Sunday, March 14, 2010
Lent 4C
Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
2 Corinthians 5:14-21
“14For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. 15And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.16From 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. 17So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Periodically, you come across a passage of scripture that has so much meat in it, so much depth and breadth of meaning that, in just a few sentences, the whole of the Gospel can be drawn out.
I’ve often heard Paul referred to as a ‘Religious Genius’, and though the term may well apply, it is slightly discomfiting … because it implies that the Christian faith was the brainchild of Paul rather than being based on the teachings of Jesus. I DO believe in giving credit where credit is due, Paul DID crystallize much of what has come down to us as our Theology, but I do not believe that, in saying that, it diminishes the centrality of the message and the person of Jesus because if it weren’t for Jesus, I don’t think Paul could have come up with this stuff on his own.
So let’s get down to it: Paul is explaining to the Corinthian church why he does what he does … why he BOTHERS … why he goes to the trouble of finding a place to preach, risking and more often than not, suffering persecution, engaging people in a dialogue that results in salvation, and then spending time – weeks, months, even years, nurturing and discipling those people who have declared their faith in Jesus as the Messiah.
What we have in this passage is a concise description of what it means to look at the world through the eyes of God.
16From 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.
What Paul is saying is that, in taking on the Lordship of Christ, in accepting the presence of the Holy Spirit as our guide, companion and comforter, THAT is the perspective from which we begin to view the world, not from our former perspective, as fallen, fallible, frail human beings … not that we stop being that, but we hopefully begin to grow … out of it.
Our view of our fellow human beings takes a decidedly different turn. We are called as followers of Jesus to look at them through the eyes of God – through “God goggles”, as the camp pastor at PassportKids camp told us the summer before last. It was a great turn of phrase… the point being that, if we hold on to looking at the world through our own, narrow and limited understanding of how WE perceive the world, it is impossible to get past our preconceptions, our subjective understanding and our very superficial view of what is going on in the world around us. We can’t get past the outside of a person … what they look like, what they wear, what they sound like, what they own … we can make a substantial EFFORT, and yes, on occasion, we CAN ALMOST come to see them apart from all that stuff … but as human beings, as created beings wired to function in that way – visual queues are what we are SUPPOSED to pick up on in order to make value judgments about someone that is approaching us.
When we make the decision to believe and declare that “Jesus is Lord” – that earliest and most fundamentally radical statement of the early church – Paul says we become new creations.
Does that mean that we get new bodies, stronger bones, more (or less) muscle and fat? No!! We are reborn in our spirit! Nothing necessarily changes in outward appearance … I’ve seen pictures of me before and after July 12th, 1973, and I look pretty much like the same emerging geek that I always was; same horn-rimmed glasses, same eyes, same nose, chin, mouth, ears. The physical didn’t change. What DID BEGIN to change was what was inside.
And that is ultimately what matters. That is what makes us who we are, that is where we define our being. We can say, “this is what I look like, but let me tell you who I AM.” … there’s a difference.
There’s a radio program I love to listen to, called “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR, and the host of the show is a man named Peter Sagal. Until this past week, I had never bothered to look their website up on the internet. When I did, I had a difficult time adjusting to the image of the actual person from the image I had developed in my mind over the last few years of listening to the show. He doesn’t look ANYTHING like what I had imagined … even though I had intentionally tried NOT to establish any preconceived notions of what he looked like. I was on the receiving end of that experience when I worked at Bell Atlantic. My co-workers who lived and worked out of the Baltimore/Washington area office had me pegged as someone darker, shorter, and heavier than I turned out to be. It was somewhat amusing to see their reactions when we DID finally get to meet face-to-face!
All that to say this: we are not truly defined – and no one is – by our outward appearance, we are defined by the inward presence of a growing awareness of who God wants us to be in relation to each other and to God.
And THAT is what Paul was getting at with the folks in Corinth. They were still seeing each other from their human perspective. Some were rich, others weren’t. Some were slaves, others weren’t. Some were Jews, others weren’t. In other words, they were still seeing each other by the world’s standards, focusing on what made them DIFFERENT from each other rather than on what made them ALIKE. And Paul is telling them – and us – that that “ALIKENESS” is the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of them and in each of us. And insofar as that “alikeness” is a uniting element, they were to apply it to the rest of their lives and the rest of their interactions with each other – Paul calls it ‘The ministry of reconciliation’ …
It is important to note here that it isn’t Paul who is calling the folks at Corinth to this ministry of reconciliation. Paul points out that it is God who is doing the calling… but it is a little more than a call … different, in some way … the word used is ‘entrusted’. If Paul had said, as he does in other places, that he ‘charged’ the Corinthians with a task, it carries the weight of … well … an order, more or less. There’s a somewhat legal or military tilt to the idea being presented. But when the word ‘entrust’ is used, as it is here, what impression does that leave?
Isn’t it a more … relational term? Doesn’t it carry more of a connotation of equals at either end of the transaction? If I entrust something to someone, it means, just as the word includes, that I trust them to do something … the way I would do it. So to hear that God was reconciling the world to God’s self through Jesus Christ, and that God has entrusted THAT SAME MINISTRY to us … then we are faced with the same task that Jesus Christ was about during his ministry.
Have we met that responsibility? Have we fulfilled it? Are there ways in which we have, and other ways in which we haven’t?
As we continue to move through the season of Lent, I hope that we would ponder these questions even as we explore the ways in which God is calling us to greater and deeper and more wonderful ways of bringing about that very ministry of reconciliation.
Let’s pray.
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