Becoming transformed, one step at a time

Sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 and Luke 6:27-38

We’re shifting gears next Sunday, beginning to ready ourselves for the season of Lent, so this is the final week that our lectionary has us working our way through 1st Corinthians. I want to focus largely on the reading from the Gospel according to Luke, but this reading from Paul really merits at least a few comments.

First of all, I think it is worth noting that Paul has become a bit cranky in his extended letter to the church in Corinth, even calling them fools for what he sees as their wrong-headed questions. Not that he thinks all of the Christians in Corinth are foolish, as he’s really focussed on those who are quite content to take the ethical teachings, the parables, and the life of Jesus itself as a sufficient basis for religious faith, with no need to talk about resurrection. This actually has a parallel in the modern religious faith of Thomas Jefferson, who painstakingly cut out all the bits of the gospels he thought were beyond reasonable belief, most particularly the miracle stories and the resurrection. Jefferson, like some of those Corinthian Christians, wanted something easier to digest, and found that miracles and resurrection gave him an upset stomach… so to speak! In Corinth it was easier to side-step this Jewish insistence that the body mattered as much as the soul, and that the only way to think about eternal life was in terms of resurrection.

So dear old Paul is wound right up, which is where he’s headed with this section of his letter when he writes,

As was the man of dust—that’s the Adam—so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven—that’s Jesus Christ—so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Or to put it differently, we are all people of this world, of the earth, but on account of Jesus we are also made people of God, with a future far more vast than is imaginable. This is something Paul himself had to be convinced of, which happened through that strange experience of being confronted by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. It undid him, and challenged every notion of God and humanity he’d previously held with such conviction. That’s why he’s so committed to getting the Corinthian Christians to see things rightly and in their fullness. He recognizes their very blindness, because he himself had been similarly blind.

As I turn to a consideration of tonight’s Gospel reading, I think it is probably worth saying that part of the problem in the Corinthian church is that they aren’t actually managing to incarnate the kind of ethic of which Jesus is speaking. All that Luke conveys here has to do with a dramatic embrace of an ethics of the Kingdom. Love your enemies,” Jesus says, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Or how about “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return”?

And what the heck is the point of that? I mean seriously, isn’t it more prudent to know who your friends are, and to do well by them? That’s been the not entirely illogical conclusion reached by many in Corinth, who are happy to be sabbath day believers but somewhat hard-nosed the rest of the week.

Jesus, however, has something very different in view. The cynic might focus on the closing portion of this, and say that Jesus is just telling them to prosper in a different way when he says,

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you.

But I don’t think that is at all about earning freedom or forgiveness or whatever, because I don’t believe he’s being prescriptive here, but rather descriptive of what a community would be like if people all lived in this manner. This, he’s saying, is what the kingdom or reign of God is about. This is who you are meant to be because this is what God is like. God “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” and deeply merciful. So “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

That is blazingly good news when you stop to think about it, and at those times when Christians have actually incarnated that good news in our generosity, acceptance, love, and forgiveness, it all but makes me weep with joy.

I think of the person from this community who tucks money into his wallet at the beginning of each month, for the sole purpose of giving it away to people he thinks might need a bit of help. I think of the friend who, thirty years ago, arrived at my door with a cheque for a few hundred dollars, right at a time when I was figuring out how the heck I was going to pay my car insurance that month. I think of the person who took me to lunch for the sole purpose of apologizing for something that had been done a decade earlier, that she really needed to set right. I think of the student at King’s College in Halifax, who five winters ago poured hours into helping me to paint an orthodox style icon of Christ, which became for me an avenue of deep, deep healing in the midst of a very difficult patch in my life. All of those gestures reflected precisely what Jesus is getting at in this teaching from the Gospel according to Luke, and all of them helped me to become at least partially more formed in that way of being in the world.

And yet, as N.T. Wright observes,

We must admit with shame that large sections of Christianity down the years seem to have known little or nothing of the God Jesus was talking about. Much that has called itself by the name of Jesus seems to have believed instead in a gloomy God, a penny-pinching God, a God whose only concern is to make life difficult, and salvation nearly impossible. (Wright, Luke for Everyone)

And for anyone who has spent much time reading church history—or maybe spent much time in a church that has built itself a hard protective shell—and you can see what Bishop Wright is talking about. What Jesus has to say in this section of the gospel would have us all imagine communities that are steadily bending toward generosity, forgiveness, and kindness—communities that are always looking to reconcile and begin again—whereas too many of us have seen a face of the church that looks more like the troubled Corinthian community than like what Jesus sets out here in this gospel reading. And that’s where it is important to turn again to Bishop Wright’s reflections:

There are two particularly astonishing things about Jesus’ instructions. First, their simplicity: they are obvious, clear, direct and memorable. Second, their scarcity. How many people do you know who really live like this? How many communities do you know where these guidelines are rules of life? (Wright, Luke for Everyone)

Maybe, though, the key is to not get discouraged or cynical about the church’s failings, but rather to get re-energized by Jesus’ words to his church. Not only is this what he wishes to see in the life of our church, but it is also something he fundamentally sees as key, obvious, and eminently within our reach when we drop the kinds of things that can make churches contentious, and get on with the things that make us a transformed people. Frankly, I like that just a whole lot more than the conflict of Corinth.