The Reverse-Deer Conundrum--October 25, 2022

The Reverse-Deer Conundrum--October 25, 2022

"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord.  Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another.  If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation. About the other things I will give instructions when I come." [1 Corinthians 11:27-33]

So, true story... once upon a time, my wife and I were in the car on our way home from somewhere one evening, less than a mile from home.  And as we come around a bend in the road, my wife says to me, "Deer!" to which I responded without even thinking, "Yes, honey?"  

At that point, she pointed ahead to the four-legged creature crossing the road [rather surprisingly to us, right in town on the edge of the campus of the university in our town, too!], and again said, "Deer!  Look, Stephen--a deer! Watch out!"  She wanted to make sure I had seen the animal crossing the road, both to avoid hurting it and to avoid having us crash into it.  Now, while to this day I insist that I was aware of the deer and was in no danger of hitting it, I will readily admit that I was confused at first by her warning.  I heard "deer," and heard "dear," like a term of endearment--so I answered, "Honey," with the same amount of perceived affection.  But in the wider context, it's obvious that she wasn't trying to be affectionate, but to make sure I perceived the living creature illuminated by the headlights so that we didn't crash.  Missing that deer could have been disastrous for all three of us--me, my wife, and the deer. For a moment, however, I heard the words that came out of her mouth and thought she was calling me "dear."

Now, years later, we can laugh about the moment.  But I've also never been able to shake the memory of that encounter when I read this passage from First Corinthians, too.  And that's because it has taught me the potentially disastrous consequences of missing the point by taking a message out of context.  This passage is one of those places in the New Testament that has been weaponized as a way to condemn people whose sacramental theology is deemed "wrong", when Paul himself tells us he's concerned about a lack of love in the community that gathers around Jesus' table.

In particular, over the centuries sometimes theologians have zeroed in on the stark warning from Paul that "all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves."   And it was assumed that Paul was warning that when you eat the bread and drink the cup in what we call Holy Communion, or the Lord's Supper, that you had to have the proper metaphysical understanding of what was happening in that ritual moment, or else you were condemning yourself to hell by communing "unworthily."  This was an especially popular interpretation of the passage during the medieval and Reformation-era times in church history when Christians fought [often with accusations of heresy that were punishable by excommunication or burning at the stake] over how, exactly, to understand the presence of Christ in our celebration of Communion.  For some, particularly those influenced by theologians like Thomas Aquinas [who himself was riffing on ideas borrowed from Aristotle], the elements of Communion--the bread and the cup--ceased to be bread and wine but metaphysically became the body and blood of Christ, but still "looked" like bread and wine on the outside.  Others, like the older brother in the faith from whose tradition I come, Martin Luther, was convinced that Christ is and was truly and physically present in the bread and cup, but that you didn't have to believe that these elements stopped being bread or wine while also being the body and blood of Christ.  And, of course, there were others still who had other opinions--that we "spiritually feed on Christ," or that these elements are purely a symbol of Christ's death on the cross, or any of a number of other variations in between.  Over enough time, those different traditions tended to harden into rigid dogmas, and then were used as litmus tests for who was, or was not, acceptable as "worthy" candidates of receiving Communion.  If you believed the wrong thing about how Jesus was present, you were out--because you weren't "discerning the body" correctly.  All because, if you take this verse out of its larger context in First Corinthians, it could sound like Paul is just warning people to have a proper theological or philosophical belief about what is happening.

But when we zoom out even just a little bit to the immediately surrounding verses and read that sentence in its surrounding context, it becomes clear that Paul isn't particular interested in questions of metaphysics, but of love for people in the community.  It turns out we have a reverse "Dear/Deer" problem here--without the context, we miss the point of what is being said.  If you are predisposed to read the Bible as a metaphysical primer teaching the precise doctrinal positions you have to believe in order to attain eternal life, you will take every verse as a philosophical proposition to be learned and memorized in a catechism.  Like the old saying, "To the one with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."  When we actually see the flow of Paul's thought here, he's more concerned with the ways people are not recognizing that they ARE "the body of Christ."  Paul had already used that way of speaking earlier in Chapter Ten, when he insisted that "because there is one bread, we who are many are one body." And he'll spend the better part of a chapter coming up next talking about being "the body of Christ" as well.  He's also just told the Corinthians how disappointed he is that when they come together to share this meal, they are not looking out for one another, waiting for those who haven't gotten there yet, or hoarding for themselves without being considerate for those without.  In other words, Paul is upset that they haven't "discerned" that THEY together are the body of Christ, and they are acting in ways that deny their one-ness.  

What has upset Paul here is not a concern for bad metaphysics, but for a failure to love.  The folks in Corinth have allowed "Me-and-My-Group First" thinking to infect their holiest gathering, because they're each grabbing food for themselves rather than waiting for one another and making sure that all are ready and able to participate in the meal.  And that, for Paul, is what runs counter to Christ.  It is the refusal to seek the good of others first that flies in the face of Christ--not whether you have memorized the correct diagram of sacramental theology.

The real tragedy of all of this, of course, is that for centuries, different Christian groups have gotten so focused on their particular take on the phrase, "discerning the body" as reason to keep people from sharing in communion [all out of fear that someone would partake "unworthily"] that the meal intended to bind the followers of Jesus together as one body has turned out to divide and fracture us further.  Our bickering over who has the exactly correct way of dissecting a Mystery of grace has turned out to splinter us further into factions who keep each other out, rather than Holy Communion being a point at which we are all made one again.  What a terrible irony.

For us today, it's worth letting this be a case study in how to avoid missing the point by forgetting context.  Like me in the car, taking "Deer" to be "Dear" and missing the context of having an actual antler-bearing animal in my headlights' field of vision, we can get so hung up on a phrase like "discerning the body" that we misunderstand what it is actually being used to mean.  When we try to reduce the Mysteries of our faith to a set of "right answers" we can memorize or diagram, we have certainly confused the real and living God with an idol of our own making.  But when we see that, over and over again, the Scriptures are more interested in making us into people who love well, we avoid disastrously missing the point.  

In this day, let's spend our energy and attention seeking how to love well--that will mean things like looking out for the interests of others more than just ourselves, and seeking the benefit of everyone rather than just Me-and-My-Group-First.  I have more than a hunch that God is more interested in deepening our capacity to love like Christ than to have the right answers on a philosophy exam.

Maybe then we will not miss out on acknowledging--and loving--the people God has placed right in front of us.

Lord Jesus, give us the humility and courage to hear the Scriptures with fresh ears and your calling to make us people who love like you.