Sermon — January 28, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Last week, a YouTube video entitled “Police Called to Stop Filming During Piano Livestream” went viral, receiving over 7.5 million views in five days. It’s a thirty-minute video in which Brendan Kavanagh, a British teacher-turned-YouTuber, sits down at the public piano in St Pancras Station in London and begins playing, while a friend live streams video from a phone camera. Every few minutes, you see people stop by to watch for a while as he plays, then wander on. About ten minutes in, a woman approaches and he steps away from the piano. offering her a chance to play. Instead, she asks him whether he’s been recording, and tells him that she’s part of a group who are there to record a holiday greeting for a Chinese TV station;. They’ve signed a contract that says their images and voices can’t be used for anything else, and she wants him to remove them from the video.
This is where things go downhill. She asks him not to publish the video. He responds by saying that they’re in Britain, not in China, and that he’s allowed to film in public. The argument continues, and escalates, until they accuse him of racism and assault and call the police.
Two officers respond. One of them explains to the group that if they’re in public, he has the right to film. The other officer looks exhausted. She and the piano player are on first name terms. It’s clear she’s had to deal with him before. She keeps asking him to turn off the camera so they can talk without it going on his YouTube channel; he keeps responding that they’re in Britain, it’s a free country, and he has the right to film in a public place. And around and around they go, for thirty minutes of video: “Could you please respect people’s privacy when they ask you to?” vs. “I have the right to film them”—and, by the way, the right to make money off the video. Based on the YouTube views, I’d say he’s made tens of thousands of dollars this week.
If you replaced the piano player with the Christians in the ancient city of Corinth, and the very tired police officer with the very tired apostle Paul, you’d have our Epistle this morning, live-streamed to millions of viewers. Each situation exemplifies the same simple but important truth: Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Paul spends much of the First Letter to the Corinthians responding to some questions about community disputes, quoting parts of their questions and giving his replies. In this chapter he turns to an argument over whether it’s okay to eat meat that’s been sacrificed to idols—and at this point, your eyes may have glazed over, because this is not exactly a hot-button issue for the 21st-century church.
So by way of context: eating meat, in the Corinthians’ world, religious sacrifice was an ordinary form of meat production. An animal would be brought to the temple of one of the various gods, and slaughtered. Some parts would be burned as an offering to the god, some parts given to the priests, and the rest used for a feast. The poorer people in the city would rarely have the chance to eat meat, except when it was distributed freely as part of a religious festival; the wealthier or more prestigious would often be invited to dine in the temple banquet hall, as part of civic or social events, which is what Paul’s mostly talking about. And this is a problem, for the Corinthian Christians, because they are just a few dozen converts living in a fully-pagan society.
Paul’s taught them to worship the one God of his own Jewish people, and to stay away from the worship of idols, from the traditional pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. But this would have a social cost. If they’re to avoid meat that’s been sacrificed to idols, the Corinthian Christians would have to stay away from family holidays and public celebrations; they’d have to turn down invitations to go out to eat.
But some of the Corinthians realize there’s a loophole. “All of us possess knowledge,” they write to Paul. (1 Cor. 8:1) We know that there really is “no God but one,” that “no idol in the world really exists.” (1 Cor. 8:4) We know, they say, that the Roman gods like Mars and Venus and Jupiter aren’t real, so we know that we’re not really worshiping them when we eat this food that’s been offered in their honor. The idols aren’t a temptation to us. We know it’s nothing but a meal. So we have every right to eat in their temples; we’re not worshiping any other god.
Now, I’m not sure their argument really works. But Paul doesn’t try to engage in a theological dispute. He simply replies: You know that it’s nothing but a meal; but not everyone does. (8:7) Your faith in the one God of Israel is strong; others’ faith is weak. You’re the leaders of the church; but what if one of the new members comes along, and sees you eating in the temple of some other god, and doesn’t realize that you’ve got your fingers crossed behind your back? What kind of an example are you setting if you lean on your deep understanding of theology to avoid having to change anything about your actual lives?
It’s pretty simple, Paul writes. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (8:1) Maybe on a theological level you have the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols, but all that does is puff you up. On the practical level you have the chance to love your neighbors, to help them turn away from idols and toward God, but you’ve chosen to make life easy for yourself instead. So “by your knowledge those weak believers are destroyed.” (1 Cor. 8:11)
The strongest Corinthian believers may well have the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols. But that doesn’t mean they should. And this incredibly specific, totally-irrelevant debate about ancient animal sacrifice turns out to be just another instance of the same rule: Even if you have the right to do something, sometimes it’s the wrong thing to do.
Paul didn’t make this idea up. It’s at the heart of the Incarnation, at the center of who Jesus is and what Jesus does. The eternal Word of God gives up everything to come down and be with us, because it’s more important to love us than to stay safe from harm. He is the Messiah, the anointed one, and yet unlike any other king, he sacrifices himself for his people, and not the other way around. Jesus has all the authority in the world; but he takes none of the power; and yet that sacrificial love turns out to be the most powerful thing of all. And—while I’m mostly spending this morning with Paul—you can see this pattern beginning in our gospel reading for today, in the story of the man possessed by an unclean spirit.
We science-minded Christians in 2024 might squirm in our seats, not sure that unclean spirits really exist. But in the ancient world, most people were convinced they did; and they might’ve expected someone with all that power to use the demons, not to cast them out. Magicians tried to control spirits and demons, to make them do their bidding. That’s exactly what Jesus doesn’t do. He isn’t a sorcerer, trying to gather an army of spirits to establish his own might. He could. He seems to have that authority over the spiritual world. But he chooses instead to use his power to heal. Given the choice between puffing himself up and building others up, Jesus chooses to help his weaker neighbor every time.
In our lives, we have the right to do so many things that are simply wrong, even though nobody could stop us from doing them. That’s half of what the meaning of freedom is: the freedom to do what we want, without anyone stopping us. We are free to things that we probably should not do. We can make a profit off a video of a confrontation with someone else. We can flaunt our wealth or our knowledge or our beliefs as proof that we are not like other people. It is our God-given right, enshrined in the United States Constitution, to be as rude as we want to the people around us, and nothing can ever take that right away.And we have the chance to do some things that are right, even though nobody can make us. And this is the other half of freedom is: the freedom to give up being right, for a minute, and do the right thing. That’s what love is, in a relationship or in a community: giving up the right to be right, for just a minute, and doing something nobody can force us to do. We are free to forgive one another, to give second and third and seventy-seventh chances that other people don’t deserve. We are free to help one another live better lives, in small ways and in big ones. We are free to follow in some small way in Jesus’ steps; to give up all the things that puff us up, so that in love, we might build other people up. And we might find, as Paul did, that if we claim to have knowledge, we turn out to know nothing; but when we choose instead to show love, God has been there, loving us all along.