The trouble with going to Ridgecrest conference center for a week is that you tend to forget how diverse a nation we are. If you were to spend too long at a place like Ridgecrest, you would get to thinking that everybody was Baptist, and Baptist of the southern variety, that everybody gobbled grits for breakfast and everybody elongated one syllable words into two syllables – see-yun instead of sin, he-yup instead of help. Honestly, it's the most down-home place I've been in a long while, and it sure does help me polish up my twang. Hope you can understand me today.
But the trouble with going to such a place is that you begin to think that everybody shares the same outlook, everybody does the same things. You would think even that everybody looked alike, except that five folks from Takoma and three from Miami did lend a certain variety to the crowd, thank goodness. You would get the impression that the whole world is just one big Southern Baptist church, grooving on the gospel, nibbling ice cream cones, and amening hot preaching.
But then you come back to Washington. Then you come back to reality. And in the real world, there are not only Baptists, there are Buddhists, backsliders, and Benedictine monks. In the real world, where you and I are called to live, there are not only folks who are like us, Christians, sharing a world view and a moral stance, but there are others, many others, who do not share that outlook and who do not live by that stance. The world you and I know best is not caught up in sermons and hymns, scriptures and prayers, but is trapped instead in the pursuit of wealth and in the relentless quest for pleasure. The world you and I experience once we leave this place is not especially concerned about who we are as believers or what we are undertaking here. Instead the concerns revolve around getting ahead, staying ahead, finding some kind of meaning, harboring at least a little happiness before the end comes and snatches it all away. We live, I am saying, in a world which is incredibly diverse, which does not necessarily accept or understand what you and I are about – assuming, that is, that we are serious Christian disciples – and which places some pressures on us - pressures to erode our identity.
And we have to decide how we are to respond; we have to decide just what it is going to mean to live in a world where the enormous variety of styles of life that surround us are always calling into question our way of living, our way of being.
The Christians of the first century had to struggle with that, too, as you might expect. A tiny minority within the massive multicultural, yet monolithic Roman empire, they found that it was not always easy to identify who they were and to make it stick. They found their own values getting lost amid all the competing ways of life. And nowhere did that problem express itself more completely and more pointedly than at the church in Corinth. These Corinthian Christians presented their mentor, the apostle Paul, with what may sound to you like a rather silly problem; but when you examine it closely, you find that it has all kinds of implications.
The problem that the Corinthian Christians asked Paul to help them resolve was this: Shall we eat meat offered to idols? Are we permitted to eat meat that has been offered as a part of pagan sacrifices?
Well, you and I feel no pain about that, because we do not confront exactly the same set of circumstances. But my thesis is that we confront it in a different guise. What was the issue, what was the problem with this meat?
The problem, in Paul's mind, was that if you share in the practices of the pagans, if you let ungodly practices feed you, then you are placing yourself under the influence of the demonic. If you begin to blur badly the distinction between yourself and your non-Christian neighbor by doing what he does and putting yourself in his frame of reference, then you are toying with something that will erode your relationship to Christ. Paul says, "What is sacrificed on pagan altars is offered to demons, not to God. And I do not want you to be partners with demons." Paul is telling us we have to recognize that we are part of a distinctive, different, differentiated community of people, and that however much we might like just to play along with the crowd in order to get along, we are about to fall headlong into a demonic trap.
As you and I this weekend think about our nation and our place in it, we will doubtless hear a good deal of talk about American as a Christian nation. Somebody will talk about a nation under God; somebody else will call for more Bible reading in the public schools. Did you know that once someone even introduced in Congress a bill that would recognize Jesus Christ as supreme lord of the United States? Well, at first blush that might sound attractive to you and me, but it just wouldn't be the truth, would it? We are not a Christian nation, because we are not a nation of Christians. We are a nation of Christians and Jews and believers in other faiths, we are a nation of unbelievers and of believers in everything. If you don't believe me, just turn in the yellow pages to the category "religious organizations," and that will barely scratch the surface. If you still do not believe me, drive the full length of 16th Street and sample the bewildering variety of American beliefs as expressed in our worship buildings. And again, that's only the beginning. We are not a Christian nation, never have been, not when at the time of the American Revolution only 5% of the population belonged to any church; not when the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution found it much more comfortable to talk in vague and abstract terms about Providence and about Nature with a capital N than to talk about the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let's not get caught up in rhetoric about a Christian nation; I do not believe there is any such thing, to tell the truth.
But what our God calls us to do is to live as a covenant community within this nation, to build our own identity and to crystallize our own way. He tells us that we must affirm that we belong to one another and that we are unique, we are God's creation. We are, says Paul, one bread, and one body. So don't eat the food offered to idols; don't blend in with the woodwork. Be unique, be special, be part of this covenant people that our God is kneading and molding.
And yes, he may put this loaf of bread in the oven too, and the fires will test is, but it will come forth one loaf, one people.
I believe that you and live in a time in which it is in fact more and more important to be clear about what it is to be the church, the covenant community. You see, too many Christians have decided that it was OK to eat the meat offered to idols, that it was OK to adopt the world's values and kind of gloss them over with a thin veneer of piety and thus we'd fit in.
Churches decide to grow and to grow at any price – and you know that I am not opposed to church growth; reaching people is at the heart of our mission – but some churches grow by manipulating people, some churches grow by promising everything from wealth to marital bliss to glowing health. And they have adopted the world's sales techniques; that's losing the distinctive spiritual dimension of our covenant community.
Christian leaders get into marketing entertainment and media images and a whole glut of commercial stuff that has nothing whatever to do with the Gospel; that's robbing us of our distinctives, our difference.
And every day, you and I are faced with whether our membership in the one loaf, the one body, the covenant community, means anything, or whether we will simply blend in with the scenery. Make no waves.
Do you remember that old rhetorical question, which asks, "If they accused you of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you"? Good question still; the only problem is that some of us don't even understand why being a Christian would warrant there being an accusation at all. Why, isn't nearly everybody roughly Christian? Archie Bunker in the show "All in the Family" used to deduce that since he wasn’t Jewish or Catholic, her must be a Protestant, like all "regular people."
No, no. To be a Christian in 20th Century America is to be a unique and distinct species. To be a serious Christian is to turn away from styles of life that are what everybody's doing and to turn to what the only one who matters is doing. To be a substantial Christian is to refuse to dine at the world's table and instead to take nourishment at the Lord's Table; for how could it be clearer than what Paul would tell us?
"You cannot drink from the Lord's cup and also from the cup of demons; you cannot eat at the Lord's Table and also at the table of demons." You cannot have it both ways; either you belong to the general, mainstream, pleasure-seeking culture, or you belong to Christ. And you must decide. You must decide.
And so, you see, it is no light thing to approach this table and here to eat, here to sip. When you come here, you have decided. You have determined that you are going to be a part of the one loaf and the one body, not the many, not the idolatrous, but the one people whom our Christ is choosing for himself.
You cannot drink from the Lord's cup and also from the cup of demons; you cannot eat at the Lord's Table an also at the table of demons. You must decide.
And so I bid you today to examine who you are, whose you are. Will you linger in the world, sampling its wares, feasting on its tasty but ultimately poisonous delicacies? Or will you examine your heart and discover here with the chosen of all the centuries that when we drink from this cup we are sharing in the blood of Christ and when we break and eat this bread, we are sharing in the body of Christ.
Who are you and whose are you? There are many idols, many alternatives ways of life; but there is only one loaf, one body worth sharing.
