Sermon: All Things to All People

Delivered at Bethel United Methodist Church in West Greenville, South Carolina on February 8, 2015.

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

All Things to All People

Audio Version

For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.  To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews.  To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law.  To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak.  I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

1 Corinthians 9:19-23 (NRSV)

Give me Your eyes for just one second

Give me Your eyes so I can see

Everything that I keep missing

Give me Your love for humanity

Give me Your arms for the broken-hearted

The ones that are far beyond my reach

Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten

Give me Your eyes so I can see

From "Give Me Your Eyes" by Brandon Heath

At the beginning of the 2011 thriller The Adjustment Bureau, David Norris, an audacious young congressman portrayed by Matt Damon, loses an election in which he is the incumbent.  When the time comes to give the concession speech, Norris abandons the speech he prepared and comes clean about some of the utter nonsense involved in a political campaign.  He confesses that his campaign team paid $7300.00 to hire a consultant to tell him how much he should scuff up his shoes.  Their rationale was that, if his shoes weren't scuffed up enough, he would appear out of touch with blue-collar workers but that, if his shoes were scuffed up too much, he would not appeal to wealthy lawyers and bankers.  Norris admits that the blue and red striped tie he wore was chosen over fifty-six other ties by a team of specialists, because the color of one's tie coveys a message of its own.  He tells his audience that his previous speeches were crafted based on input from focus groups.¹

Norris and his team put forth all this effort so that the voting population would find him both relatable and worthy of a position of leadership.

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The church in the port city of Corinth was in a bad way.  Paul, who originally planted this community of faith, has received reports that the people have divided themselves into factions, some pledging loyalty to him, others pledging loyalty to another who shepherded the congregation in his absence.  He has also received reports of promiscuity and litigation.  Paul writes a letter to the Corinthian believers to address some of the problems within the congregation.  He reminds his readers that, as followers of Christ, their allegiance is to God and not to any of God's servants.  He urges them to pursue loving, committed, monogamous relationships as opposed to hedonistic, promiscuous lifestyles.  He encourages them to work out their differences within the church instead of dragging each other before corrupt government officials.  He challenges them to put one another's needs ahead of their own so that they might not cause each other to stumble spiritually.²

Paul goes on to write that, even though he might have certain liberties as one set free by the grace of God and certain privileges as an apostle of Jesus Christ, he has set all of these things aside for the sake of the people he sought to serve.  He did not want anything to get in the way of their hearing and receiving the Gospel.³  He then makes a rather provocative statement: he says, "I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some."

In our day and time, when we use the phrase "all things to all people," we typically mean something very different from what Paul meant in his letter to the Corinthians.  As a person who is constantly weighed down by what he believes to be other people's expectations of him, I once lamented, in one of my more desperate moments, "I can't be all things to all people!"  Paul, in his letter, is not in any way claiming that he has somehow managed meet the wants, needs, and expectations of every person he met.  What Paul is saying is that he sought to become like the people he met.  When he ministered to Jewish people, he was a Jew who maintained a kosher diet and followed the Jewish Law.  When he ministered to non-Jewish people, the Gentiles, he was like a non-Jewish person, one who did not know the Law.  When he ministered to the weak and powerless, he was meek and humble.

So when Paul says that he became "all things to all people," is he saying that he was simply trying to be relatable to others?  At first it might sound as if Paul is trying to convince the people around him that they should listen to him and follow his lead because he is just like them, not unlike the politician trying to figure out how much to scuff up his shoes.  I would like to suggest that maybe Paul's becoming "all things to all people" is not mere advertising or politicking but rather something much more profound.

To truly understand what Paul is doing, perhaps it would be helpful to first take a moment to consider his background and his motivations.

In a past life, Paul was a staunch Pharisee who kept the Jewish Law to the letter, meaning that he kept himself pure from anything worldly or unclean.  He had the privilege of being mentored in the faith by a prominent rabbi named Gamaliel.  Like any good Jewish man, Paul was proud of his heritage.  He was a son of the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe of Israel's very first king, and he was originally named Saul after that same king.  Saul was a defender of the faith who sought to keep his religion pure.  He combated the growing contingent of heretics who proclaimed that Jesus of Nazareth, a criminal executed for blasphemy and sedition, was the Messiah and that this Jesus had been resurrected from the dead.  Saul oversaw the execution of the apostate Stephen who had the gall to accuse the religious leaders of murdering their own Messiah.  He even got permission from the chief priests to track down the heretics who fled to the town of Damascus and to extradite them to Jerusalem.⁴

Considering such a background, it is no small matter for Paul to say, with honesty, that he became like a Gentile to reach Gentiles.

While Saul was on his way to Damascus, a blinding light forced him to his knees, and he heard a loud voice saying, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?"  He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" and the voice answered, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."  Saul arose unable to see, perhaps beginning to realize he had been blind long before that moment.  He was lead by his traveling companions into Damascus where he waited in the dark, praying, realizing that he had been persecuting the servants of God and that he had pitted himself against the God he believed he had been faithfully serving.⁵

After three days, Saul was visited by a man named Ananias, one of the people he went to Damascus to persecute.  Ananias called him "brother," placed his hands over his eyes, and told him to receive his sight.  The flakes fell from his eyes and he was able to see once again.⁶  One might say that, in some sense, he was able to see clearly for the first time in his life.  Everything changed for Saul: none of the things he once cherished mattered to him any longer.⁷  He had been saved from himself; he had been forgiven for the horrors he had committed; and he had found a new family among the people he once hated.  He discovered a new purpose in life: he wanted the whole world to experience the Salvation he had experienced.  With the same zeal with which he once defended his faith, he traveled throughout the Roman Empire sharing the saving love and grace of Jesus Christ with anyone who would listen.

Paul wanted to invite the people of the world into the experience of God's saving love and grace, but, at the same time, he knew that he could not invite another person into his experience unless he was willing to first step into the other person's experience.  To reach out to the Jews who did not yet know Christ, he drew from his own heritage, observing the rules of his religion, all the while remembering that, by the grace of God, he was no longer under the Law.  To reach out to the Gentiles, whom he did not want to burden with the notion that they had to become Jewish, he put his culture and the Law of his religion aside, never forgetting his duty to the law of Christ.  To reach out to the weak and powerless, he kept his pride in check and he strove to practice humility.

I think that, when Paul became "all things to all people," he was not merely putting on different personas to win people over but that he was actually expressing solidarity with the people he was trying to reach.  He was not trying to be relatable to people; he was trying to relate to people.  He was not trying to meet every want, need, and expectation; he was only trying to meet one need, the comfort of knowing that one is not alone.  I imagine that, in your darker moments, it wouldn't mean very much to you for someone to patronizingly say, "I was just like you once," as if he had just descended from his proverbial mountaintop to do you a favor.  I imagine it would mean much more to you for a person to demonstrate that he or she actually understands you.

Many Christians engage in what I like to call "guerrilla evangelism."  They offer the solution to all of life's problems in the form of a three step process accompanied by a handful of Bible verses, all neatly packaged in a pamphlet or in a well rehearsed spiel that could be delivered while in line at Wal-Mart.  This hit-and-run method is nothing like Paul's style of evangelism.  Paul actually left his comfort zone, got to know people who were different from him, and walked a mile in their shoes.  He wrote long letters to the congregations he planted, in the same way one might write a long letter to a loved one.  We don't really know how to help people unless we can relate to them, and we will never be able to relate to them unless we actually care enough about them to get to know them.  As the old saying goes, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

Of course, Paul wasn't doing anything particularly innovative: he was merely following the example of his Savior.  Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was the same in essence as God, "light from light, true God of true God," but He held His divinity loosely.  He left Heaven, put on human flesh, became mortal, and came to earth to live among humanity.⁸  To borrow a phrase from Eugene Peterson, He "moved into the neighborhood" with us.⁹  Jesus danced at weddings, cried at funerals, and enjoyed dinner with the good and the bad.  He walked in our shoes for thirty-three years, experiencing the full range of human emotions, even the feeling of being forsaken by God.  The Incarnation, the life of Jesus Christ from the manger to the cross, was God's ultimate act of solidarity with the human beings God created.¹⁰  It was this Jesus whom Paul wanted the world to know, and it was the example of this Jesus that Paul sought to follow.

One of the most important things we're called to do as followers of Jesus Christ is to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  St. James, the brother of Jesus, calls this command the "royal law."¹¹  St. Paul says that the entirety of the Jewish Law is summarized in this one command.¹²  Jesus himself paired this command with the command to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength as the two great commandments on which all other religious rules are derived.¹³  Perhaps it is this law, to love one's neighbor as oneself, Paul references when he writes that he is "under Christ's law."  Can we truly love our neighbors as we love ourselves if we are not willing to put ourselves in their shoes?

Tony Kriz, known by many as "Tony the Beat Poet," confesses in his book Aloof that, when he was in college, there was one group of people he hated with a passion - fraternity boys.  He hated the way they pompously strutted around campus; he hated their wardrobe; he hated their stupid secret handshakes; he hated their hazing rituals; and he hated the way they supposedly mistreated women.  Over time, he found it in his heart to earnestly pray for the frat boys on his campus, but eventually he realized that there was only one thing he could do to overcome his prejudice against them.  After much resistance to the thought, he finally pledged a fraternity, donned khakis and a lettered sweatshirt, and became what he hated.  Over the remainder of his college career he came to view the other boys in his fraternity, not just as a bunch guys in need of prayer, but as brothers whom he loved.  Looking back on his experience in the fraternity, Kriz wonders if maybe Paul stepped into other people's shoes, not only for the sake of others, but for his own sake as well, that he might overcome his prejudices.¹⁴

In the late aughts, human "guinea pig" Morgan Spurlock hosted 30 Days, a television series that gave people the opportunity to walk for thirty days in the shoes of people very different from them.  On one episode, Spurlock spent a month in a penitentiary with convicted criminals.  On another episode, a volunteer border patrol guard spent thirty days with a family of undocumented immigrants and even lived as one himself.  On another, an atheist spent a month with a family of conservative Christians.  The people who participated in this television project, by spending time with people very different from them and living as they live, began to see people they once judged in a new light.¹⁵

We might not have such intense opportunities to walk in the shoes of other people, but we do have another, much simpler, option: we can offer other people a listening, nonjudgmental ear.  So often, when we think we're listening to someone else, our attention is actually split between what the other person is saying and what we're planning to say in response.  What if, when other people shared their stories with us, we actually gave them one hundred percent of our attention, with open minds and open hearts?  What if we put aside all of our preconceived notions about other people and immersed ourselves in their stories, imagining ourselves in their shoes?  We just might develop empathy, the ability to understand another person's emotions and perspectives.

Our tendency is not to put ourselves into other people's shoes but rather to put other people in our own shoes.  We judge their actions and their choices based on what we think we would do in their situations, even though we likely aren't in their situations and haven't been formed by the experiences that made them who they are.  According to the Greek Philosopher Epictetus, "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak."  Similarly St. James writes, "Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,"¹⁶ and to this I would add, "slow to judge and slow to form opinions."  We must be quick to listen to people's stories, slow to tell them what we think they should do, and very slow to form opinions about them.

I think it only fair to warn you that stories can be dangerous.  If you want to cling to a worldview in which you are one of the good guys and in which someone different from you is one of the bad guys, then you had better insulate yourself from the experiences of others.  Otherwise, if you truly listen to other people's stories, with an open heart devoid of judgment, then you just might catch a glimpse of the world through other people's eyes.  Then you might have no choice but to change your worldview or at least to hold it a little more loosely.

Only once we have stepped into the experiences of others can we invite others into our own experiences, and we do so by sharing our own stories.  I would argue that witnessing has nothing to do with mechanically regurgitating Bible verses and Church doctrines and everything to do with sharing one's own story of faith and redemption.  The story of Paul's encounter with Christ is told in the Acts of the Apostles three times, twice by Paul himself.¹⁷  We testify to what we have seen with our own eyes in our own lives, and we do so honestly, with our defenses down.  To the poor, we speak from our own poverty, whatever form that takes; to the weak, we speak from our own weakness; and, to the broken, we speak from our own brokenness.

In the end, we're all the same: we're all in need of love and grace.  Those of us who have experienced God's love and grace are called to share that same love and grace with others.  In the words of evangelist D.T. Niles, "Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread."  Perhaps we cannot truly be "all things to all people," but we can reach out to people in ways that demonstrate that we are for them and not against them.  We step into the experiences of others and share our own experiences with them that we may invite them into an experience of God's love and grace.

Amen.


Notes:

1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385826/
2. 1 Corinthians 1-8
3. 1 Corinthians 9:1-18
4. See Philippians 3:4-6, Acts 22:3-5, and Acts 7:58.
5. See Acts 9:1-9.  Barry Taylor refers to this event as Paul's "revelation of darkness."
6. See Acts 9:10-19 and Acts 22:12-16.
7. Philippians 3:7
8. See Phil 2:5-11, John 1:1-18, and the Nicene Creed.
9. John 1:14 (The Message)
10. Tony Jones.  Questions that Haunt Christianity: Volume 1.  2013, the JoPa Group.  ch. 9
11. James 2:8
12. Galatians 5:14
13. Matthew 22:34-40
14. Tony Kriz.  Aloof: Figuring Out Life with a God Who Hides.  2014, Thomas Nelson.  pp. 97-101
15. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437696/
16. James 1:19 (NRSV)
17. See Acts 9:1-19, Acts 22:3-16, and Acts 26:4-18.

The image of the shoes is public domain.