Consolation in Affliction

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a time of Isolation
The online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

12^th July 2020

2 Corinthians 1.1-11

Listen to this sermon here: 

After five weeks preaching through the book of Job,

            you could be forgiven for thinking that it might be time

            to move on from subjects such as suffering and affliction.

After all, surely we’ve served our time staring down disease and disorder,

            and now it’s time to move on, to a happier message?

Let’s leave Job in the Old Testament where he belongs,

            and set our sights on the Good News of Jesus Christ!

Let’s get back to business as usual

            and put the time of difficulty behind us.

Except, of course, it’s never that easy.

            The human condition even at its most joyful

                        is still tinged with both the memory and expectation of tears.

            While some celebrate, others mourn.

I’m sorry, let me start this sermon again.

After sixteen weeks of lockdown,

            you could be forgiven for thinking that it might be time

            to move on from subjects such as the virus and death-rates.

After all, surely we have served our time staring down disease and disorder,

            and now it’s time to move on, to a happier message?

Let’s leave COVID in the past where it belongs,

            and set our sights on the good news of the new normal.

Let’s get back to business as usual

            and put the time of difficulty behind us.

Except, of course, it’s never that easy.

            Even Saturday night in Soho at its most joyful

                        is still tinged with both the memory and expectation of tears.

            While some celebrate, others mourn.

And so we come to Paul’s fourth letter to the Corinthians,

            where he offers a Christ-centred message of consolation

                        to those living with affliction.

But before we get into that,

            you may have noticed that I just called this Paul’s fourth letter to the Corinthians;

                        and those who have been coming

                        to my Monday evening Biblical Studies Masterclasses will know why.

The fact is that we don’t have the whole of Paul’s correspondence

            with the church in Corinth.

The letter we call ‘1 Corinthians’

            makes mention of a previous letter, which is now lost (1 Cor. 5.9),

            and this makes 1 Corinthians the second letter Paul sent to Corinth.

Then when we get to 2 Corinthians,

            we find a reference to it being a follow-up

                        to a previous letter that was written with,

                        ‘much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears’ (2 Cor. 2.4),

            which certainly doesn’t sound like 1 Corinthians.

So we think there is another lost letter

            between what we call 1 Corinthians (which is actually the second letter)

            and 2 Corinthians (which is therefore the fourth letter).

I’m afraid it’s even more complicated than this,

            because scholars also think that 2 Corinthians is a combination

                        of Paul’s fourth and fifth letters,

            with the break coming between chapters 9 and 10,

                        but we don’t need to worry about that at the moment.

Anyway, back to chapter 1,

            where Paul begins his letter in fine pastoral form

by offering the Corinthians a message of consolation

            in their experience of affliction.

If you know anything about the Corinthian church,

            you will know that it was a far-from-straightforward congregation,

as it tried to bring together

            both gentile and Jewish converts to Christianity.

It seems that despite Paul’s various visits and previous letters,

            the church was still afflicted with fractured relationships,

not only between themselves

            but also between themselves and Paul.

And Paul’s purpose in writing to them again

            is to try and overcome the shattering of their relationships.

He sets out to achieve this with a piece of slightly convoluted theological logic,

            which runs something like this:

Firstly, Jesus was crucified as a result of human conflict,

            and the cross speaks powerfully of conflict leading to broken relationships,

            leading in turn to violence and death.

Secondly, the cross is not the end of the story,

            because God is a God of new life;

and the resurrection of Jesus offers a vision

            of God refusing to let human conflict write the terms of the future.

Therefore, the gospel of resurrection stands over and against

            all the damage that human beings do to each other

                        in their lives of conflict and violence,

            and continually calls us to a better way of being human together.

So, by this logic, Christ’s death on the cross,

            his ‘affliction’ at the hands of violent humans,

becomes a source of good news for anyone

            who finds themselves caught in spirals of conflict;

because the resurrection of Jesus

            opens a new way of relating together,

where it is life and not death that gets the final word.

This, then is the consolation in affliction that Paul speaks of:

            the good news that there is a future open to us in Christ

            that is not dominated by conflict and death.

So, for the Corinthians

            whose experience of life was seemingly one of perpetual conflict,

Paul is here opening a door

            to a path of peace and reconciliation.

He is showing them that in their arguments and difficulties,

            they are actually united with Christ in his suffering on the cross;

and that just as Christ shares their experience of brokenness,

            so too they can share in the reconciliation

            that is made possible through his resurrection.

So far, so good:

            We are united with Christ in affliction,

            and we will be united with him in consolation.

But Paul doesn’t leave it there:

            The good news of the possibility of new life,

                        in place of conflict and death,

            is not the end of the good news of the cross.

Paul goes on to say that the consolation in affliction

            that is on offer to the Corinthians

            is only the start of the good news.

The next stage is that all who are afflicted with conflict

            and consoled in Christ

            are called to pass on that consolation to others.

In other words, it’s not just

            that Christians are called to stop fighting each other,

but they are called to be a force for peace and reconciliation in the world too.

The Jewish scholar Jon Levenson captures this

            in his little phrase that, ‘the chosen are called to serve’.

And this roots Paul’s argument right back

            into the Jewish understanding of itself as the chosen people of God.

The children of Abraham are the heirs of the covenant

            that God struck with Abraham:

                        that they would be God’s people,

                        and God would be their God.

But the purpose of the covenant was never intended to stop there:

            the blessings experienced by the people of God

            were always intended to be a blessing for all the nations of the earth.

And this is Paul’s great conviction:

            that the people of God,

                        whether understood as the Jewish people of the second temple period,

                        or the new communities that he founded

                                    where Jews and Gentiles are joined together in Christ,

            the people of God

                        are not to keep the blessings of God to themselves.

If they have any consolation in Christ,

            it is only theirs so they can share it more widely.

If they are united with God through Christ’s death and resurrection,

            and released from lives of conflict and violence against themselves or others,

            it is only so that they can see others similarly reconciled.

And so we come to the church of Christ in our time.

            We aren’t Corinth, but we are Bloomsbury.

We don’t have the same issues that beset Corinth,

            but we do have our own.

And Paul’s challenge is as every bit as relevant to us

            as it was two thousand years ago.

We too need to hear that God is a God of resurrection,

            and that Christ meets us in the depths of our brokenness

to open a door for us to a life lived in reconciliation and forgiveness,

            rather than one dominated by guilt and sin and conflict.

Christ is our consolation in our affliction.

But we too have to hear the next part of Paul’s logic,

            which is that this is only the start of the story.

We have a calling to bring that message of consolation,

            that encouragement of reconciliation,

to those who are not yet and probably never will be

            part of our worshipping congregation.

And the key to this for us will be the same as it was for the Corinthians:

            we are called to set aside any hint of partisanship,

                        to give up our dreams of moral or spiritual supremacy,

            to distance ourselves from fantasies of the Christian country.

And instead to discover the healing depths of genuine relationship

            with people who may start from very different places to us.

From broad based partnerships such as London Citizens,

            to localised community groups in our neighbourhoods,

our peaceful reconciling presence

            can be deeply transformative of lives and communities.

And what we will discover, I am quite sure,

            is that God is already at work out there

                        in a world that is hurting, and grieving, and fractured, and broken,

            drawing people to reconciliation and new life.