Homily Recap (Tim Bowyer preaching)

If you want to read the text:
II Corinthians 5:14-6:2
Also, you may want to read the Mary and Martha story from Luke 10:38-42

This week, we focused on the reconciliation that God has accomplished in Christ This was Paul's emphasis to the church at Corinth in chapter 5. He proclaims the confidence Christians have in the love of Christ, convinced that Christ has died for all and was raised so that all might live in Him. Paul moves from this conviction to his statement about newness:
"So if anyone is in Christ, there is new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" For Paul the source of greatest hope, what made the gospel good news, was that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them…"(v. 19). The grammar of this text is graciously clear. God is the subject, the author and originator of the work of reconciliation. We (in verse 18) and the world (in verse 19) are the direct objects. In this we understand that reconciliation is God's work, not ours. The way God restores right relationship, friendly relations, with us and with the world is through Christ.

We discussed how human beings are drawn to renewal, happy to think about change and newness, but often get lost in despair or in perfectionism. It is sometimes our tendency to think of ourselves as if we are orphans, left alone or abandoned by God. We may think this because we have been hurt in one way or another by others close to us. We may struggle against sin or emptiness, a feeling like God was withdrawn himself from us, that we are alone. We may have seen grievous hurt in the world around us so that it seems God far off. These feelings are legitimate. After all, Christ cried on the cross a cry of forsakenness. It is the human experience to feel alone sometimes, like no one quite understands or like we have no help. The text in Corinthians dispels this sense of abandonment, because we meet a God who has drawn near to us. In v. 21, we are told that for our sake the holy one of God ("he who knew no sin") became sin. Christ fully identified himself with our human condition. He walked in our suffering and faced what would be our forsaken death, so that we may know the nearness of God, that he is abundantly merciful. In this we are adopted into God's family with Christ as elder brother.

We also get stuck in perfectionism, because we have learned somewhere along the way that being good is what matters most and what wins us approval. This comes from our childhood experience in the home, in school, and often at church. It remains in our adult experience at work, in our society, and in our religious life. We learn to ignore or repress the parts of our lives that are morally incorrect, unsuccessful, or incomplete. We think about our relationship to God as a kind of moral formation, a path to newness that is marked by hard work, improvement, and success. We also tend to misunderstand what true gift is. We tend to think about things being given to us because of our merit, because we were nice and not naughty. We consider gifts a burden because they require our responsibility if not our purchase. But kind of morality and this thought about gifts inevitably leads to exhaustion because we know deep down that we cannot rise on our own to morality and we can never earn back the gift of God. The gospel we encounter in II Corinthians frees us from this burden. It is "in Christ" and not in our merit, our working harder, or our striving that we are made new. Instead of busying ourselves with the work of God, we have one thing required of us: We are to rest in the Lord and his work of reconciliation.

This kind of freedom characterizes the new economy that God sets up in giving his son Christ. In the story from Wendell Berry, "It Wasn't Me," Elton Penn had to learn about this new economy:
(My paraphrase):
"He didn't like the thought of being in debt, let alone to a dead man, someone he could never repay! In a conversation with the town lawyer who was settling his case against the old man's children, Elton learned something about the economy of this little town. Wheeler Cattlet had to convince Elton that this is how the community worked. He instructed Elton, “Everyone in the whole community is in debt to someone they'll never pay back. Everyone is in a long line of succession. We've stopped keeping track of who owes who."
In the old economy we must somehow win God's approval, earn back the gift of reconciliation, or prove to Him that we are worthy of it. This misses the point of course and sets us up for exhaustion.
In the new economy, marked by the perfect gift of God, we find relieve and newness when we sit at the Lord's feet and RECEIVE his love. This sets up a whole new way of understanding ourselves and interacting with the world around us. It liberates us from the weight of duty and helps us find our core identity in God's love.


Discussion Questions:

1. Where is God? It is human to wonder this. Where have you sensed God's distance and how have you dealt with that feeling? How do we build the kind of confidence that Paul points to in II Corinthians, confidence that God is near and that we have not been abandoned?

2. Why is it our tendency to think that what we do is what primarily identifies us? Is this true? What does it mean to you to know that your identity as a Christian is (as Colossians 3 says) lost in Christ in God? How do we live and ACT as though we are primarily recipients in the work of reconciliation?

3. How does understanding that God is with us and that he has done the work of reconciliation effect our community and our relationships with others who are our enemies?