The Weight of Glory

The Weight of Glory
A number of years ago, I preached at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of a Presbyterian church in an Ontario town. When I arrived that Sunday morning, my hosts took me down a hallway to the minister’s study where I was to don my formal ministerial garb for the service. The hallway was lined with a Rogues’ Gallery of photos of former ministers. They stopped by the oldest photo in the gallery and asked me, “Does that photo look a little odd to you?”
Indeed it did! In fact, it was almost as bad as the photo on my driver’s license (which makes me look like an axe murderer.) In the photo the minister was slumped over in a chair and his eyes were closed. This was the minister in the late 1840’s and 1850’s who died in about 1860, they told me. Apparently, the minister’s wife was fascinated by the then new technology of photography and constantly urged her husband to have his picture taken.

And her husband, stubborn old Scot that he was, just as steadfastly refused. I can almost hear his voice. “Vanity!” he declares in his Scots accent, “Nothing but vanity! And maybe worse. It’s a graven image, Idolatry!” Being a Scots Presbyterian, there may have been yet another factor, “It’s too expensive.” And so it went on, year after year.
Then in about 1860, the minister was digging in his garden, certainly not on the sabbath, had a stroke or heart attack, keeled over and died. His wife dragged him into the house, dressed him in his clerical collar, bands and gown and propped him in a chair. Then she sent for, not the doctor or the undertaker… but rather… the photographer!
One lesson I could take from this little tale is that ministers’ wives get their way in the long run! But, more seriously, the man was dressed for church but there was no life. All dressed up but no life. I would like to speak this morning about the life we find in church.
I intend to use to pay special attention to a verse from our reading this morning, 2 Corinthians 4:17: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
I am feeling a little intimidated by preaching on this text. There is a sermon by C. S. Lewis, called “The Weight of Glory”, which is deservedly famous and still read. I suspect that many of you here have read C.S.Lewis and some of you may even have read that sermon. You can find it on line, if you like. But I want to take a slightly different direction.
In our passage from Paul’s second letter to the troubled church in Corinth we hear again and again pairs of opposing realities. It is as if Paul is saying repeatedly “On the one hand but on the other.”
We are afflicted in every way but we are not crushed.
On the one hand we are perplexed but on the other not driven to despair.
We are persecuted. but not forsaken.
We are struck down but not destroyed.
So death is at work in us but life and you. On the one hand life and on the other, death.
So we do not lose heart. Our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. Outer nature, Inner Nature. You hear the pairs of concepts.
We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen.
What can be seen is temporary but on the other hand what cannot be seen is eternal and so all this being true, “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.” On the one hand and on the other. All the pairs are facets of two realities.
You hear this pair: Slight momentary affliction, eternal weight of glory.
As you might expect, after all those opposing and parallel pairs, I want to say two things this morning.
The first is that suffering is real and often extraordinarily painful. To be really honest, it often doesn’t feel either slight or momentary. The Apostle Paul knew this, for he had his share and more than his share of troubles. He lists some of them for us:
“Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food,[e] cold and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the Churches.” II Corinthians 11:23-28. He also had a chronic ailment, probably physical, so painful that he called a “thorn in the flesh.” (One of my professors thought it might be a problem with his eyes. Talk to me after church if you want to hear more about this.)
And Paul is not the only one. You will certainly meet at some point soon, perhaps today, a person who is suffering. Or, there will be people in this very room who are afflicted in a variety of ways. I expect that just about everybody sitting here this morning could tell their own tails suffering and pain. In a single day recently neighbour in Toronto shared with us that she had experienced multiple miscarriages. The same day we heard of a woman, the mother of young children, just lost a husband to cancer. And the stories could be multiplied. In fact, I suspect that everyone of you here today could tell me stories about afflictions.
May I tell you a personal story? My father was ordained and began his ministry in First Presbyterian Church, Trail, British Columbia, in the war-wearied but hopeful spring of 1945 . Giving the congregation and the community, the name “First Presbyterian” was surely a sign of wild optimism. (Even Presbyterians can be optimists!) It’s very hard to imagine that there will ever be a Second Presbyterian Church in that town. Trail is located in the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia, on the banks of the Columbia River, just before it flows into Washington State. The Kootenays in that region are not spectacular crags and castles of stone like the Rockies or the Cascades. They are steep, jumbled, and covered with forest–but not near Trail. In those days the pollution had all but stripped the hills bare of vegetation, something which, I’m glad to say, is no longer true. At that time Trail was the worst point source of pollution in North America, all because of the giant smelter that is to this very day the town’s main employer. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pollution were the root cause of the saddest part of this story.
First Church was probably healthier than the vegetation but perhaps not by much. It did not even have a manse to offer their minister, and my newlywed parents lived in a small apartment by the riverside. Life was not easy for them. They were on what is euphemistically called “minimum stipend” in the Presbyterian Church which is church talk for “not much.” But that was in truth the least of their problems. Their first child, a son named Paul, had been stillborn. Their second child, an infant daughter, Alana, was dying. She had been born with a hole in her heart, something that could be surgically repaired now but not in the Kootenays, not in the forties. My mother has told me that the baby cried and cried and nothing they could do would comfort her. “Sometimes I can still hear her cry,” said my mother. To make matters even worse, if that was possible, my mother had been terribly ill and was only slowly recovering from typhoid fever. Hard times indeed!
“Sometimes I can still hear her cry,” said my mother. For her, the affliction was not temporary nor was it light.
A little more to finish the story: Just at that time my father decided to preach a sermon on the little story of Martha and Mary hosting Jesus. Dad told me that he let Martha have it, right between the eyes, with a homiletical two by four. Why didn’t she have the sense to sit down and listen to Jesus? How dare she try to drag her sister away to the kitchen! Why did she think Jesus wanted another casserole rather than a disciple willing to listen to him? It was tough stuff, bluntly spoken. When the sermon was over, Dad took off his preaching gown, hung it in the closet and dragged himself off to the little apartment with the sick wife and the dying child.
Sitting at the door of the apartment was a casserole. On the casserole was a note. All that it said was “From Martha.”
Dad said to me, “I never preached that sermon the same way again.” Don’t hammer Martha for wanting to care for Jesus needs. It’s very possible to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. So don’t just say to people who are suffering, “oh, while this is merely momentary and temporary and slight.”
Be careful how you use this verse. Please, be careful about how you speak to people with afflictions. Above all, don’t quote this out of context to a suffering person.
Nothing is light or momentary about afflictions except… in comparison to the coming glory. Sufferings are real. They are light only when compared to the weight of glory. That only,
The second thing I want to talk about has to do with that word “glory.”Now, glory belongs to God alone. But here is the second and more important thing I want to say about our Bible reading:
I can hardly believe it but it looks as if God means to impart some share of that glory to us. He is “preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
Paul knows that sorrow and suffering are not the last word in life. It is God’s intention to give us new life in the end. And moreover to share with us in that life some of his glory. Now this is quite amazing to me for again and again in the Bible it is said that glory belongs to God not to us. We generally think that the word glory in the Bible means a bright and shining light in the Christmas story for example we read “glory of the Lord shone round about the shepherds than they were terribly afraid.” Or it simply means honour. We pray regularly, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”
These ways of understanding the word glory are not wrong, but I think there is a deeper root meaning behind them. The word glory in the beginning was used to translate the Hebrew word Kabod. And that word means, “weight.” To give God the glory means that God has weight.
If you think about it, we still use the word in a related way. We say, “Oh, her opinion carries weight. Or… He’s a heavyweight.” This doesn’t mean that these people need to go on a diet. It means that they matter, that we should pay attention to what they say, because their words carry weight. Some of us are old enough to remember when excited hippies would say about something wonderful, “Heavy, man Heavy!” To give God the glory means something very similar, to say to God “Heavy!” It means that God’s word carries weight in our lives. It means that God, not the American president, nor the Chinese Secretary, nor the richest billionaire in the world, is the true heavyweight in our universe. God is.
But Paul says that in the eternal life we will be granted and experience some of God’s glory. “Eternal” is a matter of quality not just extent of time. Eternal life is, literally, life of the age to come. Life in the age to come has some of the quality of God’s own glory shared with us.
Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on what happens to us after death. But all this makes me recall an episode from much earlier in my life.
In 1975-76 I served as a student intern into small coal mining town of Montgomery, West Virginia. One of my responsibilities was to visit an elderly lady in the congregation. She was at that point in her 90s, was very pious, and spent her time thinking about heaven. One day, she said to me “Stephen, heaven will have airplanes!” I was taken aback, and fell back on the tactics of the incompetent minister. I quoted Scripture at her, “Eye has not seen nor ear heard the things that God has prepared for those that love him.”
She responded, “I think heaven will contain the best of what we know and experience in this present life. In my life the most wonderful thing was the invention of the airplane. There will be airplanes in heaven.”
Now I have no idea whether there will be airplanes in heaven. But I think I understand what the lady was getting at. We can only describe the indescribable, what is to come, in terms of what we now know. And in general, when the Bible speaks about heaven, and that is not often the case, to be honest, it does use the best of what we know. In the Bible it is not airplanes of course; the most vivid picture of what we know is that of a family feast. Heaven is like a great feast, the kind of family feast we may celebrate here in Muskoka, but even more meaningful in a society as in Biblical times in which people lived under the constant fear of famine. But our passage is an exception it does not speak about everyday things that we know now. It speaks about glory. This is the promise; that God will share glory with us.
I remember another older lady.
Grandma Peterkin was an elderly lady in my boyhood congregation. Life had not been easy for her. Grandma had experienced her share of afflictions. Her husband had passed away and her only son went down with a torpedoed merchant vessel in World War II. She lived with Mrs. Bennett, her only daughter. Grandma Peterkin adopted a grandmotherless boy in that church. She cared for him, asked after him, followed his development with interest and above all, prayed for him. When he decided to become a minister and went away to seminary, she wrote him the most beautiful and loving letters. (You know the name of the boy. I wish I had been wise enough to keep those letters.) One day when he was studying in England, a letter came from the familiar address but in different handwriting. The young man knew what the letter would say even before he opened it and indeed he had guessed correctly. Mrs. Bennett was writing to say that Grandma had died. It happened this way: Mrs. Bennett was awakened in the night by a noise from Grandma’s bedroom. She had knocked on the door, entered and asked,
“Mother, is everything all right?”
And Grandma replied, “Oh yes dear, I’m just dying.”
She who believes has eternal life and has passed from death to life. The one who lives now in the age to come will continue to live in the age to come, even through death. The afflictions pass away and the long awaited glory alone remains.
“This slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”