2nd Pentecost B, June 6, 2021; 2 Corinthians 4: 7- 5:1
Pastor Rebecca Ellenson, YLLC, Treasure in Clay Jars
There is a prayer in the Lutheran service of confirmation during which the pastor, the parents and the sponsors customarily place their hands on the confirmands head. It goes like this:
Father in heaven, for Jesus’ sake, stir up in Serena, in Jalynn, the gift of your Holy Spirit. Confirm her faith, guide her life, empower her in her serving, give her patience in suffering and bring her to ever lasting life.
I have know idea how many times I’ve been a part of that invocation of blessing. Like today, when we prayed over these graduates, each of those confirmation services have been times of celebration. Proud mothers wipe tears from their eyes. Fathers even look vulnerable as they gaze down at their child, remembering I’m sure, holding them as newborns, wondering where the years have gone.
Every time I’ve spoken those words I’ve stumbled, in my mind at least, over the suffering part of the benediction. On such a bright and hopeful days, the mention of suffering repeatedly jolts me back to reality. It never seems like the day to look a young person’s pain squarely in the eye. But, none of us experience healing or are a part of the healing of the hurts around us without that stark honesty, without recognizing the inevitablility of weakness, the universality of suffering, and the certainty of human need.
Paul’s words today point us in that direction too: So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.
A few verses earlier Paul spells it out even more clearly. We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.
As we age we start to understand those words. As we experience suffering, destruction, affliction we look to the eternal with hope. This week I’ve been talking with good friend of ours who is struggling right now, just released from the hospital. He has been fighting a chronic form of blood cancer for over 15 years. Thanks to modern medicine he has lived a fairly normal life up until now, but as his bone marrow fails his illness takes a greater toll. He’s a retired pastor and has lived a giving life, adopting three boys, educating them and providing a loving and stable home. They are now caring for him.
It will come to us all… in some form or another. We are mortal flesh. This year we have seen so clearly the limits of this life. Another friend of ours adheres to the principles of a book called Younger Next Year, eating right and exercising enthusiastically. Yet, he suffered this year through the effects of an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning incident. He has slowly recovered and he and those close around him have learned the excruciating lesson that controlling our future is only an illusion. We are not younger next year.
When I was in high school a friend gave me a precious moments style button to wear that showed a little child holding a little lamb. The words read, “He is my gentle shepherd.” The button touched something in me. I felt comforted, as if life with God was meant to be nice, like a precious moments picture.
I wore that button for years, on a down vest of mine, until one day I saw a painting that changed my understanding of God and my relationship with God.
*The painting showed a shepherd climbing down a rugged cliff.
*With one hand he gripped a rock and with the other he reached down to a sheep that had fallen to a ledge below.
*The painter portrayed the danger and the promised rescue, the mixture of terror and trust for the lost sheep.
*A bird of prey circled overhead.
*The shepherd’s face showed the strain, his arm muscles knotted with the exertion, hands and arms were gashed by thorns.
*The shepherd’s garment was torn in the steep descent.
That painting of the savior was so different from the button I had and from the typical picture of the shepherd in a spotless white robe strolling along a grassy level path, carrying an equally spotless and placid lamb.
I remember standing in front of that painting of the sheep in danger and knowing that Jesus spent all his energy to heal, hold, reach, and lift people to life. Compassion, strength, concentration, and determination are the condition of God. Our condition is need. The button touched something in me, that I believe exists in each of us– a longing for tranquility and security, a longing for the brokenness of life to be gone. On a confirmation day, or a celebration of graduation, or at the end of a pandemic we want pure celebration.
That rugged painting reached way into me, touching the deep reality of the human condition, and showing me that God does not erase the difficulties but enters them and helps us through them.
The painting is like Paul’s words about being weak vessels– afflicted, perplexed, and struck down. They ring true. They match the world we live in, not a precious moments world of pastel colors but a world that includes raging hunger and starvation, a pandemic, the senseless killing of warfare, oppression, violence and… on and on it goes.
Here we are, on the first Sunday in June, the beginning of summer, a weekend of graduation parties. An easing of covid restrictions. It is a hopeful, happy time. What do we hear today? Paul’s honest appraisal of life in Christ in a broken world. We may long for a precious moments gospel that paints life in pastel colors and makes us feel nice and secure, But all the positive thinking in the world will never be powerful enough to meet the needs of the world.
Paul said, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So, death is at work in us, but life in you.
With Christ the full message is there, life through death. There is no denial of reality but a call to fully embrace all of existence with the kind of compassionate commitment of Jesus. For the life of Jesus to be made visible in , we have to carry the death of Jesus in our bodies as well.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany. He was part of a failed assassination attempt on Hitler. For his part in that plot, he was jailed. From prison he sent letters to close friends. Those letters contain some of the best theology ever written, I believe.
“Like Christ,” he wrote, “Christians must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with them, and they crucified and risen with Christ.”
Christ was not some aloof God who came to earth from on high to intervene and do some miracles and then leave untouched by the world’s harshness. In Christ, God does not offer some glib answer to the agonizing problems of life. God chooses to suffer with those who suffer.
Bonhoeffer preached an Advent sermon during the war in which he said,
Christians are faced with the shocking reality: Jesus stands at the door and knocks, in complete reality. He asks you for help in the form of a beggar, in the form of a ruined human being in torn clothing. He confronts you in every person that you meet. Christ walks on the earth as your neighbor, as long as there are people.
The life of Jesus lives in us when we are little Christs to those in need. The life of Jesus lives in us when we open our eyes to the affliction, perplexity, and persecution within and around us. Only then can the light shine out of the darkness. Only then can the real extraordinary power of God heal, and hold, and reach and lift the lost back to life.
Paul says we are like clay jars holding a treasure. In modern language I guess we might say we are like styrofoam cups or cardboard boxes. We are made for use where needed. Our only value comes from what we carry, a treasure, the extraordinary power of God for a world in great need. AMEN