May the God of peace hold me by my right hand and guide me, who is a shepherd to shepherds and a guide to guides. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Good evening/morning! If you looked close enough at my hands, you would find the tell tale signs of last week’s Mission Trip: some leftover oil-based paint on my pinky, burns on my arms from both the sun and the tugging of tiny Dominican hands from VBS, and maybe a little leftover concrete dust from building walls in my finger nails. Our group of high schoolers, college aides, and chaperones went through a lot over the past week and if we pulled it all together by factoring in an appearance by Batman, an octopus, and basically a week full of inside jokes and nonsense, I’d say it was the best trip we’ve done yet. Thank you for your support and prayers, they were certainly added to our own as God rained his grace on us to complete the tasks in front of us. Because of the health of our community here at Redeemer, we were able to make another healthy, if smaller, community over in the Dominican Republic; able to work together towards the glorification of God and the building of His Kingdom.
The unity that our group showed over the past week is actually a direct contrast to the group that St. Paul addressed when he wrote his letters to the Corinthians. I was thinking about this on the airplane. Whereas I, in my position as pastor, was feeling a sense of progress, accomplishment, and satisfaction at the overall spiritual growth of our group, Paul must have felt much the opposite when he reflected about his flock at Corinth. Reading through the letters carefully, you can actually sense some of Paul’s exasperation. This actually came up during our trip, as one of our high school grads noticed Paul throwing a little sass during one of our daily office readings from 1 Corinthians as Paul was addressing some of the many problems present at Corinth. It’s a laundry list of issues that crop up in many congregations to this day: from theological and moral laxity to, as we might say in youth ministry, poor choices with their words and with their bodies. All these things presented themselves with personal turmoil and dissension. This led to the occasion that probably prompted the writing of 2 Corinthians: Paul had lost a lot of ground in terms of his authority to lead, a common occurrence with leaders, spiritual or otherwise, of groups that have splintered and formed factions. Again, considering the positivity of my experience over the last week or so, I’m super glad to not be Paul.
But despite the negativity we find in Paul’s pastoral relationship with the Church in Corinth, today’s epistle lesson contains one of my favorite “Paulisms” in the New Testament.
It’s found in Chapter 5 verse 16 and 17:
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
In verse 16, Paul distills the basic problem and its solution with what is happening to the congregation in Corinth. The people have ceased to see each other as really are and are treating them thusly. Tying this to the story of Christ’s ministry as Paul does, “a human point of view” is an incomplete picture. For example: if we simply observe Jesus as a particularly compelling rabbi who ended up being martyred by the Romans, we do not have a complete impression of the profundity of God’s work in Christ’s ministry of reconciliation; the totality of which includes his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Likewise, if we simply observe that the church is full of hairless bipeds with opposable thumbs, we again miss the complete view of the work of God’s redeemed people. Paul was reminding the Corinthians that the revelation of Christ is the revelation of a new humanity whose alienation from God and from itself has been overcome and that the behavioral implications of a new humanity ought to be recognized. That is to say, the church in Corinth needed to look upon each other from the same starting point, which is the love of God in Christ. The Christian people, according to the implications of verse 17, really are a new creation, a new mode of being, with access to and participating in the full life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Since we are that, we must constantly be thinking about how we treat each other. Put another way, in church not everybody is super awesome all the time. Even so, God is working constantly in and through us and recognition of that fact should lead us to refrain from idle gossip, factions, and the like and by contrast, spur us on to encouragement, unity, and holiness.
But sometimes the ethics of building of God’s kingdom can seem esoteric. So to make things a little more concrete, here’s yet another example from last week. On Thursday, our entire group had huge tasks in front of us. One large segment was tasked with treating and painting some iron work around try mission parish of San Simon, while the other mixed and hauled cement for walkways around the church. It was grueling work for all involved, but at the end I feel like we were all able to appreciate the other’s efforts in creating something new. Many of you might know a similar feeling: the sense of enjoying a work to completion, yes, but also taking joy in the completed work of someone else. That, my friends, is what we are meant to do with each other. God is doing the work on us, and we are to appreciate, to enjoy, the fruits of his labor by our faithfulness and affection for one other.
So let’s get the jump on things this evening/morning. Look upon your neighbor when you pass the peace today and remember Paul’s words: “Behold the new has come!”
And because Christ prays for us, let us also recognize his gift by keeping each other in our prayers.
Amen.
The Rev. David S. Bumsted
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, FL 34236
3 Pentecost
14 June 2015