Plain Brown Wrapper

Under the central dome of the great basilica of St. Marks in Venice is a treasure called the Pala d’Oro, a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing, ten feet long and almost five feet tall. It has eighty enamel plaques on it, many looted from Constantinople after the 4th Crusade. They illustrate scenes from the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Mark the evangelist, angels, prophets, and many more. Surrounding these plaques are all kinds of gemstones, in ornate gold settings. This magnificent object was begun in 978 and took almost 400 years to finish. It’s the most famous and eagerly viewed item in the cathedral, the only one, in fact, that I had to stand in line to see. What is it? It’s a box, a special kind of box called a reliquary.

Inside the Pala d’Oro are the relics of St. Mark.

What relics of St. Mark? I don’t know.

You see, tradition has it that the evangelist Mark went to Egypt after Peter was martyred in Rome, under the infamous emperor Nero. He was responsible for starting the church there; the Coptic church in Egypt dates all the way back to those very first days when Jesus’ disciples were first taking the gospel to the uttermost ends of the earth. But Egypt fell to the advancing Islamic empire, and so in 828, as Venice was flexing her muscles as a rising sea power, she sent a fleet to rescue poor Mark’s bones from the shame of resting among the infidel.

But the little church of St. Theodore wasn’t worthy of the honor. And so the following year the Doge ruling Venice at the time began building the basilica of St. Mark’s. I’m tempted to start something on the order of "This is the house that Jack built" - you know, this is the Church the Doge built, and these are the bones that lie in the box that’s under the dome that sits on the church the Doge built.

Because the whole thing was built, basically, to contain poor John Mark’s mortal remains, and the fact is that we don’t even know what they are; or, if anyone does, it’s not important enough to note - either in the guidebooks, for the tourists, or the art books, for the student. What matters is the container.

It’s just that kind of misdirected attention that Paul is arguing against in this second letter of his to the church in Corinth. You remember that last week we looked at his first letter, where he takes the congregation to task for using the wrong yardstick for judging spirituality; well, they don’t seem to have learned much. They’re still impressed by externals. Paul’s opponents have spun the news of Paul’s adventures to emphasize the negative. And there is plenty of that! He’s been beaten, thrown in jail, run out of town, gotten sick - and stayed sick. They picked up on every sign of weakness and used it to cast doubt on Paul’s authority, even on the entire validity of his ministry, because he’s not displaying the kind of power they admire and want to put at the center of the gospel message. It reminds me of things I’ve heard from some members of the Health & Wealth school of theology - the reason why Paul wasn’t healed of the thorn in his flesh mentioned in 2 Corinthians 12 was because he didn’t have enough faith!

So Paul spends almost this entire letter re-validating his ministry, explaining - again - that God does not call a people by wowing them with glamor and glitter, and that we are not to judge the success of a ministry - theirs or his - by those standards, either.

A friend of mine, back in seminary, had a very wise pastor as her supervisor, who said something I’ve always remembered. She said that no one's outside perfectly reflects their inside; either you’re going to look better on the outside than you actually are, or you’re going to be better on the inside than you actually look. I decided then and there that I’d rather look worse and be better. That is, of course, much easier said than done, because the minute you start thinking about how you look you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

The point being that the more time you spend on externals, the less time and attention you spend on the important things, the inside things, the real things. And in this part of the letter Paul points out how his unpretentious ways honor God far more than the public relations successes his opponents boast of, even though he may not be drawing the big crowds.

There’s a lot of literature out there these days on using modern marketing techniques to sell the church to an unbelieving and indifferent community. How far should we go to package the product, so to speak, to catch the eye and stimulate the curiosity of the Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, or whoever the target community happens to be? Should we go to "contemporary" worship with a praise band instead of an organ? Should we water down doctrine, downplay sin, shorten the sermon, omit the confession? How do we figure out what impresses people so that they’ll come to our church instead of the bigger one down the street?