Home > Advent Blog 2025

I Have Become All Things To All People

December 3, 2025

Ecclesiasticus 2:1-7| Psalm 62| 1 Corinthians 9:16-23| Mark 16:15-20

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, says, “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”  Without considering the problems of becoming a chameleon in order to influence people or “save some,” I want to look at this as a statement about relationships. Who I am at any moment depends in part on my relationship with the person or people who are with me. My relationship with my daughter is different from that with my grandchildren or with my friends. And my relationship with my daughter today is different from that of forty years ago. Relationships change and grow or sometimes fade away.

About forty years ago there was a period of six months when I had no contact with my father. I had challenged him when he asked me to chastise my daughter over something he disapproved of. When I said I could not do that, harsh words spewed forth. The words hurt and I sulked for six months. The funeral of a friend six months later snapped me back to my senses, and I wrote my father a letter. He responded, and our relationship was renewed and changed.  (I found my letter in his desk when I was going through his papers after he died about twenty years later.) Relationships between parents and children can be complicated.

What about our relationship with God? We are taught as children that God is a benevolent father who takes us on his lap and teaches us good things. He watches over us and protects us and knows who we are. But when he discovers we don’t always follow what he wants, he becomes a formidable judge who punishes us. Does that change our relationship with him? Of course it does. A relationship based on fear is quite different from a relationship based on love and comfort.

Relationships are formed in large part by what we know about one another. As we grow older and wiser, God becomes much more than a loving caregiver or punishing judge. God becomes creator, forgiver, manager, though I’m not sure he intervenes in football games.  God becomes all things to all people, often to the point of becoming unknowable. At each new understanding of God our relationship changes to accommodate that new understanding. Does that mean that God has changed? That is a question I cannot answer, though I strongly doubt it. But we have changed; we have learned more and we have understood more, and so our relationship with God has changed to accommodate that new understanding, and that can be quite frightening. But it can also be quite exciting. Where will this changed relationship take us; what will it teach us – about God, about ourselves and about our human relationships?

What is my relationship with God? It is fluid: it is changing; it is evolving.
Is the change scary? Only when I lose sight of God.
Is it lonely? Sometimes – when I spend too much time in my own head.
Is it exciting? Definitely!

This past year I have been absent from most Sunday services at St. Luke’s, though I have “attended” the online service every week. As my absence stretched on, I became aware that my understanding of God was undergoing yet another transformation while my relationship with God and the people who shared my search was also being transformed. I suspect we all may have experienced similar upheaval and confusion when covid kept us from being an “in person” community and when our recent transition to a new priest asked us to look at ourselves in new ways and experience new traditions. With the ending of the covid shut down, we found our way back – changed perhaps, but still a community. I will find my way back also. I have not left.

I can not resist concluding with: “Because I knew you, I have been changed…for good.”

Sally House