Sharing the Gospel, Sharing Ourselves

Responding faithfully to God’s call in our lives may or may not help us to win friends and influence people. It does mean learning to give of our very selves for the sake of the gospel.

Just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. (vs. 4)

O ne of the things they teach in community organizing is that we have to learn to act in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be. In politics, that is a world of power and money and compromise. To get anything done about the things we care about, like housing the homeless or building affordable housing or investing in low income communities, we need to learn to operate in that rough and tumble environment. I understand that.

Yet every four years one of the most disheartening aspects of presidential campaigns is watching politicians re-make themselves, chameleon-like, to win the election. There is no question, as the campaign has gone on, that both John McCain and Barack Obama have moved to the right as they have sought to court voters among what they perceive to be an increasingly conservative electorate. You can be the judge on November 4^th which candidate you think has betrayed his own principals more than the other. Nevertheless, I am quite certain I have witnessed both candidates stand up and say things in public that I am fairly certain they did not believe. I’m sure they did so because someone somewhere told them that they would need to if they wanted to win the election. It is one more reason among many that I think I would have a hard time running for public office.

They didn’t exactly have politicians in the ancient world, but they did have traveling philosophers who went from town to town giving speeches. As New Testament professor Edgar Krentz points out, entertainment options were somewhat limited in the ancient world. A good orator could gather quite a crowd. Their status depended on their rhetorical flourish. They would typically butter up the audience with flattery because their fees depended upon the reception of their listeners. Sometimes they would be hired as teachers by wealthy benefactors. All of this was part of the social system of the ancient world in which one’s status depended upon who you knew and who knew you. The social pecking order was important. You knew your status according to who was above you and who was below, with the emperor at the top and the slaves at the bottom. Life was about figuring out how to move up the social ladder.

S o when Paul breezes into Thessalonica, the locals don’t quite know what to do with him. On the one hand, he seems to have skills of the traveling rhetoriticians. His opponent suggest as much by accusing him of trickery and deceit, and impure motives. Yet Paul reminds his readers that nothing he has done has fit that pattern. When he lived among them, he took no money for his labors. Instead, he set up shop among the tradesmen. You could say that Paul the Tentmaker was sort of like Joe the Plumber, except that Paul didn’t make $250,000 a year. Tentmaking was a low status job. And he didn’t come to Thessalonica after a crowd-pleasing stop over in Philippi, but after having been, in Paul’s words, “shamefully mistreated.” In fact, crowd-pleasing was not on Paul’s agenda. “We never came with words of flattery,” Paul writes, “nor did we seek praise from mortals.”

Instead, Paul uses a striking trio of metaphors to describe his work among the Thessalonians. “We were gentle among you,” Paul writes. The Greek, in fact, can be translated, “we were like infants among you,” open, vulnerable. Or, he goes on, we were “like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” As Krentz puts it, the image is of a professional wet-nurse returning home to cherish and caress her own infant. Then, in the next chapter after the one we read this morning, Paul adds, “We dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God.” Not a domineering father who commands and his children obey, but one who urges, encourages, pleads.

None of these were high-status metaphors in the ancient world. In fact, they seem to be anti-status metaphors. An infant? A wet-nurse? A pleading father? Paul seems to be at pains to reject any notion of status-seeking at all in relation to their ministry. Instead, Paul writes, “We had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel... we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel... we speak not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.” Instead, Paul the Tentmaker, taking no money, seeking no status, enters into a relationship vulnerable enough to risk their rejection, all at the service of the gospel. So, Paul concludes, “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.”

In other words, all the pretense, all the facades, all the dissembling that is so much a part of public life is set aside, and all you are left with is Paul and the gospel, nothing to separate them from discovering a new relationship with God.

I t isn’t a pathway to win friends and influence people. It was instead a strategy to turn the world upside down; not a strategy to conform to social expectations, but to upend them.

Writing in The Christian Century, James Howell reflects on being an infant as a metaphor for Paul’s ministry. He writes,

Thinking about infants, I see a thicket of analogies between their mode of being and the way Paul invaded a city like Thessalonica: demanding, wanting a response now, being the center of attention, brooking no rivals. Paul had no desire to please people; he spoke boldly, frankly. Infants may elicit gentleness from others, but they are not themselves very gentle. Gentleness, even gentility, is cultivated over time. When we grow up, we learn how to stop acting like infants: Don't be demanding, don't cry out loud, don't wake anyone up.

The writer Thomas Merton made a similar point, Howell points out, in recounting a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13 he heard when he was a teenager from his prep-school chaplain:

His exegesis was a bit strange . . . Charity meant good sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad. . . . I think Peter and the Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.

T hrough out our homecoming season we have been focused on the theme, “Living in God’s way.” God’s call to us isn’t about being someone else, but about learning to be our own most authentic selves. Responding faithfully to God’s call in our lives may or may not help us to win friends and influence people, it may or may not confer upon us status in our culture. It may not help us to win elections. It does mean learning to give of our very selves for the sake of the gospel, which, as Paul learned, may even expose us to shame and ridicule. But in the process we discover, as Paul did, that though we may have been rejected by others, we have been “approved by God.” We learn, as Paul did, not to speak and act “to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”

In that same article, Howell concludes with this quote from John Chrysostom, one of the early Church Fathers, instructing his congregation on how to win over unbelievers:

Let us astound them by our way of life. This is the unanswerable argument. Though we give 10,000 precepts in words, if we do not exhibit a far better life, we gain nothing. It is not what is said that draws their attention, but what we do. Let us win them therefore by our life.

To help us reflect more deeply on what that might mean, each Sunday in Homecoming we are asking different members and friends of the congregation to share how they are living out their faith through particular practices. We don’t lift up these practices as exclusively Christian, but rather as examples of faith-inspired practices that grow out of our relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Together, these practices form a way of life, a way of life sorely needed by our hurting and broken world.

If Christian faith makes any difference in behavior, then the church in conformity with Christ is called to an alternative set of behaviors, an alternative ethic, an alternative kind of relationships, in dialogue with the surrounding cultures. Its difference is itself a witness to the gospel.