2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

The Second Sunday after Pentecost, 6 June 2021 | A Sermon on 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 | by Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS |

¹³Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, ¹⁴knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. ¹⁵For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. ¹⁶So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 5:¹ For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The word of the Lord.

THE WORD OF GOD: INCREASES THANKSGIVING

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our Bodies Matter

Our bodies matter, and what happens to our bodies matters. When our bodies are baptized with water into the saving death and glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are born from above by water and the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Jesus Christ taught us what Holy Baptism is last Sunday in John 3. Yes, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, crucified, dead, buried, and raised from the dead, commanded His disciples in Matthew 28: “Therefore, having gone (the aorist tense of the Greek verb ‘to go’ [poreuthentes] meaning continuing action), make disciples of all ethnic groups baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (28:19). On Pentecost Sunday, St. Peter told his fellow Jews that the proper response to God’s two words of judgment and grace is to “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38).

Our bodies matter, and what happens to our bodies in Holy Baptism matters. St. Paul writes to the Church in Rome: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Later, he writes to the Church in Galatia: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Having been claimed by the Triune God in the washing of Holy Baptism, we are no longer our own.

Our bodies matter, and what we do with our bodies matters. Baptized into Christ Jesus’ saving death and glorious resurrection, we are not Gnostics, who thinking matter bad and spirit good could go either full-blown hedonistic with their bodies or full-blown ascetic with their bodies. These extremes are yet with us today: license or legalism. Neither understands that the Lord God made bodies male and female, no other models, and He made bodies good and perfect before our first parents rebelled and then tried to hide themselves from the Lord… as if anyone ever could.

Lovingly having expelled them from Paradise lest they eat of the tree of life and live forever separated from Him in their rebellion, the Lord God promised that the ancient tempter, who had overcome them by a tree, would by the tree of the holy cross be overcome. Martin Luther saw that promise of the woman’s seed in Genesis 3:15 as the promise of the Crucified Christ, who would become incarnate in the Virgin Mary’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our sinful bodies and all sinful bodies matter, because the Lord Jesus took on our frail flesh in the Virgin Mary’s womb that He might save and redeem the whole world not with silver or gold but with His holy and precious Blood and His innocent suffering and death. Apart from Christ, the unbaptized remain wanderers east of Eden. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” All our ungodly desires, the disordered thoughts and urges that deviate from the Lord God’s original design, are part and parcel of that restlessness as Augustine discovered in reflection upon his misspent adolescence and young adulthood. It was not that he hated the body the Lord God had given him. It was that Augustine knew that his disordered thoughts and urges had kept him from the grace and mercy of God in Christ Jesus and that these could, as St. Paul warned Timothy, make shipwreck of a Christian’s faith (1 Timothy 1:19).

Our bodies matter, and we must live in these bodies from our conception until we draw our last breath. The Christian faith is not about escaping the body to live forever as disembodied spirits. Neither Christians nor those who die apart from Christ will become angels at death. Angels are spiritual beings that do not become human, although in the Bible they appear from time to time in human form doubtless to keep from scaring unbelieving humans to death. Nevertheless, we remain humans in these bodies, and no amount of Botox or plastic surgery can keep our outer self from wasting away. All the monstrous experiments being done with human tissue to grow replacement human parts on animals or to make android warriors will never make us immortals or gods. These bodies must and will die as a result of sin, our age-old rebellion. Apart from the Church, there is no salvation for these sin-sick bodies of ours. We need Jesus now and at death.

A Muscular Faith

In my 19^th summer and quite smitten with the first taste of love, I remember, on the one hand, dreaming of married life with my girlfriend and of a future life together with children. Yet, on the other hand, I was quite convinced I would not live past the age of twenty-two. It was an absurdity born of the end of my childhood and a deep uneasiness that death was lurking on the horizon. The romance did not survive, and her father, whom I dearly loved and respected, died in my 20^th summer. Then, my dear father, my nurturing parent, died in my 21^st summer. I learned that the sudden death of my old girlfriend’s father was easy on him but dreadful for his family. I learned that my father’s slow wasting away was a horror for him but gave us time to prepare as best as anyone can for the impossibility of death. The things that are seen are transient. Our earthly home and those of our dearest ones must be destroyed. Nothing we can do changes that.

Here comes that familiar question I have been asking this parish for the past seventeen years: Why do we practice the faith? So that it will be there when we need it. One more time. Why…?

On Easter Sunday, I quoted my favorite Bible verse: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). More than a few asked why that was my favorite verse. St. Paul answers that question today. These bodies of ours and of our dearest ones are wasting away. Sometimes, impossibly, little children die. We have parents in this room who have buried children years ago. Some marriages have broken apart with the death of a child, one or both parents no longer able to be together without the child. Some bear a seething undercurrent of anger, which is both hurt and betrayal, anger towards God or a spouse or a surviving child or even a pastor. Why? A this-worldly faith is no faith. It is a kind of rabbit’s foot, a whispered prayer that the boogey man go away, a childish faith that cannot survive the devil’s empty promises or this world’s sorry, shallow salvation stories. No, we need a muscular faith if we will walk through the valley of the shadow of death all the way home.

A muscular faith comes from exercise. Why do we practice the faith? So that it will be there when we need it. A muscular faith does not come from an occasional visit to the spiritual doctor. A muscular faith does not come from an unembodied faith that claims to be spiritual but not religious. Oh, just shut up with that nonsense! Really! A malleable, protean, silly putty faith is just the narcissistic self, again and again, trying to create a god in his or her image. It’s like going to the K & W Cafeteria on Sunday or the Mongolian Grill any day: “I’ll have a little of this but not that. Please give me that entrée but with the sauce on the side. No, I changed my mind. Would you make it that way?” The narcissistic self doesn’t want to be challenged, and so it pretends to have muscular faith when it has nothing but the same old: “Did God really say?”

This weekend we are recognizing our graduates from high school and from college. Some are only names in the bulletin and are not present. Charitably, some have been cautiously avoiding the services of God’s house in person during the year of Covid. Again, charitably, some are already otherwise engaged with what’s next and are not here. But some have not even the hint of muscular faith, having, like “…Demas, in love with this present world, … deserted” the Body of Christ (2 Timothy 4:10). Woke salvation stories are seductively safe, and some pastors either have no hint of a muscular faith or have deserted with Demas to a worldly, Christ-less gospel. But they won’t make it safely home with such a disembodied faith. Like us, they need Jesus.

Dear ones, a muscular faith is a practiced faith in which the Word of God increases thanksgiving in us as we, like St. Augustine, discover that God’s grace in Jesus Christ is getting what we don’t deserve… namely, the forgiveness of sins… and as we discover God’s mercy in Jesus Christ is not getting what we do deserve… namely, temporal and eternal punishment for our rebellion.

A muscular faith grows as we: pray daily through every loss and disappointment; hear God’s Word and receive Christ’s Body and Blood weekly as the Medicine of Immortality; as we studiously wrestle with God’s Word when it does not please us; as we get outside of ourselves and serve others; as we invite others into the practice of this muscular faith; and as we give sacrificially of our time, talent, and treasure. Why practice this way when being woke is so much easier? Why live this way when it’s so difficult? St. Paul writes: “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (4:17).

Our bodies matter, and what happens to our bodies matters, because even if we die, and we will, then our heavenly Father will raise us also with Jesus and bring us into His presence. What joy!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©Samuel David Zumwalt, STS

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA

Bulletin Insert

The Word of God: Increases Thanksgiving

Praying

“O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.” (The Daily Prayer of the Church, 615).

Listening

2 Corinthians 4:13 “Since we have the same spirit of faith… ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’”

St. John Chrysostom [Late 4^th – early 5^th century Patriarch of Constantinople, Turkey]: “Paul reminds us of a psalm (116:10) which abounds in heavenly wisdom and is especially fitted to encourage us in dangers…Thus he shows that there is a great harmony between the Old and the New Testaments; it is the same Spirit at work in both” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: 2 Corinthians, 234).

2 Corinthians 4:14 “he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also… bring us with you into his presence”

St. Polycarp [Early 2^nd century martyred Bishop of Smyrna, Turkey]: “He who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us also if we do his will and walk in his commandments and love the things which he loved, abstaining from all unrighteousness, covetousness, love of money, evil speaking and false witness” (236).

2 Corinthians 4:15 “that as grace extends… it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

St. John Chrysostom: “God did not raise Christ from the dead for the sake of one person only but for the benefit of us all” (236).

2 Corinthians 4:16 “So we do not lose heart… our inner self is being renewed day by day.”

St. Basil the Great [4^th century Bishop of Caesarea, Turkey]: “… If a man would also have mercy upon his body as being a possession necessary to the soul and its cooperator in carrying on the life on earth, he will occupy himself with its needs only so far as is required to preserve it and keep it vigorous by moderate care in the service of the soul” (236-237).

2 Corinthians 4:17 “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory…”

Origen [Late 2^nd – early 3^rd Bible scholar in Alexandria, Egypt]: “It was not a light momentary affliction to everyone, but it was to Paul and to people like him, because they had the perfect loving affection of God in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit poured into their hearts” (237).

2 Corinthians 5:1 “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed …”

Origen of Alexandria: “The result is that what was a vessel of dishonor shall itself be purified and become a vessel of honor and a habitation of blessedness.”

Reflecting

Is the grace of God for me a sinner daily increasing in me thanksgiving to God’s glory?

Learning

Table of Duties

Certain passages of Scripture for Various Holy Orders and Positions, by Which These People Are to Be Admonished, as a Special Lesson, about Their Office and Service

Of Citizens

“Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21).

“⁵Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. ⁶For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. ⁷Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Romans 13:5-7).

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, ²for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. ³This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior” (1 Timothy 2:1-3).

“Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work” (Titus 3:1).

“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, ¹⁴or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Peter 2:13-14) (Luther’s Small Catechism).

Doing

Pray for every unbaptized child you know and for the child’s parents, too.
Pray for your unchurched loved ones and friends. Invite one or more of them to worship.
Discuss with your spouse, your family, or a friend the responsibilities of citizenship in this land at mealtime over several days. If you have children or youth, talk about God’s gift of civil authority.
Set aside time daily, preferably first thing, but when you are able to focus, to hear the Word of God, to reflect upon that Word, and to ask the Holy Spirit to grant you grace to be shaped by and conformed to that Word. Daily Bible readings may be found at www.stmatthewsch.org. If you haven’t previously done so, please ask for a devotional booklet when you drive through to receive the Body and Blood of Christ this weekend. Daily lectionary readings are on p.182 in the front of the Lutheran Book of Worship (Year One, Week of 2 Pentecost).

For Husbands and Wives

Repeat daily: “I (name) take you (name) to be my wedded wife (husband), to have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish until death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge you my faith.”