In the Name of the Living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the 4th chapter of the second letter to the Church in Corinth, St. Paul writes:
So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.
These three sentences are among the most outstanding and most encouraging in all of Holy Scripture. They are outstanding because of St. Paul’s actual circumstances, and they are encouraging because of his absolute and unwavering certitude in God’s power.
And lest you be tempted to think that St. Paul is offering what we might call “mere encouragement” (the kind, say, that a less than sympathetic southerner might offer by shrugging and saying, “bless your heart”), remember that St. Paul knows a thing or two about genuine affliction and suffering.
“Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches (2 Cor. 11:24-28 RSV).”
And we thought we had issues?!?
In other epistles, St. Paul lays out basically the same thing. In the letter to the Church at Philippi, he writes, “For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that 1 may gain Christ and be found in him.” And in the opening paragraphs of the letter to the Church at Rome, St. Paul is again clear: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy of comparing with the glory to be revealed to us.”
Throughout the whole Pauline corpus, you see, is this remarkable dual thread of genuine, profound suffering and genuine, profound hope.
And hope has a name: Jesus Christ. In life and in death — and everywhere in between — our only hope is Christ.
And this is the hope to which St. Paul clings. This is the hope above all hopes that fills all in all — the hope that St. Peter describes as a “living hope” available “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
He is alive! Hence we have hope.
And, when we have this hope, “we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction” — whatever it may be — “is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
But, I realize just now, as I talk about this eternal hope and pine for that “glory beyond all measure,” some of you might call me an idealist or an escapist. Actually, however, I’m a realist, and I realize, as C.S. Lewis puts it, that “the cross indeed comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”
And it’s precisely because the cross comes first and Monday is tomorrow — in other words, because suffering and affliction are so real to you and to me — it’s absolutely essential that we consider today where and in whom or what our hope is actually placed.
You see, you and I are going to be tempted — sooner or later — to measure God’s faithfulness and overall goodness by whether or not He delivers us from this or that, whatever it may be. And we will be sorely disappointed — and many of us already have been many times over — when something doesn’t work out exactly like we’d, well, hoped.
When we don’t land that job or get that raise, or when our kids don’t get that scholarship, or when that relationship goes south, or when the prognosis isn’t what we had hoped to hear, we’ll indeed be tempted. And we’ll be tempted because our hope, it turns out, often times isn’t in the risen, eternal and living Christ at all, but is in rooted in something that is passing away; namely, in ourselves and in those around us.
For unlike what St. Paul can say of himself, you and I tend to place our trust in fleeting things — things he says that can be seen, not in those things eternal, which cannot be seen. Nevertheless, “what can be seen,” St. Paul reminds us, “is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
Our hope, then, — indeed, our genuine and profound hope (even and amidst our genuine, profound suffering) — must be placed in the palms of the One who is eternal — the Living Lord, Jesus Christ!
“My God, I wish to give you the gift you so much desire,” writes Austin Farrer, “I wish to commit myself and place my hope in you once and for all, so there shall be no taking it back. I commit myself into your hands, for though I cannot keep myself there, your fingers can hold me there, your strong, gentle fingers always giving way and never letting go; your wise subtle fingers wrestling so gently against my puny rebellions, that I tire myself trying to climb out of your hands, and come to rest at last in those wounded palms. You will not let me go; for though I have not the virtue to commit myself to you by an irrevocable act, you have had the love to commit yourself irrevocably to us.”
May it be so in your life and in mine.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
2nd Sunday of Pentecost
7 June 2015