Proper 5, Year B 2024: 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

 There used to be a podcast called “Musical Splaining”. The idea was that one person who loves musicals and one who hates them watch live productions together and then talk about them. During Covid, they had to switch to recordings or movie adaptations, so they pretty quickly decided they’d watch one of the greatest movie adaptations of all time: The Sound of Music. They made it to the scene where the nuns disabled the Nazis’ car, helping the von Trapps’ escape which led the podcast hosts to try to figure out nuns. And the question presented was, “what do nuns do?” Now, nuns knowing how cars work made for a great moment of levity during the pretty heavy second act of The Sound of Music, but the broader question of “what do nuns do?” was puzzling these hosts. If you’ve seen The Sound of Music, you know that these are cloistered nuns - that is, they keep away from the outside world. And so the podcast hosts could not figure out what they do with their time. And the answer I offer is: they pray. And I don’t say that to be cheeky or glib. They live lives totally steeped in God. And one of the ways they do so is by living and working in community.

I have a friend who is a cloistered Dominican nun in Virginia. She has the gifts she brought with her to the monastery - she is an accomplished pianist and helps facilitate worship with that gift. But she has also acquired new gifts in her time at the monastery. She gardens. She cooks. Because there is no “cook” on staff. The nuns all cook for one another. They grow some of their own food. Because they know that being in service to God requires being in service to one another. They don’t believe that “prayer” is only sitting and talking with God. Prayer is service.

That kind of prayer changes lives. And then it changes the course of history. Service as prayer did so for St Pachomius. Pachomius is commonly regarded as the founder of coenobitic monasticism - that is, the form of Christian monasticism in which members live together in community rather than individually as hermits. Born to a pagan family in 292, Pachomius first encountered Christianity when he was imprisoned. The Christians of the city visited everyone in the prison, bringing them not only comfort, but food and supplies - neither of which the state considered their responsibility to give to those in prison. Pachomius asked the other prisoners, “Why are these people so good to us when they do not even know us?” The other prisoners answered, “They are Christians, and therefore they treat us with love for the sake of the God of heaven.” When he was released from prison, he was baptized and began to lead a life of manual labor, prayer, and care for the poor. In time, a community of people was drawn to Pachomius, and they organized themselves into a formal monastic community. By the time  Pachomius died, his monastic federation included several thousand monks and nuns, and within a generation the monastic movement spread from Egypt to Palestine, Turkey, and Western Europe. All because “I was in prison and you visited me...for just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”

In today’s epistle we see the second time in this chapter of Second Corinthians that Paul declares “we do not lose heart.” At the beginning of the chapter, Paul writes, “Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” One of the ways in which the church, the early church in particular, demonstrates this is by being God’s mercy. By being Christ’s body in the world and showing that the body of Christ, the representatives of God incarnate, cares about the earthly bodies of their neighbors. That they are not spending their time standing around, looking up to heaven but are instead looking around them, finding the Christ in those around them and the beauty of God’s beloved creation and taking the responsibility of caring for God’s beloved creatures upon their own shoulders.

Paul’s message and Jesus’s message today contain two sides of the same coin. Jesus remarks, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Paul is trying to keep the church he founded in Corinth from becoming that divided house. Paul is reminding the church in Corinth who are in conflict with one another that it is in coming together as a unified community that we are then able to focus on what we are called to do: bring the love of God to the world. And living and working in community can be hard. Conflicting passions can get in the way and obscure our vision of our mission. And before we know it we’ve dug our heels in and are discouraged.

Have you ever felt like you’re losing heart? I wonder if Paul felt like he was - after all, he wasn’t just instructing the Corinthians to not lose heart - his letter includes himself. He said we. And we have so many opportunities to lose heart. Not just by watching the news, but by looking at the world around us. You don’t have to look hard or far to find real suffering in the world.

How do we not lose heart? By looking at the world around us. By remembering that the world, which can seem so hell bent on destruction, is God’s beloved creation. God breathed Godself into this world in such a way that there is no part of it that is not steeped in God. But we can’t see it if we’re spending our time looking up to heaven. Nor can we see it by looking down, kicking the dust. But we can see it by looking outward. We were made to be together. In Genesis 2, after declaring each part of the new creation “good” in Genesis 1, God says, “it is not good that the man should be alone.” And ever since - we’ve been stuck with each other.

And from the birth of the church at Pentecost on, we’re stuck with each other all over again. We are messy and beautiful, selfish and generous, sinful and forgiven. Paul always wants us to remember that last one: sinful and forgiven. Paul is not minimizing our sins. Paul is not minimizing the challenges we face by living in the world. When he writes, “This slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure,” he does not mean, “these problems don’t matter” or that they’re silly or that his audience is just being dramatic. Paul’s focus is on the glory beyond measure. That we can have huge problems and we have a God who can make our home look like a tent when what we have from God is a “house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Later in Paul’s ministry, he articulates this better in his letter to the Romans where he writes, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:38-39) All of these things, all of these objectively huge things, have nothing on the love of God.

So we do not lose heart. We worship a God of hope in a world that needs hope. We follow a shepherd who seeks us out in a world full of people who are increasingly lost and lonely. We have a life-giving spirit that inspires us and gives us strength and vigor. We carry with us the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ in a world that is eager for some good news. And we have one another to lift each other up, to be in relationship with our community - our church family who are our brothers and sisters and mothers. A lot is made, in my generation, of  “chosen family”. The church is kind of like that, only more, because we center ourselves around Jesus. When we do that, at our best, we live the good news into God’s beloved creation. Amen.