Trinity 2

Opening Verse of Scripture - 2 Corinthians Chapter 4

Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself.

Collect Prayer for the Day—Before we read we pray

Lord, you have taught us that all our doings without love are nothing worth: send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whoever lives is counted dead before you. Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Faithful Creator, whose mercy never fails: deepen our faithfulness to you and to your living Word, Jesus Christ our Lord.

First Bible Reading Deuteronomy 5.12–15

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Second Reading 2 Corinthians 4.5–12

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;  always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Gospel Reading  Mark 3.20–35

and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.’ And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, ‘How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

‘Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’— for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’

Post Communion Prayer

Loving Father, we thank you for feeding us at the supper of your Son: sustain us with your Spirit, that we may serve you here on earth until our joy is complete in heaven, and we share in the eternal banquet with Jesus Christ our Lord.

Commentary

Paul was an amazing man, probably the most influential person who has ever lived, apart from Jesus. He took the teachings of Jesus and he applied them to all people, not just Jews and he opened up the world to change. Without him the teachings of Jesus would have been confined to a sect within Judaism. Paul’s writings, or works associated with him, comprise half of our New Testament and they were written very soon after Jesus died, considerably earlier than the Gospels themselves. His Letter to the Romans has been the source of inspiration for the greatest theologians ever since, people like Augustine, Luther and Wesley.

Perhaps the most significant thing about him was how he changed. He began life as a proud top Jewish Rabbi with a zeal for pursuing the followers of Jesus. He believed that they had perverted Judaism and so he wanted them rounded up and brought to justice, which in his twisted mind meant that they were to be killed. The Book of Acts records that Paul was brutal and violent and believed he was doing God’s work when he dragged Christians off to prison to have them killed. (Acts 8:1). We can only guess what happened when on one of his trips to Damascus to hunt for more Christians he had an spiritual experience which suddenly and dramatically caused him to swap sides and turn from Christian killer to the leader of the mission to make Jesus know across the world.

He became accepted by the other Apostles like Peter and James the brother of Jesus and he was eventually given the mission to go to the Gentiles with the message that they could become Christians without any other trappings of Judaism. They did not need to be circumcised, eat kosher foods or follow the laws of Moses, in fact if they did so it was really bad because if they tried to keep the Jewish law and customs they were in effect saying that faith in Jesus was not sufficient on its own. The Holy Communion was the new Passover and Jesus was calling all and sundry into a new family, such as we read in our passage today from Mark’s Gospel.

Paul went about across the Mediterranean and he travelled over 13,000 miles on his missionary journeys. We know that he endured many years in prison, went through beatings and shipwrecks, and eventually he is believed to have been beheaded in Rome under the mad Caesar Nero who burned Christians as human torches. As he went around he frequently caused chao and public unrest as he met people and told them about Jesus. He was not a great orator and we know that he did not have an impressive appearance. in 2 Corinthians it is written
’his letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily appearance is weak and his speech contemptible.’ 

His Roman name was Paul, which means small ! Nevertheless God blessed his work and the Holy Spirit worked miracles through him as people accepted the message of Jesus from across the entire social spectrum.

He subsequently wrote letters to the Christian communities which he established as they struggled to make sense of their new found faith in the midst of their pagan cultures. we know he wrote at least seven of the letters attributed to him; 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon and Romans. There is considerable debate about the others but they are part of a body of material which we think of as 'Pauline', coming from his teachings. We know that he used a scribe to do his writings, he probably had poor sight because at the end of Galatians he writes ‘see what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand!’

However this outward appearance should not lead us to think of him as in any way weak. We know how effective he was as ruthless killer of Christians, when he changes sides his brilliant mind and strategy made him a strong advocate for the Jesus and the followers of ‘The Way.’ When he went to Athens, the place where Socrates had been forced to kill himself by drinking Hemlock when he had advocated foreign gods, Paul bravely argued with the philosophers and told them about God who they already had a statue for, described by themselves as the ‘Unknown God.’

He manged to literally work his way around the Roman world, using his craft as a tentmaker to earn money and engage with the people he met. As people saw in him the difference which the teachings of Jesus could make in a person’s life, they too believed in Jesus and conversions took place and Christian communities were established in the cities he visited. When he visited places like Corinth in our epistle reading today he came up against pagan cultures in which ethical values were completely the opposite of what Paul understood for the Christian life. Corinth is sometimes described as the Las Vegas of the time, but actually it made Vegas look tame. Corinth was a vice capital where worship meant visiting the huge Temple of Aphrodite which towered over the city with up to 1,000 male and female temple prostitutes. It was a busy port with all things associated with a cosmopolitan wealthy trading city full of people passing through. Paul had to bring the Gospel into this community and help the early believers to understand how differently the Christian was expected to live. In his first letter to them we read how he had to tell them that whilst sex was to be encouraged it was not OK for a man to live with his father’s wife. The new way of thinking and living was expressed by Paul beautifully in the passage from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 where he writes about love in a way which has arguably never been surpassed. It is amazing to think that he was not intending to write scripture, brilliant poetry, or systematic theology, he was just writing to particular churches which were having difficulties coming to terms with what it meant to be Christians in the first century. These churches were struggling because the only Bible they had was the Jewish scriptures which they had been told they could now take with a pinch of salt, ie no food laws, no circumcision, the old covenant was no more. Paul had to start setting some rules and apply the teachings of Jesus for people who were no longer Jewish and therefore no longer under the law which was now ‘a curse.’

Paul has not been popular with everybody since he wrote his letters. He struggled with what were difficult issues at that time and he acknowledges himself the fact that much of his/our thinking is a stab in the dark. He put it brilliantly when he used the expression ‘now we see through a glass darkly.’ Sadly small parts of his letters, written to specific problems at that given time have been used to justify for all time kinds of prejudice, from slavery to the suppression of women. We often don’t know what problems in the church lay behind instructions such as his direction for women in the church in Corinth to keep quiet. Clearly statements like these were meant for specific situations in particular places and not for all time! We know this because in other places Paul encouraged women like Prisca and Phoebe to be leaders in churches. Moreover we know that Paul was a man of his time and whilst behaviour like slavery was the norm in his day with no way of changing it, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that today Paul would have written very differently to churches. We do well to remember that this was a man who wrote to the Galatians (3:28) telling them that there sdhould be no discrimination 

'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.'

Charles Royden

Meditation

We know that Paul was a tent maker and in the passage from 2 Corinthians today he uses the very familiar metaphor of a tent to describe his body. He tells ‘my outward body is wasting away.’ We can only imagine how he felt after his punishing life of perilous journeys across rough seas when he was shipwrecked and when he was beaten and left in prison. His felt as though his bodily tent was worn out, the canvass was worn, the colour had faded, the strong tent pegs were missing and one or two ropes had frayed and broken.
His final years were lived awaiting his execution in prison. Here was a man who had every excuse to feel broken and defeated. But his words to us this morning are anything but a message of defeat. His is an upbeat message of hope and defiance. In the face of bodily disintegration he places his confidence not in the worn out tent of his earthly flesh but in God’s promise that after this life he will live not in a tent but God’s house. Bad things happen to us in our lives and among them is the gradual and inevitable disintegration of our physical bodies.

In Hebrews Paul’s reflects upon how faith keeps us going and having confidence in what we cannot see for now. He looks back on great men and women of God, who had set out for us an example of how to live. There were great spiritual giants like Moses and Abraham, but there were other less important people too like the prostitute Rahab. Paul reminds us that they endured physical struggles, some leading torture, imprisonment even being sawn in two. Then he speaks of the fact that God has something better planned for them. No old tents for them, they would be made perfect and even now they are alive with God and surround us like a great cloud of witnesses. This road we travel might be rough and steep but Paul knew better than most that the way get to the end was to keep our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12). Charles Royden

Hymns

• Earth rejoice, our Lord is King
• He who would valiant be
• Who would true valour see
• When Jesus walked upon this earth
• O God, by whose almighty plan
• Jesus, my Lord,
• In Christ there is no east or west
• God is love - his the care
• Father, we thank you
• And can it be
• All hail the power of Jesu's name
• Immortal invisible Tune St Denio
• Father God I wonder
• It is a thing most wonderful Tune Herongate
• In Christ there is no east or west Tune Kilmarnock
• Church of God elect and glorious Tune Lux Eloi

Prayers for Sunday and the week ahead

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