Proper 8, Year B | II Corinthians 8:7-15
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
June 30, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope.” – Psalm 130:4[1]
This is another of those weeks where I feel like we need to cover a couple different things to really keep up with what’s happening in our Bible readings.
At the beginning of June the Lectionary introduced us to the prophet Samuel, who was also the last of the ancient Hebrew leaders known as Judges. The following week we met Saul, whom Samuel anointed as the first king of Israel. The week after that, we read how God decided to reject Saul and watched as Samuel anointed the likely teenage David as future king of Israel. Last week, David—still a youth—defeated Goliath in battle, leading Israel’s army to victory over their perennial enemies, the Philistines. And this week we heard David’s lament over Saul and his heir, Jonathan, both of whom died in the same battle.
When we read the Bible—especially the way we’ve been covering the material—it’s easy to compress time, to look at what’s going on and assume it all happened in quick succession. It can look like God says something and then does it within a week or two—maybe a few months at most. That can lead us to become impatient as we encounter God working in our own day. God used to act quickly, so why doesn’t God intervene all the time? Why does it take so long for prayer to be answered or promises fulfilled or the world to take even baby steps toward love and mercy for all?
The truth is, God has never intervened “all the time.” Everything we’ve read in these passages over the last month took somewhere close to a century to play out in real life. It’s the same when looking at Abraham or Moses or Paul or Israel’s history or even Jesus. God is indeed working, but I don’t know that anyone’s ever seen God rushing. The good that God has already allowed us to experience may be more than some people receive in an entire lifetime or even across multiple generations—yet God has just as much love and concern for those people as for us or for any historic saint or Bible character.
God does act, but God tends to operate with an infuriating amount of patience and deliberation. Also, God doesn’t necessarily work for us as much as with us and through us, using our observations, insights, and skills to bend history closer and closer to the Kingdom. Change takes time, work, and energy—and we need to embrace all three if we ever expect to see any results.
So, sermon number one.
Next, we need to look at our Epistle reading. Paul’s writing can be difficult to follow, but this passage comes across as especially confusing. One thing to remember when reading II Corinthians is that this letter is an apology—an attempt at reconciliation between Paul and this particular congregation. Because of that, Paul seems to be especially delicate and round-about with how he writes. Without remembering that context, it becomes easy to read flattery and manipulation or even veiled coercion onto this and surrounding texts.
At this point in the letter, Paul is attempting to bring up something he and the congregation appear to have begun working on before their big fight. One of Paul’s efforts in his missionary journeys was to gather a collection of money to support the Christians back in Jerusalem, who had been facing challenges on multiple fronts. During one of Paul’s previous visits to Corinth, the people had agreed to take up a collection to aid their Christian siblings. In the course of the fight, however, that effort had apparently fallen by the wayside. Paul is now hoping to remind the people of their earlier intention while avoiding any attempts to pressure them. He’s reminding them that, despite what might have happened between him and their congregation, the people in Jerusalem still need help. Other churches have already given Paul their offerings, and he’s hoping the Corinthians will take this step as well as a sort of example that, no matter how things may turn out in their own relationship, they still realize their commitment to the broader Christian community.
One thing I suspect Paul is also trying to do here is to help the people reconsider their view of the Cosmos. Greek thought from the era frequently contains a strong distinction between physical reality and the so-called spiritual realm, with the physical being a vastly inferior, corrupted offshoot of the latter.[2] But that wasn’t the case with early Christian understanding. Rather than sharply defined forces set in opposition to one another, the physical and spiritual function more as a continuum or scale: balancing—and flexible—expressions of a single whole. Part of the wonder of Christianity is that, through the incarnation of Jesus as the Christ, God, often considered to be an exclusively spiritual being, embraces the physical as equally honorable and worthy. The physical and spiritual need not be held in conflict with one another—both are essential aspects and reflections of a mysterious greater unity.
In the case of Paul’s letter, he’s pointing the people toward that understanding of reality. When they were in need, the Corinthian church received an abundance of “spiritual”-type blessings from God—“faith…speech…knowledge…eagerness, and…love”[3]—thanks in part to the efforts of the Christians back in Jerusalem. Now that the others are in need, it seems only right that the Corinthians share their physical “blessings.”
A note of caution in this: Paul never advocates “giving until it hurts.” He specifically states that no one should impoverish themselves or give beyond their means. His goal is not to cause or increase suffering (or guilt) among those giving—to share the burden by sharing actual pain. But for those able to give, he asks that they be generous with what they can. Considering the unity of the physical and spiritual, it’s simply the concept of fair exchange.
A couple years ago we briefly talked about potential of God’s Kingdom being a realm of “enough” rather than of excess. We tend to imagine “Heaven” as a place of free and constant indulgence, a sort of magical realm overflowing with absolutely anything and everything our hearts could ever desire. But what if it’s actually somewhere everyone simply has whatever it is that they need, a time or existence settled in such contentment and trust in God’s provision that everyone simply chooses to share? That seems to be what Paul is pointing toward here: “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”[4]
What might that even look like?[5] What if contentment and generosity were the basis of our society—of our relationships with one another and instinctive expectations of ourselves? How might we function and interact if that were simply the way we knew life works? What would that sort of experience of the world even feel like? A world where absolutely everyone actively cares for one another? A world wherein we use our efforts to provide not simply for ourselves but for all those around us—not out of compulsion or external demand, but simply because we’re all free from even the concepts of greed and want and need?
As hard as I try, I honestly can’t quite imagine it, but I don’t think that’s because that kind of existence is just make-believe or can never be. It feels more like the concept is somehow too substantial, too dense and intense of a reality for me to fully comprehend—something so massively true that it extends beyond my understanding and passes through me like I’m a ghost. It’s almost a complete un-thinking of my entire life experience, a confusing beauty so profound and inexpressible that the closest description I can find for it is simply God’s presence made immediate—God’s own self incarnate not simply in the world but throughout and within all that could ever possibly be.
All of which leaves me with far more questions than answers. We spend so much of our lives focusing on fear, scarcity, and self-preservation. What if our approach to reality was instead built on security, and community, and “enough”? What might it look like for me to reach beyond myself and live in such a glorious yet alien way? To share without reserve? To trust without concern? What might it be to grasp that reality’s shadow, if only for an instant?
What must we do? How hard must we work? How long must we labor until we discover this to be true?
“I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope.”
[1] Translation from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] This idea still plagues Western religious thought today, most frequently expressed through wording that implies a sort of disembodied spiritual state in the afterlife—for example, the idea of “going to Heaven when you die.”
[3] II Corinthians 8:7
[4] II Corinthians 8:15 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[5] Since the ideas behind it were initially drawn from Bible passages like this one, these verses may lead modern readers to think of Socialism, but the text isn’t advocating for our concept of that term. This isn’t a forced “redistribution of wealth.” It seems to be a sort of mindset utterly unconcerned with even the concept of wealth.