02/11/2024: Trust Your Power

Sermon: At Holmdel Community United Church of Christ NJ 2/11/2024

TRUST YOUR POWER
“Our competence is from God”
2 Corinthians 3:1-6

To truly understand why the content of this letter is so relevant to us today, it’s important to know that Paul is speaking to a body of people who have been misled.
The nature of Paul’s ministry was to travel the gentile world, and build church communities by sharing the stories and the life of Yeshua/Jesus.
To most of the people he encountered, this was a new theology. He encouraged all who would listen to draw optimism and compassion from the life of Jesus, to follow his example, and grow a trusting, more personal relationship with God.
From reading his letters, we see that Paul would build relationships with a diverse body of people, establish a stable church community, and then travel to a different land to repeat the process.
We know that the church community he built in Corinth was visited by other ministers in his absence. Some of the ministers were motivated to undermine Paul’s message by introducing a different theology, and attacking Paul personally.
These ministers saw an opportunity to build influence, and they wasted no time disparaging Paul’s public speaking abilities and his lack of wealth. They mocked him because he wasn’t a good public speaker, he was often homeless, and he didn’t make a living from his ministry. Paul didn’t collect a salary as a minister, he fixed tents, and took other manual labor jobs to support his ministry and his writing.
O, and he kept going to jail. Much of his message was not in step with his government’s national agenda, or foreign policy. So, he was a political misfit too.
In modern words, these things, they argued, are clear evidence that he is a fake faith leader!
And that should disqualify his message. According to them, Paul was simply an uncredentialed heretic, and a con man, planting the impression that the God of Abraham would never invest in a law-breaking vagabond.
Needless to say, some in the church were persuaded by the rhetoric of these ministers. How could they not be?
Believe it or not, the way people processed factual information then, and the way we do it now, hasn’t changed much, if at all.
Still, we tend to assign more credibility to people we find physically attractive.
Many of us will listen a little deeper to the well-polished orators we see in the media.
And for all of our modernity, we have a positive perception of people in authority. Even if we never met them.
So, the ability to mislead a large number of people wasn’t hard then, and it’s not hard now.
In fact, it might be easier today.
Even in our high-tech, social-medialized society the appearance of being in a position of power has implicit credibility.
The values of the Jesus movement urge us to ignore that --- to wade through the hatred and the mudslides of prejudice and propaganda.
The concept of the Jesus movement requires us to walk through the mucky theologies, and the murk in mainstream media, and find the truth.
In Paul’s time, wealth and appearance had the power to influence the perception of fact and truth.
But now…are we so different?
In Corinth, the alternative theology these backdoor ministers were peddling was antithetical to the peace and harmonious theology of Jesus.
Having been a member of the Pharisees, Paul was well versed in social tradition and Torah.
He completely understood the power of control by punitive means.
But his personal encounter with Jesus on his way to Damascus revealed that the power of punishment is only a perception.
The most sustainable power on earth is love, and peace is a manifestation of that love.
In times of conflict, human history reveals that the most successful leaders at some point sought peace.
Those who crave the control of people, see punitive laws and war as a means to that end, but they are not correct, and it is never sustainable.
The faith leaders who visited Corinth were imposing. They had that wealthy, flamboyant, leadership look. And by comparison Paul was not impressive, so they thought less of him. Many were embarrassed by him.
But Paul saw it as an opportunity to educate the Corinthians.
He used the conflict as an opportunity to highlight the flaws in their reasoning; by reminding the church, that to highly regard these faith leaders because they are eloquent, good looking, and wealthy, is completely inconsistent with the life and the teachings of Jesus.
From Paul’s perspective, wealth, status, and self-promotion are not the best indicators of good leadership. Jesus is the prototype of leadership.
How does this relate to our lives now?
Paul was making a point that still rings true today. On a very personal level Paul was saying.
No, I don’t look perfect. I look like you.
And for more than thirty years of his life, so did Jesus.
As for me, he implies, I live and struggle like you.
I know what it takes to live on this world.
I know what it takes to live into your faith, and struggle to stay true to what you believe.
I know it’s not easy, sometimes it’s hard to find a way forward, but we have an example now.
We have a guide, a messiah who lived among us, to witness the fears of death and public ridicule, and all the temptations.
The life and leadership of Jesus is an honest picture of what we can become.
It is also a clear reminder that good people can suffer for doing the right thing.
Our humanity is the legacy of Jesus. And that legacy is constantly contested.
Some people are in constant conflict with the true meaning of humanity. For them Humanity is about control.
You see it in their oppressive behavior of others.
You hear it in their politics, their one-way theories of love and living.
You feel it when you sense that uncomfortable push to support some inequity, some atrocity, or just look the other way.
And sometimes they ask us to understand.
Understand the loss of human life, the cultural destruction of a people, their buildings, their extended families, their children, their future.
In your personal life, you may feel it as a gross imbalance in your workplace or even in an intimate relationship.
But most prominently today, we see the growing flares of war around the world and the turmoil in our nation and we ask:
What can I do?
First, remember that our God encourages us to drill through the prejudice and perception, and see humanity in all people, at all times.
Second: Use your voice and say, Stop the Killing!
Our silence today can create a hate that can last another hundred years.
Third: Paul says. “Show that you are a letter of Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:3)
The love of God is in you. It belongs to you.
So, trust your power.
Closing Prayer:
I pray that these ideas help us to create that beautiful humanity promised to us by our God.
Until we are together again--let us say—Amen/Ashe