2 Corinthians 5:1-10 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

The Third Sunday after Pentecost | 13 June 2021 | A Sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 | by Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS |

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. ²For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, ³if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. ⁴For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. ⁵He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. ⁶So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, ⁷for we walk by faith, not by sight. ⁸Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. ⁹So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. ¹⁰For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

THE WORD OF GOD: GIVES COURAGE

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

Home and Away

The most difficult part about the deaths of loved ones for their survivors is the loneliness that follows. Ask any of the very oldest Christians among us, and they will tell you how lonely it is to have buried first grandparents and parents, then aunts and uncles, then siblings, cousins, their dearest friends, and, sometimes, even their children. The weight of all that grief, the huge chunks of ourselves that are ripped away by the deaths of those we love: it all becomes too much. And as the deaths mount up, as the possibility of immediate access to loved ones goes away, we groan.

Now, as we groan, we remember that Paul has written in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 that we Christians do not grieve as those without hope. And, we remember Paul has written in 1 Corinthians 1:4 that we Christians comfort others in their sorrows with the comfort we have received from God. All of that is true, but, like Paul who has suffered so much for the sake of the gospel, there comes a point that we are not so much yearning to die as that we are yearning to be fully made new with those dear Christians that we have loved and lost. If you’ve never been there, you will be.

In other words, we Christians are not in love with death. After all, St. Paul has written in 1 Corinthians 15 that death is our last enemy. And, yes, as Johann Sebastian Bach wrote, we can arrive at that place near the end that our prayer is, “Come, sweet death” (“Komm, Süsser Tod”). But today’s letter speaks to the “in-between-ness” of life in this world for Christians.

Last week, we remembered that Christians are not Gnostics, those who view the body as bad and spirit as good. How very confused and biblically weak is that viewpoint one hears from some evangelicals that regards getting out of the body and going to heaven as the be-all and end-all. Today’s reading makes clear our final goal is not “bodiless-ness.” We aren’t going to become angels. We aren’t going to be flying around as spirits for all eternity. That’s not even biblical.

St. Paul makes clear that we Christians aren’t anxious to be dead, bodiless, or even divine sparks going home to a heaven as far removed from the messiness of creation as possible. No, we are yearning to be further clothed… not to be naked without a body … but everything typical of the reign of death, the culture of death, to be swallowed up, because God’s Son Jesus, the Living Word of God, has suffered, died, been buried, raised, ascended, and has poured out the Holy Spirit upon us in Holy Baptism as a guarantee, a pledge, a down payment, yes, as earnest money.

Being dead, bodiless, and pure spirits is not our hope in Jesus Christ. Our hope is for the resurrection of the body with Christ: yes, our Lord Jesus making us and all things new! That the Word of God made flesh and risen indeed (Alleluia!) gives us courage through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit is what empowers us to keep on in these old bodies even with grief.

Faith Not Sight

We Christians are Easter people, yes, because the Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! And we are Pentecost people, too, because we have received the Holy Spirit by our Baptism into the Lord Jesus’ saving death and glorious resurrection. St. Peter made that clear in his sermon in Acts 2. And it is our having been joined to the Lord Jesus bodily in Holy Baptism, and not merely spiritually, that is the definitive Word about us Christians quite apart from our emotions.

We do not chase after spiritual experiences as if how we feel inside makes the difference between being Christians and not. A person can get baptized again and again as some do, and a person can keep rededicating her or his life to Christ over and over, and, at the end of the day, that’s all about “me.” No one can save him- or herself. That’s why St. Paul makes clear in Ephesians that there is only one Baptism. If you have been baptized with water in the name of the one true God in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), God has baptized you once and for all. Period.

We Christians walk by faith and not by sight. Can we convince someone else that what we believe is reality itself? No, that’s not our work. Only God the Holy Spirit can create faith, which is trust in the Lord Jesus’ saving death for us sinners. Only God the Holy Spirit can create that trust that clings with joy to the Easter proclamation: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The most powerful witness we can give our unbelieving and our struggling-to-believe neighbors is how we walk by faith courageously in the face of the reign of death and the culture of death. We learned only after her death, that St. Teresa of Calcutta often went through the dark night of the soul, but she kept on courageously tending the endless parade of poor, wounded bodies in Calcutta, India, as if she were tending her Lord Jesus’ body. We saw in the last years of St. John Paul II as he wasted away with Parkinson’s Disease how he courageously pressed on as a witness to the value of every body at every stage of life from conception to natural death. They were not saints because of some intrinsic otherworldliness within them. No, they were saints because God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit gave them courage to walk by faith all the way home. Each of us knows our own unsung saints who courageously walked by faith. That’s what the Holy Spirit will use to convince an unbeliever or someone struggling to believe!

Good and Evil

Today, St. Paul is not saying that our good works save us. No, he is telling us that our lives in these earthly bodies will declare to the Lord God and to the world on what foundation they are built. Judgment is coming. The end of the old creation is coming. We confess that with the whole Church of every time and every place: “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” We confess with the whole Church of every time and every place: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Heaven, as we speak of it, is the interim state of having put off the old body in death while we await being clothed with the resurrected body. What that interim state is like none of us knows. But those whose lives are built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, have no need to fear death or the judgment that is surely coming. We pray every day and at the hour of our death: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Last week, we heard that Gnostics had such a pronounced conviction that only spirit was good: that they either did whatever they pleased with their bodies, or they treated their lives in bodies as something to be endured for a time. How clearly they disregarded what Christians call the Old Testament, which is also the written Word of God. How clearly they did not know the one true God, who created all things good and made male bodies and female bodies for each other, yes, to be united in marriage as the primary human relationship in order to be fruitful and multiply. There are Gnostics among us today, who do not know the one true God and do not fear the judgment that all of us must face for the good and the evil we have done in these bodies.

It takes courage, that only the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God, can give to face the truth about ourselves. We are not the center of the universe. We do not get to define who we are or which pronouns apply. We do not get to value one skin color over another. We are not umpires calling balls and strikes when it comes to the one true God or the written Word of God that points us to Jesus Christ, the only name by which we can be saved, the only Savior of the world who shed His Precious Blood for our sins that we might have eternal life in the new creation that came into being at His bodily resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday.

Holy Baptism changes everything, because we are joined bodily to the saving death and glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, yes, God’s Word has power. God’s Word brought everything into being in Genesis 1. God’s Word brought death when our first parents rebelled, started over with Noah and his family, scattered the proud in their conceit at Babel, created a new servant people through Abraham and Sarah, slaughtered the firstborn in Egypt but saved those whose homes were covered with the blood of the Passover Lamb, parted the Red Sea and wiped out Pharaoh’s army, made covenant by grace with Israel at Sinai, brought His people into the Promised Land, promised David an everlasting kingdom, humbled David and God’s people when they sinned, took them into exile, brought them back from exile, spoke through the prophets, and at the right time became flesh for us and our salvation. That Precious Lamb of God was crucified for us and our salvation, suffered, died, was buried, raised, ascended, and poured out the Holy Spirit on all the baptized. He will come again to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end. Trust that story. Cling to that story. Shun evil and hold fast to what is good, because our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness!

And so we sing and we pray: “Jesus, lead thou on till our rest is won.” Give us courage, Lord!

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

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA

Bulletin Insert

The Word of God: Gives Courage

Praying

“O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; 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, 616).

Listening

2 Corinthians 5:2 “For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling,’”

St. John Chrysostom [Late 4^th – early 5^th century Patriarch of Constantinople, Turkey]: “The heavenly dwelling is the incorruptible body which we shall put on in the resurrection. We are groaning now because what is to come is far better than what we now have” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: 2 Corinthians, 240).

2 Corinthians 5:3 “if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked.”

St. John Chrysostom: “It is however possible to be clothed in this body and yet still be found naked, that is, without glory or security. The resurrection is common to all, but the glory is not. Some will rise to honor and others to dishonor, some to a kingdom and others to punishment” (240).

2 Corinthians 5:5 “He who has prepared us… is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee”

St. Augustine [Late 4^th – early 5^th century Bishop of Hippo Regius, Algeria]: “She will be wed at his final coming when he will come in glory and when she will then behold face to face, for he has given to us a pledge which is the Holy Spirit…” (241).

2 Corinthians 5:6 “So we are always of good courage.”

St. Augustine: “Man indeed brought death to himself and to the Son of Man, but the Son of Man, by dying and rising again, brought life to man… He wished to suffer this in the sight of his enemies, that they might think him, as it were, forsaken, and that the grace of the New Testament might be entrusted to us, to make us learn to seek another happiness, which we now possess by faith, but then we shall behold it… Therefore, we now live in hope, but then we shall enjoy reality” (242).

2 Corinthians 5:10 “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil”

St. Clement [Late 2^nd – early 3^rd theologian in Alexandria, Egypt]: “Those who drag in a doctrine of moral indifference do violence to some few passages of Scripture, thinking that they support their own love of pleasure…they have not understood… a person may receive recompense for what he has done…” (244).

Reflecting

Do I take seriously that I must give an account of my life to the Lord God at the last?

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

To Husbands

“Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” (1 Peter 3:7).

“Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.” (Colossians 3:19).

To Wives

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:22).

“For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.” (1 Peter 3:5-6) (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 being a husband and a wife. The roles are not interchangeable even though both are children of God and mated for life. If there are children in the household, talk with them about the importance of practicing the Christian faith together: praying daily, worshiping weekly, reading the Bible, et cetera.
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 3 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.”