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

“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.”

“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:
    It manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with [the world]. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest….As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.

That is to say, the church must identify completely with sinners. To see what such complete identification looks like, Paul immodestly suggests we look at him. In relinquishing all of his “rights” as an apostle, in considering himself to be something he is not, Paul is following Jesus Christ who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Seeking to follow Jesus who became weak (foolishly weak to the wise and righteous), Paul means to enter into the other’s human condition completely. This embodiment of the other’s condition of weakness and need for the sake of the gospel—for the sake of proclaiming God’s “Yes” to the world and for the world in Jesus Christ—is the life Paul commends to the church of God at Corinth.

What, then, of the church of God at Chestnut Hill? Insofar as we are given grace enough to enter into the human condition of the other who is weak in the world, insofar as we are led to lay down our rights, our righteousness, our freedom, our cliques, our cultural biases, our self-interested causes, our status and our security in service to the other, then we are the community that lives and dies in the light of Him who first loved us.

Now such a way of being the church in the world and for the world is in stark contrast to the customary way of being the church. Customarily the members, in competition with every other appealing activity available to the inhabitants of a privileged community such as this, sets out to anticipate what might be of interest to people like themselves “out there” and so creates programs “in here” that will get them to join us. But if we look to Paul, what we see instead is a man racing out to the highways and byways of the culture in order that the hungering human spirit might be led to ask, in various and sundry ways, why someone would lay down his life for his friends…why someone would lay down her life even her enemies!

Once again, as he did last Sunday, Paul would have us understand that being the church in the world and for the world means seeing the other—every other—as one for whom Christ laid down his life: one whom God loved in this way. No longer from a human point of view do we see but we see in each person one who bears the image of God, redeemed once for all in Christ. Paradoxically, those who relinquish the life they set out to live in order to live as the other who is weak and despised in the world report, to their amazement, that it is the other who unknowingly gives them so much more at the end of the day. Just ask everyone in this congregation who has tasted this reversal in going to Haiti or Pearlington, serving meals at Our Brother’s Place or interacting with the children of Achievability. When one becomes as weak or poor or sick or infirm or imprisoned or aged to win the other, often it is one’s own faith that flip-flops from rigidity to relative grace; and one’s own life that gets redeemed in the process!

Yet Paul would be the first to confess that there was only one in the world and for the world who truly was and is “all things all to all people.” “Christ took upon himself this human form of ours,” lectured Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the seminary of the Confessing Church in Germany before it was boarded up by the Nazis with Paul’s words surely in mind. “He became [human] even as we are….In his humanity and his lowliness we recognize our own form. He has become like a [mortal] so that [mortals] should be like him. And in the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Henceforth any attack even [and especially] on the least of [these] is an attack on Christ, who took the form of a [mortal], and in his own Person restored the image of God in all that bears a human form.”

As politicians necessarily flip-flop for the sake of winning an office in the season ahead, may the church of Jesus Christ flip-flop for Christ’s sake, emptying herself and so becoming all things to all people for the sake of the gospel, that all may come to love God and be known of God. Amen!

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