A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
2 Corinthians 3:4-9
by William Klock
Imagine you’re an Israelite at the time of the Exodus. Moses shows up and announces that the God of your ancestors—a God no one’s heard from in four hundred years—is going to deliver you from Pharoah’s slavery. Sounds pretty sketchy. But then God begins to act. He sends ten plagues on the Egyptians. He turns the Nile to blood. Wow! But then Pharoah’s magicians do the same thing. Okay…maybe not as impressive as it seemed at first. But as the plagues go on, they get more and more impressive and Pharaoh’s magicians can’t keep up. By the tenth plague you know without a doubt that this God of your fathers is something. He’s even more powerful than Pharoah and his gods. And then the Red Sea. Pharaoh chased you down. Your people are stuck between the sea and Pharaoh’s army. All is lost. And then the God of your fathers parts the sea itself in an amazing display of power and authority. Imagine what it was like to walk through the sea on dry ground. And then to watch as, just as miraculously, the God of your fathers causes the waters to come crashing back into place just at the right time to drown Pharaoh’s army. And you join with your people as, for the first time, you sing praise to this God of your fathers—a God whom you’re now starting to think of as your God. But God isn’t finished. He appears as a magnificent pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night and he leads your people into the wilderness. When there’s nothing to drink, he causes water to pour forth from a rock. When there’s nothing to eat, he miraculously provides an abundance of manna and quail. At Mount Sinai he meets your people in cloud and lightning on the mountaintop. He establishes a covenant with you. He will be your God and you will be his people. He sends Moses down the mountain with the torah and with instructions for the tabernacle. And having been in God’s presence, Moses’ face shines so brightly with God’s glory that he has to wear a veil. And when your people have finished assembling the tabernacle, you see God’s glory—like a cloud—descend to fill it. It’s stounding. It’s the sort of thing the Egyptians could only dream about their gods doing and the God of Israel does it for real. And, eventually, just as he promised, God leads your people into Canaan—the promised land—and he conquers the people for you and gives you their cities. And you know it’s him, not you. There’s no doubting it. He had you march on Jericho, not with swords, but carrying his ark and blowing trumpets as you marched in circles around the city. Not to attack it. Not to put siege to it. But simply to announce that the Lord, the God of Israel had come. And when that announcement was clear and when everyone could see that you and your people had done nothing but announce the Lord’s presence, he caused the walls to come crashing down. He defeated the city. And neither you nor anyone else could possibly think of taking credit for it. Neither you nor anyone else took the Lord for granted. Neither you nor anyone else could dream of giving your faith, your loyalty, your allegiance to any other god. Because you had seen with your own eyes the glory of the Lord.
Even as the generations passed, the people remembered the Lord. They lived in those cities, they drew from those well, they harvested crops from those fields that the Lord had taken from the Canaanites and given to their fathers and grandfathers. They bore in their flesh the sign of God’s covenant—that statement, “I will be your God and you will be my people”—they bore that sign in their circumcision. And every year they celebrated the Passover and not only recalled the events of the Exodus in which the Lord had saved their fathers; they participated, themselves, in those events—they owned them as if they’d happened to them. And the covenant was renewed.
And if you read the Old Testament no further you might think it would be like that forever. How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever take him for granted, let alone turn their backs on him? How could a people who had so experienced the glory of God ever look for confidence and hope in anyone or anything else? But it happened. They took their status as his people for granted. They began to take those cities and wells and vineyards and fields he’d given them for granted. They stopped celebrating the Passover and remembering what he’d done for them. They started worshiping other gods. They lost faith in the Lord and started putting their trust in kings and in armies and in politics. And when the prophets came to rebuke the people and to call them back to faithfulness, they refused to listen and abused those prophets. Eventually, because they took it all for granted, because they were unfaithful, the Lord took away the land and the cities and fields and vineyards—and finally even his presence—and sent the people into exile in a foreign land. But not before he promised them renewal. One day he would restore them and make them new and fill them with his own Spirit, he would turn their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, so that they would be forever faithful.
And, in Jesus, the Lord fulfilled that promise to his people. In Jesus he was born as one of them, but rejected and crucified as a false Messiah. God raised Jesus from death and overturned the verdict against him, declaring that he really was the Messiah and creation’s true Lord. In rising from the grave Jesus conquered death. And then, to those who were baptised and received the sign of God’s new covenant, he gave God’s Spirit. The old Israel had a temple. This new Israel is the temple. And as we read in last week’s Epistle, Paul stressed that the risen Jesus appeared to the twelve, and to the other disciples, and even at one point to five hundred, and lastly to him. And Jesus changed everything for them. In his death and resurrection he led his people in a new exodus, not this time from physical bondage under Pharaoh, but from bondage to sin and death themselves. And in baptism, Jesus leads his people like Moses through the waters of redemption to meet the Lord on the far side. And the Spirit leads us, not as a pillar of cloud or fire, but as God’s very presence within us, as we embark on a world- and humanity-saving trek through the wilderness of the old evil age into the age to come, towards the New Jerusalem, to that day when gospel and Spirit have done their work and Jesus does away with sin and death and evil once and for all and forever, and creation is set to rights and we enjoy the presence of our God eternally. Those first eyewitnesses took this astounding gospel story to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the world and amazing things happened. It was more than just a story of the glory of God. The story of the old exodus was that, but this was more. The story of the Messiah and this new exodus has power unlike any story that has been told before or since. This is a story backed by the life-giving and life-changing power of Jesus and the Spirit and the people who heard it and believed it and came to trust in the death and, most importantly, the resurrection of Jesus, they were changed. Forgiven by the redeeming death of Jesus and then given a foretaste of the life of God’s new world by the Spirit whom he poured into them. It was a change that no one could ignore. Some were captivated by it and came to hear and to believe the gospel story for themselves and they shared in this new life too. And others got angry as the gospel story and God’s new world challenged the gods and the kings and the systems in which they were already invested. But to those who believed, the gospel, the good news about Jesus was life itself. And they gathered together as often as they could and when they did, they not only shared the community the gospel had given them, they shared in the meal Jesus had given them. In the Lord’s Supper they ate bread and drank wine—and just as in the Passover—they didn’t just remember what Jesus had done to deliver them from sin and death, they appropriated that death and resurrection, they participated in that saving event themselves. They owned this new exodus just as the Israelites owned the events of the first exodus. And each time it was as if the Lord was renewing his covenant with them: through Jesus and the Spirit, I will be your God and you will be my people.
And you might think that their faithfulness to the Lord would be unending. You would think that their trust and loyalty—their confidence—would always and only be in Jesus the Messiah. But it wasn’t. If we’re honest about our struggles, we know that it’s easy to become distracted by other things. There’s a reason we gather every Sunday to hear the good news again and to come to the Lord’s Table to be reminded and to renew the covenant. There’s a reason why wendaily immerse ourselves in the scriptures and in the story there of God and his people. Because when we don’t, even as glorious as that story is, even as it once captivated us so thoroughly, somehow—and to our shame—we forget. And Jesus is still there, but we start focusing on other things and we start looking for other things and we start putting our confidence and our hope in other things.
It even happened in the early church with that first generation of believers. Paul had arrived in Corinth in about a.d. 50 or 51. He proclaimed the good news about Jesus and both Jews and gentiles there were captivated by the story. They believed. They were baptised. And Paul stayed with them for about a year and half, helping them to set up a church. And everyone knew that it wasn’t Paul who had done. He was just an unassuming little man. Funny looking, maybe with a speech impediment. (Remember in last week’s Epistle he owned that insult about being a monster, prematurely born.) What happened in Corinth wasn’t about Paul. Brothers and Sisters, it was about the power of the gospel and the Spirit. And yet just a few years later, it all started to fall apart. The amazing story about the death and resurrection of Jesus that had once so spoken to them about the glory of God started to fade, and with it their motivation to holiness. Sin—gross, truly wicked sin—started to creep into the church and they found ways to justify it. Their worship became chaotic as people began using the gifts the Spirit had given to bring attention to themselves instead of to build up the body. They abused the Lord’s Supper and twisted and undermined its covenant meaning. And when Paul, their brother, the one who had not only brought the gospel to them, but who could speak with authority about it because he, himself, had met the risen Jesus, when he wrote to them they brushed him off. They told him they didn’t want to hear from him anymore. He’d been displaced by other preachers who were flashier, who were more handsome, who were better spoken then he was.
And so, at the end of 2 Corinthians 2 he appeals to them. He talks about himself as “we” instead of “I” and I think he does that to emphasise that he stand with the other apostles whose authority came from being eyewitness of the risen Messiah. The same could not be said of others who have come to them and led them astray. He writes to them, saying, “We aren’t mere peddlers of God’s word, as so many preachers are. We speak with sincerity. We speak from God. We speak in God’s presence. We speak in the Messiah.” The Messiah: that’s who this is really about. Paul has no authority of his own. He simply speaks what he heard from Jesus himself. And his point here is that they had once been captivated by that gospel of the Messiah that Paul had proclaimed to them, but now they’ve been captivated by the words of mere men. “Do you want a letter of recommendation before you’ll listen to me?” Paul asks. “Do I need to give you a sheaf of reference letters so you’ll know I’m legit?”
“No,” says Paul, going on in 3:2: “You are our official reference! It’s written on our hearts. Everyone can know and read it. It’s plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, with us the messengers. A letter not written with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. Not on tablets of stone, but on the tablets of fleshly hearts.”
In other words, despite all their problems, despite their backsliding into worldly ways, they are not the people they once were. Paul had proclaimed the good new—the story about Jesus and his death and resurrection and ascension—and through that preaching the Spirit had captivated them and filled their hearts with faith. They believed. They gave their trust, their loyalty, their allegiance, their obedience to Jesus and they were transformed. And Paul could see it even through all their problems. No, Paul doesn’t need to give them references. “You are my reference,” he says to them. I know you’ve kicked me to the curb, but it was the message I received from Jesus that I preached to you that transformed you—not the merely human words of the other preachers who came along. It was the word of God that did it.
And they really, really need to hear this. Because in the years since Paul left, as they’ve listened to teachers who led them astray, as the glory of the pure gospel has faded from their vision, they’ve begun to put their confidence in other things. They no longer associate Paul with the gospel. They’re thinking of him as that funny-looking little man with the speech impediment. And following someone like that in Greek culture, well, that wasn’t going to get you anywhere. And so they associated with the handsome preachers with eloquent rhetoric who could impress the Greeks. They’ve forgotten that the gifts the Spirit gave them were gifts of grace to build up the body, and now they’re abusing them and putting their confidence in them. They’ve forgotten that the gospel puts them all on an equal footing before the throne of grace, and they’re letting their old class and cultural divisions divide them up. They were growing their church—as we’d say it today—but they weren’t growing it on the gospel.
We do the same thing today. We may do it even more than the Corinthians, because commercialism is the cultural water we swim in and we don’t even realise how much it impacts how we think about church and we don’t realise how it so easily displaces the gospel and gospel growth and gospel ministry. We build our churches around personalities. We build our churches around programmes. We build our churches around demographics. We build our churches by advertising that we’re better than or that we’re not like our neighbouring churches. We treat the church as if it’s a business or a social club instead of a family—the covenant people of God, transformed and shaped by the gospel and the Spirit. The Spirit has transformed our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh through the power of the gospel, but we forget the centrality of the gospel and allow our hearts to calcify back into stone. It might not seem like that’s what’s happening at first. Our churches may even have the appearance of success, but it’s because we’re appealing to stony hearts of worldly people with what they value, not with the power of the transforming gospel they need.
It’s that simple gospel that needs to be at the centre of everything. The risen Jesus always before us. The risen Jesus at the centre of every decision we make. The risen Jesus at the heart of everything we do. Just Jesus, crucified and risen. The simple gospel. So Paul goes on in verse 4: “That is the kind of confidence we have toward God, through the Messiah.” Stop putting your confidence in other things. Just put it in Jesus. He and only he can bring us before God. So Paul says, “It isn’t as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God: God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the Spirit gives life.” The gospel was his only qualification and the only one that mattered. The same goes for us.
Now, think again of the glory that God put on display in the Exodus and in the story of Israel that followed. That’s what Paul gets at in verse 7 when he writes: “But just think about it: when death was being ministered, carved in letter of stone,”—he’s talking about Mt. Sinai and the giving of the law”—“it was a glorious thing, so glorious in fact that the children of Israel couldn’t look at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory that was to be abolished.” The glory God displayed in those days was astounding. It moved the people to faith and trust and worship. But now Paul’s talking about the new covenant and what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit. “Will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?” he asks them. “If ministering condemnation is glorious, you see, how much more glorious is the ministry of vindication—of righteousness, of justice? In fact, what used to be glorious has come, by comparison, to have no glory at all, because of the new glory which goes so far beyond it!
O, Brothers and Sisters, would that we would also be so captivated by the glory of the simple gospel of Jesus the Messiah. There is no other glory that can compare and if we will keep it always before us—this good new of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord—if we would keep our eyes always focused on it, if we let it shape our lives, if we let it shape our decision, if we let it be the basis for everything we do as the church. If the glory of the gospel were our sole source of confidence and hope, it would transform our churches and make us the people God intends for us to be. God’s promise is that one day the knowledge of his glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, but, Brothers and Sisters, remember that he has made us the stewards of that glory. He has entrusted his gospel of life to us and he’s filled us with his Spirit. It is our calling to make his glory known by taking the good news of Jesus to Courtenay and Comox, to Vancouver Island, to Canada, and even to the ends of the earth. You may have placed a veil over God’s glory. This morning let the scriptures lift that veil. Let the bread and the wine here at his Table lift that veil. Look on the glory of the Lord revealed in Jesus the Messiah and be refreshed and renewed for the gospel ministry to which you have been called.
Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.