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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Strength and
Weakness” Sunday, June 15, 2008 |
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II Corinthians 12: 1-10
Rev. |
We
spend our lives getting good at what we want to be good at or getting good at
what we believe we are called or destined to do and be. We study. We
practice. We test ourselves in the arena of life. We obsess. We see how far
we can go, how high we can fly, how hard we can push ourselves. It may
be in the arena of work, or love, or physicality, or spirituality, or knowledge,
or wealth, or service, or avocation, or safety, or whatever we decide to
invest ourselves in most fully. We
strengthen our bodies or we sharpen our minds or we soften our hearts. We
become proficient; we become accomplished; eventually we become expert. Still
we work and stretch and test ourselves. We are determined to become all that
we can be. We build
our strength. We become strong. But
then inevitably – I am pretty sure it is
inevitable if we live more than a few years – inevitably life begins to
monkey with us. The strength we have devoted our life to building begins to
betray us. Our strength becomes our weakness, and we can become strong again
only by becoming weak. This
was true in the life of the Apostle Paul. No person ever worked harder at developing
his strength. At an early age, he became a student of Gamaliel, the leading
rabbi of his time. Only the very brightest and hardest working got to study
at the After
his studies, Paul rose quickly in the ranks of pharisaic Judaism, being assigned
at a young age to be a protector of the faith, hunting down and eradicating
heretics. It is how he was exposed to Christianity. After
his conversation, Paul continued to demand of himself total devotion –
himself and others. He became a great innovator and builder and leader…a
gifted speaker and a fierce and sharp debater and unprecedented strategist of
church growth. On
three missionary journeys under the most difficult circumstances – facing the
opposition of the elements, the opposition of the enemies of Christianity,
and the opposition of the Empire, Paul made Christianity a global religion by
the force of his will. He drove himself fiercely – himself and others. He
demanded of himself total devotion. He committed himself to be all things to
all people. (1Corinthians 9:22) He was under a compulsion to preach. (I
Corinthians 9:16) He was committed to being the greatest, so committed to
this was he that he even called himself as the greatest of sinners. Isn’t
it ironic that the teacher given credit for the concept of salvation by grace
rather than by works was so driven? But at
a certain point in his life Paul hit a wall. Or maybe it wasn’t a wall. Maybe
it was more gradual. Maybe it was a steep hill. But he hit something. Something
happened. His
body, which he had driven, began to fail him. His students – those he had
mentored in ministry – John, Mark, and Barnabas had deserted him. Most of all
his churches, the ones he had founded, had been won over by a new group of
apostles – super-apostles Paul sarcastically called them. (II Corinthians 12:
11) They were teaching a form of Christianity Paul distained. Something
happen to Paul. We are
in a series of sermons right now on jetsam and flotsam on the sea of life. I
got the idea from James Tinnemeyer.
Jetsam is the stuff that, when a storm is coming, you throw overboard so that
your ship will be less likely to capsize and sink. Flotsam is the stuff that
is left floating after a shipwreck that you can cling to in order to stay
afloat until you can make your way to shore. Have I
mentioned that the jetsam we need to throw overboard to survive the storm is
often the stuff that is hardest for us to let go of? Annie
Dillard in her book Teaching a Stone to
Talk compares our human journey toward God to the 19th century
polar expeditions in which explorers tried to reach the poles. The most
important expedition, she says, was the Search
parties recovered the remains of the Another
search party found two skeletons from the The
jetsam we need to throw overboard to survive the storm is often the very
stuff we’d rather die than let go of. The
super-apostles were making claims of mystical experiences and miraculous powers
greater than Paul’s. They were teaching a different gospel, a gospel of
success rather than of grace. Paul’s churches had become smitten by these new
exciting flashy apostles with their exotic teachings. They made Paul look
like a worn-out old man by comparison. They’d turned their back on Paul’s
teachings and embraced this newer flashier more exciting gospel. The
super-apostles made fun of Paul. Paul had developed an illness of some kind…a
thorn in the flesh, he called it. Scholars have debated what his thorn in the
flesh could have been. We don’t know. Some biblical scholars believe it may
have been migraines. We really don’t know. The
super-apostles made fun of Paul. If he was a great apostle, how could it be
that he was sick so much? If God was blessing Paul, why these migraines? Paul
tried to overcome his thorn in the flesh. Three times he prayed to the So the
Apostle Paul had to throw overboard his will to work harder than everybody
else, his determination to accomplish more, his strength. The
jetsam we need to throw overboard to survive the storm is often the very
stuff we’d rather die than let go of. What
Paul had to throw overboard, most of all, was control. Abandoned by those
whom he had trained in ministry and ordained, abandoned by his churches who
had been wooed by flashier preachers, sick and physically drained, Paul had
to give up control. His only way to be strong was to trust that Christ would
work through his weakness and failings at the very time that it appeared that
all he had accomplished through his strength and hard work had been for naught. It was
not perhaps until this point in his ministry that Paul really understood his
own teaching about salvation by grace. We who preach and teach often preach
and teach what we have not yet come to understand – really – in our own
lives. We have an idea of it but then at some point we really learn it, like
Paul really learned the meaning of grace when his body wouldn’t get healed
and his friends and his churches had forsaken him. What Paul
wanted to do was to tell stories of his own mystical experiences, like the
super-apostles did. You can see him longing to compete with the super-apostles
if you read II Corinthians. What he wanted was for the migraines to stop so
he could go to But
instead he had to throw all that overboard. He had to trust in Christ. He had
to cling to Christ alone in order to be strong again in a new way. I suspect
it was the hardest thing he ever did. Annie
Dillard says that the The
flatware was what they found years later next to the frozen skeletons. The expeditions
that eventually succeeded in reaching the pole and retuning alive relied on
native techniques taught them by the Inuits, Annie Dillard says. They
traveled by dog sled. They ate seal and walrus meat, wore walrus skins, and
fed sled dogs to sled dogs on schedule. What is
it that we would rather die than throw overboard? Our silver flatware? Our
cut glass goblets? Our library? Our hand organ? Our
self-sufficiency? Our pride? Our intellectual sophistication? Our image? Our
self-control? Our success? Our power? Our leisure? Our theology? Our
morality? Our creed? But
there is no way to reach the Pole unless we are willing to travel like Inuits
and eat walrus meat. The
hardest thing the Apostle Paul had to do in his life, I am convinced, was to
become weak, vulnerable, to trust Christ. He finally had to live what he had
preached, as we should all expect to have to do. Because
no matter what we say in our hymns and creeds, we really most of us trust our
own strength…the strength of our bodies…the strength of our minds…the
strength of our wills…the strength of our determination. We turn
to our strength for salvation. But it will never save us. It will always fail
us sooner or later. If we cling to it we will die. And part of us would
rather die than leave the flatware behind. But
Christ invites us to surrender our strength and hold unto him. It is the
hardest thing we will ever do. And it is our only hope. The
only consolation is this. No one today knows the names of the flashy super-apostles.
We have not the slightest idea who they were. The book Paul wrote after II
Corinthians, the book of Romans, the book he wrote after he’d come to the end
of his own strength, has shaped Christianity more than any other. It was the
book that gave Augustine his theology, that stimulated Luther to begin the
Protestant reformation, that John Wesley was listening to when his heart was
strangely warmed. It was a book written from weakness and surrender. It was a
book that threw overboard all the jetsam of achievement and strength – a book
that clung to Christ alone. www.foundryumc.org |
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