Pentecost 7 (NL4) John B. Valentine
1 Corinthians 11:17-34 July 12, 2026

“A POTLUCK GONE WRONG”

So ... I’m headed back to Minnesota this afternoon ... to connect with some of my long-lost seminary classmates ....

And to hang out for a couple of days in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes ... and ninety-percent humidity ... and Ten Zillion Mosquitoes. Woohoo!

No doubt ... I’ll get to ...

• Have a cup of Caribou Coffee ... and
• Nurse a Grain Belt ‘Premium’ Beer ... and probably
• Have some sort of fish deep-fried ... although it won’t actually qualify as seafood ...
• And maybe bust out a “Ya sure, you betcha’ for old times’ sake ......

But ... thankfully ... because I won’t be there on a weekend ... I won’t be having to endure a real Minnesota Lutheran potluck ...... phew!

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You know about those Minnesota Lutheran potlucks .... do ya???

Made famous by comedian Garrison Keillor in his “News from Lake Wobegon”???

Minnesota Lutheran potlucks are to church potlucks what Chez Panisse and the French Laundry are “California cuisine” .... the best of the best ... or so they say.

In fact ... Minnesota Lutheran potluck culture once led Garrison Keillor to muse that:

• You might be Lutheran if you refer to your potluck contribution as a “hotdish” ... and ...

• You might be Lutheran if you only serve Jell-O in the proper liturgical color for the season ... and ...

• You might be Lutheran if you make spaghetti at your house with the little macaroni noodles because they’re not so messy ... and ...

• You might be Lutheran if you think lime Jell-O with cottage cheese and pineapple is a gourmet salad ... and ...

• You might be Lutheran if all of your casserole dishes have your name on the bottom.

All because church potlucks are intended to be these beautiful, messy, joyful expressions of Christian community.

But ... with all that in mind ... I’d suggest that there could probably be no better a title to this morning's scripture lesson than "When Church Potlucks Go Bad” or “A Potluck Gone Wrong” or something along those lines.

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You see ... as I’ve reminded you a couple of time in the last six weeks or so ... this thing we call “First Corinthians” is a letter ... a letter from Saint Paul to a community of Christians in the Greek city of Corinth ... a church which he’d been instrumental in the establishing of.

And the church council of that congregation ... or whatever the governing structure of it was ... had written Paul a letter about some of the issues that their church was facing right then ... in hopes that Paul’s answers would help them get through a rough patch.

And among the issues that they’d written to Paul about was how the congregation had gotten all conflicted over what was going down when they shared Communion together.

Now ... if you pay attention to the words that comprise Paul’s response to that concern ... that bit which we heard Donald read for us a bit ago ...

This Corinthian congregation didn’t do “Holy Communion” quite like we do ... with little pre-poured cups and a single round of pita and an ‘Altar Guild’ to oversee it all ....

No ... it was more of a mash-up of “communion” and “coffee fellowship” and a good ol’ church potluck all rolled into one .... something that they apparently called an ‘agape meal’ ... or a ‘love-feast’.

And ... apparently ... the manner in which the Corinthians were sharing that meal was NONE too pleasing to ol’ Paul.

Just look at how that text started:

“Now in the following matter I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse.”

That would be like us getting a letter from the Bishop starting ... “Folks, the way that you’re doing worship right now ... the way that you’re practicing Holy Communion ... your practice is so poor that it would be if you had all had just stayed home!”

Ouch!

Now granted ... the details are a bit sparse as to WHY Paul is so irritated with those folks in Corinth ... but if we pay attention to the clues ... we can see some hints as to what was really going on.

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First off ... it would appear that there were some wealthy folks in that congregation ... and some not-so-wealthy folks.

Which would roughly mimic the broader Roman society back in the day.

You see ... back in the Roman Empire back in the first century ... three percent of society controlled about ninety percent of the economy ... and owned most all the land ... and held all the political power.

Which left the other ninety-seven percent arguing about ... at best ... the crumbs and the leftovers that fell from the rich folks’ table..

Now ... if perchance ... you’re thankfully saying that its not like that in our society ... where just a few have so much ... I’d beg you to ‘think again’.

After all ... any of you been watching soccer for the past couple of weeks???

• the cheapest ... yes the ‘cheapest’ ... price of a ticket to the World Cup final game right now is listed at like seventy-one-hundred dollars right now ... and

• the average price of a ticket to that same game ... as of nine-o’clock this morning ... currently hovers at around twelve-thousand dollars ...

• while ‘standard premium seats’ in the lower deck cost upwards of thirty-thousand dollars apiece!

Which all means that just right around three percent of the global population is able to purchase a single ‘standard premium seat’ at the World Cup finals with their total household income for a year!

We know about income disparity ... folks. Or at least we live in a world with huge income disparities ... whether we admit it or not.

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Anyhow ... when the early church celebrated the Lord's Supper ... they had a community meal ... one of these ‘Agape Feasts’ things that we referenced earlier ...

And one of two things transpired.

Either ...

The wealthy members ... the ones who didn’t have to work manual labor jobs ... would showed up early and bring their spendy food and drink with them ... and consume it unto themselves ...

Such that when the poorer members of the congregation ... the folks who regularly worked their ten-hour days ... were able to arrive ... all the good food was already gone.

Or ....

Everyone sat together with their own households and each of them brought their own picnic baskets ...

And the rich folks had food and wine in abundance ... and the poorer folks were left wanting for more.

But ... either way ... there is some radical behavioral disparities exhibited at these ‘agape feasts ... and “one would go hungry” awhile “another got drunk” ...

Whether they intended to do so or not .... the wealthy folks in that community were using worship to reinforce the same social hierarchies and divisions that existed out in the rest of the world ...

And they’d turned this meal which was all about community and ‘a foretaste of God’s feast to come’ into a meal that simply reinforced the messages of the empire in which they lived.

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Which gets us to what is maybe to challenge-point of this text for most of us ...

That line which reads “For 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.”

Right after which it says “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.”

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had conversations with folks about the meaning of those words over the course of the past four decades .....

"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 years and decades and centuries even ... faithful and well-intended folks have looked at those words and thought ... “Oh Pastor ... I’m too sinful to go to communion today. I haven't cleaned up my life enough. I am unworthy. I just don’t measure up to Jesus’ standards right now.”

But if you look at the context in which those words are spoken ... that’s not it’s meaning at all!

I mean ... for us Lutherans ... the phrase “the body of Christ” has a double meaning:

We can use it in a sacramental sense ... as in “This is my body” ... “The body of Christ given for you” ...

to help people remember that it’s not just bread and wine that we eat when we come to Holy Communion ... but rather that the body and blood of Jesus are somehow present “in, with and under” that bread and wine ... or ....

We can use it in an ecclesial sense ... as in we ... all of us are the church ... the Body of Christ in the world today ...

As in “Remember ... Christ has no hands, no feet, no eyes, no ears, but ours”.

But which of those meaning’s does Paul have in mind here?

The sacramental one or the ecclesial one?

It seems pretty clear ... given the fact:

• that Paul’s just spent a whole bunch of the previous chapters of this letter talking about being concerned about one’s neighbors ... and caring for one’s neighbors ... and prioritizing the needs of one’s neighbors ... and

• that Paul’s next chapter in this letter is that well-remembered one about all about how “just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

That ... when Paul is talking about “discerning the body” and “taking the supper unworthily” ... it means ignoring the person sitting next to you in the pew!

In other words ...

When we come to the Table while holding onto grudges ... we ‘fail to discern the Body’ ...

When we come to the Table while allowing political or social divisions to dictate whom we love within the Church ... we ‘fail to discern the Body’ ...

When we come to the Table while harboring feelings that some human beings ... based on their country or culture of origin ... are more valuable or more to be esteemed than others ... we ‘fail to discern the body’ ...

And it all gets back to how and why we fracture this divine potluck in ways large and small.

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So let me simply leave you with this thought ... folks.

The Table of the Lord is NOT a reward for the righteous ... it is a clinic for the sick.

For ... at the end of the day ... we are all equally bankrupt beggars who come to this altar with empty hands ... and Jesus satisfies us all with the exact same gift: Himself.

For this IS that Table wherein the last shall be first ... and the first shall be last.