I’m making a doubly foolish move as I prepare this week’s sermon. First, I’m switching text horses in the middle of the stream. As you can see from yesterday’s blog post I had planned to preach on Mark 3 and the “unforgivable sin.” But yesterday afternoon I realized that I had preached that text with the same sermon title just three years ago. That’s just too recent a visit to that scene. If anyone’s interested you can find that sermon here.
Thus I switched to the epistle lesson in the lectionary, II Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1 (I’ll be taking it to 5:5). Then my other foolish move became obvious, that I simply had to use as my title those words from 4:17 which were the title of one of C. S. Lewis’ best-known and well-loved sermons, “The Weight of Glory.”
So here I am starting all over with a text I haven’t thought much about before, but which positively glows with some of that glory which it is trying to convey. Lewis took the phrase “weight of glory” in the direction of recognizing that we each have a coming glory as Christians insofar as God graciously loves and approves of us. He argued, though, that we ought be less concerned about our own personal glory, and more concerned about helping each other toward that glory which we will have as we bask in the loving presence of God.
I would like to take on a bit more of the text, which is part of Paul’s defense to the Corinthians of his ministry. Despite his apostolic role, some in that church had apparently come to hold a low opinion of him, partly because of what they regarded as evidence of his spiritual failure, that is, his sufferings. Following a spiritual logic which we see at work often in the Old Testament (in Job for instance), but also frequently today, they imagined that anyone who experienced so much affliction could not really be in God’s favor, could not be a true minister of Jesus Christ.
Paul argues that it’s just the contrary, that his suffering and affliction are glorious signs of God’s work in and through him, for the sake of the Corinthians and the whole church. So after the incredible disjunctive litany of 4:8, 9, “afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed,” Paul expresses his faith in two aspects. First the fundamental Christian conviction in 4:14 “that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence.” All the affliction, even death, will only lead to resurrection.
The second aspect of Paul’s faith in his afflictions is that “everything is for your sake.” All the bad things happening to him are for the good of others, for the building up of the church and the kingdom of God.
That two-part faith, then, that his affliction will give way to resurrection and that his affliction is doing good for others, allows him in 4:18 to say, “So we do not lose heart.” And then in one of his most beautiful moments, “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
I would dearly love to embrace that perspective on this life and the hope to which we look, to be able to know all the huge and overwhelming weight of the various sorrows we experience, but to see them in the light of a greater, immeasurable weight of glory weighting for us in the presence of God.
As it says in 5:5, where I’m choosing to end the reading, this is what we were made for, God “prepared us for this very thing,” to enjoy and bask in His glory. We Oregonians endure all the dark and damp of winter, looking forward to glorious sunny, crisp days of summer. It’s the same thing writ large in spiritual life. And the guarantee of it all is the gift we celebrated two weeks ago, the Holy Spirit.