What do we lack?
Sermon for Sunday, June 23
“You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections.” (2 Cor. 6:12)
What holds us back from living a victorious Christian life, from experiencing the power of God’s work in us and, through us, to the world around us?
Paul says to the church at Corinth that nobody is holding them back in the spiritual life but themselves. For comparison, he offers them a picture of what the victorious Christian looks like as lived by himself and his apostolic companions.
“As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger; by purity, knowledge, forbearance, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet [are] well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
All worldly appearances to the contrary, he tells them, Paul is living the life of freedom and power in Christ.
Now is this something that Paul alone can boast, as some kind of super-Christian?
In his first letter to the Corinthians, right at the outset, he told them, “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift.” God had not been holding out on this church, stingy with the gifts he bestowed on others. He has already given them everything they need!
Congregations can too often have a mentality of “lack.” We’re quite aware of what we don’t have, often in terms of material goods and circumstances, and it can prevent us from recognizing what we do have in Christ. We speak in “if onlys.” If only we had, for instance, more families with children in our congregation. A large, illuminated sign on Central Avenue. A bigger budget. A parish choir, or maybe someone who can play the guitar. Whatever it is we think is lacking to accomplish the goals we have set in our minds, to realize our dreams, to live up to our self-imposed images of “how church should be.”
Now perhaps we lost these things; perhaps we never had them; perhaps in some cases we squandered what we once had. But what we can’t say is that these are things we need, right now, to do the work and accomplish the mission that Christ has given us to do now and in the days to come. In his providence, nothing is lacking, nothing holds us back. In faith we can say with the hymn writer: “All I have needed, thy hand hath provided: Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.”
When I say “nothing is holding us back” I mean nothing external. Not God, not even our circumstances. There is something that can, and does, restrain and restrict us, sabotages us, turns wine into water, bread into a stone. Paul says to the Corinthians, “You are restricted in your own affections.”
The Corinthians are restricted by their affinity for the world, their appreciation of its “good things,” their desire to find approval and acceptance among their non-Christian neighbors and associates. These worldly affections are so strong that their appetite for the things of God is weak and faltering by comparison. Paul exhorts them to “widen your hearts”—not to the ways of the world, but to Paul and his friends, and to Jesus for whom they speak. It is Christ’s approval, his acceptance they should be seeking, not that of the world. Paul continues:
“Do not be mismated with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Bélial? Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
“I will live in them and move among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Therefore come out from them,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch nothing unclean;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.”
“Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.” (2 Cor. 6:14–7:1)
Here Paul references or directly quotes Moses, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy; as well as several prophets: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zephaniah: all of whom were speaking to the people of Israel. Observe how Paul takes this language of God making his covenant with his chosen people, in consequence of which this people must be separate and distinct and purified from the evil practices of the people around them, and applies it directly to the Corinthian church (and by implication, all Christian people).
The Corinthians are to separate themselves from the world and its ways, in order to become truly children of God, just as the ancient Israelites were called out from among the nations to be a holy people set apart for God’s glory. In so doing, they will liberate themselves from what holds them back; they will be enabled to truly live the law of love.
Paul’s example shows the way. To the world, he appears contemptible, a no-account loser and outcast, perhaps even a bad person who deserves to be punished. But in suffering all these things, he proves that he is genuine, a true apostle of Jesus Christ.
What might it mean for us, for you and me, for our church, to open our hearts more fully to Jesus? What false affections, what worldly entanglements, restrict our freedom? Can we, with a sanctified imagination, dream better and truer dreams for the sake of the gospel? How could you and I, in our individual lives and corporately as this congregation of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, here in the Village of Colonie, live as those who have been called out in covenant with Christ, as sons and daughters of God?
+ In nomine Patri . . .
