Who is Sufficient?

July 19 2020

2 Corinthians 2:14-17, 3:1-6

         My daughter Sarah has turned out to be quite a good seamstress which as I consider this I realize this is a rather odd thing. I mean, sewing is really a lost art anymore. It’s just one of those things that people just don’t seem to do that much of. Its kind of like when we made our own homemade strawberry jam, I wondered just how many people still do this. Now we froze it instead of canning it so if we had done so we would have been in an even more elite crowd. As I thought about things that are lost arts, I thought about letter writing. I can remember in elementary school how part of our writing lesson was learning how to write a letter. You had to include the date you wrote the letter, the address of the person you were writing to and then you had to have the right salutation, like “Dear, Sir or Madam”. Then came the body of the letter which was wrapped up by the closing. This of course was followed by your signature.  With the coming of e-mail and then of course, texting, all of this formality went right out the window. I mean when was the last time you wrote a letter to someone? The last time I wrote a letter was when I was part of the Kairos Team sharing the gospel behind prison walls. As part of the weekend that we spend with a select group of inmates, all the members of the Kairos team are required to write a letter to each of the eighteen inmates. Since the roster of the selected inmates isn’t finalized until the weekend begins, these letters have to be written in the evenings after we have spent our day in the prison. So its kind of intense to try and write eighteen letters in two evenings to have them ready to give to the inmates on Saturday afternoon especially when you haven’t even written any letters in like forever. What drives the men on the team to work hard at writing these letters is that we all know what these letters will mean to those who will receive them. Many of these inmates have no correspondence with anyone one on the outside. Many of their families disowned them when they were incarcerated. So for these guys to receive over twenty letters encouraging them to keep the faith in a God who loves them is a pretty powerful experience. Truth be told, this is why we write the letters so that these men realize just how much God loves them, just how much we, as their brothers in Christ, love them and in that realization begin to let their guard down and allow God to touch their hearts.

         This is the power of a letter. And another important aspect of a letter is that it is something that you can go back and read it again. The inmates who received those letters treasure them and when life starts to get to them they go and read them again and again to remember that there is a God who loves them and there are brothers in Christ who care about them. Knowing this then it is not hard to understand just why it was that Paul wrote letters to the churches that he loved. We often think of these works of Paul to be books but they should instead be thought of as letters from a pastor to his church. Or, using Paul’s own analogy, these are letters from a father to his children as Paul often writes that he is their spiritual father. Today we are beginning a message series from what is called the second letter to the church at Corinth. Corinth is a little town in the country of Greece close to the city of Athens. Here, Paul planted a church which was so very unlike churches to day because they had no central meeting place known as the First Church of Corinth at the corner of Main and First Street just off the square. No, this church was  a loose gathering of people who met every Lord’s Day in their homes where they would share a meal together as part of partaking in the ritual of the Lord’s Supper as you can read about in Pauls first letter to the church at Corinth in the eleventh chapter of that letter.

         The reason that Paul wrote his letters is that quite frankly, the church at Corinth was a mess. As the saying goes, there are no perfect churches and this church was no exception. So after Paul moved on from Corinth and word got to him about the problems at Corinth, Paul would write them a letter. Now, what we call the first letter to the church at Corinth was not actually the first letter because as we read in the fifth chapter, the ninth verse Paul had written them a letter previously. This letter that Paul references has unfortunately been lost.  Yet Paul was not the only letter writer because in the seventh chapter of this first letter, we read of how the church had also sent Paul a letter and Paul alludes to what they have written but again that letter has also been lost.

         We have similar issues with what we call the second letter of Paul to the church at Corinth because if you read this so called letter very slowly and carefully what you find is that this is not just one letter but rather it is four separate letters that have been pieced together. It seems that as these letters of Paul got passed around from house to house to be read at their gatherings, over time, these letters began to tear and fall apart. So in order to preserve them someone took and wrote them down in a new document trying to put all the fragments in some semblance of order. Well, they almost succeeded but not really.  If you want to read them in the right chronological order, you have to begin where we’re beginning today at the fourteenth verse of the second chapter and read through until the fourth verse of the seventh chapter. This is Paul’s third letter to the church at Corinth. His fourth letter to the church that he writes about in the fourth verse of the second chapter has been lost.The fifth letter though, we read from the first verse of the first chapter through the thirteenth verse of the second chapter and then we pick up the rest of that letter in the seventh chapter. Yes, the guy putting the pieces together didn’t always get it right. Finally, there is another letter Paul wrote to the church as an appeal for funds which is found in the eighth and ninth chapter and the final letter Paul writes is found in the tenth through the thirteenth chapter.  It all seems kind of confusing but I think that when you read the letters in order that they were written, they just make more sense because Paul often refers back to what he had written in his previous letter.

         All of which brings us to todays scripture. Right off the bat, Paul is thanking God for leading him in a triumphal procession.This sounds great doesn’t it, to be part of the victory parade until you do a little research and figure our just what is meant by a triumphal procession. These were kings who were returning from battle with the prisoners of war bound in chains being dragged before the chariot of the conqueror. These vanquished foes would be dragged through the streets in a public display as they were being taken to the Temple of Zeus to be sacrificed. When we realize the image that Paul is conveying here its not hard to want to believe that this cannot be what Paul meant. Down through the ages many commentators including John Calvin have changed the Greek wording so that it is Paul who is the victor. These commentators, like many Christians down through the ages want to have this image of being victorious. We certainly to not want to think of ourselves as those defeated, those bound in chains being dragged in the streets as a public display. Yet, I believe that this is exactly the image that Paul wants to begin his letter with. As Paul wrote in his letter to Rome, in the fifth chapter, we were enemies of God. As God’s enemies we had to be defeated by God. This is what Paul is getting at. Now just when we get our heads wrapped around this image of defeat, Paul abruptly changes his metaphors and he states that we are those who spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God everywhere. So we go from being a prisoner of war to a cologne salesman at a department store spraying fragrance on everyone who passes by. This fragrance is the aroma of Christ to God Paul tells us, among those being saved and among those who are perishing. To Paul then, the world is split into two factions, those who are being saved and those who are perishing.  This is also something we must stop and wrap our minds around. There are a lot of ways to divide up the world but to Paul it all comes down to people are being saved or people are perishing; there is no grey area only clear black and white. To each, the saving and the perishing, the aroma of Christ is breathed in but the affects of this aroma vary according to which group people find themselves. To those who are dying the fragrance just smells like death; to those who are living this aroma is the very scent of the living. This is an allusion to what Paul had written in his previous letter. In the first chapter of First Corinthians, Paul writes, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing but to us it is the power of God.” And further Paul writes, “For Jews means signs and Greeks seek wisdom but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” Here we begin to understand why Christ seems like sheer nonsense, something that could not be what life is about because to them Christ is something that trips them up, Christ is just stupid. Yet to the living, those who have found their life in Christ the more they are around Christ, breathing in his life, Christ like the air we breath is the power that gives us life.

         We have to wonder though just how does what Paul say here tie together? Is this just a bunch of random thoughts from the mind of Paul? Well, the way that Paul so often lays out his arguments I hardly believe that these are just random thoughts but instead there is a thread that connects them. This idea of fragrance and aroma, as Paul so well knew, is used in describing the sacrifices of the Temple. In the first chapter of Leviticus we read, “ The priest shall offer all of it and burn it on the altar; it is a burnt offering a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord”. As we said earlier, the triumphal procession ended at the temple of Zeus where sacrifices would be made. Here Paul is saying too that the triumphal procession of God also ends with a sacrifice. With this in mind it is not hard to recall what Paul wrote at the beginning of the twelfth chapter of Romans where we read “ I appeal to you therefore, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to the Lord which is your spiritual worship.” As we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, we put off the aroma of Christ who offered himself through the Holy Spirit as a sacrifice without blemish to God.When we live like this then Paul tells us people everywhere will begin to know who Christ is and what he is about. What the sacrifice of Christ reveals to the world, what our sacrifice reveals, is that real life is a life of putting no confidence in our flesh but finding our strength in the Spirit of God. This is why the sacrifice of Christ was without blemish because it was done through the power of the Holy Spirit as we are told in the ninth chapter of Hebrews. To live by the flesh makes us an enemy of God but when we experience his great love and mercy we crucify our flesh, the cross becomes our victory and our life becomes constrained by the chains of love.

         All of this we must understand as we come to Paul’s question of “Who is sufficient for these things?” This is a question that has echos of the call of Moses. In the fourth chapter of Exodus, when confronted by the call of God to go to Egypt and seek the freedom of the Israelites, Moses tells God that he is not sufficient as he had trouble speaking his whole life. God told Moses not to worry because God would open his mouth and give him what he needed to say. So to answer Pauls question as to who is sufficient, the one who is sufficient is the one who relies upon God to make them sufficient, the one who puts no trust in their own flesh to make them sufficient. It is here in Pauls letter that we begin to discover the problem being addressed by Paul which is that the church of Corinth had been visited by traveling preachers who were being paid by certain families of Corinth. The people of Corinth wanted to pay Paul like this but he refused which hurt their feelings. But the reason why Paul refused their money is for the very reason that he wanted the church at Corinth to know that his motives were pure. The reason why he was an apostle, a sent one of God, was that God had asked him to join him in his mission to save the world. This meant that he was therefore always accountable to God and when he spoke he spoke in the place of Christ. All of Paul’s ministry then was a Spirit thing. If Paul had accepted their money the ones who gave him the money might have thought Paul would have been their preacher. Paul could not forget that in his previous letter he had to address the quarreling going on in the church as some said that they were following Paul, some said that they were following Peter, some said that they followed Apollos and still others said they followed Christ. Paul had to admonish them this quarreling was of the flesh, a power thing to see who was the top dog and it just proved that they lacked the wisdom that comes through the Holy Spirit. Paul knew that this battle between the flesh and the Spirit was a constant one for the church at Corinth and this is why he refused to accept their money.

         These traveling preachers were not only being paid by people from the church at Corinth but they had gotten their foot in the door by flaunting their letters of recommendation. It isn’t hard to see that these letters of recommendation sure seemed like they could easily puff up the pride of these traveling preachers. Paul would have none of this business of letters of recommendation because as he told the church at Corinth they were his letter of recommendation. Paul’s love for them was engraved upon his heart and those who had encountered Paul would have heard about this church that he loved. They were a letter from Christ because it was Christ who had brought them into existence through the power of the resurrection.Christ wrote them into existence with the Spirit of the living God who had raised them from death, from being those who were perishing to create a new people who were being saved by that Spirit day by day. Paul knew that what made him sufficient for what God had called him to do was the power of God himself. Paul refused to rely upon the flesh but instead found his life in the Spirit of God.This was the beauty of this new covenant Paul lived under which was ratified through the blood of Jesus upon the cross. As Jeremiah wrote of this covenant in the thirty first chapter, this new covenant  was one where the law of God would be within God’s people; it would be written on their hearts. When Paul refers to the letter of the law he is speaking to the futile attempt of those who tried to keep the law through the power of their flesh. The law, as Paul writes in the seventh chapter of Romans is a spiritual thing but we are of the flesh, sold under sin. Further he writes that there is nothing good that dwells in him that is in his flesh for he had the desire to do what is right but he simply did not have the ability to carry it out. But now through the coming of the Spirit the righteous requirements of the law can be fulfilled in us. Who is sufficient to fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law? The one who is sufficient is the one who is relying fully upon the Spirit.

         So as Paul begins his letter, he begins with what is always the issue, this conflict between the flesh and the Spirit. The flesh, the way of this world, seeks its own way, its own rights, its own power and this makes the way of the flesh an enemy of God which must be defeated. The flesh must be sacrificed so that the Spirit can live in us and lead us in a way that our lives our fragrant with the aroma of Christ. The question only you can answer is this: Is the knowledge of Christ in you evident everywhere you go?Are you relying solely on God to make you sufficient to fulfill his calling on your life? Amen!