This is graduation season and last Wednesday I was at Nandua’s graduation where we saw Lauren Mears and Kerri Tracy become alumnae of the high school. Kerri did a wonderful job of capturing the mood of the night in her salutatorian’s address. We were all very proud.
One thing that happens at graduations, though, is that the keynote speakers generally pull out all sorts of phrases that have become shopworn from overuse: This not an end; it’s a beginning. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. You are the future of America. Now the baton is being passed to a new generation. Give to the alumni association now. These are the phrases we are accustomed to hearing at graduation exercises.
At least one of those phrases is a lie, though. It’s a saying that gets used, not only by graduation speakers but even by political leaders. “The future is in your hands.” That is not true. What you do with your choices in the years to come is critically important. How you live your life and what you give your energies and your labor to make a big difference in what the world looks like. But ultimately it is not true that the future is in your hands because the future is in God’s hands.
“So we are courageous always.” This is what Paul says in the passage we read from Second Corinthians this morning. “So we are courageous always.” Those were hard-won words for Paul. He didn’t have an easy life. This is guy, after all, who was knocked off his donkey and blinded while he was on a mission to persecute Christians. He had to give up all of his status and all the things he had worked for to become a leader among the religious authorities in order to follow the voice of Jesus which called to him in his blindness. When the scales fell from his eyes and he could once again see he had to put himself at the mercy of the Christians – the very people he was seeking to destroy.
He was snuck out of Damascus in a basket lowered from the city walls. He had confrontations and conflicts with people everywhere he went. He was misunderstood constantly by the people in the churches he had established – people like the Corinthians. He was beaten, jailed, undermined, ridden out of town on a rail…It is an understatement to say that Paul did not have an easy life. So for him to say, “We are always courageous. We are always confident.” This was not said lightly.
Paul knew what was coming, though, and that made all the difference. He knew that if you just take the world at face value it can be a discouraging place. In the world there is pain and injustice. In the world people suffer loneliness and despair. In the world children are neglected and the elderly know the grief of losing loved ones they have known for many years. In the world our friends at school sometimes exclude us or make fun of us. In the world we sometimes hurt our friends. In the world relationships are a mystery to us and they are the source of our greatest joys and our deepest pains. If you take the world as it is you know that it’s a tough place.
That’s not all there is to the world, though. With the right eyes you know that the greatest truth is not that might makes right and nice guys always finish last. With right eyes you can see hints of heaven peaking through the fabric of this world. As Paul puts it in chapter 4, verse 18 of this second letter to the Corinthians: “We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
The world looks different when you look at it with heaven on your mind. You start to see possibilities that were not there before. You start to realize that the suffering and the pain of this world is not the only thing to be said about it. You start to believe that the world is a God-filled place.
Yesterday we were visiting with Laura Dennis who is back home now after undergoing a lot of surgeries and a long time away. We have been praying for her for some time now. As we talked I said, “When I look at how far you’ve come, Laura, it’s miraculous. I don’t know how it happened.”
Laura didn’t hesitate. She said, “I know how.” She knew that it was the prayers of so many people and the God on whom she has relied that made all the difference. Don’t just look at what is but what can be and will be.
So we are courageous always. “We know,” says Paul, “that while we are at home in the body we are on a long journey apart from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.” It’s not always evident what God is up to. It’s not always clear why things happen the way that they do. But the ways things are right now is not the whole story. The world as it is is unstable. The only thing truly stable is what we shall become in Christ.
I’m always drawn to signs of unwarranted confidence. Like when one of our cats stares down a big dog. Who do they think they are? Once Suzanne and I were driving across southern Oklahoma with some seminary friends - driving back to Dallas. In the grasslands along the Red River there are a lot of towns that look like time has passed them by. They’re ramshackle with lots of buildings falling down. We went into one of those towns and there was a welcome sign on the highway going in. It was bent and pockmarked where somebody had shot up the sign with shotgun pellets. But you could still make out the words and what it said was: “The Best is Yet to Come.” What unwarranted confidence!
That’s exactly what Paul is talking about here, though. There is a higher calling to which we are called because there is a higher destiny to which the world is called. Jesus came to show us that the end of the line for us and for all creation is not decay and destruction; what we wait for is the new heaven and the new earth and what we do while we are waiting is to seek to be well-pleasing to him.
Paul includes in verse 11 this vision which we take to be a warning but is really a promise: “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may be dealt with according to what was done through his or her body, whether good or evil.” Now you can read that like a bad warning you give children around Christmas time: “He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good so you better be good for goodness’ sake!” You can read it like that or you can see it as a promise that the life we live for good in the world is done in expectation that this is not all there is. And we do these things, as John Wesley said, “not for wrath but for conscience’s sake.”
Another way to translate that verse is to say, “When we appear before the judgment seat of Christ who we are will be revealed at last. Our true selves will be known.” We live such strange lives as human beings. We’re never really at home. We don’t know ourselves and we always suspect that there is something incomplete about us.
Paul wants to tell us that we find our identity in Christ. The story of what God did in Jesus is so compelling and so complete that it resolves the mystery of who we are. “The love of Christ holds us fast,” Paul says, “so that we are convinced of this: One has died for all and therefore all have died.” In Jesus’ death, all those things that would lead us to self-destruction and nothingness – sin, in a word – all of that is put to death. “Jesus died on behalf of all so that the living may no longer live for themselves but rather on behalf of him who died and was raised.”
We live, not for ourselves, but for Jesus! What a relief! What a relief not to have to prop ourselves up continually. What a relief to know that our ultimate worth is measured not on our terms, but on God’s terms. What a relief to know that the things that have defined my life for so long don’t have to define them anymore. I’m not just my family history or my physical state or who I’m involved with or what my job. I’m not victim, abuser, abused, addicted, hopeless, God-forsaken, sinner – none of those words capture who I am in God’s eyes. For God I am, like God’s son, Jesus, a child. God’s child. And I live for Jesus.
I haven’t figured this side of myself out yet, but I am prone to watching some fairly dark movies. It’s partly to do with the fact that I know God sees into the darkness and knows the light of what we can become. Sherrybaby is not a movie I can recommend for family viewing but contains a vivid portrait of how hard it is to try to live on your own terms and the illusion that freedom and independence sometimes is.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Sherry, a young woman who has just been released from prison after three years. Sherry’s heroin addiction got her into the prison and she comes out determined to put her life back together. She wants to stay clean and rebuild her relationship with her young daughter, Alexis, but the patterns from her past are too deep to overcome.
Sherry goes to a halfway house and immediately begins to have trouble with the other residents and to get involved in a sexual relationship with the house manager. After getting in a fight at the house, which is called the Genesis House, she goes to live with her brother and sister-in-law who have been keeping her daughter, Alexis, while she has been in prison. Sherry’s sister-in-law thinks she is an unfit mother and tells Alexis not to call Sherry ‘Mom’.
The truth is she is an unfit mom. She has been deeply wounded by abuse in her family but she deals with it by being extremely needy and self-destructive. She ends up spiraling back into a life of drugs.
All along the way we see glimpses of what Sherry could be if she could work through her neediness and her obstinate refusal to do the things that would lead her to health. An AA friend gets her cleaned up after she has a particularly bad bender. Then she goes back to try and connect with her daughter one more time.
She gets her brother to agree to let her take Alexis for the day but she is really determined to take her away to Florida. They drive into the next state and stop at a fast food restaurant. While waiting in line for the bathroom, Sherry sees another mother berating her child and she snaps, cursing and pulling the woman by the hair and throwing her out of the bathroom. Alexis is terrified and ends up wetting her pants.
As Sherry is changing her in the parking lot she realizes that she can’t do it. She can’t be the mother she wants to be or needs to be as long she does it alone. They get back into the car and head home.
Facing her brother again in the darkened front yard of his home, Sherry looks at him with tears coming down her face. “Could you help me take care of my daughter? I can’t do it by myself.”
“Of course I can,” her brother says. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“I know,” Sherry says. “But I never asked you.”
It’s a small step. We don’t know where it goes from there. But she has made a small move toward recognizing her own limits and to taking some responsibility for her life.
“From now on,” Paul says, we don’t see anyone through the lens of the flesh. Even though we once knew Christ that way, now we don’t know him that way. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Look, they have been made new!”
What journey have you been on away from God? Where are the places in your life where you need to say, “I can’t do it by myself”? What is old can pass away. What is new can come. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Thanks be to God.
2 Corinthians 5:6-17
So we are courageous always. We know that while we are at home in the body we are on a long journey apart from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. But, yes, we are courageous even though we think it better to be apart from the body and at home with the Lord. This is our aspiration - whether at home or on that long journey apart to be well-pleasing to him.
For we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may be dealt with according to what was done through his or her body, whether good or evil. So, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade people, but who we are is revealed to God, and I hope it is also revealed to your conscience. We are not commending ourselves to you again, but rather are giving you the opportunity to boast on our behalf, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in appearance but not in the heart. If we are ecstatic, it is for God, but if we are of sound mind, it is for you.
The love of Christ holds us fast so that we are convinced of this: One has died for all and therefore all have died. And he died on behalf of all so that the living may no longer live for themselves but rather on behalf of him who died and was raised. Therefore from now on, we don't see anyone through the lens of the flesh. Even though we once knew Christ through the flesh, now we don't know him that way. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Look, they have been made new!
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