Flip-Flopping for Christ’s Sake Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 13, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Matthew 5:33-37 I Corinthians 9:19-27
“Here we go again with the flip-flop” said Daniel Shore a few weeks ago on NPR, “not a pair of sandals but the deadliest sin in the political lexicon.” I think of tax cuts embraced that once had been opposed or off-shore drilling touted that previously had been denounced, to name a few flip-flops on the one hand; while, on the other hand, there were positions taken in a primary race on NAFTA and campaign financing have been reversed as the race has turned toward the White House. The political paraphrase of our text would go something like this: to the NRA I become as a card-carrying member; to the religious right I become as one born-again; to big oil I become as an oil man; to feminists I become as a feminist. This year as in previous years the successful candidate must become “all things to all people” that he might by all means win the election. In this regard there is little new under the sun, some would say, but others have tried to say something more. Taking the high road in response to a flip-flop of Richard Nixon on wage and price controls over 35 years ago, the conservative columnist William Safire wrote, “Just as one man’s consistency is another man’s rigidity, one man’s flip-flopping is another man’s opportunity for growth.” Or consider playwright Philip Slater’s approbation of the flip-flop: “Personally,” he writes, “I have no respect for anyone who doesn’t flip-flop occasionally.” Slater is more taken with the candidate “capable of changing his mind, correcting [her] course when it’s headed for an iceberg, learning from mistakes, profiting from feedback. I’ve had enough of decisive stupidity, of rigidly refusing to respond to reality.” Likewise Raffaello Pantucci, a liberal commentator observed that, “On the basis of weight given to the ‘flip-flop,’ it would appear we need either politicians with an oracular degree of prescience—or we need ones who are so bull-headed that even in the face of overwhelming facts they stick to their guns and let history be their judges.” Having lived with the consequences of the latter in both church and state, I find myself more inclined to consider the flip-flop du jour of any given politician on its merits, believing with Emerson that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines. With consistency,” said Emerson, “a great soul has simply nothing to do.” I think it fair to say that Paul was a great soul with simply everything to do! In the face of changing conditions and contexts the apostle offers what, at first glance, would seem to be the perfect proof-text for flip-flopping. In fact, he goes so far as to present himself as an example par excellence of a flip-flopper to the Corinthians in response to an arcane question concerning the eating of meat: what does one do, they asked Paul, at a fancy dinner party held in the temple of some goddess, when the second course turns out to be meat that has already been offered to her as a sacrifice? Paul has previously gone on record about this, declaring in a stunning flip-flop from Jewish tradition that all foods are clean. Back in the Book of Acts, you will remember, Peter falls into a trance and sees a large sheet coming down from heaven filled with four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. A voice says, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” Peter initially refuses saying, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice assures him that “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Three times Peter hears this command, causing him to flip-flop, to reverse his position on associating with unclean Gentiles. “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean,” Peter said in earshot of the scribe of the day, whom we presume to be Luke. (Call no one profane or unclean? Why do we never take that verse literally, I wonder?) Peter’s trance, in turn, convinced the apostles that a flip-flop concerning dietary restrictions for Gentile converts was in order. Bring on the pork, the shrimp and, by all means, the lobster; but also drop the prohibition on meat from animals that may have met their end in pagan temples! The Corinthians reminded Paul of the change in apostolic policy in a letter to which our text is the response. In the first place, they wrote, “no idol in the world really exists” and “there is no God but one.” Hence it was not even possible to offer meat to idols because idols did not exist. Furthermore they argued that “Food will not bring us close to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” Paul, in principle, agreed. We all know this, he wrote, but…here comes yet another flip-flop: “if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.” Unable to shake the suspicion that idols might wield power over human existence, there were members of the community who refrained from eating meat at all lest, without knowing it, they might ingest meat that had been offered to idols and so succumb to idolatry. Paul refers to these economically disadvantaged, theologically unsophisticated, less educated members of the community as “the weak.” He then goes on to offer his own behavior in relation to them as an example to the so-called wise. For the sake of winning more to the gospel, he tells them, I became as a Jew to win Jews…as one under the law to win those under the law…as one outside the law to win those outside the law. Though finally Paul writes not that he “became as the weak” but that he “became weak.” Refusing to eat meat at all, he identified completely with the most vulnerable in the community, flip-flopping once again…for Christ’s sake! Reflecting on Paul’s words in relation to the church’s way of being in the world, Karl Barth writes that the church’s witness “does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them…on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them.” But Barth continues and arrives at what I think is at the heart of Paul’s reason for flip-flopping. Barth says paradoxically of the church:
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