IN CHRIST
2 Corinthians 5:14-17
A Sermon byThe Reverend Jim Lockwood-Stewart

This morning’s reading from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth bears in many ways the crowning promise of Paul’ own spiritual journey.  He said, “If anyone is in Christ Jesus, that person is a new creation.  The old has passed away, the new has come.”  For Paul entering into the power of Christ changed everything in his life.

He didn’t say if anyone believes the right things about Jesus.  He didn’t say if anyone acts the right way … he said if anyone is in Christ Jesus … that person is a new creation.  That remains our invitation and God’s promise.
“If anyone is in Christ Jesus, that person is a new creation.”

For two thousand years Christians have been preaching about a new creation … and yet so much of the church’s life … so much of our own lives … seem to be caught up in old ways … so much of our lives seem more enslaved than freed, more weary than reborn, more desperate than hopeful.

I saw a cartoon once that showed a scowling preacher looking out from the pulpit and saying “This is my fourth sermon on the transforming power of the Gospel.  Why do you look like the same old bunch?”

As a presidential candidate Barack Obama touched more than political disillusionment with the slogan “change we can believe in.”  He touched the deepest yearning of the human spirit … transformation … a new creation. We want to be people of hope  … of rebirth … of new life.

The New Creation in Christ is the promise of a new, different, transformed way of being in the world.  It is reconciliation and wonder, forgiveness and restoration, reunion and ultimately resurrection in stark contrast with their opposites … estrangement and boredom, vengeance and isolation, division and death.  What is this new creation?  We can’t capture it by definitions … but we begin to understand it through images and experiences.

The first thing we can see about the old way of things is estrangement and  alienation.   We can talk about in terms of nationality … in terms of race … in terms of age, of sexual identity, of economic status, of religion … we are a divided people. Living fragmented lives, we become slaves to our fears, we remain driven by our prejudices.  Yogi Berra said, “What gets us in trouble is not what we don’t know.  It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The new creation promises a life in which, loving ourselves, we are drawn, in love, to our sisters and our brothers.  The new creation in Christ draws us into a universal spirit that challenges the easy assurances of partial views.  I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper sticker … I saw it again yesterday … “Don’t believe everything you think.”  It is the closed mind that is broken open by the new creation.  It is the closed heart that is softened and transformed.  Christ’s barrier-breaking love reunites us with the whole family of God … and, in reconciled and restored relationships, our own spirits become whole again.

The new creation also has to do with understanding and sensing our connection with the wonders of creation.  Pioneering ecologist Rachel Carson wrote a book titled The Sense of Wonder.  In it she said,

        A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.  It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is         dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  If I had influence     over the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child I the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Reverence for the wonders of the natural world and a renewed attentiveness to things that are essential rather than artificial are a part of coming alive, of living in Christ as new creation.  In his book Geo-Justice: A Preferential Option for the Earth, James Conlon said, “Where there is no vision we lose the sense of our greater power to transcend history and create a new future for ourselves and others.”

The new creation means allowing ourselves to be claimed once again by our Source, sensing once again that there is a broader, higher, deeper claim upon us that we call divine .. the essence of which is holy … in the presence of which the only possible response is wonder and awe.

When we sense this elemental fact about ourselves … that we are all part of one family, that we are all  “Children of God” together, a future filled with possibility and promise begins to appear to us.

There is so much that we don’t like … about our selves let alone others.  How often have you heard someone say, or said yourself, “I’m my own worst critic.”  We’re hard on ourselves.  We divide ourselves into the things we like … and the things we don’t like. We get so caught up in the brokenness of affirming and denying, loving and hating, that we become immobilized.  Sister Corita painted a serigraph that proclaimed, “To believe in God is know that there is someone who knows you through and through, and loves you still and all.”  We all stand in need of some transformations … physical, mental, spiritual … but the starting place is in the courage to claim and celebrate our whole selves.  And that courage finds its source in the wonderful assurance of God’s love.   

Finally this new creation in Christ is resurrection.  It’s not just improvement … not just growth … it’s rebirth.  It’s life when all we could see was death. New creation means that new life is offered as a recurring promise.  As Karl Barth once put it … “In Christ it’s never a logical ‘therefore.’  It’s always a miraculous ‘nevertheless.’”  

Paul Tillich writes:

        The word “resurrection” has, for many people, the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images.  But resurrection means the victory of the New state of tings, the New      Being born out of the death of the Old.  Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and        tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time.”

“If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation.”   That is the truth which we continually claim and re-claim, not as a boast, or as a source of religious pride, but as an eternal blessing.  It is the invitation to be reconciled to God, to be restored to reverent wonder as a part of the community of all of life.  It is the call to be reunited … with our whole selves and with the whole human family. And it is the promise of resurrection … of life that is constantly being reborn.  Let us pray,

        O God, who makes all things new, claim us this day.  Hold us with loving hands so that we might truly love ourselves and, loving        ourselves, might find the wisdom and courage to love each other,        and so be instruments of your New Creation.  We pray it in the name and in the spirit of Jesus.  Amen.