Mt. Lebanon UMC
June 14, 2009

2 Corinthians 5:6-17 (NRSV)
5:6 So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord –
5:7 for we walk by faith, not by sight.
5:8 Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
5:9 So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.
5:10 For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.
5:11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others; but we ourselves are well known to God, and I hope that we are also well known to your consciences.
5:12 We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.
5:13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.
5:14 For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.
5:15 And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

The Sunday School class of which I’m a part is currently studying the book “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis. Even though I’m not the regular teacher, this particular book was my suggestion, and so I’ve been teaching.
The book is all about the basics of what we as Christians believe and why. Lewis starts out with his defense of the idea of God. He talks about the fact that we all, as human beings, seem to know about certain ideals, certain concepts of right and wrong.
There are several points to be made about this. One is that there are certain ideas that are considered “right” and “wrong” in almost every culture. We may disagree about how to apply them; for example, we may disagree about whether it’s more important to be loyal to your family, your community, your church, your nation or to humanity as a whole. But we agree that it’s important to be loyal to something outside yourself.

The other point that Lewis makes is that while we all believe there’s a “right” and “wrong,” it doesn’t come from inside. Because we are terrible about living up to those ideals. No one on the planet follows them completely.

But somehow, at some level, most of us on the planet acknowledge the presence of something – some standard, some meaning – outside ourselves.
For Lewis, that universal impulse – something that calls to us, but which we can’t seem to reach — is a sign that we don’t really belong here. We have been built with an innate longing for something outside ourselves, something we strive for, but which doesn’t seem to be a part of our current surroundings or which doesn’t seem to be possible with our current limitations.
A year ago, the animated movie “WALL-E” was in theaters. I loved that movie, as I do just about all of the Pixar movies. I want to see the new one, “Up,” but I haven’t gotten there yet.
“WALL-E” is about a cute little robot, left behind when all of humanity has moved away because Earth has become so polluted and overcrowded. WALL-E spends his days compacting all of the garbage that the humans have left behind, and stacking it neatly.
One of the early coming attractions previews for the movie included this slogan: “For 500 years, he’s been doing what he was built for. Now, he’ll discover what he was meant for.”
As Christians, we have to struggle with the idea that while we’ve been built for this early existence, it’s not really what we were meant for. We’re here on earth, but we are awaiting a future reconciliation, and a different plane of existence.
In this passage, Paul tells the Corinthians that he has the confidence not to worry about death. He tells them, in fact, that, in one sense, we would all rather be “away from our body and home with the Lord.”
But of course, that reunion must never be on our own schedule. My grandmother passed away a little over two weeks ago, at the age of 97, after a long life. My grandfather died the year before I was born, which means the two of them had been separated for 48 years.
We don’t know some people die young and others live to 100. Although it’s clear that God can bring good things even out of tragedy, I resist the notion of explaining away some terrible tragedy by saying “Oh, it was God’s plan.” Some things are God’s plan, but some things are the result of the evil of this fallen existence. This place, Earth, is not our home.
Christ has died for us, and our responsibility right now, as Paul says in this passage, is to live for him. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold in store for us – comedy or tragedy, health or illness, fortune or poverty, life or death.
We walk by faith, as Paul said, not by sight.
Last weekend, I was at a training weekend for the mission trip I’ll be taking to Kenya next month. We did a couple of team-building exercises, and one of them was that some of the team members were paired up with a partner. One partner had to wear a blindfold, and the other partner had to talk them through an obstacle course of mouse traps that had been laid out on the sidewalk.
Everyone was wearing shoes, so it’s not like anyone was going to get hurt, but even so the person in the blindfold had to have faith in his or her partner in order to make it through the course.
We sometimes feel blindfolded in this earthly existence. We never know what’s coming. But God guides us through it. In the team-building exercise, the guide had to give instructions one step at a time. It would have been confusing if the guide had to describe, or if the person being guided had to imagine, the whole course at one time. Sometimes we get frustrated that we can’t see our long-range destination, but we have to trust God to guide us along one step at a time.
This reliance on God sometimes seems like foolishness by human standards. In the 1970s, not long after he had become a part-time United Methodist minister, my father was given an ultimatum by the company for which he was working at the time. They didn’t like the fact that he was a preacher, and so they told him he had to choose between them and the church. He chose the church. That seemed like a crazy decision at the time – he had a wife and four children, and my youngest brother was still in diapers. But it was a step in faith. And God provided for us, as he always does.

When I’ve signed up to take my foreign mission trips, frequently I don’t know where the money is going to come from. But God has always provided. As soon as I get done here today, I have to rush back to First Church, where they’re holding a fried chicken luncheon to raise money for my trip. I’m already close enough to my target that I know this lunch will put me over the top. Once again, God has provided.
Paul told the Corinthians that “if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.”
Sometimes, Christianity looks like craziness. The Bible commentator William Barclay related the story of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, happening to be on the same ocean liner as the great writer Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was a very stiff-upper-lip sort of British fellow, and he told Booth later that he wasn’t too fond of the enthusiastic sendoff Booth’s followers, many of whom were playing tambourines, had given him. Kipling considered it undignified, perhaps irreverent.
“Young man,” Booth replied, “if I thought I could win one more soul for Christ by standing on my hands and beating a tambourine with my feet I would learn to do it.”

Some scholars think that when Paul made reference to being “beside himself, for God,” it had to do with mystical experiences like visions and prophecies and the like. These things were the subject of debate in the early church – as they are today. No doubt, some such experiences are truly of God, and it’s equally certain that some represent some sort of human influence – either intentional deception or helpless delusion.
According to this interpretation, Paul was saying that if he were found in such a strange state – and it happened to him at the very start of his Christian journey, on the road to Damascus – it would be a result of, and for the benefit of, God. If he were doing something for the sake of human beings, it would be in a more normal, understandable fashion. When we get into trouble is when we start trying to do mystical things in order to get human attention. That’s a red flag.
Whatever we do, whether it seems routine or whether it seems crazy, we must do in service to God, and at the call of God.
Paul tells us that Christ died for all of us, so that when we live, we live for Christ. He says that everything old has passed away and we have become new creatures. John Wesley used the term “perfection” to describe this new state of being, and his use of the term was quite misunderstood, even in Wesley’s own time. Wesley had to explain that, even as Christians, we still sin. We still fall short. We even believe, unlike some denominations, that it is possible to fall away from a right relationship to God.
But the “perfection” that Wesley talks about is this same newness to which Paul is referring in our scripture passage. It means that our priority has shifted from our own selves and our own needs and is now focused on God. We are living our lives on faith, not by sight, and we are living our lives for Christ, who died for us.
That requires us to constantly reconsider what we are doing, and what our motivations are. Are we doing the right things … for the right reasons? Are we trying to impress people, or are we truly trying to live our lives for God’s approval, even at the risk of appearing foolish, even crazy?
We do not know what lies ahead of us. But we know who leads the way, and who is there to catch us when we falter. And until we reach our true heavenly homes, until we are, as Paul puts it, “at home with the Lord,” that’s all we need to know.