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| We stood by her bedside... |
Yesterday, Joe and I went to visit a friend of ours who is
in the last days of her life. She has
lived well over 80 years courageously, plowing new ground, touching many lives,
articulating her faith. She cannot talk
much now. We stood by her bedside, one
of us holding her hand, the other gently stroking her arm. All the talk went in one direction, though
clearly she knew us and, I believe, appreciated that we were there. The short while we spent with our friend
points up to me a question as I project myself into her situation sometime in
the future. Is it better to remain in
the body, or is it better to depart the body?
It is a question that lies beneath much of what St. Paul says to the
Corinthians. You hear it today.
You may be one of the many people I’ve known who intensely dislike
St. Paul. People frequently find Paul difficult to understand, his arguments
hard to swallow, his vocabulary a far cry from what they perceive to be the
simple gospel of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson
is perhaps one of the most famous examples of people raised in the Christian
tradition who took a razor and glue and excised from the New Testament the
passages that he couldn’t stand, saving those consonant with his own
philosophy. Not surprisingly, St. Paul
was irrelevant to Jefferson’s project of compiling “The Life and Morals of
Jesus of Nazareth.”
Whether you turn off to Paul or whether you are one of his
fans, I invite you to consider some of the ideas that are packed into a chapter
or two of his Second Letter to the Corinthians.
This invitation I frankly issue knowing that in order to get at anything
you might want to take home with you entails dodging, if not trashing, some of
the ideas that over the centuries folks have imagined Christian faith to be
about. Let’s go straight to the heart of
some basic issues.
Like what, for instance?
Like this: how does one actually
live a daily life in actual accord with authentic faith in Jesus? Like this:
what is important about bodily life with all of its possibilities for
joy, bliss, ecstasy even—as well as its possibilities and probabilities of
pain, sickness, weakness, trouble, distress?
Like this: how do we square a
life “in Christ,” to use Paul’s term, with the anxieties, distractions,
challenges that ordinary experience in the world of politics, employment,
relationships, tosses our way—experiences that in one way or another keep us
worked up, fretting and stewing about issues that seem to be—and often
are—beyond what we can control or even attempt to handle?
Let’s start with a central term in Paul’s argument in the
fifth chapter of Second Corinthians.
That term is “body.” Borrowing
from the current well-known philosophy of the Greek Stoics, Paul essentially
counts as immaterial whether or not one is living the everyday life or has died
and gotten beyond the cares of this world.
Why? Because the reality that he
and you and I are living into is a living Christ. We have been delivered from what we might
call the ordinary way of life in the world, and have begun to live life dancing
to a completely new tune. It is new,
though ancient. It is new to us, but
only because we’ve inherited a pattern of living that is at odds with what we
are designed for. It is new because it
involves a renewed consciousness, and awaking to a reality that can easily be
missed if we are (and we certainly are) distracted from noticing it by whatever
occupies us at the moment.
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| "As many as have been baptized into Christ have clothed themselves with Christ..." |
Now lots of people read Paul, not here but elsewhere,
notably Romans 7, and completely misunderstand another term he uses, which is
“flesh.” While “flesh” and “body” would
seem to us to be the same thing, for Paul they are significantly
different. “Flesh” has to do with what
we can think of as an ego-driven life.
Flesh is effectively soulless. If
you look at how flesh behaves, you may start listing such things as greediness,
argumentativeness, divisiveness, one-up-man-ship, fearfulness, anxiety, refusal
to forgive wrongs, and on and on. “Body,”
on the other hand is inescapably how we experience life in this world. Indeed Paul begins this section of Second
Corinthians marveling that we have the treasure of Christ’s life in what he
calls “clay jars,” meaning the physical body.[1] So Paul’s project, quite unlike that of other
sects and belief systems popular at the time, was not to get out of the body
and become pure spirit, but rather to experience the power of the indwelling
Christ in this life here and now. When
we encounter Paul in other places using the metaphor of “walking by the
Spirit,” that is what he is talking about.
For him, the death and resurrection of Christ has changed everything,
including the entire thrust of history. “If
anyone is in Christ,” Paul says, “there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new!”[2] Christ
has opened up a new age into which we are invited to enter through our
baptism. “As many as are baptized into
Christ have clothed themselves with Christ,” he says to the Galatians.[3] That makes sense when compared with what he
says in Romans, “Clothe yourselves with Christ, and make no provisions for the
desires of the flesh.”[4] Now you see that “flesh” is not the body but
actually the “normal” way of life in the world that is antagonistic to Christ,
and indeed is a product of those powers that crucified Christ and continue to
do so.
That brings us to a second phrase, key to understanding both
what Paul meant and the implications for us.
The whole sentence runs thus:
“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;
even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no
longer in that way.” Stop and think for
a moment about Jesus. How do you imagine
Jesus? Is he a dead historical figure, one
who lived two millennia ago, remote from your personal experience but still a
person whom you admire from a distance?
Is he a larger-than-life spiritual being that you imagine “up there” or
“out there” in space? Is he a buddy, a
friend, a companion that walks beside you, to whom you chat intimately and in
whom you confide? Paul rarely talks
about “Jesus” but frequently talks about “Christ.” To borrow wording you may know from the Book
of Common Prayer, “Christ dwells in us and we in him.” Christ is a living reality, closer to us than
the clothes we wear or the air we breathe.
We are, he says, “ambassadors for Christ,” possible precisely because
who we are, how we live, and what we do manifest Christ—which is the primary
way that others can come to know him as real.[5]
If you want to take something away today to chew on, try
this, because there is nothing more important, relevant, or critical for
Christians in this country today. If you
can’t imagine Christ doing something—let’s say for example, ripping families
apart and taking screaming children from their sobbing parents—then it is
totally inappropriate to be Christian and either do such things or sanction
such things. It doesn’t matter what your
church credentials are or how many degrees in God you have or what your
justification is. And it serves to bring
us to a third an challenging phrase in this epistle. “For all of us must appear before the
judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been
done in the body, whether good or evil.”
Now that notion will only serve to fuel the fires of those who treat the
Christian life as a system of rewards and punishment, a matter of retributive
justice where the goods (generally imagined to be the afterlife) are parceled
out to those who deserve them and withheld as retribution for those who
don’t. But I invite you to consider
laying this notion alongside what we’ve already said that Paul means about the
indwelling Christ. If Christ dwells in
us, so does his judgment seat. And while
we might imagine that Judgment to be at the entrance of the next life, or at
the hour of our death, or at the end of human history, the reality is that the
judgment is as present this moment as it will be at some future time. That in
turn means that we are held accountable for what we do with the inner life of
Christ and its inevitable outward expression.
There is no reason to puzzle over what the life of Christ is like. All we have to do is to read the
gospels. His was a life driven by a
passion for justice to the point he was willing to take on both political
policy and religious tradition, overturning the practices that oppressed the
poor and subjugated the powerless. His
was a life on fire with zeal for breaking down barriers that people use to
separate themselves from fellow human beings.
His was a life that saw the unity of all under the reign of God. He got angry, hungry, lonely. He became joyful, playful, serious,
stern. He practiced inclusiveness,
acceptance, and forgiveness. He never
asked that anyone worship him, and never requested that churches be built in
his honor or that he become remembered mainly for starring in stained
glass. Those who would be so bold as to
say that they follow him, let alone love him, are like him.
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| "We have this treasure in clay vessels..." |
No one who even tries half-way to be like Jesus will find it
easy and few will find it natural.
Generally it requires a radical shift in our way of thinking and our way
of being, because we are formed by forces that teach us in many cases to be the
opposite of what he was. And that is
why, being accountable, we need to make a daily trip deep inside ourselves to
the judgment seat of Christ, where we can honestly say, “I have fallen far
short of the Life, this treasure contained within this clay jar called
me.” Sometimes we can honestly go so far
as to say, “I have wandered far in a land that is waste.” That is where mercy and honesty kiss each
other. It is never about being
perfect. It is about owning the fact
that we are just bodies, living in a world where the pressure to seem what we
least are weighs heavily upon us. It is
knowing that you are and I am, as the great Carl Jung once said, “just a clod of
earth.” Yet it is also remembering that
though we are clay—dust even—we live in Christ and Christ in us. That is enough to take us through the darkest
day that ever dawned.
A sermon preached on June 16, 2018, on 2 Corinthians
5:6-17.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018
[1] 2
Corinthians 4:7.
[2] 2
Corinthians 5:17.
[3]
Galatians 3:27.
[4]
Romans 13:14.
[5] 2
Corinthians 5:20.
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