Homily on 1Cor 1:10-18

Have you ever been poisoned?
Maybe when you were a kid, you accidentally drank something or ate something poisonous.
When I was in college I worked for a paving contractor,
and once we were paving a remote stretch of road way out in the mountains.
It was a blistering hot day and before lunchtime I had drank all of the water out of my cooler,
and I was dying of thirst.
There was a little cabin just off the road from where we were working and nobody lived there.
So, in desperation I went over to see if I could find a garden hose, or a faucet, or something that would let me get some water.
At the corner of the cabin, there was a faucet, and I quickly filled up my big thermos.
As I was walking back, I hefted up the thermos and took a few deep gulps of the water,
but as the water was going down, I knew something was wrong.
I stopped dead in my tracks coughing and gagging.
The water system in the house had recently been shock treated with chlorine,
and the water that I was drinking had about a hundred times more chlorine in it than the water in a public swimming pool.
Usually, when you are poisoned you know immediately that something is wrong,
most poisons taste awful.
They burn your mouth and make you gag.
But the real danger is from the poisons that don’t taste that bad.
I have a friend who loves soft shell crabs,
they are his favorite food in the whole world.
Once he went to a nice restaurant and ordered their soft shell crabs,
and he munched down this big plate of summer delicacy.
But all that night, and the entire next morning he was sicker than he had ever been in his entire life.
It was the worst food poisoning that he had ever known.
Sometimes when we are poisoned, we don’t realize it is happening until it is too late.
Today, St. Paul warns us of this kind of poisoning.
He says, “I hear that there is quarreling among you and that the community is divided.”
Fighting and division.
How easy it can happen.
If you are under the age of eighteen and you have a brother or sister, do you ever fight or argue with them?
If you are over the age of eighteen and you are married or dating,
do you ever quarrel or argue with your spouse, your boyfriend or girlfriend?
If you are single do you ever quarrel or argue with your neighbors, or colleagues?
If you are a parent, do you ever argue with your children?
Is there fighting and division within our families, and communities, and even within our Church?
Certainly there is, and it is a deadly poison because like food poisoning, we hardly notice that we are being poisoned.
When there is trouble or you find yourself in discomfort, the natural reaction is to identify the source of the discomfort, and then get away.
This approach works fine for mosquitoes, or the roasting midday sun, or a cold draft.
“Oh, wow, that feels awful. I’m getting out of here.”
But what do we do when another person makes us feel uncomfortable?
How easy is it to say, “You are the source of my discomfort, so I’m getting out of here.”
Or, we may simply choose to drive the annoying person away from us.
When we do this, when we point the finger at another person, and say,
“You are the source of my problems, you are why I feel bad, and you have to go.”
it may feel great at the moment.
And communities and cultures have done this kind of thing for ages.
The Puritan communities that settled Connecticut were masters of pointing the finger.
If you misbehaved, you could be banished from the community.
Or, if there was a drought and the crops failed, or if there was an epidemic and people got sick and died,
there might be a witch hunt.
The people would band together and place the blame for their misfortunes on the person in the community who didn’t quite fit in.
Maybe it was the old widow who lived on the outskirts of town, the one who is not like us,
“It is her fault, it is the fault of the witch.”
And if things go too far, the mob might very well burn someone alive.
Fighting and division can poison families, marriages, communities, parishes and entire churches.
And if things go too far, people can be in danger of spiritual death.
Have you ever been poisoned?
Satan and his devils want nothing more than for us to be divided from one another,
because when we are fighting and divided from one another,
when we isolated from one another,
then we are isolated from Christ.
And without Christ, we are lost.
Someone once said that the only thing that you can do all by yourself is to go to hell.
And the more that we isolate ourselves from each other in this life,
the more that we are poisoned by hatred, and anger, and judgment,
the more that our lives become a living hell.
So when you have been poisoned what do you do?
You find a doctor who can give you an antidote.
And if you are already too ill to get to a doctor yourself, then you pray that a doctor can come to you and save you.
And this is exactly what Christ does for us.
Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the perfect physician,
the physician of souls,
comes to us and offers us the perfect antidote,
his Precious Body and his Spilled Blood,
the Holy Mysteries.
Once a dear friend of mine was suffering from an overdose of narcotics,
and it was dreadful.
She could barely maintain consciousness,
and it was hard for her to breathe.
The life was slowly draining out of her.
But once the doctors realized what was going on, they gave her an antidote called narcan,
and miraculously, within seconds, she regained consciousness, and was able to breathe.
Antidotes can work like that.
Now a regular chemical antidote administered by a regular doctor,
cures us whether we understand how it works or not.
The Doctor gives us the proper dosage and we get better.
But Christ’s Body and Blood don’t work this way.
It is not magic, and it is not chemistry,
it is love.
God’s love is the perfect and only antidote for the poison of fighting and division.
Because the love of God is the love of forgiveness.
God loves us more than anyone could possibly imagine,
but God is not ignorant.
God’s love is not like “first date love” where you are head over heels on fire for someone before you know about their bad habits and character flaws.
God knows all of our character flaws, and all of our dirty secrets.
He knows our sins better than we do…and yet, knowing all of our failings he loves us just the same.
This is why the Mysteries of Holy Communion are so holy,
because the Body and Blood of Christ is the Word of God saying,
“I know what you have done. I know that you have hurt me.
I am painfully aware of the horror of betrayal, and mockery, and abandonment.
I am perfectly aware of the nails in my hands and my feet, and the pain of the crucifixion.”
And in the middle of all that pain and suffering, God says to us,
“I love you. Even if you hate me, I love you.”
This it the word of the Cross that St. Paul offers us today.
It is the word that sustained the martyrs, like St. Lawrence of Rome who was burned alive,
but who responded in love to those who tortured him.
So, we’ve all been poisoned, and what do we do now?
Take a minute to picture in your mind the person who you like the least, the person who has hurt you the most,
the person who you cannot stand.
And in your mind make this little confession to that person:
“Christ loves me, so I love you.”
During the week, make that part of your prayer life.
It takes less than a minute, but it allows the antidote of God’s love to course through our veins,
and cure us of the poison of sin.
And as we are cured of our illness, each one of us will begin to radiate more and more fully,
the love of God, perfectly expressed in the broken body and spilled blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
It is the antidote for the poison of argument and division.
It cures us of our sins, heals our wounds, binds us to one another in the perfect bond of love.
For in Christ there is no strife, no argument, no division,
but only perfect love and everlasting life.
Amen.