Years ago (in fact it was the first summer after we were married), Karen and I decided that we would spend our summer vacation visiting her relatives and my birthplace here in Nova Scotia. We didn’t have a large salary between us, and we were young and adventuresome, so we decided that it would be a camping holiday. Everything went wonderfully smoothly until we were in Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. It was there that, around two in the morning, the heavens broke loose with a torrential rain. The downpour was unremitting. Pools of water began to develop on the roof of our old canvas tent and the whole structure began to sag. I ran around the outside tightening the guy ropes, but my efforts were of no avail. We rearranged things inside the tent to protect them from the drip-drip-drip that had begun to develop. But by five o’clock and not having slept a wink, we decided that it was time to pack up and abandon ship, so to speak. So, we hopped into the car, drove the two hours to Sydney and waited in the parking lot outside Canadian Tire until opening time. (Needless to say, the sky had already begun to clear, and I don’t think we had another drop of rain for the rest of our time in Nova Scotia!)
Well, I hope my little tale of woe doesn’t discourage any of you who might be thinking of camping this summer! It’s really an attempt to help us dig into the apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 2 Corinthians this morning, where Paul begins by writing about tents: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven…”
I probably don’t have to remind you that Paul was a tentmaker by profession. That was how he made his living. And I suspect that he worked hard to make good, quality tents. Although in the climate where he lived, they would have been more to shield from the sun than from the rain. Yet Paul knew that, no matter what kind of material you stitched a tent from, it was not going to last for ever. It might stand up for years, with special care perhaps even a decade or two. But the ravages of the hot Middle Eastern sun would eventually reduce it to worthless rags.
For Paul the tents that he carefully cut and sewed together were a reminder of his own mortality. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament put it much more grimly when he mused,
Honour and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young,
Before the years take their toll and your vigour wanes,
Before your vision dims and the world blurs
And the winter years keep you close to the fire.
In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.
Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.
The shades are pulled down on the world.
You can’t come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.
The hum of the household fades away.
You are wakened now by bird song.
Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.
Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.
Your hair turns apple-blossom white,
Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.
Yes, you’re well on your way to eternal rest,
While your friends make plans for your funeral.
Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.
Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.
The body is put back in the same ground it came from.
The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.
It’s all smoke, nothing but smoke…
Everything’s smoke. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, The Message)
Well, if that doesn’t get you down, in recent months the fragility of life and health has been made much more real for us with the advent of covid. Who would have thought less than half a year ago that we would all be attending church on YouTube, followed by a fellowship hour on Zoom, and shopping at stores dressed like bandits?
Promised (1-8)
Well, it wasn’t my intention to put you into a depression this morning! Nor was it Paul’s when he wrote to his friends in Corinth. Because Paul wanted to assure them that this tent, that is our bodies, is not all there is to life—that they will be replaced with something far greater and far more glorious than anything you or I can ever begin to imagine. In Paul’s words, it is “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands”.
Now the biblical authors in their wisdom (and that includes Paul) do not tell us in any detail what that resurrection life will be like. Suffice it to say that it will surpass anything we have experienced in the here and now. The prophets offer us glimpses in the language of poetry of a place where “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food,” where there is no harm or destruction (Isaiah 65:25). The book of Revelation gives us that remarkable picture of a numberless crowd of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” standing around the throne of the Lamb, while the angels and the heavenly beings cry aloud,
Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honour
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen! (Revelation 7:12)
But it seems to me that apart from a few other images here and there, that is about as specific as the Bible gets. C.S. Lewis was able to put a lot of these biblical pictures together in what I think is a very original way, in a little book entitled The Great Divorce. It is the imaginative story of a group of people who are transported from this world into the next. To his surprise, Lewis finds that the world as he had known it had in reality been little more than shadows and that life in the world to come was far more real and far more solid than anything he might have envisioned even in his wildest dreams.
After he gets out of the bus, he senses that he is in a space with a vastness far greater than anything he has ever experienced before. Even the solar system seems like nothing more than the inside of a room. As his gaze turns to his fellow passengers, he observes that they are transparent like ghosts, that the grass does not bend underneath them when they tread on it. He stoops down to pluck a daisy growing at his feet and, although he tugs at it until sweat pours from his forehead, the stalk refuses to break or even twist. The story goes on and I’ll leave it to you to read it. But the point that Lewis was seeking to make is that the world that awaits us is immeasurably more substantial than anything we have experienced or can even imagine in the here and now.
Practised (9-17)
At this point we need to be clear what Paul (and for that matter the whole Bible) is talking about. It is not just some future experience that awaits us, the proverbial “pie in the sky when I die”. For those of us who have entered a relationship with Jesus Christ it is a present reality. Paul puts it this way in verse 17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
So there is a sense in which, through our faith in Jesus Christ, you and I have already begun to set foot in that new creation. To be sure, we are still fallible, sinful and as prone as ever to mess things up (and here I speak from my own experience!). Yet at the same time we are called both as a church and as individual believers to live as inhabitants of that new creation.
“So,” says Paul in verse 16, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” That is, when we enter a relationship with Jesus, everything takes on a new perspective—particularly the categories by which we are so inclined to define ourselves and other people, whether they be social status or education or looks or sex or race or whatever else.
As I was preparing for this morning’s sermon, I came across some profound words on this subject by James Denney, a Scottish Bible scholar who taught with remarkable clarity. Here is a little of what he wrote more than 125 years ago:
Those who are in Christ have died to the whole order of life in which [people] are judged ‘after the flesh’. Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, … of race, [all of] which is not Christian… These distinctions … are meaningless in relation to Christ, and ought not to be made… If [these] distinctions … are lost in the common relation to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all things are ours, because we are his. To make them narrows and impoverishes the soul. To be guided by worldly distinctions is to know … people by what is superficial in their nature; but … to look at [them] in relation to him who is Redeemer and Lord of all, is to know all our [brothers and sisters], and to know them not on the surface, but to the heart.[1]
This was the point that Paul was at pains to get across again and again in his two letters to the church in Corinth. For tragically it was a congregation where social status was still all too important for some, where others had not let go of pagan practices, and still others had allowed themselves to slide into immorality.
In contrast to this, Paul writes elsewhere that in the Christian community “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And in the book of Acts Paul’s companion Luke tells us of the earliest Christian community, where
they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)
Now I’m not saying that we need to mimic that church in every detail, but clearly it was a community in which Jesus was present, where the world to come was visible in the things that are, where God’s new creation was erupting amid the old. And that is what God in Christ is calling you and me to be today. To put it in Paul’s words, we are Christ’s ambassadors.
Purchased (18-21)
But how is all this possible? Paul summarizes it for us in what for me is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
It was on the cross that Jesus absorbed into himself all the anger, pain, bitterness and division, all the injustice, prejudice, conflict, hatred and evil that have so poisoned and corrupted God’s creation. It was at the cross that God pronounced his definitive “No!” to all that is wrong with the world. And through that cross God has opened the way to the new creation, to our home in eternity.
The day will surely come when you and I will shed this tent of our earthly bodies—when we shall be gathered in that new creation to stand in awe around the throne of the Lamb. But between that time and this God has redeemed us and called us and empowers us to be agents and representatives of that world that is to come—a community where Christ is present and seen and believed through the witness of our lives. May God the Holy Spirit make us equal to that task!
