Never Easy, Ever Hopeful

2 Corinthians 4:1-18

One of my favorite quotations from Peanuts is this: “No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.”

We pastors are classic conflict avoiders. We bury our heads in the sand—particularly if we feel that the difficulties of ministry, especially those caused by denominational issues, are an outrageous intrusion into our real calling, the pastoral ministry. If we can just escape the conflicts, ministry might even be easy or—dare we say—fun. Indeed, when will it ever be easy?

Christians came up with an idea a few decades ago about how one knows the will of God. It went like this: If circumstances got difficult or you encountered obstacles, then the path you were pursuing must not be God’s will. And if you didn’t think it was God’s will, you quit. This is what I call the “open-door/closed-door” method of knowing God’s will. It has its place among an array of data points for discerning God’s will. But if one relies on it exclusively, one may give up on a perfectly good idea too soon. An unforeseen outcome of this unfortunate mindset is a generation of Christians who are wimpy, unable to persevere through periods of serious difficulty.

I may have described the extreme case. Perhaps we might not actually quit, but we lose heart or we get discouraged, because by outward appearances things seem to be falling apart. And we wonder: When will the ministry to which I was called ever be fun?

This year’s been a really tough year for me. Just a year ago I lost my associate pastor with very little notice upon my return from a sabbatical. And that was the first of five staff departures in this last year—each one a different case and a different reason, none of them, I don’t think, because of me—and a real bummer. Presbytery has delayed for two months the consideration of our mission study that would allow us to form an APNC and start our search. I have officiated at nineteen memorial services this year. In the last two months I’ve been plagued with an intestinal parasite. And to cap it all off, two weeks ago, for reasons we still cannot explain, our entire campus was overcome with fleas. Yeah, life is difficult; ministry is difficult.

And these circumstances are nothing compared to the hardships suffered by our sister churches here and around the world. My heart absolutely breaks for the difficulties of the diaspora of southern churches to other parts of the country and all of the devastation that so many of you have encountered.

The question is the same—when will it ever be easy?

I hate to break it to you, but it’s never going to be easy. The Christian ministry is difficult. This is a given and it’s nothing new.

Our passage today points to several reasons why the church of our present day faces difficulties. People’s eyes are blinded. They cannot see and they cannot hear. There’s a lot of noise that is making it difficult for people to hear the gospel. Books like The Da Vinci Code do not help us, but muddy the waters and make it very difficult for people to get the clear gospel.

There is opposition. Opposition to the gospel builds among those who have competing agendas. We have that even within our own denomination. We have seen our debate opponents use evangelical names and phrases to deceive Presbyterians into thinking that their position has evangelical support. We’ve seen the distortion of Scripture, deception, and bad ethics in the process.

People offer plenty of opposition and so does the evil one who opposes our work, the work of the church. There are spiritual battles we’re all facing. I have seen this reality unfold in my own congregation.

Tracing back the spiritual history of First Presbyterian Church of Concord in San Francisco Presbytery: in 1983 our church bought a piece of property next door to our campus. It was the town porno theater. It was discovered in the course of making the deal that the porno theater’s lease was unbreakable for three more years. So for three years First Presbyterian Church of Concord was the proud owner of a pornographic theater, deriving income from it.

What do you do? Some people left the church—quite a few as a matter of fact—because they considered that income the devil’s money. This invasion into Satan’s real estate began what has become a twenty-year season of spiritual battle in our church. And I know it’s because the evil one lost territory and now opposes our efforts to make Christ known in our city.

People oppose our Kingdom business, and the devil surely does. Now if that’s not enough, ministers and elders and deacons and church members are themselves weak and vulnerable to sin. We have had our own share of scandals that have, for many, made the gospel hard to see. And certainly the world we live in promotes the idea that life should work and ministry should be fun and fulfilling. And so don’t, please, talk to me about discipline or delayed gratification. These attitudes define the framework in which we are doing our ministry.

And so Jesus said, and I believe from first-hand experience, that ministry is difficult. “In this world you will have trouble.” He told us that we would suffer persecution, and urged us to be prepared for it.

And so we ask, “How bad can it get?” How difficult can it really be?

Paul was hounded as he preached the gospel and planted churches. There were folks who came in after him and tried to undo what he was doing; trying to say, “Now Paul gave you a good start but really you’ve got to do more—you’ve got to become a Jew before you can become a Christian.” The so-called Judaizers or the peddlers of the Word came to undermine Paul’s progress.

Sometimes you feel that’s what’s happening in your own setting. You preach a sermon on Sunday morning, and the folks read the newspapers or watch a contradictory television program on the History Channel or read Da Vinci Code and come back the next week and you have to start all over again.

But for Paul it was far more serious than that. Later on in the book of 2 Corinthians in Chapter 11, he begins a list of some of the hardships he has experienced. “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I’ve been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea, in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep. (We certainly can feel that one.) I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food. I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.”

He’s afflicted, stymied, persecuted, at a loss sometimes. Perhaps he in his day experienced what we do now: those crabbies who set ambushes in our congregational meetings, or presbytery committees delaying action that will benefit our congregation, or church members who move away just as they retire or just as they buy their first home. Or, as in our church, you might have the year when the children’s department falls apart. That year the elders, the Session as a whole, became our children’s department. Now you can imagine how those elders felt when they were installed. “Wait, wait, I thought I was going to be an elder. But I’m teaching Sunday school?”

Or heaven forbid that G-6.0106b would be challenged again.

We’re tempted to say, “You know what? This is not the ministry I signed up for.”

For the last three years, I have prayed every week with fifteen pastors of different denominations, most of them nondenominational. One of them oversees a church—Harvest Church—which bought the other theater in town, the Capri Theater, at the Park N Shop shopping center eight years ago. They didn’t know they were supposed to apply for their use permit before the sale went through. After they bought it, they applied for a use permit to be a church, and the City denied their application. For years the city refused permission. The church offered to make it a conference center: “We’ll have just two hours of worship on Sunday, but the rest of it will be multi-use.” Resoundingly rejected. And then they brought the issue back: “Okay we’re going to be a church—twenty-four hours a day—deal with that.” Appeal after appeal was pursued. The church spent eight years and over two million dollars to finally get permission to worship in the Capri Theater.

Before that was over, Rich, Harvest Church’s pastor, came to our prayer meeting and said, “You know, I just want to do the ministry that I’ve been called to.” After commiserating with him, all of a sudden the wind of the Spirit blew in the room and we realized, “Rich, this is your ministry!” His gracious perseverance has opened relationships between the wider Church and the City that were unimaginable ten years ago.

And I’ve come to believe that where you and I are, with the stuff we’re dealing with, we are in the ministry that God has ordained for us. Our ministry is to the denomination in which God has placed us to evangelize. This is our ministry, and we’re not going to give up. We’re perplexed, but we’re not going to give up; we can’t give up.

Now some people do give up—people without adequate faith to see God’s purposes in their calling. They can’t sustain a positive attitude.

Paul sees his defeats as privileged participation in the sufferings of Jesus. He doesn’t stack them into his pity pile and bury himself with them. Rather he lets each disappointment, each difficulty, remind him of the overwhelming love of Jesus expressed through Christ’s passion and death.

So with this way of thinking, Jesus’ crucifixion leading to resurrection and humanity’s redemption, Paul sees this repository of his own hardships pointing toward resurrection hope. And what that means is that how things end up in this life is not the final outcome of our labor. By not losing heart, by remaining faithful and setting forth the truth plainly, doing an honest ministry, we are accomplishing something of great eternal value.

According to Paul—and this is set now in the broader context of those middle chapters of 2 Corinthians—our hardships accomplish at least three things that can encourage us when circumstances are difficult.

1) These ministry hardships remind us that what we are experiencing now is not heaven. This may seem perfectly obvious, but if we are focused on the Lord’s Kingdom work, we are hoping to have a taste of heaven before we die. We may be trying to create heaven on earth; we may wish for the kind of ministry, the ideal ministry that could be mistaken for heaven some day: perhaps we expect our church to become heaven; or our city—But the truth is, it isn’t heaven; it never will be heaven. We are “away from the Lord,” not yet with him—it’s the “not yet” part of the kingdom. So don’t get too attached to this church, to this denomination, to this body, to this building. It’s all going to change. It’s going to be traded in for a new body—and a new Body with a capital B.

2) Our hardships engender hope in a glorious future. We live by faith, not by sight. Now we’re groaning through life’s difficulties—oh no, not another setback! But the Holy Spirit is given to us as an “engagement ring” if you will. And someday the bride of Christ will march down that aisle into the Bridegroom, Christ’s arms. We live in this hope.

3) But our hardships accomplish one more thing. They test our commitment to the Lord, when there are no feel-good props. We make it our goal to please God alone, Paul says. It builds character in us. We are strengthened from the inside out by the difficulties. It is enlarging our capacity for the work we’re going to do in heaven. We’re going to work there, you know. It’s going to be productive; it’s going to be wonderful. But we are going to work. And this work we’re doing now is getting us ready and enlarging our capacity to hold and to view the glory of God. This body and these eyes cannot survive a first-hand viewing of God’s glory—yet.

We’re tested and we’re strengthened and we don’t always know any more than that, why things happen the way they do. Paul sees hope. He says, “We do not lose heart. We have a treasure—the gospel. It is true and valuable.”

One of the ninety-five theses of Martin Luther, posted on the door of the church in Wittenberg says: “The true treasure of the church is not indulgences, it’s not worldly wealth; it is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.” We have that treasure in these jars of clay.

God can use even me. And God can most certainly use you to deliver this treasure to our spiritually impoverished and love-starved generation. There is no room for excuses on that point. God can, wants to and will, over your dead body, use you in ministry. He says it right here. We’re dying, and yet Christ rises, and the work of the kingdom bears fruit through our wasting away.

God delights to demonstrate his power in our weakness. And that’s one of the amazing paradoxes of our faith and its experience in our lives. The glory of this treasure shines through our inadequacies and our flaws.

We have hope, because God is doing something through us. If we’re wimpy Christians and we sit back and we say nothing when we see things coming down, the stuff will just keep happening. But if we stand up straight and we speak the plain truth graciously, patiently, don’t yell—we don’t do that—we don’t twist Scripture, we don’t play any shenanigans in the processes of our presbyteries, but remain honest with the gospel and our life in it, then God is going to bear fruit, if not visibly under our leadership, then in this generation. I believe it. We know this to be true: Jesus Christ is Lord and the only Savior given to humankind by which we may be saved. We know that. We don’t lose heart; we’re people of hope, a hope that fades memories. Difficulties we have to endure will soon be forgotten—they are “light and momentary afflictions.” We are people of a hope that removes fear. We have courage to face the relentless onslaught each day brings. A person who looks forward in resurrection hope is not afraid to tackle today’s problems, no matter how big or how complicated they may be. And I really rigorous work, the homework, the preparation, and the writing that equips the rest of us to do the work of Christ that we’ve been called to.

So let us walk in power and purpose, so that God may receive and we may fully see the glory that awaits. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This sermon first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2006).