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Church of the Crossroads
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
February 5, 2006
Neal MacPherson

THE FREEDOM TO LOVE

When, as your pastor, I have at times been criticized by someone for saying something in a sermon that was not acceptable, or for holding a theological position that was not appreciated, or for doing something that did not sit well, there has always been a wise soul who has said, “Remember, Neal, you can’t be all things to all people,” and another who has chimed in, “You have to understand that you can’t please everyone.” Surely, they are right.

How surprising it is, then, when we hear the apostle Paul say, “I have become all things to all people.” According to his testimony, he became as a Jew to the Jews. To those under the law he became as one under the law. To those outside the law he became as one outside the law. To the weak he became weak. He became all things to all people so that he might win them over to the Good News of the Gospel.

We could say that Paul claims a chameleon-like quality for himself. He reminds us of the character of Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen’s 1983 comedy, titled simply Zelig. Zelig is a “chameleon man” who was so accommodating to those around him that even his appearance changed to match the appearance of his companions. When Zelig finds himself between a pair of Orthodox rabbis, he immediately sprouts a beard and side curls. In a Chinese laundry, his features become Asian. In the company of a group of psychiatrists, he speaks psychobabble. In the film, as witnesses are summoned to offer their remembrances of Zelig, his name undergoes a slight change. The witnesses drop the hard “tz” pronunciation for a soft “s” – selig – which means “blessed.” When we can identify ourselves with others, we are indeed blessed. The apostle Paul writes, “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.”

This capacity to identify one’s self with the other is also found in the thought provoking poem, Call Me by My True Names, by the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh.

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself in the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Paul becomes all things to all people in order, as he says, to win them over so that they might share in and come to know the good news of the Gospel. Love will be the way. As he will remind the Corinthian church four chapters later:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
      - 1 Corinthians 13:14-17

There is a freedom to love that is at the heart of the Gospel, and it is this freedom to love that will enable Paul as he seeks to be all things to all people. In freedom, he will do everything he can to accommodate himself to others, to be all things to all people, not for his own sake, but for their sake, so that they may come to know newness of life in Jesus the Christ.

Truly, we are free to love. In freedom, we can choose to set aside anything that might limit our capacity to love and to be in solidarity with others. In freedom, we can avoid anything that would serve to restrict our deep identification with the life experiences of others, without which, as Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem suggests, compassion is impossible.

We have to be honest. There are many things that can get in the way of our loving others. For example, we can allow our sense of what is right and wrong to come in the way of our capacity to identify our lives with the lives of others. As one who has just seen the film, Brokeback Mountain, I am astounded that the Vatican should call this film unacceptable for viewing. The Vatican’s pronouncement is a good example of moralism getting in the way of the need for human solidarity in this world of ours, so deeply broken apart it is by ideology and conflicting cultural values. As, in freedom, we immerse ourselves in this remarkable film, it doesn’t matter what our sexual orientation is. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we hold to be good and moral. If we let that all go, we cannot help feel the both the love and the pain of the relationship between Jake and Ennis that is so poignantly explored in this fine film. This film invites us to abandon the systems of morality that separate us one from another in order to identify ourselves with the love between these two men. In freedom, we have the capacity so to do.

There are other obstacles that can prevent us from identifying ourselves with others, as Paul sought to do in his vocation as an apostle. Most notably, perhaps, is the concern for self.

To identify ourselves with the lives of others means that we will have to let go of self-interest and self-concern, and that, my friends, goes against the American cultural grain. We are a society of self-concern. There is nothing, we believe, that should get in the way of our own self-interest, our own self-fulfillment, and our own self-realization.

The whole context of the New Testament writings is different. Here, the concern is not for the self-interest, self-fulfillment, and self-realization of the individual, but for the life of the community. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes:

. . . Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
  did not regard equality with God
  as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
  taking the form of a slave,
  being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form
  he humbled himself
  and became obedient to the point of death-
  even death on a cross.
      - - Philippians 2:3-8

Paul is deeply concerned about the life of the community, which, in the case of the Church in Corinth, was being torn apart by dissension and conflict. To encourage the communal life of the Corinthian Christians, Paul offers the example of his own life. He is willing to forego all the personal rights and authority he has as an apostle in order to fulfill his life’s vocation to proclaim the gospel, free of charge, as he says.

In freedom, he can do so. He can do whatever he chooses to do. Yet, and here is the strange irony of this passage, in freedom Paul chooses to become the slave of all. He writes, “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.” Both freedom and bondage are required if we are to love others and so enable them, by the grace of God, to enter into newness of life.

In his work, The Freedom of the Christian, in two statements about the human being, Martin Luther states the dialectic between freedom and bondage. He writes, on the one hand, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none,” and then, in the second breath, he says, “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

When Church of the Crossroads is at its very best, it is a community of love. It is a community in which we are sometimes able to let go of our self-interest and self-concern, our rights and our privileges, so that we may truly identify ourselves with the lives and stories of others. It has happened in the life of this community, and it will continue to happen, by the grace of god. When we are able to be human beings for others, something amazing takes place. Others are able to own the stories of their lives as they are received by us, and we are able to own the stories of our lives, as they are received by others. Mysteriously, as our life stories are given and received and given again, new life is realized among us. We are granted hope and courage for the living of our lives simply because we know that we are no longer alone as we find our lives received and affirmed in a community of love.

Truly, when, in freedom, we lose ourselves for the sake of one another, when we choose to become bound to others, when in the suffering of others we ourselves suffer, when in the rejoicing of others we ourselves rejoice, when we come to see the stories of others reflected in the stories of our own lives, when we experience empathy and solidarity, the new life that is given is the same new life that is given when God in love and compassion comes to be with us and for us in Jesus the Christ.

For the sake of that new life of the gospel, Paul will be all things to all people. To the Jew, he will be as a Jew. To the one under the law, he will be as one under the law. To the one outside the law, he will be outside the law. To the weak, he will be weak. May it also be so with us.

Amen.

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