2 Corinthians 8:7-15

Now as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you—so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.

I do not say this as a command, but I am, by mentioning the eagerness of others, testing the genuineness of your love. For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my opinion: it is beneficial for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something. Now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have. For I do not mean that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may also supply your need, in order that there may be equality. As it is written,

“The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

Sermon Text

 We come to the yearly moment where the lectionary necessitates we dig into money for a little bit. I promise though, it will be a worthwhile discussion and not just me putting a hat out to you all. Money, time, resources, all of these are what allow the world to spin around and around the way that it does. We live in a time and a society where legal tender is the one universally accepted means of business. If you want to own a house, it takes money, if you want to feed your family it will take money, if you need non-negotiable health care, it takes money. As Joel Grey once told the world, “Money makes the world, go ‘round.”

Our scriptures were written in a far more fluid time in the world. While currency had revolutionized the way trade was conducted centuries before the New Testament enters the world stage, the world was not yet under its total thrall. Locally the main way people conducted business was via barter. I give you a chicken, you give me a hammer, any difference in value will come out in the wash down the road. Some people in this room may remember, distant though it may be at this point, a time here when people were willing to do something similar. So many babies in the United States were, not all that long ago, brought into the world with vegetables and fresh eggs paying the doctor’s fee.

Even as we do most of our transactions by cards and online, we still find a familiar rhythm working in our lives. Money comes in, money comes out, the bills are paid and the food is bought, and at the end of the month we hope that we have even a little extra money to squirrel away. We save, not so we can hoard our money, but so we can be prepared for emergencies that may creep their way into our life. Most people, at this point, are only about one paycheck away from falling into poverty – a huge departure from more hopeful economic conditions of a few decades ago.[1]

The wide disparity in wealth means that there is a constant need for us to be willing to work with others to meet people’s needs. When everyone is struggling it takes everyone to make sure that everyone has what they need. If only a few people are willing to help, then suddenly they are drained of their resources and pushed down lower than those they first set out to help. If no one helps, then nothing will move forward to better the world we are living in. The way that the world benefits the most is when everyone is willing to come together to do what needs to be done to help, and does so as much as they can.

In our scripture for today, Paul is writing to the Corinthians. This is after the passage we read a few weeks ago where he was telling them that though life may seem overwhelming, God will see them through their darkest days. Immediately before the section we read this morning, Paul tells the Corinthians about ministry he had been doing in Western Greece – or Macedonia. In Macedonia, the scattered Christians – though poor – had raised a large amount of money to help meet the needs of Christians in Jerusalem. Paul tells the story of their generosity, not to shame the Corinthians into giving to this fund, but to inspire them that they are capable of it. If the poor in Macedonia can raise this money, why not the middle class of Corinth?

For Paul, it is not a question whether someone will give to help others – they will give to help others because their Christian, he assumes that much. What he encourages them to do is to become people who give eagerly. He doesn’t tell them, “If you do not feel like giving, don’t.” He says, “it is right not only for you to do it, but to be eager to do it,” in other words the giving is assumed, he just asks them to do so willingly and with joy.

Paul also sets parameters for this giving. We do not give so that we become impoverished and another person becomes rich, but so that everyone has what they need. We are called to give based upon what we have, not what we do not. Therefore, if after all necessary expenses we have $5 to our name, we are called to give generously based upon that $5, not the theoretical hundreds we would have if we had a different job or a different life entirely. I point out I say, “necessary,” expenses here because we all have plenty that are not necessary at all, whatever our particular vices may be that take from our livelihood.

I want to be up front in saying that one of the most consistent ways that we can fund ministry is giving in this building, to the ministries not only of this building but to the conference and beyond through our connectional giving. Like the collection for the Jerusalem Church, we as a conference take up money as each individual church and send it on to do ministry across the state. This year, the conference has cut the mission budget of all mission sites by 25%, and our conference ministries have been cut by 50%. Hundreds of thousands of dollars that could go to help our communities and our college students cut. Why? Not for greed, but because there is just not enough money coming in. Not enough churches paying apportionments to see the good of the Church happen beyond their doors.

Domestically, we need help too. We are so close in both churches to meeting our budget for the year. We dream of the day we have the means to do more than just keep the lights on and keep our current ministries going, but that takes money I’m afraid. The shortfall is different in each church, but it is there. If we do not see a major turn around in the next six months, we will have to think about how we can cut our expense rather than expand our ministries. If we want to grow and flourish we need to be willing to put forward a little bit more toward the mission of the Church to see that the needs of our community are met.

I say a little bit, because it really is a little bit. I’d say it is a universal thing that if all people in a Church gave just a little bit more each month, major changes would happen. I cannot prescribe that amount, because I don’t have everyone’s financial records in my hand. Yet, I think that all of us might have a bit more we could put forward for the kingdom. Maybe that means mailing a check even if you’re not here on a Sunday, maybe that means giving one hundred more dollars a month, maybe that means putting an extra dollar forward than you did before.

No one likes money talks, but we need to be honest about it all the same. Scripture is not neutral on matters of money. We are called to give to the ministries of the Church and to live a life that is based – not on us accumulating as much comfort as possible – but on working to make more equal the disparity between the rich and the poor among us. I am guilty as anyone of not contributing as fully as I could, except maybe abstractly in the form of my time. Yet, time cannot keep the lights on, sadly that is just not the way of the world.

For the next year, I go down to a single income household. I also will be welcoming a child into my life. I’ll be eligible for the food pantry and make use of it to make sure we have what we need. Yet, I have told Grace that as we plan ahead, we will be working to expand how much we can give in the midst of this sudden drop in income. We must be more generous, even in the midst of harder times, because the work of the Church does not stop no matter what we are doing. Maybe that just means I don’t turn in a receipt now and again to provide more cushion in our budget here at the church, maybe it means I drop some money in the plate now and again, maybe it means I keep a few twenties in my wallet for those I meet who need it. No matter what it is, I must follow the example of Christ – who became poor for my sake, though rich, and in so doing gave the model for generosity.

We are Christians, that we give to the cause of God’s mission is a given. Let us develop a willing and eager spirit for that generosity the only way there is to do so… By practicing our generosity. Let us give not to impoverish ourselves, but to fund the work of the Church, and let us do so with joy, that through our meager means some may know the goodness of God who did not know it before. – Amen.

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[1] Though generally reported, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness gives the statistic at its most stark. “In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness.”
Available at: https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends

Job 38:1-11

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

Sermon Text

 I really like to book of Job, but I am also really afraid of the book of Job. Afraid of a book in the Bible?! What could I possibly mean by that?! Well, let me tell you. The problem with Job is that about three fifths of it is a trap. Job has a bunch of friends that speak a lot about God and about why Job is suffering. If you read through their speeches, you may even agree with them! Yet, we are told, they are all of them wrong, all of them misguided, and all of them in their own ways misrepresented who God was.

The problem they faced was that their friend was in pain, he had lost everything, and they wanted to do something to help him. As he sat in that Ash Pile, calling for God to answer him about what he could have done to deserve what he suffered, his friends made a mistake that so many of us make when comforting a friend. They tried to answer the question that only God would be capable of answering. They reached out a hand to their grieving friend and, rather than showing him comfort in the face of adversity, they tried to pull him up before he was ready. In doing so, they ended up stepping into God’s place – explaining things they had no understanding of.

God eventually enters in at the end of the story, thundering from the midst of a storm cloud. God does not address Job initially, instead calling to his friends. “Who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” What follows is something like God’s bona fides, a long list of the wonders God has worked.

God looks to around and starts pointing. “See the earth? I formed it from dust! See the Heavens, I placed every star and planet in their orbits! See the sea and its creatures? I can fish up the biggest of them! See the giant beasts of the savannah? They are mere pets to me!” God establishes that all things, natural and otherwise, are God’s domain. God alone can speak to Job’s pain.

Oddly though, God does not. Job never gets an explanation for why Satan was pulled in to test his faith. Why did his children die when a house collapsed on them? Why did his riches get stolen away by thieves? Why did fire burn the rest of his possessions? Why? Why? Why?

The work of explaining God’s response to evil in the world is known as “Theodicy.” It is any attempt at answering the question, “How does a good God allow bad things to happen? Millions of pages have been written about this and millions more have been lost to time. Worst of all, the work that these writings set out to accomplish can never be done… The answers we write will always be insufficient. Like Job’s friends we step up to the plate, we ready ourselves to all at once answer the most significant question in the universe, and we whiff, we foul, and often times strike out in the attempt.

The fact is, we are simply unable to provide a sufficient answer. We cannot conceive of why pain exists the way it does. We could lean on the idea that God gives us freedom, and that freedom necessitates that we might suffer, but no one chooses to face natural disasters or disease. We could lean on the idea that God allows some evil for greater good, but then we have to decide if we are willing to be collateral for someone else’s good day. We could lean on a million compromises to who God is and how God works, but that will always land us in the same place Job’s friends were. God looking down on us, asking why we would make things worse by opening our mouths.

There is only one answer to pain in this world, one answer to the problems that we face. I have a feeling you could guess what it might be. The answer I give you to all these problems, in all sincerity, and without glib of any kind… is Jesus Christ. The person of Jesus Christ, and the revelation God’s character through Jesus Christ, gives what I consider to be the only acceptable answer to evil in this world. If we are to derive any sense of why the universe is the way it is, Christ alone will give us an answer that does not frustrate, confuse, or demean us.

Usually when we talk about Job we take a hold of God’s words to Job’s friends and make them an answer to Job himself. We cast God as working in mysterious ways beyond ourself, and say that any amount of trouble that comes against us in life is just a part of that higher understanding. God doesn’t seem to be content with that answer though and I do not think we usually are either. See, Job understood God throughout the book, what he didn’t understand was his pain.

When Job sat on the Ash Heap he did so in a way that balanced two realities – God is good, and God would vindicate the oppressed of the world and his pain was real, it was unwarranted, and it was brutal. It was this dual reality that made Job shout at one time, “I know my redeemer lives!” And in another, “If only I had a lawyer, I’d win my case against God!” He knew God was good, and that is why pain seemed to be so strange, “Why would the God I know do this?!” I’m sure there are people in this room that have felt this way before. You are not alone, plenty of people have, and yet… We still know God is good, even as we struggle through.

We know this because Christ showed us God’s love. God was not content to sit in Heaven and watch us struggle, God took on flesh and suffered alongside us. The mystery of pain was not theoretical to God, it was felt in God’s own flesh and bones. God knew sorrow and anger and fear and doubt… God felt all of this, so that God could stand beside us on our hardest days and on our greatest ones. Christ’s life, Christ’s Death, and Christ’s Resurrection, those are an answer enough to pain and suffering, because they show that God is invested in all parts of life.

We can never answer the question of why bad things happen the way they do. Maybe the particular causes of specific events, but if we want to explain away evil, we will never find something that will satisfy every potential situation we find ourselves in. It is not admitting defeat to say a problem is too big to explain all at once – it is a declaration of honesty and of humility. More than that… Would we want an answer to our question or our experience more?

If God came to me and gave me a reason why cancer is as painful as it is, why war is allowed to become atrocity, why people go hungry or hurt or struggle… would I be happy with the answer I was given? I’m not sure I could be… I am just not sure any “answer,” would be enough. Like Job, in the face of God’s enormity and knowledge and strength, all I can do is say, “I don’t know…” and focus on what I do.

I know that God is good, I know that God has shown me love again and again in this life. I know that Christ chose to enter the mess of this world in every way he could, and facing all pain and strife he went on to die a criminal’s death so that in all things he might share in our experiences. After he had accomplished all things, he rose from the dead as a promise that death would not rule in the end, the pain was not the only thing we had to look forward to, and that life blossoms in unexpected and wonderful ways. I do not have an answer for why bad things happen, but I have an answer to all evil – and that answer is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We embrace this truth, this answer, not so that we become complacent in the face of suffering and pain, but so that we have a model of how to move forward, even as we acknowledge the present depravity of things. Scripture asks, “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread?” In a similar way I ask, “Why seek answers for the question that will not bring life?” Christ is with us, in all things, may that be sufficient in the face of evil. – Amen.

Ezekiel 17:22-24

Thus says the Lord God:

I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender shoot from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will transplant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain height of Israel I will transplant it, and it will produce boughs and bear fruit and become a noble cedar.

Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree; I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.

Sermon Text

Prophet’s have the impossible job of relating the reality of God to the reality of humanity. God is significantly more substantive than we are. There is more of God than there is of anything in existence and, since God is the source of all things, God exists in a deeper way than we as humans are capable of. If that sounds confusing, then I have done my job in making clear just what the prophet has to do. Besides speaking to the future of God’s people, the alternative to what their own thoughts and desires would produce, they are also speaking the greater reality of God into our lesser one.

Ezekiel is a prophet who has some of the most grandiose visions of God in scripture. When God appears in Ezekiel, the prophet struggles to describe any part of the scene. In the opening of the book, Ezekiel is walking by the rivers of Babylon and suddenly sees heavenly beings that his mind can barely comprehend. He describes them as best he can – creatures with faces in each direction, their skin seemingly made of brass, and their wings motionless even as they fly around. These move in tandem with wheels set within wheels covered in eyes. Both creatures herald the arrival of God’s throne and of the “Son of Man,” another miraculous figure Ezekiel can barely begin to describe.

God seems to be aware of the limited vocabulary that we human beings have, because each encounter is given a healthy dose of explanation or analogy to help make the divine message a bit more mundane. Our scripture today is in the midst of a lengthy prophecy which uses the image of eagles, pines, vines, and rivers to get across a much wider narrative. In essence, what we are told before the scripture we read is that one king – Jehoichim – did what God wanted and the other – Zedekiah – did not. As a result one will be blessed and the other will be destroyed. A classic narrative of how following God’s will benefits the one who obeys and a practical warning not to rebel against an empire that is much bigger than you or your kingdom.

You and I, however, are not sixth century kings, so what do we do with this text? This is where we as interpreters have to ask ourselves a question. Is this a message for a time or for all time? Not all messages in scripture are for everyone, some are very specific. With rare exception, however, there is some element of the teaching that is relevant to us. This promise to God’s people in exile that they have a future and that this future will benefit others, that seems to sound familiar to me as a Christian. I remember that Abraham was promised he would bless all nations and I remember that Christ came to save the whole world. If this is true, maybe this vision of a tree connects to something tangible in our lives.

            Scripture usually uses the image of a cedar and other large trees in reference to powerful empires. The formal term for this motif is a “cosmic tree,” and it was used in Assyrian and Babylonian imagery to describe their place as the pillar that held up the world.[1] Scripture usually twists this image, however, and shows that it is God – not any worldly power – that holds creation together. In Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar builds a great empire, but the “tree,” of that empire is torn down by God, its stump locked up so it may never grow again.[2] In Ezekiel, the tree is specifically tied to the two Judean kings that are placed in Babylon and in Judea. Out of the exiles in Babylon, we are told, God will make a mighty people that will shelter all nations.

            As Christians, we profess that Christ established a kingdom for all people from all places on earth. There is no one who does not have a place in God’s kingdom and no people who cannot find a home within that kingdom. This is not a kingdom like other worldly kingdoms – dependent on successions of kings and military might. It is a kingdom with one eternal ruler, a nation who takes up tools to help rather than tools of war. It is an empire of spirit rather than matter.

            We are coming closer and closer to a general election in this country, and I do not anticipate that it will be a smooth election year. The lead up to our primary was nasty enough, I can only imagine how things will heat up as we approach the general. The political stakes are high in this election as in any. We all face a dichotomy between the reality that our vote matters – our view on what comes next in the country and in democracy – matters… and the reality that, regardless of what happens we will all have to wake up the next day and keep living life. There is always work to be done, there is always life to live, and in the face of any potential future – we must figure out how we as the people of God are going to live out our calling.

            We in the United States are poisoned by a concept of the political. Advocacy, voting, civic participation are all important and we must be active in these things to ensure democracy thrives. However, we taken the worst lessons of politicking and applied that to our faith and to our kingdom work. We campaign for one thing or another in our churches, we try to sway people to vote this way or that way, and we even try and blame leadership for the way things are… Instead of focusing on our own participation in the broken systems we choose again and again to take part in. On one hand, this is endemic to the specific systems we in the Methodist Church have – after all we are a democracy. On the other hand, it is more than Methodists who try to make the Kingdom of God come into being through political rather than spiritual thinking.

            Faith impacts the way we act in the world, and so there are politics that align with and that work against a Christian view of the world. Any policy that advocates for cruelty rather than compassion, that does harm to the least of these, that seeks to criminalize the marginalized, and that generally sets out to hurt others is obviously, should obviously be, anti-Christian in our minds. Yet the methods of this world and its power struggles are a matter separate from these concerns. While we as worldly people tend to group the world into enemies and friends, scripture asks us to blur those categories, and in so doing, create a kingdom where all people can find shelter.

            This does not make us opinionless or uselessly moderate, it simply means that we do not make our decisions based upon categories or assumptions, but upon people and their welfare. People often criticized Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. because he took sides in political struggles. He was called a socialist, a communist plant, a Marxist seeking to destroy democracy. However, his stance was a Christian one – that all people were worthy of human dignity. His methods were likewise Christian – he called people to look upon the suffering of those who were hurt by the Jim Crow South and the ignorant North. He called people to nonviolently face atrocity, so that their cause would be obvious in the eyes of world. You cannot hurt unarmed people and not reveal your own depravity in doing so.

            He called upon the White, Moderate Church to free itself of the idea that it was wrong to be political. He asked them to take on a Kingdom Perspective that would impact their politics rather than the other way around. Silence in the face of oppression is complicity after all. Yet, the kind of reconciliation he was seeking was Biblical and it was powerful. He did not advocate for cheap grace that would pretend injustice never happened, but an honest reckoning to the harm that white folk had caused to black folk since 1619 and beyond. It looked forward to a future where reconciliation was possible, it acknowledged a present where the evils of hatred still reigned, and it did not deny the past where even worse was perpetrated.

            Regardless of what happens in November, we as the Church will be called to a witness that we have always held. We will be called to advocate for those in need, to acknowledge the harm that our current systems cause, and to work for a future where all people can live in abundance, peace, and harmony. We do this by seeking to live with people, not writing off others as our enemies. We do this through serious reflection and repentance on our own part. We do this through engaging with the world around us as members of a political system, but in the manner of people of God. We do so not to win, but to see that God’s will is done. We do so not to triumph over those we disagree with, but to see that all people are given their God given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

            The cedar that our scripture speaks about is the plant that obeyed God, the plant that listened to the call to care for others and consented to be watered by God’s own hand. The world may fall apart in the coming years, but the Church cannot be allowed to do the same. We need to be a place that sets the example for inclusion, for kindness, and for mutuality. That means we all have to humble ourselves. Republicans! Repent of your sins! Democrats! Repent of your sins! Non-Affiliated Voters, we do not get out of this either! We too must repent of our sins! Our nation has done evil in this world, our parties have contributed to it, we as individuals have done the same. We must change if we wish to see the world around us change.             Jesus spoke of a tree, more humble than the cedar, but equally important. A mustard seed, deposited in the ground, grows up to give shade to all the birds of the air. Have we faith sufficient to overcome our sins? Have we a desire to be different from the world around us enough to be genuinely good to one another? Have we the Spirit of God within us, to say that we can live with the people we disagree with? Can we accept that the image of God in them is more important than that thing we dislike about them? This only works if we all are willing to take part, if we are all able to mutually put down our weapons and take up the work of making this world a better place. People of God, I want to see us grow to be a cedar that gives shade to all people, are we willing to follow God and see that growth? May it be so, may it be s

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[1] Margaret S. Odell. Ezekiel (Macon, Georgia: Smyth and Helwys 2005.)

[2] Daniel 4

Genesis 3: 8-15

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this,

    cursed are you among all animals

    and among all wild creatures;

upon your belly you shall go,

    and dust you shall eat

    all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman

    and between your offspring and hers;

he will strike your head,

    and you will strike his heel.”

Sermon Text

As you receive this I should be in Buckhannon for Annual Conference. This is one of the rare Sundays I get to write a sermon I do not actually end up preaching. For those who stumble upon this online or who receive it in our weekly mailers, may this word – though not spoken aloud – be a blessing however it find you.

The passage we read above is the start of all trouble. After humanity betrayed God’s trust and ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, they hid and tried to cover their shame. Their attempt to hide could not overcome the compelling nature of God’s presence. When God asked them, “Where are you?” they could not help but cry back, “I heard your voice!” Even when they had done wrong, they still could not help but hear God and answer. There’s something to that, I think. If we have known God and we love God then even when we do wrong, we desire to be back with God again. A call comes out for us to come home, and we can only resist it for so long.

The first people had erred all the same, and they would face consequences for the wrong they had done. Sin, definitionally, puts distance between us and God. If God is the source of all life then distance from God is distance from life itself. Humanity did not need to be punished to suffer after the Garden – they had done that all themselves. God spells out the punishment for every participant in the whole debacle. Humanity would struggle to scrape a living out of the dirt, children would no longer be guaranteed to see adulthood, and loss would define more of life than plenty would. Hard time had entered the world, and no one could be blamed except for our own sinful selves.

The one who had initiated this deception, all the same, was a quite literal snake in the grass. This Primordial Serpent is described as being limbed and lingual, speaking and walking in a way that no serpent ever would be again. The story seems to want to explain how snakes came to slither rather than to wander and to leave tracks in the dirt wherever they go. In our Genesis study we recently looked at this story and how there is nothing in the text that actually calls the snake “the Devil,” or “Satan.” Where do we get this idea of the serpent as the source of all evil then?

I could here go into a history of the interpretation of the text, the way that Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian stories came together to make an understanding that fallen angels took the form of snakes to tempt humanity. That isn’t the question that is really being asked though. Why do we see the serpent as the source of all evil in Eden? Because it speaks to us on a personal and spiritual level. We as people know what it is to fight sin, to face temptation and not always win, to meet evil face to face, and struggle against it. We see the snake and its machinations against the first couple and in that we see a reflection of our own life.

We often treat Eden like something that happened once a long time ago. If we are more earnest in our reading, however, I think we can see it play out time and time again. We often know what we should do and yet do something else. We know what we should not do and yet we do it willingly and with relish. We who love God do not always reflect that love in our actions. We fail, we give-in, we sin – again and again and again. Eden is not a far-flung history, it is a reality we play out every day.

It is not wonder then that the story became for us a fight with primordial evil as an external force as much as an internal reality. If we can see sin as something solid, something outside ourselves, it is easier to imagine that we could overcome it. The sin of the first humans was in their unwillingness to follow God’s commands, an internal reality, but it was realized by the temptation of the serpent, and external reality.

The promise of Genesis 3 is not just that the Serpent will be reduced to a crawling beast and enemy of humanity, but that God will allow humanity a way to escape sin’s control.  The internal reality of our sin can be conquered with God’s help and the external manifestations of it can be put down. The curse of the serpent makes clear that Sin will not have the last word. The serpent is made into a stupid animal rather than a clever beast and the descendants of Eve are given victory over it. The skull of the serpent, of sin, will be crushed, and the heel of humanity will only ever be bruised.

On a grand scale this promise is called the “proto-evangelion,” the first instance of the Gospel. Christ will come and crush evil and allow us to escape from sin. Yet, God did not wait for Christ’s incarnation to begin this work. From Noah’s reception of the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” to Moses’s full reception of the Law, to the judges, to the prophets, and even till today – God is constantly working to empower people to conquer sin. We are not helpless in the face of the world’s evils. We are constantly being equipped to take counter wickedness with righteousness, love, and holiness.

I will close this unspoken sermon with a quote directly from John Wesley, his vocalization of what it means to be saved is one of the best I have seen, and it captures what kind of victory over sin – over the Serpent – we are promised in Genesis 3.

“By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven: but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity; a recover of the divine nature; the renewal of our souls after the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.” – A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

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.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 1:1-8

[2] 2 Cor 1:8-9

[3] 2 Cor. 2:4