All Things to All People

February 5, 2012
Sermon by The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

The apostle Paul is exhausting.

“I have become all things to all people,” he says.

“All things to all people.”  That sounds like an exhausting level of commitment to me.  Who could realistically be all things to all people?
Really, I hate to break it to the Apostle Paul, but I know plenty of people of faith who would quickly say, “Paul, you are not all things to me.”  (Come to our biblical studies classes and meet us!) “All things to all people.”  Think of the risks of being everything to everybody.

If Paul is talking about pleasing everyone he meets, being a glad-handing people-pleaser co-dependent, then where is the integrity in that?  If we let ourselves be pulled in every direction and try to meet every need and every expectation of each unique person won’t we lose ourselves, lose our bearings, become hypocrites, phonies?

This is the risk.

That is the risk that Paul is taking for the sake of the Gospel and it is the example he is trying to give.

Paul is willing to sacrifice his identity for the sake of the good of others, for Jews, for Greeks, for the weak.

In the last few chapters of his 1st Letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes a clear argument that even though Christ sets us free, the true mark of that freedom is love.

Concretely, he says, even though you are spiritually free and you know idols are not real and the temples of idols are meaningless and silly and you could eat the meat sacrificed there with a clear conscience, restrain yourself for the sake of neighbors who are not yet free enough to see what you see.

Freedom is perfected in love, AND this means that our status as Christians can never become a something we turn into an egoistic identity that separates us from or makes us superior to others.

If we are tempted to elitism and superiority we are not in the spirit.

Now this is a challenging message for all of us who were raised in a culture that worships the self.  As for me, I was raised during the 70s when self-realization and self-actualization were all the rage.

It was the Kool-Aid I drank from many sources included the book Free to Be You and Me .  The message was clear; my ultimate good was my authenticity, and all my meaning in life would flow from discovering who I am.

The goal was to liberate, I get that.  But the result (or unintended consequence) was to put a new kind of burden on my soul.  Could I really find everything I need by looking inside?  Could I really bear the responsibility for making my universe meaningful?  Would my authentic self know automatically how to learn from others or even co-exist or collaborate with others in community?

Paul is offering another vision.  In fact if you read all his writings I am not sure if he is particularly concerned with individual spirituality and individualistic salvation apart from the salvation and spirituality of community, creation and the cosmos as a whole.

Paul is concerned – as always- with a common good.  What is a ‘common good’ it is something we can’t have by ourselves.  We must hold it in common.  It can’t be mine alone and it can’t be yours alone, it must be something we share and for which we are yoked in responsibility or it will cease to exist.

For Paul, I can’t make progress in the Gospel unless you and I move together.  I can’t make progress in love alone.

This is so much the case that Paul can lay aside his identity as a Pharisee, as Jew, as a Roman citizen and rather than insisting on his right, what is owed him, that to which he is entitled, instead, he is focused on the relationship, the common good.  His focus is not on being right, or righteous. His focus is on the relationship and the good of the whole… to the point that he is willing to sacrifice for it.

Even our much- worshipped quest for authenticity can become a distraction – in biblical language “an idol” – which pulls us from the common good, the pursuit of a shared wholeness.  Which returns me to the importance of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the arch enemy in a world that worships the authentic self.  And that is a shame.

We need hypocrisy.  We need to fake it until we make it.  We need to put on masks, and experiment with ways of being if we are going to grow and mature in virtue and faith.  One of the many problems with ‘authenticity worship’ is that it is a dead end.  Once I find myself, then what?  Is that all that I have or can hope for?  It can even become an excuse:  “Well that is just who I am,” we say to excuse ourselves.  It becomes a hiding place. Where we claim a clarity, a purity, and a simplicity that is not really human.

We are invited into a wholeness that includes our God-given selves but is also so much more.  The gospel is an invitation into a common good and what will feel like a loss of self for a greater healing.  Amen.