A DIVING ECONOMY OF ACCOMMODATION September 3, 2006 Joyce Shin Associate Pastor for Congregational Life, Fourth Presbyterian Church Psalm 23 1 Corinthians 8 1 Corinthians 10:25–11:1 Holy God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and Redeemer. Amen.  Fifteen years ago, my parents returned from a reunion with my father’s family in North Korea. Almost forty years had passed since my father had been separated by the war from his mother and father, sister, and brother. Unfortunately, during those years his parents had passed away, and so in 1991 my father could visit only their grave. I was not there, but the photographs taken at the gravesite show moments of honoring the spirits of my ancestors. A small stone table had been set. Food had been prepared. A small mat had been laid, and my parents knelt upon it. All of this took place before the grass-covered mounds of earth under which my grandparents were buried. Sounds very foreign, doesn’t it? To me, too. I had never seen my parents engaged in these practices. Perhaps had I been younger, they would have waited before showing me those pictures. Even a few years ago, when I asked my mom to describe this event to me, I detected a sense of her parental concern not to confuse me. In the midst of her explanation, she said, “You know, of course, this isn’t a Christian practice.” More than anyone, parents care about how their children receive the knowledge passed on to them. They know their children so well, and they try to give them what they need when they need it. It is this sensitivity to the particularities of their children—to their unique personalities, their past experiences and present needs—that makes it possible to meet them where they are and to help them to flourish from there. We have all been students. We know that the best teachers are those who find out what we already know so that when they teach us something new, they can teach us in a way that helps us to understand that new idea, that new concept, that new way of doing something. There is an art to teaching, an art to parenting, and an art to pastoring. The ancients called it accommodation, or condescension. Some of you may be cringing, and rightly so, because these words are not our favorite words today. Nobody likes to be condescended to, and accommodation, we know, can be a very slippery slope. But please put aside your skepticism for just a little while. For the earliest church fathers, accommodation was grounded in an understanding of God’s relationship with humanity. Accommodation was God’s plan to save humanity. They knew, as we do, that on our own we are incapable of bridging the gap between our fallen selves and God on high. God alone can lift us from our sinful state and does so by coming down (condescending) to our human capacity for the sake of our salvation. Through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God came down to us so that we could be raised with him. For Paul, this was God’s plan of salvation, this was the divine economy God designed for us. As a pastor, Paul was concerned about the salvation of each person. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul addressed what he saw to be a threat to God’s plan of salvation. Paul addressed a conflict over food. The conflict was framed by two opposing sides: on the one side were those “strong” Corinthians who knew that “an idol has no real existence” and that “there is no God but one”; these were the Christian doctrines that they had probably learned from Paul. On the other side were those “weak” Corinthians who did not know these things. They continued to inquire about the food they ate. “How was the meat prepared? Am I about to eat food that I shouldn’t eat?” Behind the issue of food, then, was a deeper conflict between people with certain knowledge and people lacking that knowledge. The “weak” thought it necessary to abstain from eating meats sacrificed to idols, while the “strong” knew that, since idols were nothing, what they ate would make no difference. As you can imagine, if the “weak” observed the “strong” eating meats that had been sacrificed to idols, influenced by that example, the weak might have eaten against their own conscience. We can assume from Paul’s rhetoric that a common saying of his day was something like “Act for the sake of conscience.” For us, too, this is a familiar idiom and principle. As Presbyterians, we vote according to our consciences. This is precisely what our Book of Order tells us to do. Even if we think that our neighbor lacks the necessary facts and, furthermore, doesn’t think about the facts in the right way, we nevertheless uphold her right to vote according to what she thinks is true according to her conscience. And we expect the same with respect to ourselves. But here Paul says something remarkable. He says, “Act for the sake of conscience—I mean the other’s conscience, not your own.” Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to learn the art of accommodation. What would it mean to act for the sake of another’s conscience? For the strong Corinthians, it would mean that they would not eat meat. I think, however, that Paul had a greater challenge in mind than the challenge to abstain from eating meat. Acting for the sake of someone else’s conscience required that the “strong”—the people who thought they had all the answers—give up some of their liberties for the sake of the weak. Paul could not tolerate seeing the strong claiming liberty in the very act that enslaved the weak to idolatry. So he warns the strong, “Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. . . . By your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed.” Paul reminds the Corinthians that Christ died for the weak. Christ became human and suffered the worst ills of humanity, all for the sake of our salvation. And it is in this divine economy of accommodation that we participate when we, as Paul exhorts us to do, imitate Paul, as Paul imitated Christ.   So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. The idea of accommodation may surprise you as a basis for a social ethic. It becomes, however, all the more significant as we increasingly interact with persons having knowledge different from our own. We live in a situation today not so different from the early urban Christians. From the issue of eating foods sacrificed to idols, we get a glimpse into the complex and diverse religious world of the early church. Greek pagan religions, Judaism, and Christianity existed side by side, influencing each other so much that it was no simple task to determine where the boundaries lay. We could say that Paul’s world was a pluralistic world. In a speech given at Hyde Park Union Church in Chicago, church historian Martin Marty offered his vision of what will face the church in America. Among other predictions, he said that we should expect a different kind of Christianity because of its encounter with other religions, not just in the big cities, but even in Middle America. What kind of Christianity will flourish? If you visited the Presbyterian Church (USA) news website a few years back, you may have come across a lively debate called “The Jesus Debate.” It centered around the very important issue of being a Christian in the midst of religious diversity. The debate started with a report about a Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference. One of the speakers at this conference, the Reverend Dirk Ficca, raised the question, “How can a Christian live out his or her own particular faith while fully engaged in a religiously pluralistic world?” Given the fact that we encounter religious diversity in our communities, in our families, and in our churches, this is certainly a pressing question for us today. There are many positions being taken on this issue. Some Christians think that they alone know the truth and that, therefore, there is no reason to pursue truth in dialogue with others. These are the exclusivists. Others take an inclusivist stance: that is, that we can include other religious traditions, because they have the partial picture of truth, while we have the whole picture. Relativists say, “Actually, there is no such thing as Truth with a capital ‘T’”; so every opinion is relative to another opinion, and no opinion is absolute. There are also some who say that we should pay attention not to the different particularities of each religion, because in this way religions vary so much. Rather, we should look for the most universal principles that all religions share; we can call this a reductionist approach to religious pluralism. There are a number of other options that we could list and think about. If you are like me, you might find something valuable in each position, but something problematic as well. As a Christian, I don’t want to water down my faith in Christ. I cannot give Christ up just because that is the main thing standing between me and a non-Christian. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul provides us with another alternative—one that is grounded in God’s plan of salvation, in the cross. For Paul, the incarnation, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was the ultimate event of divine accommodation. As a pastor and missionary, Paul modeled himself after Christ and called others to do the same. Like the parent concerned about how his child receives the knowledge passed on to him, like the teacher who adapts her style to the needs of her student, or like Paul, who became all things to all people, we can be in relationships of genuine love and concern for the other person’s well-being. And yet, accommodating relationships do not have to be marked by unchanging hierarchies of authority. We can strive for relationships of mutuality in which everyone involved recognizes that it is not always enough to act according to what one knows. While knowledge divides, love builds up. What would this look like? Perhaps it would take the form of conversation, in which we would tell each other the best reasons we have for believing what we believe and for doing what we do and in which we are willing, if so compelled by what we hear, to be transformed by the other person’s concerns, values, and ways of seeing the world. We don’t need to fear that in our willingness to be transformed we are risking the core of our Christian beliefs. The willingness to be transformed is rooted in the cross. Out of love for us, Christ willingly transformed himself by becoming like us, taking on our suffering, and dying a human death—all for our sake. Imitating Christ requires more than simply acting according to what we know. It requires more than acting for the sake of our own consciences. Our pursuits of truth cannot be only for our benefit, but for the benefit of everyone. That is the good news of Christ. That is God’s divine economy.