"Eat More Chikin?": Some Initial Thoughts about Chick-Fil-A and the Christian Kerygma

So often, people are so concerned with doing something right that they fail to act righteously.  In other words, people get so fixated upon the minute details that they lose sight of the whole picture. 

The whole Chick-Fil-A debacle is a prime example.  Christians are polarized over whether or not they should eat a chicken sandwich.  When a single chicken breast successfully wedges a gap between those who claim a divine unity, then there are clearly deeper crises at work within the Body of Christ than which restaurant to eat at after church. 

Jesus confronted the same problem with the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew:

You blind guides!  You strain for gnats and swallow a camel!  Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence!  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets... (Matthew 23:24, 29-31 NASB)

In this instance, many are tempted to reduce righteousness to a single act:  eating or not eating chicken.  For so many  Christians, the choice which another Christian makes becomes the litmus test of his or her communion with Christ.  This temptation to sit in God’s place, as arbiter of God’s love toward His people, ensnared the Donatists in the 4rd and 5th centuries, and many well-intentioned Christians fall into its grip today.

To be clear, I think that it is appropriate for Christians to discriminate between unrighteous and righteous acts and attitudes:  I am most certainly doing so in this note!  However, we should not let the unrighteousness of others grant us license to withold love from another, for we, too have fallen short of the law:

If however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.  But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.  For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.  For he who said,  “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.”  Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. (James 2:8-11 NASB)

So often, one becomes so fixated upon one point of the law, that he or she deludes himself or herself into thinking that following that single point suffices for the whole law.  Yet,  the revelation of God is that He desires the utmost purity in all points of the law in order to be satisfied and that Jesus alone has obeyed the law. 

If this is the case, then the truly righteous Christian would not only declare certain attitudes wrong, but promptly admit that he or she contributes to the problem.  In fact, sinfulness, the very act of setting oneself up as the exemplar of God’s righteousness and arbiter of His love is the problem that God sent Christ to rectify! 

Regardless of our denominational background, we are united in a Baptism into Christ: a death to self and a resurrection to new life.  The solution, if it is to be truly Christian, will include a death to one’s preconceived notions of God’s expectations, openness to God’s actual expectations, eagerness to repent of one’s failures to meet those expectations, and an invitation to others to do the same. 

This universal solidarity of repentance and the redemption that it brings is God’s plan in Christ.  And that is a much bigger than a chicken sandwich.