Canter Bridge

When one’s goal is the wider celebration of God’s glory in creation and society, how does one measure success?

What are the proper metrics? How does one arrive at the decision to keep going or, alternatively, to throw in the towel and try something else? What credentials does one accrue?

The apostle Paul, deep into a rhetorical wrestling match with the relationship that binds him to the Christians at Corinth in a prickly but enduring group hug, ventures upon the concept that they are his calling card, his letter of recommendation, his proof of life. These flawed friends, who locked in relationship with Paul are capable of causing him and each other grievous pain, are the raison d’être of his scars.

How can this be?

The most reliable indicator of faithfulness in Christian service is the lives that are marked with God’s glory by our having passed through them or lingered with them. It is of course possible to lay down one’s life for unnumbered years and see little or none of this mark in the lives one has touched, this in spite of heroic faithfulness to vocation and the sacrifice that it requires.

It is also possible, in this day of mass movements, to rack up impressive stats and to marshal the crowds that seem to substantiate their worthiness.

Yet the most consistent and reliable indicator of faithful service remains, as Paul indicates by autobiographical wrestling with the undeniable bond that at the moment seems more to torture the Corinthians and Paul than to console or empower them, the lives one has marked by the sheer, persistent, self-denying practice of hanging out with them in Jesus’ love.

It would be wrong to overlook the polemic in the air that obliges Paul to bare his heart in this way:

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God.

Immersed as he is in a culture of self-recommendation and the accumulation of status markers that require an ever-lengthening list of recommenders, Paul turns the table on self-service and cuts to the chase. Have we been there for you or not?, he appears to ask, allowing his premise to sink deeply into the rhetorical exchange. It is as though all reduces to this. Suddenly the worthlessness of conventional credentials seems clear. The lethal stink of their self-referential moral swamp burns the nostrils.

It all comes down to this, one senses that the apostle claims.

You are written on our hearts, the only achievement we can claim. You’re all I’ve got in this damned, beancounting world.