Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 139:1–18
2 Corinthians 4:7–15

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When I was in college, I won a scholarship for memorizing all 107 questions and answers to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and I still remember the first one:

Question: What is the chief end of humanity?

Answer: To glorify God and enjoy God forever.

I had to actually sit with a professor and recite them all — the questions as well as the answers — and I did it. By the time I pronounced the final “Amen” that ends the 107th question, I was exhausted but triumphant.

But before I could ask where to pick up my scholarship money, the professor asked me a question: “And what does it mean to you to glorify God and enjoy God forever?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I’d memorized it as the answer to a question about the highest aim, the chief end, of humanity, but I didn’t have the faintest idea of what glorifying God was actually about.

I still got the scholarship, and I’m still learning about glory.

“To the glory of God.” That’s the phrase that ends this scripture.

Glory is all over the scriptures. The story of the exodus says that “the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain.”

One of the psalms says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.”

The Christmas story begins with the glory of the Lord shining around some shepherds.

The scriptures come back time and time again to glory, to the glory of God as it shocks and surprises people, terrifies them, and saves them.

The letter we read from today has the word glory in it fourteen times. The first letter to the church in Corinth mentions glory nine times. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the early churches, he had started about where they should place their trust and their hope; it always came back to glory. “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” he said. “This slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory,” he said.

Glory is the highest aim of life, of faith. For the church in Corinth, Paul aims for glory, that grace would spread to more and more people in that congregation, increasing thanksgiving to the glory of God.

It’s good to come back to glory and to recenter ourselves on glory, because there are so many other things that feel like urgent aims. Success, security, growth, victory, getting in to our top school, taking a stand against injustice.

Church is for lots of things: inspiring worship, service that helps people and impacts our community for good, caring for one another, growing in faith and knowledge. Yet all of that comes back to glory, the glory of God.

The glory of God is our highest aim and chief end.

Here’s another verse from one of Paul’s letters about glory, the one to the church in Rome: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Does that resonate for you, falling short of glory? It does for me. My compassion feels half-hearted, my courage fleeting, my commitment to the truth at times wavering, my prayers distracted, my very faith pockmarked with doubts.

So not glorious.

I’m leaving on Wednesday for a youth mission trip, and I tell you, you don’t ever fall so short of the glory of God so hard as on a youth mission trip. Because it all starts with visions of a team of people united in purpose, supporting and encouraging one another, making a meaningful impact on people through service and compassion, returning home with moving vignettes about the friends they made and the lessons they learned.

And those things all happen, no doubt. Over and over again, they happen.

But then someone throws up in the van. Or your flight gets canceled, so you spend the night in the Newark Airport Motel 6 getting bitten by bedbugs. Or a student loses their passport. Or someone trips on a curb playing kickball, so you spend half the night in the ER getting X-rays.

I could keep you here all afternoon with stories of things that went wrong on youth mission trips, when the reality fell far, far short of the glory I envisioned for them.

Paul has those stories, too. Paul’s ministry was several long mission trips, as he traveled around the Mediterranean preaching about Jesus and starting churches. It was not all glory and heroics. Christianity in these early days was an illegal religion, and the early church and its leaders faced intense persecution.

Paul wrote openly about this. Bible scholars call these “hardship catalogs,” and there are several of them in Paul’s letters. We got one in our reading, when Paul writes that he and his fellow missionaries are “Afflicted in every way ... perplexed … persecuted … struck down.”

That one is pretty tame compared to the one near the end of 2 Corinthians:

“Labors … imprisonments, countless floggings, and often near death. Five times,” he says, “I have received the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches.” (2 Corinthians 7)

Everybody knows that Paul writes a glorious game, but the on-field product doesn’t really cut it by normal standards of strength and effectiveness.

Now, we don’t live in the world the Apostle Paul and those early Christians lived in. I mean, these verses actually say, “While we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake.”

Yet Christianity is not illegal in the United States, and it has never been, so going to church on a Sunday afternoon is not an activity that will get you arrested, much less given up to death.

Personally, I’m glad for that, though it means that there is huge chasm separating our experience of faith today in the world we live in from Paul’s and the early Christians’ experience of hardship and affliction in the world they lived in.

And yet when we read here that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,” that means us, too.

Because the story that shapes the life of faith — Jesus’ faith — today just as much as 2000 years ago is the story of one who taught those who wished to follow him that they must deny themselves and take up a cross. He said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it” and “there is no love greater than the one that lays down its life for one’s friends.”

And so he did. That is our story — that the one to whom Christian faith looks as guide and teacher, Savior and Lord, willingly went to death, for our sake and for the sake of the world.

This is the story that shapes our faith and our life more than any other, if we will let it. And if we let it, we too will experience affliction; we may find ourselves, for the sake of our faith, opposing the political and the economic powers of our day in a way that will not cause them to celebrate and reward us but rather to strike us down.

If we let this story shape our story, we undoubtedly will find ourselves perplexed, as we sing a song of trust in God’s good promises in here, knowing full well that out there scores of people are living in God-abandoned circumstances we shudder to think too long about, depths of poverty and despair that make belief in a good God very hard to rationalize.

If we let the story of Jesus’ death be the story of our life, it will lead us to toil and hardship, hunger and thirst, and sleepless nights and constant worry. We will carry in our bodies the death of Jesus, and our lives will be the vessel through which people will come to encounter the treasure that is the gospel, the very good news that Jesus died that all might have life and have it abundantly.

“We have this treasure,” you know, “in clay jars, so that it would be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

It’s possible that the clay jars Paul is referring to here were actually lamps. They held light inside them for illumining shadowy places, and it was the thinness and the fragility of the vessel that allowed the light that was inside it to get out.

The light of God’s love is the extraordinary power that faith offers to the world, and the only way the world can see it, can know it, is through clay jars. God’s strength shines through our weakness. Or as the song we will sing on our way out of here today has it, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

It is our light, only it belongs to God; it doesn’t come from us. And it shines most clearly not through our strength, our confidence, our success, but through our weakness.

The worst youth mission trip I ever led was my first one, in 2009. I led a group of youth from southern California to the US/Mexico border. We spent some time in Tucson, and then we went to Nogales. I did have someone throw up in the van on that trip, but that was the least of what went wrong.

We took students to a courthouse in Tucson to witness an immigration hearing. As part of what was called “Operation Streamline,” up to 100 women and men who had been picked up by Border Patrol were all processed at once, waiving their right to an attorney and pleading guilty to the crime of entering the country illegally, then taken out of the courthouse and deported en masse.

Kids were shocked. Several were crying. I immediately regretted the mistake of bringing them to something they weren’t ready for.

On another day we walked out into the desert. We went and stood at the border wall in Nogales. It was August, so it was over 100 degrees, and though it sounded like a good idea to invite high schoolers to imagine what it would be like to come upon that wall from the Mexican side in heat like that, I didn’t count on them not having brought enough water and having a dehydration crisis.

Finally, we walked out on a migrant trail on the US side of the border to a spot that people used for changing clothes and discarding belongings as they neared where they expected to be picked up. It was a living mural of desperation: pictures, empty water jugs, Bibles, bras, notes to loved ones back home written by migrants who were considering the very real possibility of their death.

When students got home and told their parents the things we’d done, I got some distressed phone calls. I found myself apologizing for a string of ill-conceived ideas and decisions that had caused our youth distress and maybe even put them in danger. I felt pretty broken by it.

Several years later, Emma, one of the students who had since graduated from college, applied to be a full-time church volunteer on the border. As I spoke to her about why she was doing that, she brough up that 2009 mission trip to Nogales. A little traumatized, I said something like, “What a disaster that was. I can’t believe I did that.”

She looked confused. She said, “What? That was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. And the things that felt the worst at the time were the most powerful parts of it.”

An experience of ministry that seemed to me utterly broken — a complete failure — contained a power that did not come from my planning or my leadership. At least for Emma, God’s power shone through that confounding, heartrending, experience, illumining for her a sense of calling for her life years later.

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.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church