Selling the Gospel.
Epiphany 5B
2/8/09
Keith Reeve

        Once upon a long time ago, when many more people than now wore lace-up shoes and boots, I spent a long weekend in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, going door to door in a neighborhood where anthracite coal-workers lived. I was successfully selling shoe and boot-strings. Along with several other new hires for the sales department of America's largest publishing company, I had just been introduced to what was called their “Sales Psychology”. For a couple of weeks we had been lectured on subjects like: “empathy for clients”, “persistence over resistance”, “analyzing quotas”, and, most importantly: “Meeting client needs.” That weekend in Wilkes-Barre was our practicum.

The idea was that this was an opportunity to test out the theories we had just learned. I got to the needs bit by asking what my clients did when they were dressing to get to work and they broke their boot-strings. I asked, empathetically, if they had spares or did they have to keep tying knots until they could eventually find time to go shopping for new laces. Over and over again, I helped them to establish their need for the very items I had kindly brought to their front door for them and so they happily purchased my wares.

        I was, and still am, amazed at how efficiently the sales techniques I had learned in the classroom produced results. For the next few months, as an advertising space sales person, I applied those same strategies with even greater success and earned very large commissions. Increasingly I became concerned that I was manipulating my prospects mainly for my own financial gain rather than for their benefit. I decided that this was not my vocation, so I quit. I don't claim that I am especially righteous. I just needed to sleep more easily at night.

What that long ago experience left me with has been an ongoing recognition of what is going on whenever the same approach is being used on me. I am forever skeptical when anyone points out to me a need I had never been aware of before; not just by telemarketers, but by doctors and ministers of the Gospel. I am troubled, for example, when I hear evangelical TV and radio preachers quoting today's text in which St. Paul claimed that he had become all things to all people. I understand it usually as a sales pitch promoting church growth, and particularly the evangelist's own mega-church's growth. The line between a sincere desire to share the good news and a self-serving use of a technique for winning converts is a narrow one. The distinction depends on motivation. Remember that St. Paul has just been explaining that he has not received any financial reward for his preaching.

What does it mean then to become all things for all people for the sake of the Gospel? Perhaps some of you, as you listened to the Epistle reading, were reminded of the phrase: “reaching across the aisle”, the political strategy being followed currently by President Obama. He says to African Americans: I am the son of an African. To non African Americans: I am the son of a white mother. For liberals: I can get prayed over by Gene Robinson. For conservatives: I can choose Pastor Rick Warren. For Muslims: I can quote my family's background. For Christians: I can share my Baptist credentials.

Surely St. Paul got exactly that same criticism the president opens himself up to for being less than principled. That criticism, I believe, is unfair in both cases. I have no intention of canonizing our new president. We will have to wait to see how history judges his motivation, his integrity, his values and his success as a leader in calamitous times. I only want to suggest that there is much to be said for a theological, political, and diplomatic stance, which assumes that progress in human relations begins by recognizing our commonality rather than our differences. In the words of one of our loveliest collects: “God has made of one blood all the people of the earth.” I also believe that if it were not for Saint Paul's evangelical use of this assumption we would not be here this morning worshipping as Christians. That is not to say we wouldn't all be “religious”. We might well recognize what was true for most of the Hebrew prophets, like Isaiah, in our first lesson this morning, and the Psalmist whose words we sang together. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? Lift up your eyes and see who created this incredible universe in which you are very tiny grasshoppers, and your existence is so very short. Great is the Lord and mighty in power; There is no end to his wisdom.”

Rudolf Otto was an early 20th Century German Lutheran theologian, who had a profound influence on many of his contemporaries including Carl Jung and C. S. Lewis with the publication of his book called: “The Idea Of The Holy”. In it Otto described what he called “a sense of the numinous”, a word he made up to denote “the intense feeling of awe, which may come sweeping over us, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship”, and may, for some, become a lasting resource for their faith convictions. Researchers in the field of comparative religion have suggested that this is the essential common tie shared by members of all faiths. Wordsworth called it
“...a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”

So when St. Paul visited Athens, and stood on Mars Hill, just below the Acropolis, he preached to the already religious Athenians assembled there. “I understand that you worship what you call the unknown god, he said, “now let me try making your God known to you.” After reviewing the scriptural story of salvation, he introduced the Greeks to Jesus Christ, as the one who makes the awesomeness of this numinous available to all as “God with us”. This is the one, he said, who makes the transcendent, imminent. This is this one who gives us an entrance into God's heart which is full of love, forgiveness, and grace. What St. Paul did, in fact, was Christ-like. He patterned his life, his words, and his actions after Jesus' life, words and actions. As he wrote to his congregation in Philippi “Let this mind, this attitude, 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 servant.” It was this truly empathetic attitude that Jesus exemplified throughout his earthly ministry as he befriended fishermen, children, Samaritans, women, outcasts, tax collectors, poor, sinful, sick and emotionally disturbed people. He said: “That is what I came out to do.”

At our Baptisms, you and I were inaugurated into this holy way of life and through the grace of the Holy Spirit we have been empowered to pursue it in each of our ministries, in our vocations, our jobs, our relationships, respecting the dignity of every human being. When we are nourished by holy food and drink at this table and reminded of God's great love for us all in our liturgy, we know that that is what we came out to do. AMEN.

©2009 Keith Reeve