Year B: February 7, 2021 | Epiphany 5
Epiphany 5, Year B: I Corinthians 9:16-23
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
February 7, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 25:10 in).
“I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” – I Corinthians 9:22b[1]
A lot of people, even within the Church, aren’t particularly fond of the Apostle Paul. Frankly, it isn’t all that hard to see why. He’s confusing. He can be harsh. And he often sounds pretty full of himself. When you add the enshrining of some Roman-era cultural norms into what eventually became a sacred text, he comes across as pretty legalistic, too. Scholars and theologians try to smooth some of those difficulties by arguing about which letters the “real” Paul wrote and which were written later by one of his followers. While we could probably debate both sides for days without coming to a settled conclusion, the fact is that whoever wrote these letters doesn’t really matter: they’ve all been an accepted part of the New Testament canon since at least the late 2nd Century of the Common Era. The early Christians found them important enough to preserve for us, and they’re all a settled part of our scriptures.
Paul himself was active around the middle of the 1st Century and likely died before anyone formally recorded any of the Gospels, making his letters the oldest written portion of the New Testament. He sent his first letter to the Corinthian congregation roughly 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and it—like much of Paul’s writing—appears to be a series of responses to questions this early fellowship had sent him after he had moved on to share Christ’s Good News in other cities throughout modern-day Turkey and Greece.
This letter aspect is actually one of the difficulties Paul offers us. We have his responses, but we have few—if any—of the original questions. We can deduce some of them, but others are completely lost to time. That can make interpreting and applying Paul’s instructions problematic. Does what he wrote directly relate to modern situations, or, since his answers addressed specific inquiries, should we simply apply what makes sense now and just note the rest as historical artifact?
Where I spent the first 30+ years of my life, we didn’t have any of those kinds of problems with Paul. Paul was the ideal Christian, the ultimate missionary and evangelist. Our place wasn’t to ask him questions; it was simply to obey whatever he said, imitating him as he imitated Christ.[2] My friends and family—my entire Christian community—had committed ourselves to following the entirety of the Bible. So today’s reading caused us no small trouble.
In some places, including Paul’s letters, the Bible told us to separate ourselves, to keep ourselves pure from the defiling effects of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. We were “to present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”[3] For us, that largely meant withdrawing from broader society and even other branches of the Church. In fact, the sin our preachers most frequently warned us about was “compromise.”
“Compromise” was essentially anything that might give ground to Satan and therefore somehow accommodate evil. In practice, compromise might cover anything from engaging in interdenominational ministry to listening to Christian Contemporary Music[4] to being able to discuss the contents of last night’s popular TV show. We understood it as pretty much anything that allowed or influenced a person to deviate their actions ever-so-slightly from what we read in the Bible—or even to unintentionally look like they might have been doing so. That made the second part of our Epistle reading today a conundrum. Imitating Paul here meant disobeying the Bible elsewhere. If we needed to “abstain from all appearance of evil,”[5] how could we follow Paul in becoming “all things to all people, that [we] might by all means save some”[6]?
During college, my friends and I attempted to solve this problem through brief weekend bouts of “soul-winning,” something we privately described as “bug spray evangelism.” We knew we couldn’t really be all things to all people like Paul was—leadership expected us to maintain “Christian standards” so people could see we were committed to Jesus by at least looking different than everyone else.[7] But we could pop out of our protective bubble once every week or two on a Friday night or Saturday morning and either pass out tracts together downtown or run the early evangelistic service at the local men’s shelter. It didn’t really reflect what Paul was saying here, and we knew it. Several of us also suspected it wasn’t remotely effective (hence the bug spray comment).
Looking at this I Corinthians passage roughly two decades later—and from a much different place in life—I can see some problems with how we were approaching the text. I often warn about reading modern cultural, theological, and philosophical concepts backward onto the Bible, and I think our group’s trouble with Paul was largely a result of not being aware of that danger. It’s hard to notice how our own ideas and biases affect the way we see the world around us—and especially hard when no one has ever even mentioned the idea. My goal now in approaching the Bible is to do our best to understand what it says within its original context, difficult[8] though that may be, and then to extend our thinking and actions from there. The literal reading of an ancient text in English translation—even the most thoroughly researched and well-intentioned one—will almost always lead to confusing the present with the past.
That’s one of the reasons I try to bring you alternative interpretations when I preach. It isn’t that our modern Bible translations are wrong or untrustworthy—most are genuinely excellent. But committees of people spending years working together tend to accept the most neutral[9] interpretations. We also know that languages change—imperceptibly to those using them—and societal thought structures rebuild themselves along with those changes. When we spend our lifetimes watching at the world from our perch at the end of a branch, we often don’t realize that we ourselves, simply the latest buds on the still-growing tips of history’s tree, have been moving over time as well.
As cultures and societies evolve, any accurate translation will slowly drift toward misunderstanding. A word or phrase that captured a particular meaning even a few decades ago[10] might need to be reassessed today in order to restore the original text’s nuance or even to break a singular interpretation’s stranglehold on what deserves a more diverse application.
Paul’s writing tends to be full of those kinds of details, but three that stand out for me today have to do with slavery, “the law,” and—particularly in respect to my youthful self—“winning” different groups of people.[11]
It’s important to remember that slavery in the ancient world was not related to American chattel slavery. Some slavery in the Roman Empire was life-long and involuntary, but much was essentially similar to modern contract work. There wasn’t really a different term for forced versus optional “enslavement.” In many cases, an individual made an exclusive agreement with an employer, joining their household to perform a certain job for a specific amount of time for a mutually-defined payment. When both parties had fulfilled their part of the agreement, they might choose to make another one or they could go their separate ways. Some modern readers raise concerns about Paul appropriating the idea of slavery as a powerplay or as trying to manipulate the poor and oppressed through false comradery. My own guess is that Paul describing himself “a slave to all” was simply a familiar image of voluntary indebtedness—something anyone, even a “freeborn” citizen like him, could do. Paul saw himself as having been joined to God’s household. If all people are created in God’s image and are inherently part of God’s family, Paul was therefore indentured—and that culture’s understanding of a slave—to everyone he encountered.
Next, we need to address “the law.”[12] Christians have a long history of associating any mention of “law” in the New Testament with the Mosaic Law of the Hebrew Bible. Historically, we’ve tended to use the concept as something of an us-versus-them denigration toward Jewish people: we know the secret that we’re free before God, but those ignorant people still think they have to follow the rules. Once again, I don’t think that’s what Paul is trying to set up here. First of all, Paul expresses great respect for his fellow Jews and the Torah elsewhere in his writing, particularly in his letter to the Romans. Second, he never uses a definite article with “law” in this passage, although he does use one when referring to the Mosaic Law other epistles. And finally, the primary meaning of this word is a generic term for a custom or local cultural observance. When we recognize that Paul was writing to a non-Jewish congregation thousands of miles from Palestine, and one likely unfamiliar with much of the Hebrew Bible, that suggests his readers would have understood this word in the sense of it being an expected, normative practice, not a specific legal or religious code.
Basically, Paul is emphasizing to the Corinthians that any one region’s customs and social expectations often have little to do with the Gospel itself. He isn’t deriding Jewish people or their sacred texts; he’s simply using his home culture as an example of how he adapts to present the Gospel in differing contexts. “I presented myself to the Judeans like a Judean…Among those who observe a practice, I similarly observe that practice, even if I don’t need to…Among those without that practice, similarly, I don’t observe that practice.”[13] Elsewhere Paul warns his readers about “Judaizers”—what we might call cultural imperialists. I think Paul is offering a gentle warning to this Gentile congregation: don’t get wrapped up in the details of particular ways of doing things that any one culture embraces or even demands. The Gospel supersedes and reaches beyond all those boundaries, and we need to remain flexible enough to adapt in the moment.
Finally, I need to talk about “winning.”[14] Modern American Christianity equates Paul’s message here with what my college friends and I were trying to do: active proselytization through public conversation, handing out literature, street preaching, etc. Again, looking at the broader context and circumstances, that’s not how the Corinthians would have read this letter. The root behind Paul’s term here holds the concept of offering profit or gain. It didn’t necessarily refer to success in a competition as much as to providing a helpful advantage. And Paul specifically says he’s doing this for others, not himself: “I presented myself to the Judeans like a Judean in order that I might profit the Judeans,”[15] and so on. So Paul wasn’t necessarily pounding the streets trying to convict people of their wickedness or convince them of the right way to think or behave.[16] He was saying that by adopting local traditions as much as possible, he hoped to offer people a leg up, assistance in moving forward in their search for and movement toward the God of love and mercy revealed in Jesus Christ.
And much to the consternation of my old friends and my younger self, that sort of voluntary enslavement, that acquiescence to local practices—that “compromise”—is exactly how Paul was imitating Christ.
As this year’s season of Epiphany draws toward its end, it’s important to remember that Epiphany is a time of wondering, of “what if?” What if God were one of us? What might God do if faced with pain, hunger, loss, and oppression? How would God treat people if God were as weak, as powerless and fallible, as susceptible to trials and temptation as the rest of us? And then Epiphany answers those questions by offering us the life and example of Jesus Christ.
The wonder of the Gospel isn’t simply that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”[17] The wonder of the Gospel is the revelation of the humility of God. God didn’t feel a need to stand apart from creation to maintain purity or holiness. God doesn’t just slip into controlled interaction with human society once every other weekend. God isn’t worried about defilement from having to face the snares and messiness of everyday life and relationships. Christ’s incarnation shows us God actually embraces all of that, engaging with us not as some transcendent Other but as a regular person—a person who learned and grew, who laughed and loved, and who observed certain customs while disregarding others—a person who wasn’t concerned with keeping up appearances but entered into genuine friendship and community with the outcasts and “sinners” of his day.
Despite what we may think, God has never been afraid to be open and accepting with us. Following Jesus’ example—and Paul’s imitation of Christ—means that we set aside our preferences and privileges, our pride and presumptions, and even our imaginings of what (or who) is or isn’t holy in order to unveil the present Kingdom of our humble and loving God and to clear a path for understanding, continuing to provide others even more practical advantage in their search for that realm of love and peace.
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Philippians 3:17 | II Thessalonians 3:7, 9
[3] Romans 12:1
[4] We understood CCM to be God’s words poisoned with the Devil’s music.
[5] I Thessalonians 5:22 (KJV)
[6] I Corinthians 5:22
[7] The minimum off-campus dress standard for men was a collared shirt and “business casual” pants (aka: not jeans or workwear).
[8] Maybe even impossible!
[9] And often neutered.
[10] Much less several hundred years.
[11] Unfortunately, “saving” will have to wait for another day.
[12] νόμος (nomos)
[13] I Corinthians 9:20-21 (my translation)
[14] κερδαίνω (kerdaino)
[15] I Corinthians 9:20a (my translation)
[16] One might be able to argue that elsewhere, but I don’t see it as relevant here.
[17] Mark 1:15a