Sermon, 2021.6.27: "Christ's Poverty and Ours"

Ben Miller
“Christ’s Poverty and Ours”

A Sermon for Christ Church (Lead, SD)

V Sunday After Pentecost, 2021.6.27

Season After Pentecost: Proper VIII (Track 1), Year B

II Sam 1.1, 17–27 • Ps 130 • II Cor 8.7–15 • Mk 5.21–43

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

that though he was rich

yet for your sake he became poor

that by his poverty 

you may become rich. —II Cor 8.9

If you were to ask me to give a list of my top five favorite Bible verses, I would need time to choose carefully, because my first instinct would be to provide five verses from the Apostle Paul, and you would groan and ask me to be more creative. 

I just love the Apostle Paul. I don’t think I would be a Christian without him. And today’s reading from II Corinthians demonstrates one reason why. In this passage he’s doing the most ordinary thing in his ministry—asking for money, which, as we all know, is the Church’s oldest tradition. Clearly he needs something from the Corinthians, and he thinks they are capable of more material generosity than they are showing. 

But Paul grounds his appeal in the most extraordinary way. With just a simple gesture of his tongue and an openness to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he has bridged the reality of the Lord in heaven and the reality of the Church on earth in the most profound way:

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

that though he was rich

yet for your sake he became poor

that by his poverty 

you may become rich. 

You might notice that when you heard the passage read earlier, the verse didn’t begin with “For you know the grace…” but “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ…”  This translation choice is a little unfortunate, because it obscures the chief significance of grace for the Apostle, and the mighty power of the grace of Christ in our life today. 

Grace is a word you hear in church often, but might not be one whose definition you have considered. Grace is a rich term for God’s unmerited favor. Grace is an abundant favor, the kind that goes beyond notions of earning or merit. Think of Psalm 23, when the psalmist says “my cup overflows,” and you might have a picture of grace.

I am talking about grace today because it is something we all need that the world does not know how to give to others. We live our lives by measurements and standards and notions of merit and earning. And yet God does not treat us this way, because the will of God is for all of us creatures to share in His goodness—and if God’s goodness is infinite, then so too is that good life we are promised by God to live.

And from where does this infinite goodness of grace come? This is the apostle Paul’s brilliance: he appeals to what seems like a paradox: Christ’s poverty. 

For your sake he became poor

that by his poverty 

you may become rich.

A New Testament scholar called this verse a crystallization, quote, of Paul’s “master story.” It is his master story because it is really the story of our salvation. We could not afford salvation. It was not purchased in a transaction because we accumulated enough goodness in our spiritual bank account to spur God. Salvation was given to us simply because God loved us and desires our good in all things. And the Son of God loved us so much that He would become incarnate in space and time 2000 years ago and make Himself vulnerable to all of the danger of this world, its oppression, its violence, its callousness, its weights and measures that are used to inflict the innocent and prosper the guilty—the Son of God would enter this poverty. 

That is the amazing truth of the Gospel. And for us who believe in the Gospel, this amazing truth makes an amazing claim on us:

If Christ became poor for our sakes, that we might become rich, then for us to gain the riches of Christ, we must be joined to him in his poverty.

This is why Paul says “for our sake” Christ became poor.  For our sake Christ became poor because in the human condition is one of deep poverty. I am not trying to make a false equivalency between the problems of those who are materially well off and those who are not—God forbid!—but simply to claim that to be human in this life is to experience some kind of poverty—a desperation in material needs or in spirit or in both, with the various weights and measures the world inflicts upon us without any grace.

Even someone with the political power of David can experience this kind of desperation, as we hear today in II Samuel. Contrary to some popular preaching and teaching in other churches, I don’t think David is supposed to be our role model—again I say, God forbid! But this passage is an exception. We see something more raw here, something from his heart. Here David is simply a poet who lost his best friend. “How are the mighty fallen!” he shouts three times today.

And more pointedly, this desperation and poverty—material and spiritual—is the woman who bled today in the Gospel reading. Perhaps some of you recognize yourself in her. The pain that is carried for years. The countless failed attempts to be well that have deprived her of livelihood. That loneliness this kind of pain inflicts—because pain certainly makes you lonely. 

Like the Psalm today, one can imagine her lament: Out of the depths I have cried to you, O LORD.

Like the Psalm today, one can imagine our lament: Out of the depths I have cried to you, O LORD.

Perhaps you have suffered in your life, or shared the sufferings of someone else. Maybe someone close to you died. Maybe there is different kind of death, in that someone cut you off from your life. Maybe there was an unexpected condition, an unexpected expense, that made you tired of being alive. Maybe you keep failing at your dreams.

We lament when we are desperate. 

We lament when we are poor. 

But we know one thing: 

Christ knows this too, because Christ became poor for our sakes.

Christ knows this too because Christ healed the woman who bled.

Remember what she says today,

“If I but touched his cloak.”

If I 

but touched. 

Her whole self, her soul, her body, has waited for salvation, “more than watchmen for the morning.”

And this desire was not shunned by Christ. The mere touch of his clothes became the plenteous redemption for which this woman waited.  

Christ has made this woman a model of our humanity. Her poverty, her desperation, is no longer an embarrassment to be marginalized by the world’s weights and measures into a living death. 

It demonstrates how our own laments, our own struggles with poverty and desperation and failure, are more than occasions for death, but occasions to meet the Lord God himself in the face of Jesus Christ. And not only to meet the Lord, but to go where Jesus has gone: from death into life, that infinite life and infinite goodness that overflows our cups with plenteous redemption.

If Christ became poor for our sakes, that we might become rich, then for us to gain the riches of Christ, we must be joined to him in his poverty. And this is only frightening if you cling to what you think are riches. But if you know your own poverty and desperation, then you have drawn near to God, and the grace of Christ will say to you what is said in today’s Gospel: “Do not fear, only believe.” “Your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed.” 

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

that though he was rich

yet for your sake he became poor

that by his poverty 

you may become rich.

May 

this grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

and the love of God

and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit

be with us all evermore. Amen. —II Cor 13.14

Word count: 1354