Annual Meetings

​Our readings for this morning are perfect for Annual Meeting Sunday!
 
This may sound odd, but I would argue that the entire book of Deuteronomy was the minutes of the most important annual meeting in the entire history of ancient Israel.
 
First Moses’ back story.
 
It begins with the Hebrew people enslaved in Egypt. God sent Moses to free his people and lead them out of bondage. Ever since, Jews have commemorated that mighty act of liberation at Passover. Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover meal, so we indirectly commemorate the same event every week in our Eucharist.
 
After getting the Hebrews out of Egypt, Moses led them to Mount Sinai where he received the law that has defined Jewish identity right up until today.
 
Next, Moses guided his people around the desert for forty years, until the entire generation of freed slaves died off. Finally, Moses led their now-adult children to the edge of the Promised Land, conquering a couple of minor kingdoms along the way.
 
It’s a dramatic story. But at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses had reached the end of his story. Moses was about to die. Moses’ people would have to enter the Promised Land without him.
 
We need to pause here to think about Moses’ people. Everything in their lives was about to change. They were going to cross the Jordan River into the heart of the Promised Land where they would embark on a long war of conquest against a large, technologically superior, hostile population. They had grown up in the desert as nomads but, after the war, they would settle in towns and become farmers. And Moses had been their divinely appointed leader for their entire lives, but he wasn’t going with them. All that change all at once must have been terrifying.
 
So, Moses called the people together for a meeting. The entire book of Deuteronomy is that meeting. Moses didn’t worry about a quorum. They didn’t elect a new vestry or review their budget. But in all important respects they did that day what we will do at our annual meeting.
 
That was three things. Moses began by reviewing what had brought the Israelites to this point. In the heart of the book, Moses reminded them of the laws that were supposed to govern their behavior as God’s people. And Moses looked ahead, at the challenges to come. That’s all annual meeting stuff.
 
Our passage is one of the places Moses looks ahead. Going forward, Mosese won’t be their leader. But Moses promises them that God will raise up other leaders like him, leaders who will help these people and their descendants to know and to do God’s will.
 
As Christians, we see Jesus as the most important successor to Moses. Already in the New Testament, the apostles pointed to this passage as a prophecy of Jesus.
 
Moses is looking ahead to the coming of the Messiah. But Moses is also, I think, promising the Israelites that God will be with them every step of the way, as they enter the Promised Land and through all the centuries after that, right up to today and off into our future.
 
As we gather for our annual meeting, we will do what they did. We will review our immediate past, and we will look forward, as best we can, into our future.
 
And we will look back at the last year and ahead into this one with the same faith that sustained Moses and his people all those centuries ago. We gather with the conviction that God, who has led us to this point, will continue to lead us as we go forward. God will raise up the people we need so that together we can live as God’s people in this time and place and embrace God’s mission for the world around us.
 
But in one important way, our meeting differs from Moses’ meeting. We no longer take the law of Moses as the standard for our common life. As the Apostle Paul so forcefully reminds us, Christ set us free from the law.
 
But Scripture continues to offer us guidelines for how we should live as a Christian community, just as the law did for Moses’ people. And one of the passages that articulates those guidelines is our reading from First Corinthians.
 
In our reading, Paul addresses the question, can Christians eat food that has been sacrificed to idols?
 
If, for example, someone sacrificed a goat to the Greek god Zeus, took home his portion of the sacrifice, and then served roast goat at a party afterwards, could a Christian in good conscience eat the goat? Or,  would eating the goat mean indirectly participating in the worship of Zeus?
 
Paul’s answer may be surprising. Paul tells the Corinthians that they are welcome to join in the feast if they like. After all, he tells them, “no idol in the world really exists” and “there is no God but one.”
 
But Paul keeps going. The problem is, recent converts, people used to worshipping Zeus, might get confused if they saw mature Christians eating food that had been sacrificed to Zeus. The confused converts might conclude that Christians actually worshipped Zeus. They might return to the worship of Zeus themselves and so be lost to the Church.
 
So, Paul’s final word on the question of eating food that had been sacrificed to an idol was, “I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.”
 
Notice how radical Paul is here. Christians had a perfect right to eat meat sacrificed to idols. The theological objections that some Christians were raising to that practice were wrong. But even though the concerned Christians were wrong, Paul told the Corinthians who knew better to give way.
 
None of us are likely to face the particular issue of this passage. But there are obvious modern parallels. I sometimes have a glass of wine with supper. So far, so good. But if I am having a meal with an alcoholic who recently quit drinking and was struggling with it, I would skip my wine that night out of deference to the needs of my companion. Not because alcohol was bad but because alcohol in that situation would be bad for someone I cared about.
 
Paul tells us to do the same thing with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
 
This may seem obvious, but it is a big deal, and harder to live by than it sounds. We should always avoid speaking or acting in ways that harm others. That’s true even if the other person’s concerns are wrong. I can’t say to myself, he or she is just being too sensitive or is wrong-headed or whatever else I might say to justify my behavior.  It doesn’t matter whether I am right so much as whether I am acting in love. That’s worth all of us pondering the next time we find ourselves in a disagreement.
 
At our annual meeting, we’ll take care of the business of being Church.
 
But in this time of self-reflection for us as a parish, we should keep in mind Paul’s picture of what life in Christian community is supposed to look like. Do we prioritize love in our interactions with each other? When we disagree, do we insist on our own way, or do we do what is best for our brother or sister?
 
My prayer for us is that God will help us to be the kind of community God calls us to be, as we move into this new year. In Christ’s name. Amen.