Sermon 061409 2 Corinthians 5:1-10
How many of you love camping? How long is a good length of time to go camping? I did a lot of camping when I was growing up, and as I got a little older, I noticed we didn’t go any more. I asked my mom why we didn’t camp anymore, “you loved camping!” I said to my mom. My mom looked at me and said, “I hate camping, it was the only vacation we could afford when you were little.” Shocking revelation!
I still enjoy it. But there is a limit to my enjoyment of it. The last time I went camping was when Anne and I went with a couple we knew that was here from Belgium. They wanted the rustic American experience, and so we threw our tent in the car and followed them, and followed, and followed, at which point we realized that they had NO IDEA where they were going! So we took the lead, and eventually found a campground, but it was LATE.
Setting up a tent in the middle of the day is hard enough, much less at night by car headlight. I was a little annoyed, but I kept it to myself. We didn’t have time to get a fire going to cook, so we went out for dinner. Every place was closed, but we found a bar that would sell us potato chips. I was a little annoyed, but I kept it to myself. We finally made it back to the tents, and as I laid down on the lumpy ground and got ready to sleep, I heard a voice with a Belgin accent address me. “Matt, what size are you?” I replied, “I’m about 6’2.” Again the voice, “how much do you weigh?” “About 220 pounds.” After a brief silence, the voice returned, “According to National Geographic, you are overweight. But you are not obese or morbidly obese.” “Thank You” I replied.
Inside, I was thinking, I hate tents. There is no privacy, there is a small rock poking into my back, and these folks from Belgium can pepper me with questions and insult me at will! But there are lots of reasons not to like tents. In a wind storm, they can just blow right over. If a tent stake comes out, the whole thing can fall in on you in the middle of the night. If it rains, you will get wet, if it gets cold, you will get cold, if it’s too hot outside, it is going to be too hot inside! So I like camping in tents, but only for a night or two, not for weeks on end.
So it’s a little disconcerting to hear how Paul describes life in this world, as a tent camping trip that lasts your entire life! For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling. We don’t often think of life like this do we?
But isn’t it true. Life in this sinful and fallen world is like life in a tent. First off, we aren’t totally shielded from the effects of the world around us. We feel the effects of evil. We struggle with sins. We hurt at times. We have reminders that our very earthly bodies are temporary structures don’t we? Sore joints, aches, pains, diseases, you name it! We can resonate with that language, we GROAN to put on the heavenly dwelling!
But at the same time, even as we look forward to our heavenly dwelling, tent life is still a little scary, because one day, for each of us, the tent stakes will get pulled up, and the tent will collapse. We don’t know when that day is. But one day, our hearts will stop beating, our lungs will stop breathing, and the camping trip is over. And it is then that we will be very glad that we have another home. The building from God, a house not made with hand, eternal in the heavens.
The point that Paul is making is that we can know our hope is secure. We can know, no matter what is going on around us, that we have an eternal and heavenly home. God promises this to us. This is why he died on the cross for your sins. This is why He rose from the dead. This is why he gives us the Holy Spirit, to continually remind us and show us what kind of love God has for us, and who gives us hope. I love how Paul describes it: He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
The result of all this for our future is pretty obvious. We will live, unshaken, protected, joyful, praise-filled, tear-less, lives in our heavenly home with God! But there is a result of this hope that is immediate too. That touches our lives right here, right now. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. With our future in heaven secure in the Blood of Christ, we can be of good courage, even in these tents we live in today.
This is an important thing for us to sear into our minds, especially in these times. Because the truth is, that even as Christians, even as those who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, who stake our claim in the resurrection, who know we have a heavenly home waiting for us, we are still guilty of treating all kinds of other things as a means for our security, our hope, our future. There are a lot of things in this world that seem reliable, or solid, or secure, but are they really?
In 1989, there was a huge earthquake in San Jose, where I grew up. 7.0 on the Richter Scale, which means nothing to most folks in Ohio, but that is HUGE, just so you know. The epicenter of the earthquake was just 10 miles from my house, and I can’t tell you how scary it was to be in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, when the whole house began to shake, and buck, and rattle. Not just scary during the earthquake, but for a long time afterwards as well. Scary because, your outlook changes.
You just don’t think of your HOUSE as something that can be moved like that. You lock the door at night and feel safe when you hear that click. You never think of the walls as things that can just move back and forth. You don’t think of the foundation of your home as something that can be shaken like a toy in a dog’s mouth. But they can be moved. And it’s a hard adjustment to make to your thinking.
I’ll bet there’s been some shaking going on in your life lately. I’ll bet there’s a lot of things that you thought were secure, but are learning that they aren’t always so solid. A lot of people never considered that their retirement savings might drain away like water through a hole in a bucket. A lot of folks didn’t consider that they might show up to work faithfully like they always had, and at the end of the day they would be walking out escorted by a security guard with a cardboard box of all their belongings. There is no way to prepare to go to the doctor for what you think is a simple problem and have him tell you, “it’s cancer.” You can never be ready to hear that your parents have decided to get a divorce, or to hear your spouse tell you they’ve fallen in love with someone else. You never considered that one day the bank would force you out of your home. It happens every day, to people you know, to you, to people you love. All these things we put our trust in never prove to be as reliable as we thought. As Jerry Lee Lewis famously sang, “There’s a whole lotta shaking going on.” It’s very true of this world, especially lately.
So what do we do as Christians with all of this? Paul writes that we are to always be of good courage. Easier said than done, right? What is he talking about, always be of good courage? Paul isn’t saying that we are to always be happy and saying, yippee at everything. That just isn’t how life goes. I don’t know one person who every smiled and said, “all right!” when they heard they had a life threatening disease, or that they were losing their job, or that they spouse was going to leave them, or that their stocks were in the toilet. That isn’t what Paul is saying. He is saying that no matter what, have courage, have confidence, and be bold.
HAVE COURAGE! This doesn’t mean that we never have any anxieties or fears. That’s not the definition of courage. Walt Michaels, former coach of the New York Jets said, “Everyone has some fear. A man who has no fear belongs in a mental institution, or on special teams.” I think of an interview I saw with man recalling his time as a paratrooper in WWII. The interviewer said you guys must have been fearless. And the veteran took offense. He said, “never say that, we were all terrified, but we jumped anyways, to say we were fearless diminishes the courage it took to do what we did.”
And that is true here. To live the Christian life, especially in hard times, is something that takes courage. It takes acting in spite of fear. It takes faith that God is good, even when everything else seems to point another way. It takes a willingness to take courageous risks, even when we don’t know exactly how everything is going to turn out.
HAVE CONFIDENCE! This is where courage comes from. We have a confidence that the world doesn’t have. We may not know who wins every battle, but in Christ we know who has already won the war. We know that there is absolutely nothing in that will have the final say in our lives accept for the cross and the empty tomb. As we read in Romans 8 - For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Confidence is simply this, that we acknowledge that right now we are living in tents, and that despite all that might happen, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven. We will feel fear, we will experience pain, we will hurt, and cry, and struggle. But we also have confidence, that God will take care of us here and now and for all eternity. We have confidence, that God’s sacrifice for us on the cross was all that we need and that we can depend upon his grace. We have confidence that God’s love for us never waivers and that his plan for us it better that we could ever imagine.
BE BOLD! This is the result of courage and confidence. In the second part of the reading we have these great words of encouragement: Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. This is boldness, that no matter where we are, we strive to please God. We are bold, not because we have confidence in ourselves, but because we have confidence in GOD. We are bold because we know we are never further than God’s grace can reach. Bold because we have the Holy Spirit alive in our lives as a guarantee of what God has prepared for us!
There are no guarantees in this world aside from the Grace of God. This is what we hold onto in the storm. The tents of our lives get tattered and worn out, they get blown about by the winds of struggle and conflict, they get drenched by storms of tears and heartbreaks, they get covered with the dirt of sin.
But we have a promise that gets us through the storms. That God is good. That the cross has changed us. That the empty tomb will never forsake us. That God’s grace will never desert us. That we have the unshakeable building ahead of us, eternal in the heavens.
Be of Good courage.
Amen
