Living by Faith – 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:7

Of all the apostles of the early church, Paul stands out as a missionary and a theologian.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that his travels were recorded by Luke and that so many of his letters to the early churches have been preserved.  Certainly he is an important figure in the development of the church both in the number of communities he established and in our deepened understanding of God’s plan for humanity.

But Paul was not the only apostle to leave us with their reflections and teaching about the God they had lived with and whom they chose to follow even after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We have Peter, James and John – and that’s only the ones whose writings were considered worthy enough to be included in what has ome to be known as the New Testament.  It is no doubt true that most – if not all – of the apostles left behind their impressions and understanding of God  which they had come to know through Jesus.  The decision to include the writings we have was taken at a certain point in time after the Christian faith had gained official status within the Roman Empire.  Before that, the writings were circulated amongst the various communities but general knowledge of all the writings would have been limited.

I say this because as important as Paul has been to the spread of the Christian faith in the ancient world and as astute as he was in presenting the faith and defining doctrines that we hold true today, he is still one voice among many.  Each person who encountered Jesus and who chose to follow and become disciples and later apostles, each of them came to that decision from different starting points, from different backgrounds and with different gifts; and each of them contributed to our understanding of the faith and each has shared with us their experience of God and how they understood the role of community in the life of the people of God.

One thing we may be certain of is this.  We are called by God to live this earthly life seeking to do what the Lord requires of us.  In the words of the prophet Micah, we are to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. These are to be guiding principles by which believers and believers in community are to follow. When we reflect on the message that comes through the gospels that have been preserved, we discover over and over again the same guiding principles followed by Jesus.  His encounters with people were guided by a desire to do whatever he believed to be just, to exercise love and respect for the life of each one by showing kindness in his approach and in his teaching and healing, and he remained humble by listening to and fulfilling the will of the Father who had sent him into the world.

When you grow up in the church, you have a certain mindset, you have a way of viewing the church and the faith of the church. Tradition and practice are important parts of how we approach and express our faith. Anything that disturbs that tradition and practice is viewed with suspicion.  Our first reaction to change is that people are determined to destroy what tradition and practice have built.  But is our faith, our tradition, our practice to be frozen in time? The Bible itself is a chronicle of change – a change in practice, a change in tradition and yes even a change in how we respond to God. The very movement of the Spirit of God through time sought to take the commandments of God from being written on stone to being written in people’s hearts.  What really is a detriment to any institution, to any movement, is stagnation.  When we believe that the world stands still, that the time we are living in will always be what we know it to be or desire it to be, we are in danger of losing sight of the guiding principles of our faith which have been given to us by a living God who calls us to follow in faith.

There is an old hymn called Faith of our Fathers. It has been updated in terms of its wording to reflect the time we are living in, but the basic message has not changed. The faith of those who have come before us is still alive today and will still live tomorrow but only if we remain open to the guiding principles of God as recorded in the book of the prophet Micah and as spoken and lived by Jesus.

When we accept the guiding principles of God and dedicate ourselves to be followers of God in Christ, we commit ourselves to a path in this life that will not be shared by everyone that we meet.  We may or may not find our physical life threatened.  We may or may not find ourselves ostracized from full participation in the society around us. We may or may not suffer for our faith yet!  We do not know what the immediate future will hold for any of us. Will we end our lives here in relative peace or will we find ourselves living in dangerous times the likes of which most of us have never experienced.

But that is exactly the situation that the early Christian believers experienced. They were threatened physically with torture and even death. Their faith would have seen them ostracized by non-believers who could have been family or friends. They may have even suffered a loss of employment. They knew what it meant to suffer for their faith.

Paul knew that the threats to life, limb, mind, body, and spirit were real and very disturbing to many of the new converts. They had heard the promise of resurrection and they knew about the new life awaiting them beyond the veil of this life but their present afflictions were weighing heavy on them and they were tempted to abandon their faith and return to the safety of what they knew before.

Paul sought to encourage them to not give up hope, to not surrender to the afflictions they were suffering and abandon their faith.  The destruction of the body in this world may seem to be a loss but to Paul there is no loss – there is only a further gain. A constant theme in his writings is expressed here – what is mortal shall take on immortality. What is clothed in this world will be clothed even more in the time to come.

Yes, we inhabit bodies that by their very nature waste away. Paul calls this our outer nature.  But we have an inner nature and that is our mind, our heart, our soul. We cannot save that which will waste away but we can save that which God seeks to renew day by day – that part of us that can survive the trials, tribulations and suffering of this life and be clothed for a life that nothing can ever take away. We cannot see this life; we cannot touch this life but we can believe that it is real; we can be confident because it has been promised by Jesus and guaranteed by the Spirit of God.  We live this life by faith, not by sight.  But we live it with the assurance that what we have entrusted to God will be preserved unto eternal life.

AMEN