A sermon preached at
Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
4 February 2018
1
Corinthians 9.16-23
Mark 1.29-39
Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2018-02-04-simon-woodman-dont-tell-me-what-to-do
“I have
become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
This
phrase, uttered by Paul at the conclusion to our passage this morning
from his letter to the church in
Corinth,
has caused
much debate amongst those
who have tried to understand his motivation
and methodology,
particularly as they might apply to
the missionary endeavours
of the church
to ‘win’ people for Christ.
Does
becoming ‘all things to all people’
constitute a call for relativistic
pragmatism,
whereby Paul, and by
implication all of us,
was willing to forgo his
principles and convictions as long as some are saved;
or is there something else going on
here?
It’s a
tricky one, because at the heart of this
is the deeper issue of how the
ethical perspective of the Christian
should relate to the ethical stance
of the world beyond the Christian community.
Are we to
take a moral stand over and against the world,
calling the world to live according
to our standards;
or are we
to enter the world and risk compromising our high ideals,
for the sake of making the gospel of
Christ heard more widely?
The history
of the missionary movement is littered with those
who have occupied the imperialist
end of this spectrum,
and it isn’t always pretty.
The great
global missionary expansion
that rode the coat-tails of European
colonialism
was one
which by and large sought to impose Christian morality
by firm persuasion, and by force if
necessary;
with colonised nations places such as South
America
being forcibly converted to Christ,
and required to live accordingly.
Closer to
home, and closer to our own time,
the Western church’s current evangelistic
efforts
often seem
to revolve around trying to persuade people
that there is something deeply wrong
with their current worldview,
to which only the church of Christ
has the solution.
And so
people are invited to leave their past behind,
and move into the new way of living
that is available to them through
faith in Jesus.
This may
even have been your own experience of coming to Christ.
I think
that what it boils down to
is whether we are going to seek to
assert any kind of firm difference
between
what we might call God’s culture
and our lived experience of Human culture.
Are we
going to seek to persuade, cajole, or require
those who live in whatever passes
for our prevailing culture
that they
should, ought to, or must take on a new way of living,
that we are going to assert is God’s
preferred culture?
It’s really
a question of whose rules are we going to live by?
Shall we live in obedience to the
rules of our dominant culture,
or according to the rules of some
so-called counter-cultural kingdom of God?
And in any
case, what is the relationship between these two cultures going to be?
And what does this all even mean,
when we get down to the practicalities of it?
What does it mean to live by God’s
laws rather than by human laws?
Should I still pay
taxes?
Or drive on the correct
side of the road?
Is it OK to educate my children
according to my beliefs
rather than according to
the best insights of scientific knowledge?
‘Living by
God’s laws’ is good Christian-speak,
but what does it really mean
for those of us who have to live in
the real world?
Now, I
don’t know about you,
but I have never really liked being
told what to do.
As I child
I was, what my father used to call, a contrary little whatsit,
(I’m paraphrasing him here, you
understand).
I can
remember that I would deliberately do the precise opposite
of whatever he was telling me to do,
even
if I had been just about to do of my own accord
the very thing I was now
refusing to do.
It wasn’t
that I was by nature particularly badly behaved,
it was just that my motivation came
from within rather than from without.
In some
way’s I’m still a bit like this;
I’m much more likely to do something
if I’ve decided that I want to do it,
than I am because someone is
requiring me to do it.
And I
wonder about you, where do you sit on this?
Are you like me, a rebel within a
cause;
or do you prefer being told what to
do?
Do you
respond well to being given a code of rules for how to live,
that you can keep and get right, and
know that you’re doing OK?
If so,
you’re not alone.
There is great comfort to be found
in knowing where you stand on issues
because an external
voice is telling you how to respond.
Many of those who are drawn to
religious faith
are in precisely this
category.
I have
often wondered, from my perspective,
why those strands of religion
that offer very strong
answers and very few grey areas
are so attractive to highly educated
people,
and I’ve
come to the conclusion it’s because some people,
particularly those who have to
handle great complexity and nuance
in their engagement with
the world on a daily basis,
crave deep-down the kind of certainty
of belonging and being
that a definitive
religious community can offer.
And so
people look to the Bible as a rule-book for living,
to be read and followed uncritically;
and they
look to the church as the arbiter of what’s right and what’s wrong,
telling them how to live well and
rightly in a complex and ambiguous world.
In the
clash between God’s culture and Our culture,
a church that clearly articulates
what God’s culture looks like,
over and against the
prevailing culture of society,
is offering a highly attractive
proposition.
And the
thing is, there are so many voices
competing for the right to tell us
what to do.
It can be
utterly overwhelming to have to try and choose between them;
and we can cast around in vain
for a basis on which to
decide who has the right to tell us what to do,
and whether we have to
do it.
From the
advertising industry telling us to buy this, or not to buy that;
to political voices telling us to
vote this way, and not that way;
to moral voices telling us to do
this, and not to do that.
The ability
to distinguish right from wrong can become lost to us,
as we find ourselves unable to work
out
whether the calls on us are absolute
or relative.
In response,
many of us turn to our friends, our families,
our social networks, or our faith
communities for guidance.
The rise of
social media has created possibilities
for new communities of moral and
ethical reinforcement,
as people are able to establish
peer-groups across geographical boundaries.
The role of
Twitter in everything from the Arab Spring of 2010
to the most recent American
Presidential election,
shows the
power of such virtual communities
to transform the geopolitical
landscape.
And the
questions over the ability of big data manipulation of such communities
to achieve political objectives is deeply
troubling.
It seems
that if people no longer know, instinctively,
where to turn for their moral compass,
they will still find somewhere.
None of us
live in a vacuum
and we’re still going to get our
ethical code from someone;
but if it’s
not some external metanarrative
offered by political ideology or
religious conviction,
it will
most likely be from peer-pressure
or the moral outrage of the
Twitter-storm.
The
fragmentation of society into mutually-reinforcing groups,
motivated primarily by self
interest,
lies behind
many of the movements
to deconstruct the larger institutions
that have held sway in recent decades.
The Brexit
mantras of ‘I want my country back’,
or, possibly, ‘I don’t want these
Brussels bureaucrats
telling me what my money
should be spent on,
or what shape my banana
must be’,
have offered
a highly compelling narrative
to many who were seeking new rules
to live by,
and a new world in which to live.
Well, now
we’ve got our freedom, and I wonder what we will do with it?
Just this week I watched Miriam Margolys Big American
Adventure,
and she
visited a ranch in Arkansas, Trump territory.
She was speaking with the wife of the rancher who lived
there
about the
America First ideology that is driving so much
of the
domestic and international political agenda of the current administration,
and they said,
“y’know,
our country was founded on people like us,
who
went to work every day,
y’know they
left England because they didn’t want people telling them what to do.
So
they come over here and they make the best country in the whole world,
and then
you have Obama that says ‘we’re gonna make everybody even’...
well
that’s not right.
If you
don’t want to go to work every day,
why should
you have all the benefits that I do.”
A bit later in the programme, in response to the question
‘how would
you like America to change?’,
the leader of an alt-right group, a church pastor named
Mike,
who believes
that Jews, blacks, and homosexuals
should be
neutered, deported or executed,
replied that
‘well
obviously I’d like it to change
to be a
godly country that enforced God’s laws’
And here we are, back again at the clash
between
God’s culture and Our culture.
And I honestly think that as Christians, we have to find a better
way through this,
and I think
this is where Paul can be so helpful to us
with his
comments to the church in Corinth.
“I have
become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
You see, I am simply not satisfied with a version of
Christianity
that seeks
to exert its own moral and ethical code
as
normative and absolute on the world,
and which then
seeks to take enough power to enforce that code on others.
I don’t believe that God’s
culture is in competition with Our
culture,
in such a
way that we are in a battle with the world
which we
must win in order that people can come to know Christ.
I don’t think we should seek to create godly countries
where
people live by God’s laws.
I think it was a mistake when Constantine tried to do that
in the fourth century,
and I think
it’s a mistake when Islamic extremists attempt to do it today
with
the re-establishment of a caliphate,
and I think
it’s a mistake when Pastor Mike wants to do it in America
and
votes Donald Trump in to do it for him.
And I don’t believe in the notion of England as a Christian
country,
and I
wouldn’t want to live in it if it was,
because
Baptists have been persecuted by the established church in London before.
You see, the problem with any kind of Christendom
is that
when Christians become the absolute legislators,
they try to write their version of so-called biblical
morality into the national law,
and then
require others to live by it
as if this
in some way saves or Christianises the nation.
And Paul knew this danger of absolutizing religious belief
all too well.
He had grown
up in two very different but closely related worlds.
As a Roman citizen, he was raised in a city
where the
emperor required everyone to worship him;
and as a Jew he was part of a people
who
believed that God ruled their country absolutely.
His whole life was lived out in the tension
between two
competing religious orthodoxies.
And so he says,
“I have
become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
To the Jews, Paul is a Jew;
to those
who live under the Jewish law, he is one who lives under the law;
to the pagans who are not under the law,
he is one
who is himself outside of the law.
He is neither Jewish nationalist, nor Imperial worshipper;
because he
is free from all these demands.
And this means that we, too, are free from such compulsions.
Where Christians have gone wrong, I think, down the
centuries,
is that we
keep setting up God’s culture
in
opposition to human culture.
We create a competing ethical narrative
which we
set up as an alternative
to that
which society has constructed,
and then we seek to impose our own moral code on others,
either by conversion,
coercion or force,
in order to
win the world to Christ.
And this isn’t what Paul has in mind at all.
When we simply seek to replace secular law
with our
own version of the law of Christ,
we just re-invent the wheel
and
reconstruct the very thing that Paul is so scathing about,
we rebuild
the very thing we’ve just torn down.
Paul’s great insight is that those who follow Christ
have been
freed from the law, be it religious or secular.
The ten commandments are not binding on those who follow
Christ,
any more
than are any other attempts to codify human behaviour.
But, and here’s the key thing,
Christians
are not free to do whatever they like,
with no
thought to the consequences.
For Paul, God’s
culture is always, definitively and absolutely, a culture of love,
and it is
made known in the person and example of Jesus.
And it is this culture of love
which
offers the only credible alternative
to all other human cultures,
which are
always, definitively and absolutely, predicated on violence.
There is no vision of human society which does not, in some
measure,
depend upon
the threat of violence to en-force its requirement.
And when Christians seek to re-write society as God’s
society,
we end up
in the same place of legalism and punishment
as all
those who have gone before.
But, if Paul is right, it is not our calling to re-write
society,
it is our
calling to subvert it through love.
This message of good news,
that
Christians are to proclaim and embody,
is
a gospel of love,
it is an
invitation to enter into a new world
where
the sole defining absolute,
is
the love of God in Christ Jesus.
The key question for Christians is therefore not what law they
should keep,
but how can
they live in love.
They are free from all laws apart from this,
because this is the only ethical absolute: that
we should live in love.
And this culture of love
is one that
can take root in and among all other human cultures.
We do not need to create a law of love
that we
must argue for, defend, or impose on others.
Rather, we can live the law of love into being
in the
midst of whatever culture we find ourselves.
So Paul can be a Jew to Jews, and a Gentile to the Gentiles,
he can be
all things to all people,
because that is how he can make known the love of God
to those
who do not know what it is to live in love.
Those who have taken it upon themselves to live in the love
of God
do not
enter human culture as a conquering force,
seeking
power to dominate and impose,
but rather
to bring to birth the power of transformation from within,
to
make known the law of love
which
has the capacity to make all things new.
So our involvement in our society
is one
where we are the yeast in the loaf,
the
active ingredient that transforms the whole,
the
pinch of salt that seasons the meal.
Should Christians become involved in politics?
Absolutely
yes.
The structures of our society need transformation and
redemption
and we have
a part to play in the drafting of legislation
and the
betterment of the common good.
It is our calling to speak love into places of hurt,
to speak
peace and reconciliation to places of division and strife,
to point to those places where love can be found
and to
proclaim the blessing of God on them.
Because not everything in human society is bad,
and not
everything in it needs re-drafting.
There is much that is good, and godly, and worthy of
blessing and sanctification,
and
sometimes our role is to see where God is at work beyond the church,
and to join
our voices and efforts with those
who
are outworking a message of love
even if
they look nothing like us,
and
believe nothing like we believe.
God is the God of the whole earth,
not just
our little corner of it.
He doesn’t need us to defend his rights,
he just
asks us to make him known.
As Jesus went from place to place,
crossing
borders and entering towns to proclaim the message of God’s love for all,
and
bringing healing and transformation to the hurt and the vulnerable,
so we too are called to journey from our own places of
security,
into places
where we are not always welcome,
in order that the reigning boundaries of power in our world
might be challenged
in the name
of the one
who
continually transgressed those same boundaries in his time and place.
But we do this not because we are seeking to replace society
with our
own version of it,
but because we believe the good news of the love of God
is a gospel
for all people, and all cultures,
because we believe that in God and through Christ,
there is a
new creation where all are equally loved.
And this means that faith in Christ can have multiple
ethical outcomes in this world,
as long as
they can all be fitted under the umbrella rubric of the love of God.
As Tom Wright puts it,
‘Christian
freedom is not freedom to do what you like,
but
freedom from all the things
that stop
you being the person God calls you to be.’
And so we take our place in society,
becoming
all things to all people
that by all
means we might save some.
