It was a true pleasure to hear a young man in our congregation just home for the summer from graduate school across the country say how good it felt to be back in worship at Valley Covenant. “I just feel so much at home here,” he said.
Paul addresses the deep-seated spiritual roots of our need to be at home in our text for this week, II Corinthians 5:6-17. One of his most famous phrases is from verse 8, often misquoted as something like “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Though not an exact quote, it’s more or less correct unless one goes away with the impression that leaving the body behind is the essence of being with the Lord, i.e., that God intends for us to live with Him as bodiless spirits forever.
In the more modern NRSV translation “present” becomes “at home,” a more literal rendering. Paul’s point is not that the idea situation is bodilessness in God’s presence, but that all else being equal, it’s better to be at home with the Lord than at home in the body.
Ultimately, as we saw in last week’s text, God’s plan for us to have both, to be at home once again in resurrected bodies and at home with Him on the new earth which Jesus will bring at His return.
So as the text winds up, Paul declares that we have a new point of view, fully in keeping with what Scripture says all along, that God is concerned not with outward appearances of our bodies, but with the inward work of the Spirit in our hearts. So verse 7 says “we walk by faith, not by sight,” and verse 12 speaks of giving a resounding reply to those who “boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.”
The alternate Old Testament reading from I Samuel 16 clearly picks up that theme of God’s concern with our inward being as David is being anointed as king. I Samuel 16:7 says, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And the Gospel lesson from Mark 4:26-34 about the growing seed and the mustard seed points to God’s great work using what is at first appearance insignificant.
The upshot is that where we are in this world can often feel not much like home. We want to be somewhere else. As C. S. Lewis observed so well and so often, we are like fish made to swim but living out of water in our longing for something unseen which we cannot have fully in this present world. It has to do with an unseen work going on inside us. So that’s how we come to the conclusion of the text in I Corinthians 5:16 and 17, that we no longer regard anyone from an old, human point of view, but see everyone in Christ as a “new creation,” growing in anticipation of complete fruition in the coming kingdom.