Sermon Audio
January 24, 2016 Septuagesima
The Imperishable Crown
Joshua 1:1-9, Psalm 20, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, St. Matthew 20:1-16
I went for a session with a personal trainer. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had an image of a Marine drill sergeant, a guy who has three modes, grunting, screaming and in-your-face.
Well, he introduced himself as Brian and he seemed rational. He didn’t spew saliva when he talked and he didn’t yell at all. He watched me run for a while and then he told me I was doing it all wrong. My problem, he said, was that like a lot of people I have a forward list. I don’t stand straight but lean. This was not a revelation for me. It has been a lifelong condition. My mother was concerned about it and took me to a doctor, shortly before I started school, as I recall.
He told her I had probably had a case of polio so mild it had not been diagnosed but serious enough to leave me listing a bit. I’ve never found this assessment entirely convincing, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason, I tilt.
Brian told me to stand straighter and run more softly. In other words, to come down with less impact. Simply by moving my head back I straightened my spine and found myself landing, not on the balls of my feet as before, but on the heels with the weight shifting forward onto the balls as I strode.
In no time at all I felt myself running much more softly, and that meant with far less effort. I could set the treadmill for 6 m.p.h. and cover the same time or distance as previously with less strain. The energy I had been pounding uselessly into the mat was now propelling me forward. He even gave me some lifts to do to straighten me out.
In my many decades on this planet I had been involved in a number of athletic pursuits and no one had called this matter to my attention. And in no time flat Brian had made me a more effective runner.
This picture leapt to mind as I read our epistle lesson for this morning: “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it.”
Sometimes we do the wrong things, or we do the right things in the wrong way, and we continue for what seems an eternity without correction. St. Paul is calling for our attention today.
Let me note here that as we begin the pre-Lenten season on Septuagesima Sunday that through Lent I will preach the epistle lessons the lectionary gives us. You can look them up and read and ponder them as each approaches.
In my younger days I never won a prize on the track and perhaps even with my improved technique I never will, but of course Paul is trotting out one of his frequent sports metaphors to exhort his readers to a disciplined spiritual life.
The Corinthians, the recipients of this letter, would have been especially appreciative of the imagery. Every other year, the Isthmian Games were staged about 10 miles from their city. In the ancient world, this spectacle ranked second only to the Olympic Games.
Paul, who spent many years in Corinth, may have attended the Isthmian Games and the events may have stimulated these sports analogies which he sprinkles through his letters. Some speculate that, because he supported himself in ministry as a tentmaker, he may have participated in stitching the many tents that sprawled across the site to house participants who came from the far corners of the empire.
The church at Corinth was especially troublesome for the apostle; as a result we have two of his longest letters addressed to it. Most of its members were gentiles, and many of them appear stuck in the pagan ways of old. The city was important for both strategic and commercial reasons, host to soldiers, sailors and merchants and awash in the pleasures of the flesh common in garrison towns and ports and trading centers. It was also the regional intellectual capital, home to philosophers and poets and those who prided themselves on their reasoning and debating skills.
Paul wants them to grasp that living the sanctified life demands putting away carnal pursuits and intellectual conceits. The Christian bears the Holy Spirit inside him, equipping him to understand the things of the spirit and to push down the appetites of the flesh. For a model, the apostle offers himself.
He has begun chapter 9 by defending his apostleship, which outsiders have called into question. Strange as it may seem to us, he appears to have come under attack for supporting his ministry with outside work, his tent-making.
In his world, free men did not ordinarily perform manual labor. And Paul was more than free; he was a Roman citizen. As such, it was particularly unseemly for him to make his living with his hands.
He argues that he does indeed have the right to live off of his labors in ministry. Either way, he must preach the gospel; it is his burden and his blessing. But he goes on to explain that the freedom he enjoys in Christ does allow him to expound the gospel without charge to those in the church.
Why would he do so? To make himself a servant to all. His mission is to win all he can to the saving message of the gospel, to the truth that resides in Jesus Christ . . . to Jew and Greek, to weak and strong, to soldier, sailor, merchant, debater and philosopher.
He will do this most effectively, he contends, by living off the income from his night job and offering the gospel in the role of servant rather than employee or professional: “Now this I do for the gospel's sake, that I may be partaker of it with you” (9:23).
He is both preacher and hearer, teacher and learner, apostle and follower.
Sometimes I amuse myself by speculating on how Paul would be received if he mystically re-appeared as a preacher of the gospel in our place and time.
Like his Master Jesus, he brings a message of radical discipleship, of unstinting devotion to God on high worked out through a stream of acts of love for God and man – for the two are inseparable.
Would this gospel that encountered so much resistance from church-goers fascinated with all the vain, shiny things of life in first-century Corinth find a more gracious reception 2,000 years later? Would churches that have been free to propagate the faith without persecution from repressive governments and hostile cultures rally to his cause?
In heaven, the Bible tells us, everyone worships continually. I do not take this to mean that everyone remains on his knees all day every day. I take it to mean that everyone’s constant disposition is one of worship. If Paul returned to preach on earth, I do not suppose we would cease to go about our everyday activities. But would an attitude of advancing the kingdom on earth become our constant disposition?
Would the faithful remnant shake off our self-satisfaction and fatigue and disappointment and lethargy and dedicate ourselves to mission? For that is all the church has ever been and all it will ever be until the Lord returns, a remnant, a sliver of the population at large.
In the days of the great flood, the Lord found only Noah and his family righteous enough to sow the seeds of a new creation. In the time of Sodom, Yahweh listened to Abraham’s pleas to save the righteous from destruction. Yet only Lot and his family escaped as the hellfire and brimstone rained down.
When Elijah prophesied, a mere 7,000 out of all Israel comprised the righteous remnant. Later, only a minority straggled back from exile in Babylon. We’re supposed to be aliens and strangers in the land, our citizenship located in heaven, awaiting that glorious day when our Lord transfers His throne to earth.
But doing what here? Not puffing ourselves up because we are among the chosen. Not biding our time here in frivolous, fruitless pursuits. Rather serving as His instruments to grow the faithful remnant one soul at a time so as to expand the community of worshipers of the King of kings.
I went through a brief period recently when I let my dauber down, the first such bout I’ve experienced in this work. I looked out week after week over a crowd of empty seats and wondered if my labors were of any avail. It occurs to me now, reading the apostle’s words, that our small numbers may be a blessing.
Now, I do not wish to deceive you. I would be glad of more fanny-filled seats. Church growth is good; it must be, many books are published on the subject. But in a church of hundreds or thousands it is easy to see oneself as part of a major force that holds sway in its context.
There is movement, meetings, activities. Is there purpose? I think of a cartoon showing two Martians looking down on earth on all the people scurrying about.
“What are they doing?” one asks.
“They’re going,” the other responds.
“But where are they going?”
“Oh, they’re not going anywhere. They’re just going.”
We must hope those large churches are more purposeful. Regardless of their size, they, too, are part of what is merely a remnant. The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. We, on the other hand, should have no trouble holding that truth in mind.
As we do, let us look to Paul for the meaning of what we do and why we do it . . . for our purpose. He is not pushing the discipline of the monastery: Pray seven times a day and build yourself up into a spiritual giant. With himself as model, he is preaching a Christian life lived out loud, among the masses so desperately in need of a Savior.
Here is the reason he exercises the rigor of supporting his ministry through outside work, of subjecting his body to the demands that keep it fit for service. His words pound with greater force in the original. To “contend for a prize” is from agonizomai, from which we get “agonize.”
To “discipline” the body is, literally, to “strike in the face, treat roughly, torment.” To bring the body “into subjection” is to “enslave” it. To be disqualified is to “fail to stand the test, be rejected.”
The dedicated athletes who competed in the Isthmian Games trained for 10 months in advance, during which time they were “temperate in all things.” They did not spurn only grossly harmful things like rich foods and strong drink; they avoided or moderated things that were acceptable for others, like late hours and distractions that would keep them from intense workouts.
The committed Christian, by the same token, should not be content with putting away from him the “serious” sins but must turn away as well from any conduct that compromises his ministry.
Paul makes his body the slave of his will. We can allow the body to thwart that will. We may wish to serve but discover ourselves unable for physical reasons because we have not treated our body as the temple of the Holy Spirit it is.
The apostle uses metaphor, but he intends his words in their literal sense as well. Like spiritual flabbiness, physical flabbiness may deter us from our Christian service.
How much ministry goes undone because Christians have not kept themselves fit for it – in the most basic sense of that word? I read an interview last week with J. I. Packer.
The renowned Anglican theologian, professor and author long resident at Regent College in Vancouver, B. C., has recently developed macular degeneration so severe he is no longer able to see well enough to read, write or preach.
He is 89, and he has no regrets. He is grateful that neither he nor his wife has suffered the dementia that has corroded the minds of so many friends in their age cohort. He is so near the end that he would have little productive time in ministry remaining even if his vision were not failing.
Above all, he is grateful for God’s sovereignty. The Almighty has equipped him for service lo these many years and now, in His time, He has taken away the faculty of sight so vital to Packer’s work. This has happened when it has happened because God has willed it to happen; thanks be to God.
Reading between the lines, I detect another thread, left unsaid. Over all those years of an illustrious career in the Lord’s service, he kept his body fit for that service. It was through the Lord’s sovereign will and not because of any neglect on the part of His servant that that body, nine decades on, has finally failed.
It is gloriously spent of all strength, used up in pursuit of the work he was given. Beloved, we cannot all be celebrated scholars but we can all be disciplined in nurturing and using the gifts our Lord gives us, including the gift of health.
What was the reward of those dedicated competitors in the Isthmian Games? Paul reminds that it was a perishable crown. This image would have struck his original readers like a wagonload of celery. The champions in those games won fame that spread throughout the empire but their immediate prize was a crown fashioned from withered celery.
Yes, a vegetable diadem. It sounds a little silly to us.
But what if it had been wrought in gold? The apostle’s point is that the rewards of this life have meaning only in the context of the next. If we are striving for glory for ourselves we can win crowns encrusted with jewels and we will have gained nothing more than a perishable thing.
If we burn off both physical and spiritual flab, train our bodies and bend our labors to grow the kingdom on earth, we win imperishable crowns we will wear in the eternal kingdom, in the presence of the King.
The Book of Revelation shows us our King arrayed in splendor: “Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and on the cloud sat One like the Son of Man, having on His head a golden crown, and in His hand a sharp sickle” (14:14).
Resplendent He is there, but we must not forget that before He took up that crown He wore another, a crown of thorns. If He could endure that crown for us, will we not bring our bodies into subjection that we might compete for the true prize – not the perishable but the imperishable, the one that proclaims that our time here has not been spent in vain? Amen.
The Imperishable Crown
Joshua 1:1-9, Psalm 20, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, St. Matthew 20:1-16
I went for a session with a personal trainer. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had an image of a Marine drill sergeant, a guy who has three modes, grunting, screaming and in-your-face.
Well, he introduced himself as Brian and he seemed rational. He didn’t spew saliva when he talked and he didn’t yell at all. He watched me run for a while and then he told me I was doing it all wrong. My problem, he said, was that like a lot of people I have a forward list. I don’t stand straight but lean. This was not a revelation for me. It has been a lifelong condition. My mother was concerned about it and took me to a doctor, shortly before I started school, as I recall.
He told her I had probably had a case of polio so mild it had not been diagnosed but serious enough to leave me listing a bit. I’ve never found this assessment entirely convincing, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason, I tilt.
Brian told me to stand straighter and run more softly. In other words, to come down with less impact. Simply by moving my head back I straightened my spine and found myself landing, not on the balls of my feet as before, but on the heels with the weight shifting forward onto the balls as I strode.
In no time at all I felt myself running much more softly, and that meant with far less effort. I could set the treadmill for 6 m.p.h. and cover the same time or distance as previously with less strain. The energy I had been pounding uselessly into the mat was now propelling me forward. He even gave me some lifts to do to straighten me out.
In my many decades on this planet I had been involved in a number of athletic pursuits and no one had called this matter to my attention. And in no time flat Brian had made me a more effective runner.
This picture leapt to mind as I read our epistle lesson for this morning: “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it.”
Sometimes we do the wrong things, or we do the right things in the wrong way, and we continue for what seems an eternity without correction. St. Paul is calling for our attention today.
Let me note here that as we begin the pre-Lenten season on Septuagesima Sunday that through Lent I will preach the epistle lessons the lectionary gives us. You can look them up and read and ponder them as each approaches.
In my younger days I never won a prize on the track and perhaps even with my improved technique I never will, but of course Paul is trotting out one of his frequent sports metaphors to exhort his readers to a disciplined spiritual life.
The Corinthians, the recipients of this letter, would have been especially appreciative of the imagery. Every other year, the Isthmian Games were staged about 10 miles from their city. In the ancient world, this spectacle ranked second only to the Olympic Games.
Paul, who spent many years in Corinth, may have attended the Isthmian Games and the events may have stimulated these sports analogies which he sprinkles through his letters. Some speculate that, because he supported himself in ministry as a tentmaker, he may have participated in stitching the many tents that sprawled across the site to house participants who came from the far corners of the empire.
The church at Corinth was especially troublesome for the apostle; as a result we have two of his longest letters addressed to it. Most of its members were gentiles, and many of them appear stuck in the pagan ways of old. The city was important for both strategic and commercial reasons, host to soldiers, sailors and merchants and awash in the pleasures of the flesh common in garrison towns and ports and trading centers. It was also the regional intellectual capital, home to philosophers and poets and those who prided themselves on their reasoning and debating skills.
Paul wants them to grasp that living the sanctified life demands putting away carnal pursuits and intellectual conceits. The Christian bears the Holy Spirit inside him, equipping him to understand the things of the spirit and to push down the appetites of the flesh. For a model, the apostle offers himself.
He has begun chapter 9 by defending his apostleship, which outsiders have called into question. Strange as it may seem to us, he appears to have come under attack for supporting his ministry with outside work, his tent-making.
In his world, free men did not ordinarily perform manual labor. And Paul was more than free; he was a Roman citizen. As such, it was particularly unseemly for him to make his living with his hands.
He argues that he does indeed have the right to live off of his labors in ministry. Either way, he must preach the gospel; it is his burden and his blessing. But he goes on to explain that the freedom he enjoys in Christ does allow him to expound the gospel without charge to those in the church.
Why would he do so? To make himself a servant to all. His mission is to win all he can to the saving message of the gospel, to the truth that resides in Jesus Christ . . . to Jew and Greek, to weak and strong, to soldier, sailor, merchant, debater and philosopher.
He will do this most effectively, he contends, by living off the income from his night job and offering the gospel in the role of servant rather than employee or professional: “Now this I do for the gospel's sake, that I may be partaker of it with you” (9:23).
He is both preacher and hearer, teacher and learner, apostle and follower.
Sometimes I amuse myself by speculating on how Paul would be received if he mystically re-appeared as a preacher of the gospel in our place and time.
Like his Master Jesus, he brings a message of radical discipleship, of unstinting devotion to God on high worked out through a stream of acts of love for God and man – for the two are inseparable.
Would this gospel that encountered so much resistance from church-goers fascinated with all the vain, shiny things of life in first-century Corinth find a more gracious reception 2,000 years later? Would churches that have been free to propagate the faith without persecution from repressive governments and hostile cultures rally to his cause?
In heaven, the Bible tells us, everyone worships continually. I do not take this to mean that everyone remains on his knees all day every day. I take it to mean that everyone’s constant disposition is one of worship. If Paul returned to preach on earth, I do not suppose we would cease to go about our everyday activities. But would an attitude of advancing the kingdom on earth become our constant disposition?
Would the faithful remnant shake off our self-satisfaction and fatigue and disappointment and lethargy and dedicate ourselves to mission? For that is all the church has ever been and all it will ever be until the Lord returns, a remnant, a sliver of the population at large.
In the days of the great flood, the Lord found only Noah and his family righteous enough to sow the seeds of a new creation. In the time of Sodom, Yahweh listened to Abraham’s pleas to save the righteous from destruction. Yet only Lot and his family escaped as the hellfire and brimstone rained down.
When Elijah prophesied, a mere 7,000 out of all Israel comprised the righteous remnant. Later, only a minority straggled back from exile in Babylon. We’re supposed to be aliens and strangers in the land, our citizenship located in heaven, awaiting that glorious day when our Lord transfers His throne to earth.
But doing what here? Not puffing ourselves up because we are among the chosen. Not biding our time here in frivolous, fruitless pursuits. Rather serving as His instruments to grow the faithful remnant one soul at a time so as to expand the community of worshipers of the King of kings.
I went through a brief period recently when I let my dauber down, the first such bout I’ve experienced in this work. I looked out week after week over a crowd of empty seats and wondered if my labors were of any avail. It occurs to me now, reading the apostle’s words, that our small numbers may be a blessing.
Now, I do not wish to deceive you. I would be glad of more fanny-filled seats. Church growth is good; it must be, many books are published on the subject. But in a church of hundreds or thousands it is easy to see oneself as part of a major force that holds sway in its context.
There is movement, meetings, activities. Is there purpose? I think of a cartoon showing two Martians looking down on earth on all the people scurrying about.
“What are they doing?” one asks.
“They’re going,” the other responds.
“But where are they going?”
“Oh, they’re not going anywhere. They’re just going.”
We must hope those large churches are more purposeful. Regardless of their size, they, too, are part of what is merely a remnant. The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. We, on the other hand, should have no trouble holding that truth in mind.
As we do, let us look to Paul for the meaning of what we do and why we do it . . . for our purpose. He is not pushing the discipline of the monastery: Pray seven times a day and build yourself up into a spiritual giant. With himself as model, he is preaching a Christian life lived out loud, among the masses so desperately in need of a Savior.
Here is the reason he exercises the rigor of supporting his ministry through outside work, of subjecting his body to the demands that keep it fit for service. His words pound with greater force in the original. To “contend for a prize” is from agonizomai, from which we get “agonize.”
To “discipline” the body is, literally, to “strike in the face, treat roughly, torment.” To bring the body “into subjection” is to “enslave” it. To be disqualified is to “fail to stand the test, be rejected.”
The dedicated athletes who competed in the Isthmian Games trained for 10 months in advance, during which time they were “temperate in all things.” They did not spurn only grossly harmful things like rich foods and strong drink; they avoided or moderated things that were acceptable for others, like late hours and distractions that would keep them from intense workouts.
The committed Christian, by the same token, should not be content with putting away from him the “serious” sins but must turn away as well from any conduct that compromises his ministry.
Paul makes his body the slave of his will. We can allow the body to thwart that will. We may wish to serve but discover ourselves unable for physical reasons because we have not treated our body as the temple of the Holy Spirit it is.
The apostle uses metaphor, but he intends his words in their literal sense as well. Like spiritual flabbiness, physical flabbiness may deter us from our Christian service.
How much ministry goes undone because Christians have not kept themselves fit for it – in the most basic sense of that word? I read an interview last week with J. I. Packer.
The renowned Anglican theologian, professor and author long resident at Regent College in Vancouver, B. C., has recently developed macular degeneration so severe he is no longer able to see well enough to read, write or preach.
He is 89, and he has no regrets. He is grateful that neither he nor his wife has suffered the dementia that has corroded the minds of so many friends in their age cohort. He is so near the end that he would have little productive time in ministry remaining even if his vision were not failing.
Above all, he is grateful for God’s sovereignty. The Almighty has equipped him for service lo these many years and now, in His time, He has taken away the faculty of sight so vital to Packer’s work. This has happened when it has happened because God has willed it to happen; thanks be to God.
Reading between the lines, I detect another thread, left unsaid. Over all those years of an illustrious career in the Lord’s service, he kept his body fit for that service. It was through the Lord’s sovereign will and not because of any neglect on the part of His servant that that body, nine decades on, has finally failed.
It is gloriously spent of all strength, used up in pursuit of the work he was given. Beloved, we cannot all be celebrated scholars but we can all be disciplined in nurturing and using the gifts our Lord gives us, including the gift of health.
What was the reward of those dedicated competitors in the Isthmian Games? Paul reminds that it was a perishable crown. This image would have struck his original readers like a wagonload of celery. The champions in those games won fame that spread throughout the empire but their immediate prize was a crown fashioned from withered celery.
Yes, a vegetable diadem. It sounds a little silly to us.
But what if it had been wrought in gold? The apostle’s point is that the rewards of this life have meaning only in the context of the next. If we are striving for glory for ourselves we can win crowns encrusted with jewels and we will have gained nothing more than a perishable thing.
If we burn off both physical and spiritual flab, train our bodies and bend our labors to grow the kingdom on earth, we win imperishable crowns we will wear in the eternal kingdom, in the presence of the King.
The Book of Revelation shows us our King arrayed in splendor: “Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and on the cloud sat One like the Son of Man, having on His head a golden crown, and in His hand a sharp sickle” (14:14).
Resplendent He is there, but we must not forget that before He took up that crown He wore another, a crown of thorns. If He could endure that crown for us, will we not bring our bodies into subjection that we might compete for the true prize – not the perishable but the imperishable, the one that proclaims that our time here has not been spent in vain? Amen.