I have two reactions to all of this stuff about earthly and
heavenly bodies in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. The first is, “Yes,
of course, inside of us there is something that is our true nature. Yes,
definitely we are made for something more; we are limited here and in need of
saving.” But then I that other reaction hits and I think, “Paul, this isn’t
very helpful for what we should be doing in the meantime.”
Honestly, I
take issue with some of what Paul is saying, not because it’s not true, but
because it tends to give rise to the kind of Christian who is overly eager to
leave their bodies behind. Meanwhile, we have a God who created these bodies
and called them “very good.” We are not just holy creatures covered in sinful
bodies; we are sinful creatures obscuring good bodies. Now that distinction
might not seem that important, but our understanding of the body and the
soul—the tent that we live in and the God’s building for us in heaven, as Paul
puts it—impacts how we prioritize the time we spend on earth. I’ve seen far too
many people who excuse human beings from having responsibility for their
neighbors, for the natural world, and even for the way they treat themselves
out of some over-eagerness to fast-forward to eternity.
It’s a
tough line to walk. I believe we were created to live with God forever, and,
yet, even if that is true, this is the only life we have—the only opportunity
to make life better for our fellow human beings in the meantime. This is where
we can make a difference, and if you read Paul as an excuse not to, then I
think you are misunderstanding God’s will for us.
For that
matter, I have grave concerns with people who read Paul out of their own
self-centeredness. If you are the center of the universe, then it’s entirely
possible to read about salvation as personal, individual, and ultimately an
excuse to do whatever you please as long as things between you and God are good.
The reality is: Life is not about you. I don’t know how to convince anybody of
this, really, because selfishness is such an ingrained trait that we fight
irresistible currents to try to get any selfish person to become less selfish,
and, yet, what can we do but remind one another of this? Life is not about you.
This
pandemic actually has the potential to teach us these lessons if we allow it.
Our actions right now impact countless others—some we see, many we don’t. We
are connected with a wide range of people through our relationships. That web
stretches outward far beyond our knowing. Our interconnectedness is our
strength, and, right now, it is our weakness. Any selfishness on my part may
well have repercussions downstream beyond my sight. We simply don’t know. But
we also need to tend to these connections. We can’t completely isolate
ourselves—we weren’t created for that. So, here we are, standing tenuously in
the chasm between our selfishness and human need for relationship.
Who’s
tired?
Back in the
pre-COVID days—long ago, you might not remember them—we were planning a Rural
Revival event at Grace that was supposed to take place in March. The theme of
that event was to be resiliency in mental health. Little did we know we would
be undertaking a great experiment in resiliency—an experiment that involves
periodic injections of new rules and occasionally excitement over the laxing of
old ones, of governmental orders and tough discussions about how to respond to
suggestions and guidelines, of schools and local businesses doing the same, of
economic stresses and more. This great experiment is testing our resiliency and
reminding us of our limitations.
It is in
this moment that we need to recognize these two lessons from Paul’s letter to
Corinth. 1) we are destined for more than what we experience here, and 2) we
are here, so let’s get to work. Those shouldn’t be competing ideologies—one
leads into the other.
The last part of chapter 5 that we
read today is the hardest part of all—this idea of being judged on the good and
the bad we do. Honestly, I don’t know what Paul is saying here, because
elsewhere in his letters to Rome and Galatia and Ephesus—and even in his first
letter to Corinth—Paul emphasizes time and again that it is not the good we do
but the good that Christ does through us that saves us. The only way I can
reconcile Paul with himself is to believe that here he is maintaining that what
we do still matters. I don’t know if our behavior makes a lick of a difference
for salvation, but I do know it makes a real difference in the lives of other
people here and now—and that matters. Other peoples’ lives matter.
That should
be obvious, but it never has been. Week after week we gather in church, even in
normal times, and pray for victims of war and hunger and disease across the
planet, but it doesn’t feel real. Even if we see terrible pictures of Syrian
refugee children drowning while trying to cross the sea, or of Muslim Uighurs
boarding trains for reeducation camps in China, or of slums in Tijuana, or of Ebola
infections in Uganda, it doesn’t hit us in the heart until we know someone or
until we experience it in the eyes of other people. The same is true of
systemic racism closer to home. It’s hard to understand until you experience
it, and most of us here never will.
In some
respects, COVID-19 is less lethal than some of these other things that happen in the world on a daily basis, but rather than minimizing the effect of the pandemic, the
fact that the world contains a good deal of suffering should galvanize our care
for those who do suffer needlessly of all things—coronavirus or not. The
pandemic has the potential to remind us of our humanity and how we might care
for one another in our weakness, or it can just set a wedge between us and our
neighbors. It’s really up to us.
Either way,
these earthly tents are temporary. Either way, we are being judged by how we
love our neighbors. It may not be the entry ticket into heaven, but why have we
made that the only reason for doing good?
Ultimately,
I worry about reading this side of Paul in a time of crisis, because too many
of us are already too eager to escape from things. There is much to be done
here and now, and sure, it isn’t how we anticipated, but our earthly bodies are
still worth saving. We are of immeasurable worth just as we are, even as we are
invaluable to God as the creatures we were created to be. It’s both. It usually
is both.
So, may we
live in the freedom and the grace to care for one another, knowing that God
holds our ultimate destiny further ahead.
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