For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake. For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you.
Sermon Text
Fragility is a real part of life. We are born fragile and we spend our entire lives as fragile human beings. Despite the incredible resiliency we display as a species – nothing can change the limited nature of our existence. We are prone to injury, to sickness, and, yes, to death. We are born into this world and we are small and helpless, and we only grow a little beyond this across our life. We are, as the scripture says, dust that soon returns to dust.
We do not like to acknowledge our fragility. We would rather look at our ability to overcome trouble than our tendency toward it. Why wouldn’t we? It is not pleasant to hurt or to fall ill. It is not pleasant to suffer or to die. Life can be overwhelming and life, it must be said, can be hard. We live a life where everyday could be our last – that is not a cynical outlook, it is simply a realistic one.
Bummer of a start for sermon, isn’t it? We like to ignore this aspect of life, but in scripture and in our own lives we cannot escape it. We know plenty of people who died long before their time and who did so suddenly. We know people who suffer with chronic conditions and pain. We know that there is trouble upon trouble that fills this earth. It is hard, people of God, to be a human beings – because to be a human being is to know sorrow upon sorrow. The author of Ecclesiastes tells us two truths – our life is like “a vapor within vapor,” (הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים, hevel hevelim,) and “life is wearisome, more than anyone can name.”[1] It is tough to make it through.
Our scripture today captures a moment in Paul’s life where the number of negative things far outnumber the positive. This letter to the Corinthians was written after Paul had suffered beatings on the hands of Jews and Gentiles. He had been pushed again and again to and beyond the edge of his ability. He spent time and energy and his own sweat and blood to spread the Gospel, even to the point of describing a recent attack as “having received a death sentence.”[2] Worse than all of this, his beloved Corinthian church seemed to have abandoned him.
We are not given the details of what happened, but sometime after writing 1 Corinthians, a letter calling the people of God to stand as one – not making factions based on who they thought was a better teacher or leader – he visited them. While there, one of the church people made a speech against Paul, publicly shaming him and attacking him. The Church did nothing to defend Paul in this moment and he left with a broken heart. A letter was written, lost to time, where he spoke his full frustration, anger, and betrayal down, but we do not know what it said.[3] 2 Corinthians was written after he was told to give them another chance, to attempt to reconcile with the Church he had loved so dearly.
For Paul, these troubles were offshoots of his ministry. He worked to spread the Gospel and so suffered persecution under the powers of his day. He lived and worked with a community and so was vulnerable to the kind of personal attack he saw in Corinth. For those of us here, blessed with a country and a culture that allows us to practice our faith freely, we do not have to fear persecution often. We do, however, know something about hardships. As I already said, we have all faced illness, fear, betrayal, and generally know the kind of pain that comes with life. While I do not think many of us in this room can associate directly with what Paul faced as an apostle, we all can relate to the message he gives us in the section we read today.
“We have this treasure in clay jar,” that is how Paul describes our life. There is something within these fragile bodies of ours that is much more precious than the container itself. As amazing and wonderful as the human body is, as important as it is to care for, Paul tells us that there is something imperishable within the perishing aspects of ourselves. The Spirit of God works within us, it awakens our soul and creates something the persists beyond ourselves and despite ourselves. Our soul, though a part of our complete being, is the means by which we know resurrection and the way that we can survive life’s troubles.
The promise of faith is not always in deliverance but in perseverance. We are not always delivered out of circumstances so much as through them. Paul was not always saved from the situations he found himself in, but he was able to make it to the other side of them. Even in his death, we are told in his farewell letter to the Philippians that he sees even this as a way to become closer to Christ. Faith does not always eliminate our troubles, but it does give us something deeper and stronger than those troubles.
Paul lists a rapid fire set of ways God cares for our fragile beings and enriches our soul. We are “afflicted… but not crushed,” literally, “We are pressed, but not compressed,” in other words though we are forced into a single reality – the trouble that we are facing in a moment, we are not made less of a person because we suffer. He says that even when we are lost, we have a way ahead of us, even if we cannot see where it leads. In the face of violence, we are not left to suffer alone, God who suffered for us suffers alongside us. If our fragile vessel is thrown to the ground, it is not destroyed, even if it shatters.
Paul’s description of suffering is from the perspective of someone who is purposefully taking on trouble for the sake of other people. So when he says, “death is at work in us but life in you,” the comparisons we can make between our earthly struggles and Paul’s specific apostolic hardships do become more limited than they might otherwise be.
Yet, in the hardships specific to faith and the hardships ubiquitous among all people, there is one thing that allows us to carry on. That is Christ at work within us. In the following chapter, Paul moves from pottery to tents as an image of our lives. He says that as we live in this world, suffering as we sometimes must, God does not abandon us to the “tent,” we presently inhabit, but builds up an eternal home in Heaven. This eternal home is not an escape for our Spirit at the end of all things, but the perfect and incorruptible body that awaits us in the resurrection – when Heaven and Earth meet and life never ends.
Until we see this completion of God’s work, we have God’s grace within us. When we pray for God to strengthen us and we feel consolation from God – we have received grace. When we read scripture and find our hearts given words to express our joys and sorrows – we receive grace. When we gather as believers and support one another as the Church – we have received grace. Most visibly and obviously, when we take bread and cup and celebrate the work Christ has done in saving us, we receive grace. We are sustained only by God’s gift of grace to us and we depend upon God in all things.
I ask us all to take Paul’s words later in the letter to heart. “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” We are not big and strong because we are Christians, no we are more often shown to be small and weak in the face of life’s trouble. It is God who is mighty, God who is able to overcome pain and death and suffering. God is the source of our life and it is from God that we receive strength, peace, and power enough to overcome the troubles of this world. Let us praise our God who has given us this gift, and boast in our weakness, that we may be made strong through God’s sustaining grace. – Amen.
[1] Ecclesiastes 1:1-8
[2] 2 Cor 1:8-9
[3] 2 Cor. 2:4
Teach us to Number our Days 