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Let us pray.

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Your word, O God, is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

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So as we hear your word this morning, God, we pray that you would show us your light.

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Amen.

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Our second reading is from Paul's other letter to the Corinthian church,

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2 Corinthians, chapter 4, starting with verse 5.

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Let us listen together now for God's word to us.

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For we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord,

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and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake.

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For it is the God who said, Light will shine out of darkness,

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who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

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But we have this treasure in clay jars,

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so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God,

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and does not come from us.

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This is the word of the Lord.

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Thanks be to God.

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One of the results of the English Reformation was the creation of the Westminster Confession,

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which for a long time was the central statement of faith for the Presbyterian Church

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here in the United States, as well as other denominations and Presbyterian bodies in the world.

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It grew out of an assembly that met in the 1600s at Westminster Abbey in London.

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The Westminster Assembly came together in 1643, and as they began their work together,

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it was theologians and church leaders and pastors gathered together,

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one of them stood up and asked this question, What is God?

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And no one was immediately willing to answer, so they decided to ask the youngest one among them to answer first.

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Probably a sign not of humility, but of spite or punishment or something.

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So, George Gillespie, poor soul, 30 years old,

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Scottish minister, happens to be the youngest among them, he stands up and he says to them,

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I need God's wisdom. Will you join me in prayer?

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And then he prays with these words,

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Oh God, thou art a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable,

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in thy being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

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And someone there had the presence of mind to pick up a pen and to write down these words as they were being prayed.

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But as you might know, and as Presbyterians know very well, when something gets written by a committee,

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it never stays in its purest, most elegant form.

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It grows, sometimes it metastasizes.

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And such was the case here.

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These simple, beautiful, honest words, by the time they make their way into the Westminster confession itself, have become these.

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There is but one only living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection,

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a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible,

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almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, I'm not even halfway done,

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working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory,

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most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving, iniquity, transgression and sin,

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the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments,

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hating all sin and who will by no means clear the guilty.

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The fourth great end of the church, the fifth one in our series, thanks to Bill, who mixed everything up on us,

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is the preservation of the truth.

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And this sounds an awful lot like what the Westminster assembly was doing.

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Here is a Christian body needing to define for itself what it believes and for the church that it is forming.

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And so it states its faith clearly, it sets out the markers of truth, and it aims to preserve that truth.

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This is probably pretty close to what Presbyterians in the United States had in mind

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when they added the great ends of the church to our constitution, and among them the preservation of the truth,

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that it is the church's duty to take the truth that we have received, that we have inherited, and to safeguard it,

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to preserve sound doctrine.

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And I would guess it probably also lines up pretty well with what many outsiders believe about the Christian church,

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that we gather together in our sanctuaries to fine-tune and perfect proper belief

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so that we can tell the difference between who belongs and who doesn't.

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Now we could certainly adopt this attitude and even understand it to be central to our purpose and our identity,

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and many Christian bodies throughout history have done so, and many today still do.

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It's not a hard view to imagine that there is divine truth, absolute truth,

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that this truth has been revealed to us and that over the centuries we have carefully developed

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a proper understanding of the truth, and having developed that proper understanding,

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it is now our sacred task to preserve it, to guard it from heresies within,

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to shield it against godlessness from the outside, and to make the church a fortress,

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a keep, the world is a threat to the truth, an enemy to the truth that needs to be convinced, converted, conquered.

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All of this sounds very much to me like what it would look like to preserve the truth.

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There's something easy about this, there's something comforting about this.

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We like the clarity, the certainty, we like firm lines and sharp distinctions,

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but does it sound to you like the church of Jesus Christ?

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The apostle Paul says, we have this treasure in clay jars so that it may be made clear

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that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

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The treasure he's speaking of is the truth of the gospel,

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which he had just said in verse 2 of that chapter which we didn't read.

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The treasure is the truth. He says it is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

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And the clay jars, well that's Paul himself and his other apostles.

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It's the church, it's you and I, fragile, simple, earthen vessels as King James says.

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We don't have to be perfect, we don't have to be right, we don't have to be indestructible.

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Frankly, a clay jar isn't all that important, it's dispensable, it's not especially valuable.

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It's easy to replace. What gives a clay jar its value is not the jar itself, but what the jar contains.

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So what does it contain? What are the contents? What is this treasure? What is the truth of the gospel?

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Is it something like the rigid formula of Westminster but just dressed up in humbler garb?

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Do we still get to be right as long as we're kinder about it?

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Do we still get to judge the rightness of others as long as we do it with love?

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Paul's most articulate statement of the shape of this truth, the truth of the gospel,

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comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 1, words that we heard.

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He says, the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,

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but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

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We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Greeks,

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for God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

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When I was a kid I wanted nothing more for Christmas than a Super Nintendo.

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I had a regular Nintendo which we had bought second hand, but my friends all were getting their Super Nintendo's

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and I've never envied something so much in my life and every year at Christmas time

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I would scan below the Christmas tree for a package that was of just the right size and shape.

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I never asked my parents for it because I knew it was too expensive, but I still dared to hope.

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And every year I found a package under the tree that was just the right size and shape.

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And on Christmas morning I would open it up and I would find a toy or a science experiment or God forbid clothing.

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And my hopes would be dashed. I never did get my Super Nintendo, but I'm okay. You don't have to worry about me.

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When we look at the Gospel we think we know exactly what's inside.

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We think we know exactly the shape of that Gospel.

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It is something that affirms or justifies the choices that we make in life and the people that we have become.

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And certainly it is something that rejects the same people that we reject.

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And certainly it is something that assures us that we are on the right track or that we are on the right side of history

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or that we are on the right team and on and on.

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But if we open it up and we look at it, we really look at the Gospel.

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What we find is messy. It's contradictory. It's hopelessly naive and idealistic and it trips us up.

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Paul says, I preach Christ crucified.

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It's important to remember Christ is not Jesus' last name, but it's a Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah.

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Paul is saying that I preach a crucified Messiah. This is a plain oxymoron.

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The Messiah was supposed to come and restore Israel's greatness.

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So for the Messiah to die on a cross is an impossibility.

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Paul says, I preach a crucified Messiah. The core of the Gospel truth is a self-contradictory idea.

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It is the idea that God's love is expressed through sacrifice, that God's victory over all evil comes through defeat,

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that God's great immense power is demonstrated in weakness.

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To paraphrase Paul, this is a stumbling block to good religious folks and it's utter foolishness to the unchurched or the de-churched or the anti-church.

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So to recap, as a vessel of the truth, the church is fragile and disposable.

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And the truth itself is contradictory, paradoxical, unsystemizable, and it trips us up.

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You see, nothing of what it does to those on the outside. We are frail containers of a foolish message.

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The preservation of the truth. If we are disposable vessels and the truth is an upside down trip hazard,

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then where does this leave us in responding to this great end?

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It was Paul who got us into this mess, so it's Paul who should get us out.

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And in 1 Corinthians chapter 4, Paul says this, think of us in this way, by us he means the apostles.

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Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries.

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So finally we come to the subject of stewardship.

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And on Generosity Sunday, this is probably not what you expected.

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Financial stewardship is an important part of the life of discipleship,

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but it is only one part of the kind of stewardship that the church is called to live out.

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Today we're talking about the stewardship of the truth, or to put it better, to put it the way Paul does,

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the stewardship of the mysteries of God.

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This is how Paul wants the church to think about him and the apostles.

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And I think this is also how the church should think about itself.

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We don't need to be preoccupying ourselves as guardians of sound doctrine.

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We have done plenty of that throughout history, and it has borne the bitter fruit of fragmentation

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and sectarianism and even violence.

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That is a hermetically sealed Tupperware jelly jar kind of preservation

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that just puts Christianity up on a shelf, a relic, an artifact, a historical curiosity.

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But if instead we believe that there is a living mystery at the heart of our identity

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and that we are stewards of that mystery, that we are custodians, caretakers of that mystery,

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that is something altogether different.

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There is so much loneliness in this world,

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and we are stewards of a special kind of community.

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There is so much fear and anxiety in this world, and we are stewards of a unique vision of hope.

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There is so much coarseness and cruelty in this world, and we are stewards of radical grace.

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There is so much self-interest in this world,

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and we are stewards of a generosity of spirit.

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We are stewards of the gospel of a crucified messiah.

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We are frail containers of a foolish message.

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We are stewards of self-giving love in a world that so rarely gives and is forgetting how to love.

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And this is the mystery at the heart of who we are,

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at the heart of what God has created us to be and what God is calling us to do.

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The church is called to fan the flames of this living mystery,

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not to lock it up, not to seal it in, but to keep it alive, to stoke it, to feed it,

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with the fuel of our gifts and our lives.

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But we have this treasure in clay jars

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so that the world will know that this extraordinary power is from God and does not come from us.

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Let us pray.

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God, may we be your faithful stewards,

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stewards of the mysteries that have been entrusted to us as your church,

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stewards who take care faithfully of your good work in our lives and in this world.

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We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.