I’d like to tell y’all a story. Once upon a time, there were three good Jewish boys named Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Their homeland, the kingdom of Judah, had been conquered by the Babylonian Empire; along with their good friend Daniel, they were among the thousands of Jews who were taken from their homeland and dragged back to Babylon as spoils of war. Like Daniel, they had stayed faithful to God, and God had blessed them; the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had given them positions of authority among the administrators and bureaucrats of his realm. And as usually happens eventually, staying faithful to God got them in trouble.
You see, one day, King Nebuchadnezzar decided it would be a really swell idea to have everyone in his government worship a huge golden statue. He had it made and erected outside the city, where there was room for the Babylon Symphony Orchestra to set up nearby, then summoned all his administrators, bureaucrats, and officials to gather before the statue. His herald gave them the king’s command: “When the orchestra starts playing, bow down and worship the king’s statue! If you don’t, you will immediately be thrown into the fire in that huge furnace over there.” And the orchestra played, and everyone fell flat on their faces and worshiped . . . except for Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who stayed standing.
I didn’t make up this story, of course; as I’m sure many of you recognized, it’s from the book of Daniel, chapters 1 and 3. The story of those three young men—mostly known by their Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—has been told many ways for many reasons, but I’m not sure it’s ever been used as a commentary on American political and cultural polarization, so this morning might be a first. To unpack that, I need to define a few terms from my training in family systems theory. One, anxiety: this refers not to the emotion but to a theological concept, the bone-deep, floor-of-the-soul-deep awareness of sin and death, the awareness that this world is broken all the way through and nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. It does manifest itself as the emotion of anxiety, but also as shame, fear, rage, despair, lust, greed, gluttony, defensiveness, pride, emotional paralysis, contempt . . . the list goes on.
Two, the herding instinct: rising anxiety in a family, a church, an organization, drives members to seek unity and group cohesion above all else—to circle the wagons for protection. This effectively means handing over control to those who are least mature, most selfish, and most demanding, because they’re the ones who will blow things up if they don’t get their way. It produces emotional fusion and enmeshment within the group and enmity toward those outside it, smothering individuality and making creative thinking and problem-solving impossible.
Three, self-differentiation: the balance of staying connected with others without being fused with, absorbed by, or dominated by them, or being driven by conflict with them. Edwin Friedman defines it as “taking maximum responsibility for [our] own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or [our] context,” and as “charting [our] own way by means of [our] own internal guidance system, rather than perpetually eyeing the ‘scope’ to see where others are.” This is an aspect of the concept of detachment, which Emily introduced last week, on which we will be focusing during this season.
Now, those of y’all who were with us in the fall of 2022 I hope will remember the sermon series we did on hospitality. In particular, you might remember Andy Popenfoose’s sermon, at least for reenacting the Iliad with Iain and Jericho. Andy was talking that morning about ideological hospitality as a response to a disturbing reality: this nation has regressed culturally to the point that our political polarization is largely driven not by differing visions of the good but by animosity toward “the other side.” As he put it at one point, “Based on those studies . . . nothing is more motivating to us than stopping our enemy.”
This is a manifestation of the herding instinct, which starkly divides the world into two warring camps: either you conform, or you’re an enemy. From a theological perspective, the herding instinct quickly becomes idolatrous as the demands for conformity and submission escalate. Like Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3, it demands that everyone in the group bow down to the golden statue or else be thrown into the superheated furnace. Most people cave; when the orchestra plays, they fall flat on their faces. Some run, taking off before anyone has the chance to grab them and tie them up—and where was Daniel that day, anyway? And a very few do what three young Jewish men did on the Plains of Dura that day before the king of Babylon: they do neither. They understand, whether consciously or not, that if you cave or you run, either way, you are allowing the group to dictate your actions. In Daniel 3, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah stay connected to the group—they stay present with their fellow administrators, officials, and bureaucrats—but they don’t submit to the group. They make their own decision to do what they know is right rather than letting the anxiety of the group drive them either to flee or to conform.
As we turn to 1 Corinthians 8, I want to suggest that Paul is calling us to the same thing. The importance of self-differentiation manifests in a much subtler way here than in Daniel 3, to be sure, but it’s no less significant for all that. After all, for Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, the choice was stark and simple, even if brutally hard. For the Corinthians, it is not so simple; as Paul makes clear, it’s not only possible but easy to escape one error by falling into another.
Thus in 8:4-6, he articulates a fundamental concept which we also see in Psalm 111: only God is worthy of being called God and worshiped as God; all other gods are ultimately nothing. That’s a profoundly important truth, and we might fairly think that if we’ve grasped it, we’ve accomplished something and gotten ourselves somewhere. But Paul doesn’t begin this section of the argument of this letter with that concept. Instead, in verse 1 he sets forth an equally fundamental principle: “Knowledge puffs up; love builds up.” He then expands on both halves of this statement. First, he deflates the Corinthians’ pride in their knowledge with the observation, “Whoever thinks they have it all figured out still has a lot to learn.” Second, he points them to something better. There are a couple variants of the Greek text in verse 3; our English Bibles translate the longer version, but if we use the shorter version, we have the powerful declaration, “If anyone loves, that person has experienced true knowing.” Yes, it’s important that we know there is no God but God, but we cannot know that truly apart from the love of God—both loving God and loving other people.
That truth carries through the rest of this chapter, in various ways. For one, there’s what we might call the first detachment, from overt idolatry. Some in Corinth have been able to detach in this way; they understand that putting food in front of a piece of wood doesn’t actually do anything to the food, regardless of how the wood is shaped. Others in the church haven’t come that far yet—they haven’t been able to disconnect themselves from their culture and upbringing, which have taught them to regard that piece of wood as a god. They no longer worship the gods of their culture, but they haven’t yet won free of them.
Pausing here for a moment before we move on to Paul’s primary concern in this chapter, obviously offering food to little statues isn’t a major issue for us in our cultural context, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have equivalent issues of our own. I think it’s worth taking a long, hard look around us and asking ourselves what those issues might be. Does our culture have gods and goddesses of its own? I think it does—and maybe as large a pantheon as the Greeks and the Romans. It seems to me the chief god and goddess rising in Western culture—the Zeus and Hera of the new paganism, if you will—are identity and desire. I once had a Presbyterian colleague argue strongly that economics is one; I would never have come up with that on my own, but he left me convinced. There are others I could mention, and doubtless you could name still others that wouldn’t occur to me. What are the forces that our society believes rule human life—the powers which must be appeased, before which we must bow, to which we must yield? And what would it mean for us to differentiate ourselves from the world around us, to detach from its idolatries, and go our own way?
I think these are important questions which are worth careful consideration; but if we follow Paul’s concern in our text this morning, we see him going in a different direction, and if we remember that knowledge puffs up, I think we can understand why. The people who were the real problems in the Corinthian church weren’t the ones who still thought food that had been offered to idols was spiritually dangerous. The problem people were the ones who had gotten free of that trap and pitched headlong into another one: the trap of spiritual pride and spiritual arrogance, two closely-related vices which are perhaps the deadliest known to human experience. They were the ones whose idolatry posed the greatest threat to the church.
You can understand how knowledge could take you in that direction. If I imagine myself in their place—I know idols are actually nothing, and food offered to them is still fine to eat. I look around the church and see other Christians who haven’t figured this out, or who can’t bring themselves to believe it, and it’s painfully easy for me to feel superior to them. My knowledge makes me better than them, or maybe I have it because I’m better than them. The temptation is strong to prove I’m better than them by openly doing what they falsely believe to be wrong. If it hurts them, well, tough goats. That just proves their inferiority.
The issue here isn’t just our knowledge, though, it’s also our sense of—and belief in—our own rights and freedoms. Since idols are nothing, I have every right as a Christian to eat meat that has been offered to them. Since meat is expensive but meat that has been offered to idols is cheaper, that right is significant for my budget. You’re suggesting I should deny myself a cheap source for perfectly good meat just because foolish, immature people don’t understand this? You’re trying to violate my rights and infringe on my freedom. It’s the same sort of argument we heard—loudly—from various parts of our community about mask mandates for COVID-19. If you grant the starting assumptions, it makes sense, too. The problem is, that rests on the individualistic Western idea that when we stand up and demand our rights, it trumps everything else, which idea is not biblical in the least. We’ve been taught by our culture that our rights and freedoms are paramount, but Scripture says that just isn’t so. Paul’s instruction is clear, especially in the Tom Morgan version: “If exercising your freedom hurts someone who’s weaker than you, stop it.”
What we have here, I believe, is a second level of idolatry, and one which is driven by cultural anxiety just as much as the idolatries of the world; worse, it’s at least as prone to take people whom Jesus loves, for whom he died, and whom he calls us to serve, and dehumanize and depersonalize them as threats to be defeated. If it’s worth the time to try to identify the idols of our culture, and I believe it is, how much more should we strive to identify the idols of the church? We should note this very carefully, brothers and sisters: when Paul looks at people in the church who are still caught up in the idolatries of the world, he does not condemn them for their weakness. His chief concern for them is not that they be taught until they learn better. His chief concern is that they not be destroyed by others in the church who value their own sense of superiority above the very lives of brothers and sisters in Christ. If Paul were around today, I don’t think he’d be one of those folks standing behind the walls of the church condemning those people out there for their immorality; I think he’d have us pointing our fingers at ourselves. He’d probably agree—maybe not with every charge of immorality aimed at the world, but I’d bet most of them; and then he’d say, “So what? Repeat after me: ‘It is a true saying and worthy of acceptance that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
So, then, what’s the way forward? Self-differentiation is critical, but it’s hard; where do we start? I actually do have an answer to that, I think. Remember, anxiety in all its manifestations—anger, fear, worry, pride, defensiveness, disgust, and so on—drives hyperseriousness and the herding instinct, destroying perspective, turning every person who disagrees with us into an existential threat and every molehill into a hill to die on. Self-differentiation is possible to the extent that anxiety is overcome, and so it’s there that we must start.
Our way forward, I believe, is to practice peace. Practice shalom. Remind ourselves that God is in control, and that he is our provider; cultivate a mindset of abundance rather than a scarcity mindset. The world is driven to grasp for things by the fear that it otherwise will not have enough; we can live with open hands, letting the good things of life flow freely across them, and be at peace because we know God will bless us with everything we need. Look for opportunities to go to those we have hurt and those we have wronged, confess the ways we have sinned against them, and ask their forgiveness. They may not give it, I know that well, but a weight will lift from your shoulders regardless. For all it cost me, I’ve never regretted doing that. And, of course, pray steadily, without ceasing. The peace of God is his gift and a fruit of the work of his Spirit; we cannot create it for ourselves, only receive it from him.
To do that, we of course must open our hearts to God; we also do well to put ourselves where his blessing is pouring out and his peace is being made. That means, among other things, meeting him where his blessing is made visible and his peace is tangible: at his table. Here we re-member that Jesus is God’s final answer to the brokenness and wrongness of the world, for no matter how deep a pit we dig for ourselves, there is no pit so deep but Christ is deeper still. Here we gather with all those with whom and between whom he has made peace, joining us together as his body, both those we see and those we have yet to see. And here we enact our hope that his work will not fail, that all will be perfect peace, perfectly whole, perfectly restored, when he comes again.
Photo © 2016 Michael Borgers; photo has been cropped to fit. Public domain.