Mid-Week Meditation: Right or Righteous

Its been a long time, I shouldn't have left you and all that.  I apologize for my absence.  I have been busy creating a new work, and I will share all of that with you soon.  I promise to not leave for so long again.

But, not too long ago, friend of mine had a small disagreement with her partner.  They are the parents of an adorable, two-year-old daughter.  On one occasion,  they had a discussion about the proper amount of food to feed their daughter.  While the "experts" agree that children should eat one tablespoon of food for each year of age.  So, my friend's daughter should get two tablespoons of the several healthy things on her plate.

It was established that my friend was feeding her daughter a bit more than that.  My friend naturally felt guilty about this and was a little defensive when it was brought to her attention.

New parents, and I mean this earnestly, are beautiful.  They want to be the best parents they can be and will even take counsel from the "experts" even when the "experts" and their counsel isn't nearly as sound as common sense and mother wit.  Feeding a child too much is a very difficult thing for engaged parents to do.  My friend should not have felt the least bit defensive for feeding her daughter a bit more than the experts have suggested.

My friend's disagreement made me meditate on 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, the Apostle Paul's scolding of the church in Corinth.  In the passage,  Paul indicates that there are clearly rich and educated people in the church who are worshipping alongside poor, uneducated ones.

There was a religious practice in the city for non-Christians to place freshly cut meat on an altar as a sacrifice to some local deity and then after several days, allow humans to eat the meat.  Christians struggled with the ethics of eating meat that was placed on an altar for sacrifice to a local deity.

The educated members of the Christian community clearly thought that there were no problems with eating the meat, while the less educated members of the community believe it was sacrilegious to do so.  The educated members of the Christian community looked down on the less educated members of the Christian community because they held this belief.

Apostle Paul scolded the educated members of the church.  He told them that while they were technically correct that there were no ethical concerns that would bar Christians from eating the sacrificed meat, they were dividing the church because they were calling the uneducated members of the church stupid in essence.  Paul called on the educated members of the church to be loving and righteous rather than simply right.