Glimpses
2 Corinthians 3:16-4:7[1]
Our world is not one that makes it easy for us to hold on
to our Christian faith. The message that the life, death, resurrection,
ascension, and reign of Jesus points us to a way of living that promises us
true life is only one among many messages out there competing for our
attention. If you want to be seen as a person of worth and value in our world,
you need youth, beauty, talent, wealth, or power. Or as many of them as you can
get. Youth and beauty mean people notice you. Age and the signs of aging mean
people overlook you. Talent means you count, in some cases to the tune of
millions of dollars, in some cases to the tune of tens of millions. Wealth and
power go hand in hand in our world. Those with enough wealth have the power to
get their way, whether it’s right or not. It can be hard to see how Jesus
Christ makes much of a difference in a world like that.
Part of the problem stems from the various media sources in
our world. These sources are means of communication that have given us ready
access to information and have made it possible for us to stay more connected
to one another than ever before. And that’s a good thing. But they also have
the power to shape our perception of the world in ways that can distort the
truth. Every “report” is an interpretation from a particular point of view. And
any media source that doesn’t recognize their own point of view is likely
intentionally distorting the truth for their own purposes. What counts these
days is being the first to “break” a story, not making the effort to ensure
that you got the story right. Or that the way you presented it was fair. And
we’ve faced this distortion of reality for so long that many people would be
hard-pressed to explain why they view the world the way they do. It’s just what
they heard from their favorite media source.
Amid the competing versions of “truth” that are out there,
what matters isn’t whether you have done your due diligence to fact-check what
you say. Rather, what matters is how well you “spin” your story so that it’s
convincing. I find myself speechless at times over what we as a people believe
to be “true,” and the flimsy basis upon which we believe it. And I’m
dumbfounded that in a country that still to a large degree considers itself
“Christian” we follow people and embrace ideas that blatantly contradict
everything Jesus stands for. But then, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when
what really counts for us is the size of your home or your bank account, or
whether you get to drive the latest and greatest car and sport the finest in
fashion. When our values are measured by what we have instead of who we are, we
have truly lost our way.
All of this brings us back to how important it is for us as
those who profess Christian faith to make the message about the life, death,
resurrection, ascension, and reign of Jesus Christ the one that truly defines
our lives. This brings us to our lesson from 2 Corinthians for today. St. Paul
himself had lived his life based on a message that was very different from the
one that Jesus taught. His view of the world was one that had been defined by
the distinction between those who are “righteous” and those who are “sinners.”
And that distinction was based on things like your ethnic background, your
loyalty to the “right” people, or even by the foods you ate. It was something
that could be measured, and anyone who didn’t “measure up” was a sinner. Like
most people in that kind of system, it was always the “others” who didn’t
“measure up.”
St. Paul was so committed to that view of the world that he
considered Jesus a blasphemer because he offered God’s love and grace and mercy
to everyone regardless of whether they “measured up” or not. And he considered
all those who followed him and spread his teachings not only to be a threat to
his way of life but also as “enemies” of God. And so it was that he set out for
the ancient city of Damascus with authorization to arrest and even kill any
Christians he found there. But St. Paul met someone he didn’t expect on the
road to Damascus: he met the risen Lord Jesus himself! And in the face of the
Jesus, he saw something he also didn’t expect. He saw “the glory of God.” As
St. Paul says in our lesson for today, “For God, who said, ‘Let there be light
in the darkness,’ has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the
glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6, NLT).
I think he was referring to the “light” that he saw in the face of Jesus on the
road to Damascus!
It was that encounter that changed St. Paul from a man who
was “breathing out murderous threats” (Acts 9:1, NIV) against the
followers of Jesus into a man who completely changed his life to follow Jesus
himself. Because of what he saw in the face of Jesus, because he could say that
God had made that light “shine” in his heart, St. Paul changed his life from
being a man who believed he could and should measure everyone else by his own
life into a man who recognized that he could never truly “measure up,” and nor
could anyone else. And his life would never be the same. He gave up a life in
which he was considered one of the ones to “watch” as an up-and-coming leader
to one who was seen as a “fool for Christ” and the “scum of the earth” (1 Cor
4:10, 13). He walked away from everything he had valued in order to follow
Jesus.
But more than what he gave up, St. Paul tells us in this
passage what he gained by that dramatic change. What he gained was nothing less
than the life and the love and the power of God at work in him. In our lesson
for today he says it this way: “as the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we
become more and more like him and reflect his glory even more” (2 Cor. 3:18, NLT). But reflecting the glory of the
risen Lord Jesus Christ is a very different thing from the glory of this world.
The glory of this world is based on how much you have. But the glory of Christ
is based on how much you’re willing to sacrifice. The glory of this world is
based on how well you look to your friends and others. But the glory of Christ
is based on how well you serve the least, the last, and the left out among us.
The glory of this world is based on how much power you have to get your way.
But the glory of Christ is based on how consistent you are about treating all
people with kindness and respect, especially the most vulnerable among us.
A life that’s based on following Jesus is one that looks
very different from one that’s based on the values of this world. Sometimes it
can seem like the values of this world have so much more appeal, so much more
impact than the values of our Christian faith. But I choose to believe that
what God is doing in our world through Jesus Christ is ultimately more
powerful. To believe that, we have to “hope for more than we have yet seen,” as
one of our confessions of faith puts it. It’s a matter of believing that in
Jesus, especially in his resurrection from death to new life and in his reign
in our lives through the power of love, we see a glimpse of the work that God
“will surely finish” one day. More than that, as we embody the way Jesus lived
in our own lives, we reflect the glory of Christ still to this day. We become
living “glimpses” of the one who died for all people, who was raised to life to
defeat the power of death, and who reigns over all the powers of this world.
[1] ©2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by
Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 2/11/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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