Preachers are a strange lot. To what lengths we go to proclaim the gospel! We speak truth to power, compassion to the loveless, healing to the ill, and hope to those who grieve. We give people permission to laugh at death. This isn’t a standard occupation. The salesperson meets a need with a product or service. The engineer solves a problem. The politician lobbies for the vote. The physician isolates the tumor. The mechanic diagnoses, replaces the coil. Doings, all. But not for preachers. “Doing” is not the ministry of proclamation. The one who proclaims the gospel isn’t just doing something. She is someone, for someone. It’s about character.
Paul asserts the right of the apostle, the one who is authorized—made co-author with God—but by not exercising the right. His right to preach, and be paid, is clear, but he takes no pride in it; he does not declare that his right to preach supersedes someone else’s right not to listen. Preachers who speak too loudly, take note! Preaching isn’t a privilege but an obligation, not a badge of honor or an act of will but a commission. Bound and free, obliged and indicted, Paul recognizes that to speak the gospel into being one’s own being must change. It must become whatever is real for others to face what is not.
Luther took this passage and built his system of Christian Liberty around it: free with respect to all, slave with respect to all. But what interests me in the text is not freedom or slavery, per se, but the idea that preaching the gospel changes the preacher into something the preacher is not, so as better to communicate. To the Jew the preacher becomes a Jew, to the Gentile a Gentile, to the weak weak. Preaching is ultimately a paradoxical activity, because in proclaiming good news, we preachers become all things to all people. There is an “I must” beneath the “I am.” And “I am” speaks when “we are.”
It’s good to recognize the projections people cast upon us: righteous, holy, saintly even, above reproach, on a pedestal, whether we want to be or not, even as it embarrasses us. When we walk into the hospital room, the patient is well aware that we represent something greater than ourselves. Becoming all things to all people, we participate in incarnation, Word made flesh. We represent. We exercise our right not to exercise our right! And we don’t have much choice in this. Being a proclaimer of gospel brings it on.
Who among us has not wondered at the source of pastoral authority? Perhaps it is bestowed by the hierarchy of the church or laying-on of hands. Perhaps it is authority granted through genuine relationships, the authority of a trusted friend. But I suspect that the authority granted the preacher is more the power of vulnerability, the power that comes to the shape-shifter who can become all things to all people, and in so doing, can accompany them as representatives of the divine in human form. There is an incarnational quality to Paul’s case: as God becomes human, so we reveal God, in all our diverse and paltry glory. In fact, we must. There is imperative built in.
The obligation is heavy: we are not free from God’s law of love. Yet it is also liberating: we are free to engage other people where they are. The door opens. We visit them in homes, coffee shops, workplaces, and nursing homes. We have privileged access in the ER. We tremblingly point the way. Doing so, flawed, imperfect, we still become instruments of salvation. Right becomes responsibility. Proclaim the gospel? That’s a double dog dare.
