Text:  1 Corinthians 9:16-23 (Job 7:1-7; Mark 1:29-29)                                       W 5^th Sunday after Epiphany

Chameleon for Christ

            In the name of him who came to proclaim freedom to the captives, dear friends in Christ:  As I’ve indicated before, sometimes it’s not immediately obvious what the connections are between the prescribed readings for any particular Sunday.  We know that in general they were picked to compliment each other or to reinforce a certain theme; but there are days – like, say, today for instance, when you’re just left scratching your head to try to figure out what the common thread is.

            In the Old Testament lesson we have this (what shall we say?) “something-less-than-cheery” tirade of Job, which might be summed up by saying: “Life is nothing but meaningless sorrow, drudgery, and pain.  Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, somehow it does. And then, if you’re lucky, you die.”  Yes, ever the optimist, that fellow Job; but to be fair, knowing his story, we have to admit he came to this assessment of life honestly.  Okay, then we skip over to the Gospel lesson where we’ve got Jesus going over to Peter’s house after Sabbath services where Jesus has been teaching in the synagogue.  They’re probably expecting a Sabbath noon dinner; but when they arrive, they find that Peter’s mother-in-law is down with a fever, which in those days was a lot more serious than it is today.  No problem:  Jesus heals her, and she gets up and starts fixing dinner for them. (That’s pretty convenient, isn’t it?) Anyway, word gets out that Jesus has the healing touch, and before long there’s a large crowd gathered around the house looking to get their miracles too.  Jesus is up half the night taking care of them.  Meanwhile, word is continuing to spread to surrounding communities, so that in the morning there’s even a bigger crowd there.  Trouble is that Jesus has slipped out in the predawn. He’s not in the house where the crowd is waiting for him to appear.  The disciples fan out to find him, and when they do, they tell him, “Everybody’s down there in the town looking for you.  Aren’t you going to go back and take care of them?”  Jesus says, “Nah.  I’ve got teaching to do in other towns; that’s why I’ve come.  So let’s get going.”  And off they go, presumably leaving that crowd of sick and lame people still anxiously waiting for him to wake up, come out of the house, and heal them.  Hardly seems like Jesus just to leave them there like that.

            All right, then we’ve got the Epistle lesson in which the Apostle Paul is trumpeting the fact that as a pastor, he worked for the Corinthian congregation really cheap:  that is, for no wages at all (a custom I’m personally pleased hasn’t caught on around here; nor do I hope it starts).  Then he goes on to explain the sorts of changes in his personal approach that he was willing to go through to communicate the Gospel to various groups of people – all of which is very commendable; but what’s it got to do with the other readings we heard?  What’s the common ground here?

I think we can piece it together this way:  the lesson from Job gives us a vivid description of the human condition as it is living under the curse of sin in a fallen world.  Oh, it’s not quite so gloomy all the time.  There are moments of happiness and joy; but overall it’s more hard work and repetitive toil than it is pleasure.  And when the chips are down: when you’re broke, out of work, your health fails, a loved one dies, or some other disaster befalls you, those moments of joy are soon forgotten; swallowed up, as it were, by misery.  Now, we who have faith in the Savior know that the Lord uses the problems of our fallen world to draw us near to him or perhaps for other good and wise purposes that are hidden to us.  That is to say, we know God’s hand is guiding all things for good, so there is purpose and meaning behind everything; but for those without this knowledge, who do not know the Lord and his love in Jesus Christ, the bad times are especially difficult. They have no hope, no one to turn to; no one whom they can trust will see them through.  They can understand no reason for any of it.  This is especially true in our day and age when so many people believe that all of life and the universe we live in is just a great big cosmic accident that has no meaning or purpose.  For such people it really is a case of “you live, you suffer, you die, and that’s it”.  It doesn’t mean anything.  And so we hardly wonder that for them life is all about the material things, the physical things, the here and the now; because, they believe, there isn’t anything else.  Such people are truly lost.  While outwardly things may appear to be all right for them, especially in the good times, the truth is that many of them live lives of quiet despair.

Theirs is a poverty of the soul, a spiritual bankruptcy born of not having a relationship with the One True Living God who alone can fill the voids and give life meaning and purpose. The trouble is that most of them don’t even know what it is that ails them.  All they can see is the physical.  They don’t understand that their most important needs are spiritual – or the few who do understand, go looking for answers in the wrong places, in things that cannot give them what they need.

And that’s what we see in the Gospel lesson.  Jesus has spent the morning teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. A comparative handful of people in the city heard him; but the thing to see is that that’s where the real healing was happening.  That’s where God was working through his Word to restore relationships with lost lives and fill the people present with real spiritual wealth.  But who wanted to be bothered with that?  Very few indeed.  Ah, but as soon as word gets around that there are physical healings going on, the people come out in droves.  They literally swamp the house where Jesus is.  Everybody’s got to have his own miracle.  And though no one actually says it, the overall attitude is, “Fix my body, and to hell with my soul” – which, of course, is exactly backwards from the goal and purpose of Jesus.  He’s here to save souls from hell first.  The rest will follow in good time.  But what happens is that the hype over the physical healings actually become an obstacle to Jesus’ greater mission to preach and teach the good news of God’s kingdom. Jesus moves on to teach in other places, because it’s in that that the true healing people need takes place.

And that brings us to the Epistle lesson where we find St. Paul out fulfilling the Great Commission of our Lord to make disciples of all nations, not by performing a lot of healing miracles, but rather, as Jesus said, by baptizing and teaching the Words of Christ.  And in this section, what Paul is saying is that in his ministry he’s trying to remove as many obstacles as possible that people might have to hearing the Gospel, that is, the good news that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, died for the sins of all, and that through faith in him the broken relationship we have with God is restored and made right again.  That’s the truth that heals souls and makes it possible for us to live with God now and forever.  That’s the message Paul wanted to get out, and he didn’t want anything to get in its way.

            So, for example, that’s a big part of the reason he accepted no wages from the Corinthians while he worked among them.  He didn’t want anyone to think that the only reason he was out there teaching about Jesus was to make a good living for himself.  There were in his day (just as there are today) all kinds of teachers going around peddling various philosophies, and all of them charged handsomely for their services.  Paul wanted people to know that what he was doing was different, that his motivation was not to make an easy buck; but to help people discover the same truth of God’s love in Christ Jesus that saved him.  He wanted his actions to show how Christ’s love alone compelled him to share the Good News.  Of course, he still had to eat.  And so while he lived among the Corinthians he was supported in part by working as a tentmaker (his old profession), and he also received mission funds from other congregations he had planted earlier in Macedonia. But again, the point is that even though he had a God-given right to be paid for his work, he didn’t want the issue of his wages to be an obstacle that stood in the way of people hearing the Gospel. He adapted himself to serve their greater needs.  That’s the principle he’s setting forth.  How sometimes it’s necessary for Christians to change their outward behavior and approach to reach people with the Good News of Jesus where they are.

            That’s why he goes on to speak of becoming all things to all people.  You see, in a typical group that Paul might be address, there would likely be some Jews who scrupulously observed all the strict laws and traditions of their people; there would be some proselytes (that is, Gentiles who did their best to practice the Jewish laws and customs); also some of the so-called Gentile God-fearers (that is, Gentiles who believed in the God of Israel, but who didn’t try to practice the Jewish customs, nor were they interested in starting), and then there would be outright pagans, Gentile people who worshipped idols.  And very often after hearing him speak, people from any one of these groups might be intrigued and say, “Hey Paul, come on over to the house and tell us more about this”.  And when these sorts of opportunities came up, as they often did, Paul says that he would adapt himself to fit in with the ways of his hosts so as not to offend them. He didn’t want his outward behavior and his own personal customs and appetites to be an obstacle to people receiving his message. 

            And because it’s a little hard for us to get into the mindset of his time, I thought a more contemporary illustration would help capture what he’s talking about.  Most of you know that I was stationed in Brazil for a while where I served as a liaison to the Brazilian Army.  When we first arrived on station, my family and I stayed for a time in the transient officers’ quarters on the military quartel (or base) where I was serving.  This was in the same building that served as the officer’s club.  So anyway, the first evening we’re there, a lot of the officers were having a get together with their families on the large patio area right there in front of our room, so they said, “C’mon out and join us.”  Well, it seemed the thing to do, you know, to get acquainted and all, so we did.  Turns out they were having a “carangueijo”, that is, a crab feed – and that requires a bit of explanation.  The city in which we were living was right on the coast, and had a little estuary and bay. At low tide this wide mud flat would appear, and people would go out on it to catch these nasty little mud crabs that hid in holes way down deep in this thick black mud that looked like crude oil and smelled like sewage (mostly because that’s what it was).  The crabs were fairly small, about the size of my hand. And their legs were covered with long, thin spines, which looked like really thick hair.  Anyway, folks would catch a bunch of these crabs, throw them live into a big pot of boiling water, let’m simmer for a while, and then eat them. So you have to picture this:  the crabs hadn’t been cleaned at all, so the water they’re boiling in is just as black and funky as it can be.  And the crabs are so hairy that even after boiling, they’ve still got this stinky black mud all over them.  But that didn’t seem to bother anybody.  They’d sit down with a board in front of them, put a crab on there, and then start whacking it with a wooden dowel to crack the shell all over. Then they’d pick the meat out with their fingers or suck it out of the broken joints.  It was really a mess.  And so all these folks are sitting there, piles of smashed crab carcasses and bits all around, with crab juice and black mud running down their arms and dripping off at their elbows leaving puddles of goo on the table … it was just about the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen anyone eat.  No, I take that back:  the most disgusting thing was one fellow there (who just happened to be their chaplain) who would yank the legs and lower portion off the main shell of the crab’s body and hold it like a cup.  It’d be filled with this yellowish green slurry that contained the crab’s guts and Lord only knows what else.  He’d just lick his lips and shoot it back like a shot glass.  It was just plain nasty.  So anyhow, we’re looking at this scene, trying our level best to conceal our horror, and they said, “Sit down; join us.  Have a couple crabs.”

Now, what do you do?  Let me say this:  initial impressions are important, and so whether or not it was intended, the episode turned out to be something of a test.  I could easily have torpedoed and sunk their assessment of me, and therefore undermined my whole two year mission there, had I given in to what I was thinking and feeling about their custom.  It would have looked to them like the American Gringo was just too uppity for them, and it would have played right into the popular Latin American stereotype of the Ugly Norte-Americano.  So, if you’re wondering, let’s just say I did a soldier’s duty and made a sacrifice for my country.  It was the right thing to do because it made it possible for me to work and communicate with them on their ground.  There were limits, of course.  I did not make the ultimate sacrifice and trade “shots” of crab guts with their chaplain. Fortunately for me his little custom was too much even for most of them.  But my point is this:  if this was the right thing to do to merely to help my mission as a military liaison, how much more should we be willing to meet people where they are without giving offense to serve our Lord and his mission of reaching out to the lost with the Gospel of his grace? 

You see, for Paul, who had been an observant Jew, if someone had laid before him a plate of oysters or of pork ribs, he’d have had the same initial reaction that I did with the crabs.  Ingrained on his very psyche was the idea that such things were unclean.  He had to get over it for the sake of the Gospel.  And then after he had become accustomed to such things, the Jewish mindset of legalism was an offense to him; so he had to overcome that too at times.  And understand that dietary customs are just one aspect of this whole thing.  Paul says that he became himself whatever was necessary to advance the cause of the Gospel: a chameleon for Christ, so to speak; blending in with his surroundings so that merely physical concerns would not stand in the way of people hearing the spiritual message he had to give them. His thrust here is that we should think the same way and act accordingly.

With this in mind, I’d like to wrap up with two ways to apply this concept; one that’s wrongheaded and another that’s more on target.  First, there are some people in the church who think of the weekly Sunday worship service as a primary means of evangelism.  The goal then is to make what goes on in the Sunday service as basic and culturally sensitive as possible.  If people like it, give it to them, as long as it brings them in the door. It seems like it might be a good idea; but there are many problems with such an approach, not the least of which is that every service and message then must be limited to theological milk for infants in the faith.  What happens is that no one ever matures and moves on to the meat.  The result is self-imposed spiritual malnutrition.  No, the worship service of the church is primarily to feed and develop the established flock; not to increase its numbers. Or think of it this way:  a chameleon changes only its color to fit in with its environment.  By changing the way they worship, Christians change more than their color; they change what they are.  That we must not do.

What we need to do is to recognize, like St. Paul, that we here in the Church of Jesus Christ are sitting on what is both humankind’s greatest treasure and the True God’s one and only powerful message of reconciliation that gives to those who hear and receive it forgiveness of sin, eternal life, and boundless joy and peace in the here and now and forever.  We need to be open to opportunities to share it, adapting ourselves to the situations of the people we encounter.  It’s wrong for us, for example, to expect people outside the church to live according to its moral standards.  Now, that doesn’t mean I have to become an adulterer, a criminal, or an alcoholic to witness to one; but it does mean that we can’t demand up front that they change their ways before they’re qualified to hear what Jesus has done for them.  We meet them where they are and proclaim the Gospel.  It’s Christ who then gives them the power to change – just like he changed us and continues even now to cause us to mature in faith, hope, and life.  In view of this, then, may the merciful God who called us by the Gospel and who is even now in the process of changing us to be like his Son who became like one of us to save us, give us his grace to be like chameleons for Christ for the spread of his Gospel.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!