February 8, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

All Things to All People

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Isaiah 40:21–26
1 Corinthians 9:16–23

One of the unsurprising ironies of early Christian history—of all Christian history—is that the drive to be one (as God is one) leads to conflict and schism. The Christian community ought always to strive and pray for unity—but to admit a considerable measure of diversity. How much unity is achievable? How much diversity is tolerable? These are judgments that each generation must make. . . . Saint Paul, at his best, . . . had the clearest knack for polyphony, for bringing into overt expression the conscientious voices of many: of tradition, of scripture, of weak, of strong, of time-honored custom, of the radically new gospel. This is at least one feature of Paul’s rhetoric that we could well imitate.

Wayne A. Meeks
The Origins of Christian Morality

Paul was a city person. Unlike Jesus, whose language reflects his familiarity with Palestinian village life, Paul drew on metaphors of schoolroom, workshop, stadium, or gymnasium more than images of farm life. As a missionary, Paul made his rounds to strategically located cities of the northeast Mediterranean basin. That is why some scholars have attributed to Paul the first “urban movement” of Christianity.

The cities of the Mediterranean world were at the frontier of great political and social changes. In a book entitled The First Urban Christians, New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks writes,

For a very long time groups of foreigners had gathered in each city: merchants and artisans following the armies or in search of better markets or better access to transportation, persons enslaved and displaced by war or piracy and now set free, political exiles, soldiers of fortune. These non-citizen residents often retained some sense of ethnic identity by establishing local cults of their native gods or by forming a voluntary association, resembling religions of one kind or another (p. 13). By the time Paul lived, the cities had become quite complex, consisting of many different socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious groups.

As you can imagine, in this pluralistic setting, different social perspectives and different cultural and religious practices all converged. In the letters Paul wrote to these city churches, such as his letters to the Corinthians, Paul addressed a number of disputes between persons on different sides of issues—issues ranging from sexual freedom to the right of apostles to marry, from their right to receive financial support from the churches they established to eating meats sacrificed to idols, the topic on which Joann Lee preached last Sunday.

Paul addressed each issue; his letters were situational. This doesn’t mean though that Paul’s letters don’t reveal a coherent worldview. On the contrary, in his practical exhortations, we are able to discern coherence in his thought. Running throughout his letters is a rhetoric that ties together his responses to the variety of situations he addressed. There is in his letters what New Testament scholar Margaret Mitchell calls “a rhetoric of reconciliation.”

In Paul’s day, the issue of freedom—freedom “to do whatever one wants” (1 Corinthians 6:12; 10:23)—was the political issue. No matter the specific problem at hand, debates within the church and in the Greco-Roman world at large were often framed by people on different sides who argued against compromising, against conciliating the other side, because to do so would entail some loss of their own freedom. Schisms, factionalism, party politics was the unavoidable result. It was in the midst of this kind of political and social climate that Paul was working to plant churches. In his astute way, Paul discerned that all of the contentious issues at play in the Corinthian church were related to the problem of party strife. So we find him responding not to the parties individually, but to the problem of factionalism itself. Factionalism, Paul argued, countered the church’s theological calling to unity and concord in Christ.

In the passage you heard this morning, Paul’s rhetoric of reconciliation rings loud and clear. Listen again to what he wrote to the Corinthians:

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.

Paul called upon himself as an example of partisan-free behavior. A member of no party, he tried to be “all things to all people.” Free and slave; Jew and Gentile; those under the law and those outside the law—these were mutually exclusive categories that in Paul’s day were exhaustive of the human race. You were either free or slave. You were either Jew or Gentile. If you weren’t one, you were the other. In his letter to the Galatians, he even included the categories of male and female. There he wrote that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

We know of others who have been great rhetoricians for reconciliation. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. Martin Luther King Jr. too comes to mind. Both of these men are known for making speeches that pierced the consciences of audiences, touched their audiences’ hearts, and moved them to act in new ways, ways that even went against their own private gain, against the traditions and ways of life they knew well and from which they had benefited. In their speeches, Lincoln and King had to address ways of life that could never lead to unity and would necessarily lead to division and violent strife. The times in which they lived called most urgently for a rhetoric of reconciliation.

Given the human condition, we can safely say that there will never be a time when reconciling rhetoric will not be needed. Some would say, however, that these days—the time in which you and I now live—are in sore need of reconciling words and gestures. We need to hear our leaders say that they are willing to make compromises when by doing so they will contribute to the common good and strengthen the whole body.

Although we are tired of factionalism and party politics, we are nevertheless skeptical of reconciling rhetoric. We can’t help but wonder if someone is saying such and such because of the situation he is in or because he knows it is what people want to hear. To be “all things to all people” could be a perfect way of life for a political chameleon. This was a concern in the ancient Greco-Roman world just as it is today. Living around the same time as the Apostle Paul and near the city of Delphi, Greek historian Plutarch described his take on a political chameleon. He wrote,

What man is there, then, so indefatigable, so changeable, so universally adaptable, that he can assimilate and accommodate himself to many persons. . . . Such varied adaptation were the task of a Proteus . . . who by magic can change himself often on the very instance from one character to another, reading books with the scholarly, rolling in the dust with wrestlers, following the hunt with sportsmen, getting drunk with topers, and taking part in the canvass of politicians, possessing no firmly founded character of his own. (Margaret Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation, p. 134)

Plutarch’s description is humorous, but unfortunately from time to time we have all been exposed to chameleons of one sort or another. It is of utmost importance that we know the sincerity of people who call us to reconciliation. Paul knew this. That is why he offered himself—his own actions—not only as an example for others to follow, but also as proof for the sincerity of his message: he was not all things to all people for the sake of his own popularity, but for the sake of the greater good, for the sake of the body of Christ, for the sake of the gospel, which he held to be for everyone—Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female alike.

It is understandable and smart to worry whether or not the things that public officials and leaders say lack depth. And yet when we hear a public leader draw deeply on his most cherished values and beliefs, like religious values and beliefs, our skepticism is not assuaged. Living in America, where we uphold each person’s right to believe and value what that person will, no matter how different those beliefs and values are from our own, as long as they don’t impinge upon our own, we have ironically come to feel quite comfortable with rhetoric that is shallow.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to National Public Radio’s Saturday morning Weekend Edition. I turned on the radio just in time to hear clips of speeches made by Abraham Lincoln. And though I cannot quote verbatim the parts of Lincoln’s speech I found so moving, I do remember that they included language about God—God’s fatherly care, I believe. Addressing parents who had lost their sons in battle in the midst of our nation’s painful civil war, Lincoln drew upon religious language as he expressed his most profound sorrow.

As moved as I was by his rhetoric, I couldn’t help but think that today it would cause quite a stir if our public leaders drew upon their religious beliefs and values so explicitly in their public statements. Given the religious and cultural diversity of our day, we have come to think that we have to check our religious values at the door before we enter the public realm if people are going to have any chance of coming to agreement, consensus, or unity of mind. Christians can’t assume any longer that people will know what they mean if they use Christian language, which, while it may have meaning for us, may be quite unfamiliar to non-Christians.

This doesn’t mean, however, that a rhetoric of reconciliation has to be shallow. Like Paul, who tried to be “all things to all people” for the sake of the gospel, we too can root our reconciling rhetoric and work in the gospel. For Christians the good news of our reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ is what makes reconciliation among persons and groups possible in the first place. Its possibility is a gift from God. Its actuality will entail our compromises, our sacrifices. As Paul exhorted us, it requires us to imitate him as he imitated Christ, not just in rhetoric, of course, but in the whole of our lives. Amen.