Of Things Seen and Unseen

Sermon by James W. Crawford

April 26, 1997

From Second Corinthians 4, 5

Paul finds himself the butt of outright contempt. His antagonists in Corinth continue to heap abuse on him. They challenge his apostolic credentials; they ridicule his interpretation of the Gospel; they taunt his evangelism. Why? Because, in the first place, Paul is a stumpy, repellent figure. No one so ugly could represent the Divine, say his accusers. But more telling than Paul's sorry appearance, his detractors make hay out of the resistance he faces as he seeks to spread the Gospel. "Say, Paul," they sneer, "all those hardships you describe in defense of the Gospel; those beatings, the stonings, the shipwreck, the betrayals, the sleepless nights, robbery and starvation--say, Paul, do you think you'd be facing that kind of resistance if you were really spreading the Gospel? Don't you get the message? God's against you. Give it up. Leave the scene. Your ugliness and the obstacles to your progress prove your apostasy. Fraud! Failure! Fake!"

How does Paul defend himself? How does he deal with poverty and failure in the fight for the Gospel? How does he interpret his constant plight? He looks to the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. He sees at the Cross resistance not unlike the resistance he faces; he sees in the resurrection the vindication of what appears to be our Lord's failed ministry. He says, "That resistance and failure, that vindication and triumph holds for me too. Thus we do not lose heart." And Paul goes on to say that the troubles afflicting him are nothing compared to the future the Gospel promises for human life. They are but trifles, he writes, "because those of us in the service of the Gospel do not focus on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are temporary, whereas the things that are unseen are eternal."

I

I wonder. Where do you and I focus most of the time? Do we focus our

minds, our hearts on the seen or the unseen, the temporary or the eternal? When it comes to other people, for instance, what do we see: the visible or the invisible? the temporary or the eternal? simply what is there? or that they are children of God rooted in eternity?

I have not read the new book by Sheila Rausch Kennedy as she describes her efforts to hold off and now to reverse what the Catholic church calls the annulment of her marriage to Joseph P. Kennedy, II. I have read some interviews with her, one appearing in The Globe and another in The Timesthis week. And I know there are two sides to every story, but among other things in her story, one finds constant reference to her badly eroded self-esteem: her husband's putting her down, a harsh temper crushing her, a constant sharp insistence that she was, as she describes it, a "nobody." Sound familiar? It does to me. More than anything else, this sad self understanding walks into a pastor's office time and again. People who feel like mistakes, unlovely, unloved. Men and women down on themselves, suffering often from the myopia of others, the constant judgment, frequently, of a religious tradition beating them down, creating a crisis of self-confidence.

And what saves them? What saves us all? Well, I resist making it too simple, but understanding the eternal grounding of our lives is surely a beginning. Putting lives in eternal perspective can begin to make a change.

Rabbi Harold Kuschner tells of an encounter he had at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center two or three years ago. In the course of a series of lectures  Rabbi Kuschner is asked by a patient there, a thirty-two year old Episcopal Priest dying of AIDS, to come see him. Kuschner assents to the invitation, goes down the hall with the medic and meets this young man, as Kuschner says, "pale, emaciated, lying in bed hooked up to several intravenous tubes." Kuschner asks, "How are you doing?" The man replies, "Not too good. But I'm getting used to it." Kuschner then asks if the man somehow feels as if he's been brushed aside by God, locked out, diminished because of something in his character or behavior. The young man replies:

No, just the opposite. The only good thing that has come out of this is that I found out something I always wanted to believe is really true. No matter how much I may have messed up my life, God hasn't given up on me. I've felt his presence here in this hospital room. God can love me even when I find it hard to love myself.

He pauses to gather his strength before continuing.

When I was young. I thought I had to be perfect for people to love me. My parents gave me that message, threatening to withhold love every time I offended them. My teachers in school gave me that message. My Sunday school teachers reinforced that lesson. We didn't go to one of those hellfire and brimstone churches, but we heard a lot about how much pain we were causing God every time we sinned, and I think that was just as bad, especially given the list of things we were told were sins.

I tried so hard to be perfect so that my parents, my teachers, and God would love me. I probably went into the ministry in part so that people would think that I was morally perfect and love me for it. But every time I did something that I knew was wrong, and every time I told a lie to cover up for myself, I would hate myself for being such a phony, and I was sure that God was as contemptuous of me as I was of myself.

But lying here in this hospital bed, knowing I'm going to die soon, I had this insight: God knows what I'm like and God doesn't hate me, so I don't have to hate myself. God knows what I've done and he loves me anyway. I'll be leaving the hospital soon, not because I'm getting any better but because there's nothing more they can do for me and they need the bed for somebody they can help. I don't know if my congregation will take me back now that they know that I'm gay and I have AIDS and I am dying. I hope they will, because there's one last sermon I want to preach to them. I have to share with them the lesson my illness has taught me. You don't have to be perfect. Just do your best and God will accept you as you are. Don't expect your children to be perfect. Love them for their faults, for their trying and stumbling, even as our Father in Heaven loves us.

Oh, young man, you've got it! You have made a claim, not on the seen but on the unseen, the unfathomable and undying love of God reaching out for us, whoever we are, whatever our condition, indeed, however distant we may feel, eager to succor, to hold and to sustain us. Invisible, but real; unseen but eternal.

II

Setting our sights on the unseen, the eternal, means hanging on tight not only to the source of undying Divine love, but to the kind of human community promised by the Gospel. You will remember Paul writes his letter to a church in a cosmopolitan setting, an urban church: diverse, pluralistic, everyone with a different taste or clinging to a different truth. To that church in Corinth, Paul talks about a new age, a new community. He sees the breaking down of barriers among creeds, races, nations, genders as one of the gifts of the Gospel. "From now on," he writes in lines just following those we read a few moments ago, "From now on we regard no one according to worldly standards . . . If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. Everything old has come to an end, behold new things have come to be."

Heaven knows how we need keep our eyes open to the eternal as we press forward toward a reconciled world. I have been intrigued by President  Clinton's revived public commitment to racial justice and reconciliation. Apparently we are going to hear a lot from him this spring about dreams, plans and action for racial harmony in our country. And even as we gather here, another conclave convenes in Washington this morning described byNewsweek Magazine as General Colin Powell's "New War," his battle against what he sees as the greatest threat to the United States at the turn of the century. As Newsweek says to General Powell, "It's not NATO's eastern flank, it's not in Asia or anywhere outside our borders: The threat is young people who are disengaged from American life, who don't believe in the American Dream. . . many of them residents of our inner cities." And we know we are in trouble. We have read recently of the increasing resegregation of our schools in face of the assumption that in these circumstances, at least, separate cannot be equal. We have learned recently that a lethal public health experiment taking place fifty years ago, using Black men as guinea pigs, to this day produces fear and resistance among Blacks to what most of us consider life-saving public health measures. This week, the American Association of University Presidents, at the urging and with the leadership of President Rudenstein at Harvard, these university presidents made a public statement asserting and describing the unseen components of undergraduates making a university a dynamic place for learning, these components consisting not simply of quantitative test scores, but including differences of culture, world view, leadership qualities and potential, life experience--components necessary to consider as they come bundled in differences of race, or religion, or creed or gender all for the sake of a new world in the next century.

Can we keep our eyes on the reality of this eternal community as we tackle the divisions we create among ourselves? Can we live and work from unseen things amid the striving, the chaos and fissures of our own time? In the face of resistance and cynicism from so many quarters, can we sustain our hope for a world of justice and reconciliation?

"Yes," says Paul. In essence, he says, we dare not give in to cynicism. The resistance to our hope is but a trifling affliction in light of the glorious hope we pursue.

"Hope," Paul promises. Hope! What does it look like? Well, what with all the Kennedys in the news these last two weeks--and we have already referred to one of them--bear with me as we step through some of the fog and rubble and return for a moment to April of 1968. I would remind you of a gentle reflection delivered by Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis as he sought the nomination for President in a campaign ending with his assassination. Some of you will remember seeing and hearing this reflection almost thirty years ago this month. As described by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on that early evening of April 4, 1968, Kennedy stood on the back of "a flatbed truck in a parking lot under a band of Oak trees. . . It was a cold windy evening. . . and the wind blew smoke and dust through the gleam of the spotlights." People had been eagerly waiting his arrival. Kennedy began to speak. He said, "I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight." After a gasp and hush from the crowd, Kennedy continued:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of us who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States in not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer with our country, whether they be white or whether they be black . . .

We've had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult time in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life and want justice for all human beings to abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.

Amen, Robert Kennedy.

And so we close. How about it, as we encounter the challenges and opportunities of life, as we tackle the mandates and promises of living out the Gospel in our work, our family life, on the streets and in the life of this city, wrestling with choices, risking time, and money and self, can we stand with Paul secure in the Gospel hope, confessing with him, "I do not lose heart . . .this slight, momentary affliction prepares us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen; for what is seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal."