6th Sunday after Epiphany            Â
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
Solid Food
I will never forget the first time I drove through Wisconsin. It was the summer of 2010, and I was on this epic two-month road trip across the United States with my mom. And, as we crossed the border from Minnesota into Wisconsin, the forests and lakes gave way to rolling green hills, as picturesque as the backdrop of ad for farm fresh dairy. It had been a while since we had seen any buildings or billboards, so it was kind of a surprise when we came around the curve of a hill to be greeted by this gigantic sign in the middle of nowhere, it must have been thirty feet across, ten feet tall, maybe thirty feet up in the air, with a huge pole at the center, holding it up. This enormous yellow sign, with eight-foot-tall capital letters that said “CHEESE.” This giant sign that said “CHEESE,” and above it in letters maybe one-fifth the size, it said, “Restaurant.” “Restaurant CHEESE”, and I thought, yes, we are indeed in Wisconsin.
I had just turned 30, and I didn’t have all of the food issues that I do now, or at least that’s what I thought. And, I was really excited to be in the fabled dairy lands of America, to try Wisconsin milk and cheese, butter and frozen custard. That giant “cheese” sign led us to a restaurant right off the highway, surrounded by those rolling green hills. And, as the sign promised, they did indeed have cheese. It was a restaurant/cheese shop, with dozens upon dozens of different varieties of cheese, and we ordered deep fried cheese curds and a margherita pizza for lunch. And, it was good.
Over the next few weeks, as we made our way across the Midwest and down the East Coast, we had ice cream, and Irish nachos, and cheeseburgers, and fondue, and I kept getting sicker and sicker. I thought I had caught some kind of travel bug. And, by the time we reached my friend in North Carolina, I pretty much had to sleep for an entire day, because I had gotten so weak. I felt so bad and I was so tired. I thought maybe it was the flu, but I started to make the connection between how I was feeling and what I had eaten. I realized that I might have become lactose intolerant, which unfortunately happens to a lot of people when they get to their thirties.
When human beings are infants, we all produce an enzyme called lactase, which helps us to digest milk, because milk is where most of our nutrition comes from when we’re babies. As we grow older, a lot of people start to produce less and less lactase, and that’s what was happening to me. It was time for me to graduate to grown-up food.
I kind of always thought this lactose intolerance thing was a product of our modern culture, but as I look at today’s epistle reading, it makes me wonder if it was happening even back then during Biblical times. “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.”
Of course, here, Paul is using the analogy of food for the way Jesus’ followers were behaving. In the same way that infants are fed with milk instead of solid food, when Paul was with them, he spoke simply. He was introducing them to Jesus’ teachings; this was something new, and he couldn’t give it to them all at once. It would have been overwhelming, and he was worried they wouldn’t understand. He fed them spiritual milk, because they weren’t ready for the deeper, more complex, solid food. In fact, he wrote this letter in part because they were behaving like children, arguing with one another over which leader to follow, saying “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” instead of “I belong to God.”
Paul admonished them, saying “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” Their bickering, their “one-upsmanship” was petty and pointless. What good is it to proclaim oneself as better, when the whole point of following Jesus is building community and working towards making the world a better place for everyone?
Tribalism is always getting us into trouble. It’s one of the most insidious destructive human behaviors, and the cause of so many problems in the world. We are so quick to separate ourselves into different groups, different tribes, pointing out all of our differences, proclaiming that our group is better than the other groups. It’s lizard-brain, infantile behavior, and it doesn’t serve us. The human race needs to graduate to solid food.
Dinner parties are pretty interesting these days, because of all of the different dietary restrictions that people have. I don’t remember having to jump through all of these hoops twenty years ago. We have our gluten-free people, and our vegans. We have people that keep kosher, people who are allergic to shellfish or nuts. We have people who need to avoid sugar or red meat. And we have people like me, who can’t do dairy. Now, we could choose to instead only associate with people who have the same dietary restrictions that we do, but that would be a little silly and more than a little impractical. Why would we stop associating with people just because of what they eat. We’re all mature individuals here; we can figure things out. Does it make dinner more complicated? Yes. Does it mean that there are foods that I might never be able to share with certain groups of people? Probably. But, I’m not going to stop seeing my friends because I’m forced to make a vegan, gluten-free cheesecake every now and then. Being with my friends is more important than the limitations on our meal.
As human beings, we were designed to exist in community with each other. That’s where our focus should be. That’s the solid food. There are so many different kinds of people in the world, and they are a reflection of the infinite nature of God. We were created in God’s image, and when we reject entire groups of people, we are rejecting an aspect of God’s creation. We’re rejecting an aspect of God.
The world is like a giant dinner party of life. Who are we inviting to the table. Are we willing to sit down with people who have a different skin color, or level of education? What about people who come from a different place, or practice a different religion? Are we going to sit down with people who have different political views, or sexual identities? Are we ready to sit down at the table and have solid food, and leave the milk behind? It is time for the human race to grow up. We are not in the business of burning bridges and building fences. We’re in the business of reaching out and building relationships.
Plymouth is currently working with numerous local agencies to find a solution to homelessness in Helena. I think we would be hard-pressed to find a group of people more different than us than the unsheltered population. We’re not looking to get rid of them or to make them feel unwelcome. That would be the simple solution, the milk solution, the solution opposite of what Jesus teaches us to do. The unsheltered are our neighbors, and they are God’s children, just like us. Our desire to help them is solid food. Our willingness to see all people as worthy members of our community, with a right to food, water, safety, and dignity is solid food.
It’s time to leave the milk behind, metaphorically speaking, of course. We need to do the difficult, solid food work that Jesus is calling us to do, because we are all in this together, and none of this works if we aren’t all here. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
