too much. At that level we’re probably going to engage with questions of little more gravitas than whether or not we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant. Paul’s answer at surface level is simple: will it hurt the faith of those we’re eating with? It’s not a particularly important question outside of Auckland anyway – I’m not even sure if they still run the restaurant that I used to eat and argue at in Queen Street, though I did find one in Brisbane.

But there are deeper questions here. What in my lifestyle detracts from the claims that the gospel makes on me? I remember years ago encountering Ronald Sider’s seminal book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Sider, an American Evangelical from an era before that phrase was irrevocably tainted,  powerfully reminded Global North Christians like me that our comparative opulence dismantles, for those living and dying in refugee camps, at the claims we make for a God of love.

Where, you might ask, is all that in a passage about food offered to idols? A wonderful Roman Catholic researcher named Jerome Murphy-O’Connor was one of the first to bring to my attention if not to the attention of biblical interpreters full stop, that the poor of Corinth could not afford meat unless it was effectively second hand.

Second hand meat sounds a putrid concept, but what was meant that the meat that was offered to idols and not eaten by said idols was then often on-sold to Corinthians with limited budgets. There are questions of social justice and even education going on here. The so-called “strong” in Paul’s letter, to use a word borrowed from Romans but which does not appear here, are effectively rubbing the noses of the so-called “weak” in their lesser knowledge and faith. The so-called strong were not necessarily spiritually stronger, but economically more powerful: perhaps we can think again of the wealthier families who insured that as they sat in the better pews, closer for example to the heaters: the poor were left with only what the Syrophoenician woman called the scraps left under the table. Paul will have none of that.

The so-called “strong” operating their spiritual as well as their economic superiority. Paul refers several times particularly in the Corinthian letters to those who are “puffed up” with self importance. Here too he approaches the criticisms that Jesus levels if the scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Paul had no time, just as Jesus had no time, for any kind of arrogance, spiritual, economic, or worse: both. And the forms that this can take are often very subtle. If the Anglican church has a tendency to its own form of sin it is that we can too easily demand a high level of literacy, and even in some places badges of social standing, to become a prerequisite to membership. I have told here before the story of the tattooed Māori friend of mine who was told that she had come to the wrong church.

I don’t think that is a problem for our faith community. But we are called to look at the sometimes subliminal barriers that we erect around our faith. As part of my historical research I’m finding that with the very best of intentions our forebears in the church contributed to the loss of two generations by somewhat condescending attitudes towards younger generations trying to find their way and their voice in life. The attitude was as if the church gatekeepers of the time had adopted the stance of the strong in Corinth, and the result was the empty pews that dominate our narrative today.

Every time I encounter this passage in Corinthians and its sibling passage in Romans I find myself wondering how we can do better, how we can better exercise the responsibilities of open access to the faith and the joy and the love that we have found in Christ. In the year ahead I hope we can look at many ways in which we as Christ bearers can improve our profile in the society in which we have been called to live. We are custodians here of what is really both a sacred site and a sacred drama. Our task is to make it as open and accessible as possible.