Epiphany 4

Think sick, be sick.

Doctors are beginning to sense that there’s a connection between the two.

Researchers have made a surprising discovery: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women who didn’t hold such fatalistic views.

Their risk factors were the same: age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. So their higher risk of death had nothing to do with these usual heart disease culprits. Instead, the only difference was their beliefs – whether or not they believed they were at risk for heart disease.

Bottom line: They thought they were going to get sick and die, and so they did.

This study is a classic in research on the “nocebo” phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that’s exactly what they get.

The word placebo is Latin for “I will please,” and that’s exactly what those little sugar pills do. They please us and make us feel better. But nocebo is Latin for “I will harm,” and that’s precisely what negative beliefs tend to do. Think sick, be sick.

There was a nocebo effect running wild in Corinth back in the first century AD, and it was tied to concerns about eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Transport yourself, just for a second, back to this bustling Greek city, a hub of commercial activity and religious diversity. Look around, check out the temples to the Greek gods. Worshipers in Corinth routinely sacrifice animals to their gods, and then the remainders of the sacrificial animals are sold to the meat markets for resale to the public.

If you go to a Corinthian Burger King, your Whopper might include leftovers from a sacrifice to Zeus, the king of the gods.

This is common practice, and no one has a problem with it – no one except some of the early converts to Christianity. These followers of Jesus have, of course, turned their backs on the Greek gods, and they feel guilty about eating meat that has been sacrificed to gods who are idols. They want to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, and they sense that eating this tainted meat will make them spiritually unclean.

These fears about impurity are enough to make them miserable. It’s an ancient example of “think sick, be sick.” What’s true today was undoubtedly true back then.

The nocebo effect.

In steps the apostle Paul, with what he hopes will be a cure. He reminds the Corinthians that no idol in the world really exists, and that there is no God but the one Father of Jesus Christ. Sure, there may be many “so-called gods” in heaven or on earth, but for Christians there is only one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator and Preserver of all things (1 Corinthians 8:4-6).

So is there any problem with eating meat offered to idols? No, not really. Idols don’t exist, so sacrifices to Greek gods are sacrifices to nothing. Meat can’t be tainted by something that is nothing.

But wait a second. The nocebo effect reminds us that people can get sick based on beliefs, not just facts. In the study mentioned a minute ago, the women who believed they were prone to heart disease died at a higher rate based on their beliefs, not based on their physical health. It’s not enough for a doctor to say, “You’re perfectly healthy.” And it’s not enough for Paul to say, “Idol meat is perfectly fine.” People have to believe it for it to have an effect.

Paul knows that not everyone is going to believe what he says about idol meat. And so he recommends that the Christians in Corinth put more emphasis on love than on knowledge. “Knowledge puffs up,” he reminds them, “but love builds up” (v. 1). So make your decisions based on what is most loving, he recommends, not on what is most consistent with higher knowledge.

Love is the key, according to Paul – regardless of where you stand on idol meat, or anything else.

There are numerous nocebo effects crippling our Christian health today. We make ourselves sick when we disagree over issues that may someday seem as antiquated as the Corinthian disagreement over meat sacrificed to idols.

Roman Catholics debate whether priests should be allowed to marry, and whether women should be ordained. Gender-inclusive language in Today’s New International Version Bible has created a tug of war between camps in the evangelical world, just as similar changes in the New Revised Standard Version created conflicts among mainline Christians a few decades ago.

Believers of all denominations wrestle every day with the isuues of religious school vouchers and doorbell evangelism.

It’s enough to make you ill. The cumulative effect of all this dueling and debating is downright sickening. What we have now is a church that has been fighting for so long that it is “worried sick” and “scared to death.” And these are not simply figures of speech from the popular lexicon – they are becoming observable scientific phenomena. The nocebo effect.

So, what’s the cure?

Paul’s advice is to avoid rating knowledge or certainty or “being right” too highly. The operative principle for the church is love, shown through an attitude of respect for Christians of

diverse beliefs. Not everyone has the same knowledge, he says, and this is as true for the issue of idol meat as it is for the issues that vex us today.

Christians don’t share all of the same knowledge, observes Paul. Get used to it. Get over it.

The important thing is to behave in such a way that you do not become a stumbling block to your fellow Christians. For Paul, this meant that he abstained from eating meat, even though he believed that there was nothing really wrong with it. He took seriously the fact that some of his fellow Christians believed that idol meat was unclean, and that their faith would be hurt – even destroyed! – by eating such meat. And so Paul put their needs ahead of his own, and promised “I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall” (v. 13).

What a concept: to put the needs of our Christian opponents ahead of our own. To invest our energy in building up their faith, instead of knocking down their points of view. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and to follow the words of Jesus when he said “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12).

In the church today, we are so concerned about being right that we have forgotten about being loving. But as Paul points out in today’s Epistle about idol meat, our primary Christian responsibility is not to be correct, but to be compassionate. Our job is to care for, nurture and build up one another in love, and to recognize that everyone is a precious child of God, a brother or sister “for whom Christ died” (v. 11). If we fail to see each other in this light – see even those with whom we have profound disagreements – then we sin against members of our family, and, according to Paul, we “sin against Christ” (v. 12).

There’s a slight variation of the nocebo effect that seems applicable to the church today: “Act sick, be sick.” When we fail to behave as Christians, showing love and mercy and grace and

understanding, we fail to function as a healthy church. Our sick actions invariably result in our becoming a weak and sickly community of faith.

But when we act in ways that are loving, we discover a health and vitality that we’ve never known before. A church that loves God and neighbor is a community of faith that is growing larger, getting deeper, reaching out and changing human lives. When we behave this way, we become a truly strong and healthy part of the body of Christ in the world today.

So, will we be a nocebo, “I will harm” … or a placebo, “I will please”?

What’s pleasing to God is a church that puts love first.