Fashionable Sins--July 25, 2022

Fashionable Sins--July 25, 2022

"I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons--not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not even eat with such a one." [1 Corinthians 5:9-11]

It is telling--and, I would add, heartbreaking--that church bodies have gone through splits and schisms over questions of what counts as sexual sin, but I don't know that I've ever heard of a Christian denomination having a crisis because it took too strong a stand calling out greed or abusive language from its members.  And yet here is Paul, moving immediately from his concerns about sexual sins to "the greedy and robbers," as well as "idolaters," "revilers," and more.  Funny, isn't it, how easily we give ourselves permission to pick and choose what we get to condemn in others, and which things we are going to give a pass to--or try and baptize into virtues like " ambition" or "success."

Okay, time-eth out here.  We are headed back into the minefield that is this section of First Corinthians, and as I warned at the outset last week, we run the risk of stepping on something that is explosive.  Paul is not interested in pulling punches, neither with his readers in the first century nor with us in the twenty-first century.  That said, all too many people have been clobbered by Respectable Religious People who have selectively weaponized verses like these [and others yet to come in subsequent sections].  Plenty of folks have had targets put on their backs, been disowned by their families, or kicked out of their churches because somebody decided to take selected parts of this passage with rigid literalism and aggressively enforce violations of it, while almost certainly NOT having the same impulse to excommunicate any big givers whose wealth might have also made them guilty of greed.  Too many people have been told they are damaged goods or damned to hell because of their relationship status by folks in churches who have no problem with other, more influential big names speaking slander, insult, and abuse at others--even though Paul lumps "revilers" in the same category as those who are "sexually immoral."

My point here is not to say we should crack down on sin by kicking everybody out the first time they mess up on any of the items in Paul's list here, but rather to compel all of us who might want to see ourselves as "righteous," "pure," and "holy" to take an honest look at the convenient double standards we tend to trot out with a passage like this.  And by the same token, I'm not saying we should just give up on our calling to hold one another accountable with a shrug.  The trouble is how often Respectable Religious People decide which sins to get "tough" on, not based on which gets the louder, clearer, or more frequent warnings from the Scriptures, but based on who has power.  And if any of us found ourselves grinning and chanting, "You tell 'em, Paul!" to ourselves last week when Paul was calling out the man who had "taken" his father's wife, but are quietly grumbling to ourselves today now that Paul has turned his sights on greed, idolatry, and verbal hatred, then it's clear we are part of the problem.  In an age where greed is often re-branded as "the American dream" and where hateful or abusive speech is spun as "looking tough," it's easy to give a pass to hate and avarice because they are fashionable sins, while vilifying people whose flaws don't make them more prestigious or powerful.

So, yes, we will have more we have to deal with from Paul regarding particular matters of sexuality, and there are going to be even more places of contention there [just truth in advertising, there].  But for today, we need to follow Paul's lead and watch how the apostle himself doesn't make sexual sin the one be-all, end-all of transgression--but rather, he is concerned in all sorts of areas with variations on the same recurring problem with human beings:  we keep using people and loving things.  Sexual sin, as we began to look at it last week, is in so many ways, a matter of using people or treating them as objects, while greed is the inverse problem:  it is loving things at the expense of loving neighbors.  In truth, they are two sides of the same coin.  But if we find ourselves shaking angry fists only at the cases of using people but stare at our feet in silence when it comes to excessively loving things [or money], we've got a deeper problem.

Today, maybe it's worth checking on ourselves before we start kicking anybody else out--to check and see whether we've been ignoring the things [like greed] that Paul is not afraid to call sin, but which no contemporary church has been willing to split over.  Maybe we should be honest about where we have been harboring double standards, and do some work on ourselves, before we start clobbering somebody else who has already had Bible verses used as a weapon on them.

Lord God, make us honest with ourselves, so that we no longer give a pass to our favorite pet sins, while making other peoples' sins to be irredeemable monstrosities.