Becoming all things to all people: A Meditation on 1st Corinthians 9

St. Paul begins this chapter, upbraiding the Corinthian Christians for not only challenging his apostolic mandate, but also the reasonable liberties he didn’t even take.  He makes mention that like the other Apostles (including Cephas, or St. Peter,) he has every right to have a wife and children, and to receive wages as a pastor in order to live (just like the Law teaches from Moses.)  St. Paul, however, chooses not to have a wife, nor even to take any pay for his work preaching the Gospel throughout his missionary journeys.  He chooses rather to work with his own hands, and eschews the liberties to which he is entitled under the Law.

To the minds of modern pastors and congregations, this may sound very strange.  Modern pastors usually spend a great deal of time studying and preparing for the pastoral office, perhaps even amassing huge student loan debt in the process.  Normal pastoral education includes a four year bachelors degree, and a three to four year graduate degree, often with an unpaid year of field work called a vicarage.  They are expected to master the Bible not only in their own tongue, but in the original languages, so that they might be able to expound it most accurately.  They study the history of interpreting the Bible in systematic theology courses, so that they can recognize the truth of God versus the lies of the devil in any time or place.  They learn pastoral counseling and care techniques, so that they can apply their theological study to the individual lives of the people they shepherd.  They learn to stand in the place of Christ as an under-shepherd, speaking His Law and His Gospel to His people, and serving as stewards of His mysteries.  They learn to move as freely among the poor and oppressed as they do among the wealthy and the sophisticated.  They learn to walk with Christ’s people as they experience joy and pain, success and failure, eventually guiding them from this life to the next in the blessed assurance of Jesus’ Gospel of salvation.  They learn to stand between heaven and earth, interceding and caring for Christ’s people, and living out in their person the lonely truth that we are only pilgrims and sojourners in this vale of tears.  They see things that shake them to their core, and hear things that pierce the mind, often facing the demonic in more tangible and life threatening ways than anyone will ever know.  If they are married and have children, they must fight every day not only for their own spiritual lives, but also for the lives of their families, knowing that the devil would like nothing more than to crush a pastor by destroying those he loves most dearly.

And on top of all this, most American congregations think a pastor works just one day a week, preaching on Sunday.  They assume he also has capacity and interest in running all their various programs and projects, spending every waking hour tending to the details of various self-made priorities.  Either undaunted by, or ignorant of their pastor’s duties and training, they often foist upon him things he was not trained for, and things Christ did not send him to do.  Endless streams of board and committee meetings, social welfare programs, community involvement, finance or budget planning, and strategic planning or “vision casting” which always seem to try to re-cast the Church of Christ into some new cultural image.  Thinking their pastor little more than the community social planner, they usually pay him very little, often not enough to support his wife and children, nor to pay for those large student loans.  Add to that the constant congregational pressure to squeeze the pastor’s wife and children into an endless array of service projects and committees, so that they might get more bang for their buck, and this picture can look pretty bleak.  What many American congregations want of their pastors, is not what many pastors have been trained and called to do.  And what’s worse, is that if they don’t bend to the cultural demands of their congregation, they can find themselves without any means to survive at all—educated and trained for a calling no one wants them to do. 

What St. Paul writes to Corinth is good for us to hear today, as well.  Should pastors be able to live on the wages of preaching and teaching the Gospel?  Most certainly.  But rather than becoming slave to the Corinthian’s false understandings, and allowing the Gospel to be swallowed up in endless controversies, he prefers to restrain his liberty.  He works with his own hands to support his needs, electing the life of what we would call today a bi-vocational pastor (sometimes called “tent-maker pastors,” or “worker-priests,” depending on the parlance of your tradition.)  He knows that he will be held in lesser regard than the other Apostles, but he chooses this path of personal disregard, so that the Gospel might not be hindered.  Unbound by the proclivities and misunderstandings of the congregations he tended, he became all things to all people, able to speak truthfully and unfettered to all:  a Jew to the Jews, and a Gentile to the Gentiles; a man of education to the educated, and a man of simplicity to the simple; to the poor he became as one content in any circumstance, and to the wealthy he became one who knew how to properly handle wealth.  He came to anyone and everyone as Jesus would come to them, so that Jesus’ Gospel might not be hindered by either his own or other’s foibles.  In this way Paul became all things to all people, so that in his witness to Jesus as the Savior of the world, by all means some of every kind of people might be saved.

But it is not St. Paul who saves anyone, and he would be the first to tell us so.  St. Paul desired himself to be reduced, his liberties curtailed, his body subdued, so that in any and all ways, Jesus might shine through him.  Paul knew that his own glory and liberty didn’t mean anything, but Jesus’ glory and His Gospel of Salvation, was and remains the very life of the world.  Should churches have full time, well trained, and well cared for pastors, whose sole focus is on the ministry of Christ to His people?  Yes, indeed.  But the ministry of Christ is not a profession, and it does not exist for the glory of the servant nor of the congregations.  It exists always and only to bring Jesus to the people, together with the full counsel of His Word.  And so, even as the Church of Christ will continue to struggle with understanding and properly executing Christ’s Office of pastor, it will also continue to require the witness and work of bi-vocational pastors like St. Paul—those who are willing to be despised by the world, even by the church and fellow pastors, so that they might more freely become all things to all people, that Jesus might work through them to save any and all to whom they are sent.

Thanks be to God for faithful congregations, who support and care for their shepherds whom Christ has sent to them for the proclamation of His Word.  Thanks be to God for faithful pastors, who quietly yet daily tend to the needs of Christ’s people, bringing His Word to bear for their forgiveness, life, and salvation.  And thanks be to God for the bi-vocational shepherds who follow in the footsteps of St. Paul, who bear the scorn of many, that the Gospel of Christ might not be hindered in any way, even amidst this secular and pagan world.  Thanks be to God, that He has become all things to all people in His Son, that by the means of His Holy Cross, He has saved even us.  Amen.