Either/Or...Both-And

Either/Or... Both-And--August 29, 2018

"Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, 'It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.  Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.' What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. They had these men stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them." [Acts 6:1-6]

It takes great wisdom to spot a false dichotomy out there in the world.  And it takes even more wisdom to know not to accept its terms.

Just so we are clear and all on the same page, a false dichotomy is when some present you with an either-or alternative that doesn't seem to be necessary.  And our culture, in this time and place, is swimming with them.  The most extreme and obvious examples probably jump out at us well enough for us to spot them.  If someone says, "You either like pancakes... or you must hate puppies!" you know that this is a logical misstep.  That's a false dichotomy--there are people who do not like pancakes but do love their puppies, and there are surely also people who do not care for puppies but are perfectly happy with a stack of pancakes instead.  There is nothing, logically speaking, that requires one to choose one OR the other in this choice, this dichotomy.  It is a false choice--you can, in fact, have both in this instance.

Other examples get more subtle, or play games with our traditional assumptions and loyalties.  If someone says, "You either wear this American flag t-shirt that I'm selling... or else you aren't a true patriot!" well, I hope we would recognize that as another false dichotomy.  (For that matter, I would hope we would also know that proper observance Section Eight of the U.S. Flag Code requires that the U.S. Flag never be used as an article of clothing, bedding or drapery, nor handkerchiefs or napkins...)  But again, the underlying logical problem is that the statement presents a false-choice: either you are a patriot and buy the speaker's t-shirt, or you are not patriotic if you do not buy his shirt.  Well, again, that should obviously be hogwash to our ears, but we have a way of getting our gears all gummed up when questions of patriotism arise, and sometimes we don't think quite straight.

The false dichotomy is a terribly insidious little trick, and because people have a way of accepting the terms and choices presented to them, we keep falling for them.  Whether it's a line like, "Vote for THIS party/candidate, or else you're not a true Christian!" or "If you don't help me lie to my boss, you don't really love me!" or "It couldn't have been unethical--it was perfectly legal!" we are bombarded by false dichotomies all the time, from voices that expect us (and pressure us) to accept the conditions they set up for us.

The question, once we have turned our critical thinking skills on in our brains to try and spot them when they are put to us, is, "What do you do when someone presents you with a false choice?"  Well, maybe like Yogi Berra famously (and humorously) put it, "When you come to the fork in the road, take it."  That is to say, maybe you say out loud that you don't have to choose just one or the other alternative--maybe some things are overlapping, or both-and kinds of scenarios.

Well, we needed to have this background conversation on logical fallacies because in this episode from the early church in Acts, clear thinking actually prevailed.  And a moment that felt like it could have been hijacked into a false dichotomy... did not succumb to that temptation of bad logic.  Thoughtful hearts discerned that the two needs in the early Christian community were not either/or alternatives, but both were vital parts of the church's life.

The situation was basically this: as the early church grew, it began to include a more and more diverse population.  And one of the first barriers it had to cross was a language barrier.  Some of the early Christians were all Judean, Hebrew or Aramaic-speaking, Jewish families who had come to faith in Christ, and some were Greek-speaking (Hellenist is the word in this case) Jewish backgrounds.  From the very beginning, the community of Jesus had a food distribution program, but that was easier at first when it was all just people from the neighborhood whose stories and needs you knew.  As the church grew to include new people--new people who didn't necessarily speak the language of the "original" insiders, mind you--the work of making sure that everyone had their food needs covered became a full-time job.  It was either going to have to be overseen by people who made food ministry for the vulnerable (widows had no safety net and very limited means of providing for themselves) their entire job, or it was going to fall apart.  And the leaders of the Christian community--the original apostles who had followed Jesus--knew they already had their work cut out for them in preaching, teaching, and traveling to take the Good News of Jesus everywhere.  

Now this would have been the moment for the early church to fall for it.  This would have been an easy moment for some loud voice to rise up and say, "Looks like we have to pick one or the other--EITHER there can be preaching and teaching and praying in this new thing called church, OR we have feed the hungry among us.  But there's only enough in our human resource department for one or the other!"  This would have been an easy moment for the disciple community to fracture into parties along the lines of "preach and teach" versus "feed the needs," and knowing human nature, it would have been easy for the whole Christian church to split over which one or the other was THE right thing to do.  

But something wonderful happened instead of a split while the church was in its infancy. Something amazing and yet terribly common-sense happened: they refused to accept that this was an either-or proposition.  The apostles knew that they did not have the time or resources to divert to managing a food-distribution program.  But--and this is key here, too--they didn't belittle the need as unimportant, nor did they write it off by saying, "We can't be responsible for feeding people, too!"  They accepted that the community of Jesus needed to be about both the feeding of the hungry AND the sharing of the news of grace.  They knew that they were called to be about the relief of suffering AND the teaching of the Reign of God.  And maybe even deeper, they understood that they could not do one, at least very meaningfully, without doing the other.  Only focus on handing out food and you might as well just be a restaurant; only talk nice religious talk without attending to physical needs too, and your witness will be empty and shallow.  This isn't an either-or choice; it's a both-and situation.

This is so often our challenge in this day, too.  It is easy to hear the same rationale echoing in the back of our heads and down our church halls today, too.  "We only have enough resources to either reach out to the community, or to focus on worship and teaching." Or, "We don't want to speak to real problems or issues around us, because the church is only supposed to focus on 'spiritual' things" (whatever that might mean).  We are always feeling the pressure to make the church's life a false choice between the ministry of teaching and the ministry of the table, our message and our mission, our words and our actions.  But let this moment be a reminder for us: these things are not really separate "sides" or "alternatives" at all.  They are all part of the one mission of the Jesus-community--to live, witness, serve, and share in the Reign of God as we've known it in Jesus himself.  So when we preach and teach and witness, hurray, that's part of our one mission.  And when we share our tables, not out of condescending pity for "those people," but with such indiscriminate love and dignity that everyone walks away both fed and honored, well, that's also a part of our one mission, too.

For all the ways that organized institutional religion blows it--and we do get plenty of things all fouled up--this is a moment when both the organizational side and the institutional dimension of the church were exactly what we needed.  We needed to have someone say, "We need to share both faith and food." We needed to have someone say, "We do not have to accept the terms of a false dichotomy." We needed the wisdom of humble leaders who knew they couldn't do it all but also didn't want to give up on important work in either direction.  And, thanks be to God, that happened.

Today let us remember that the shared table is just as much an essential part of our calling and ministry as Christ-followers as Bible studies, sermons, and worship services. We do not have to accept the split that gets foisted upon us.  We can follow the example of these wise early saints who said, "Both... and."

Lord Jesus, help us to see the breadth of our calling, not just in talk and theology but in action and practice, sharing tables with one another and feeding all around us.