Journey into Weakness

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

 

            A Wall Street Journal article featured some interesting safety tips for our journeys through this life:

 

 

This article reminds us that life is difficult. If it is true that we are all on a journey of faith, then it is equally true that sometimes our journey takes a detour toward the difficult; sometimes our journey seems to lead us through a minefield.  As the saying goes, “None of us get out of this life alive.”  “Death and taxes are the two constants in this life,” opines another saying. Life is difficult and we fail our Lord if we, as people of faith, are not honest about this truth.

 

            As a pastor I am acutely aware of life’s difficulties along our journey of faith.  It is part of every pastor’s calling to walk with people through their worst moments.  As I prepared this sermon, my thoughts remembered the youth who died in a car accident the week of his high school graduation, the wife whose husband betrayed her with an affair, the husband whose wife died in a car accident that was his fault, the parents of the teen addicted to drugs, the children of the parent addicted to alcohol, the parent whose child committed suicide, the women who watched first her mother then her husband wracked with cancer.  And the list could go on.  Many of you who are doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, therapists, or simply good friends to others, or simply human beings who exist on this planet have similar stories to share.  No one is immune from life’s difficulties.  Life is difficult and we fail our Lord if we, as people of faith, are not honest about this truth.

 

            There are Christian people who preach and teach a different message.  There are those who preach and teach the so-called “prosperity gospel.”  The essential message of the prosperity gospel is that God wants us to prosper.  God so wants us to prosper that we should expect God’s help in making us wealthy.  I have heard these charlatans tell their congregations to “pray for that BMW!  There’s no shame in wanting more.  God wants you to want more because God wants to give you more, and the only thing holding God back is your lack of faith.”  Notice, please, who is ultimately responsible for anything bad happening to you: you are!  This Christian heresy distorts the faith to say that we are to blame for life’s difficulties; our lack of faith is all that is holding God back from blessin’ us up the b’jeebers!  Uh, no.  Life is difficult and we fail our Lord if we, as people of faith, are not honest about this truth.

 

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            Today’s New Testament lesson talks about the thorn in Paul’s flesh, a thorn symbolic of the pain and suffering endured by Paul.  The thorn in Paul’s flesh is perhaps the greatest challenge to faith: if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why must we suffer?  Doesn’t God hear our cries of pain?  Doesn’t he care?  Scripture addresses these questions in many ways, but one thing Scripture never does is offer a full and complete answer.  Rather than answer the question of why we suffer, Scriptures speaks to the question of how we can suffer in a redemptive manner. 

 

            Please hear me correctly: I am not saying that suffering is good.  What I am saying is that suffering is not God’s intention for his creation, but good can come of it because the God who himself suffered and died on the cross is present with us and works through us when we hurt.  Paul was something of an expert on suffering: beaten and jailed for preaching the gospel, attacked by wild beasts, shipwrecked in the Mediterranean.  Yet it was Paul who could testify from personal experience that,

 

 

This thorn in Paul’s flesh is no light matter.  It is curious to me how polite Bible translators can be.  The Greek word for “thorn” is skolops, which means “stake.”  We get a thorn in our flesh when we walk by a rose bush in shorts: “Ow, I have a thorn in my flesh.”  A stake, however, is a different matter.  A stake must be driven into the body with force, an ugly sight to be sure.  Interpreters have suggested what Paul’s stake might have been: a spiritual temptation, epilepsy, migraines, poor eyesight or malarial fever.  Personally, I don’t think it makes that much difference what Paul’s affliction was; we all know what a “stake in the flesh” is when we suffer from it!  The important thing is what response can we make to redeem our suffering?

 

I like Paul’s response to this question: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.”  Paul’s statement fascinates me because it is so like something we would do.  In his audacity, Paul does not take “no” for an answer, even from God!  Three times he pleads with the Lord.  Sometimes I think the great people of Scripture like Paul or Mary didn’t experience the same things we experience, but the Bible consistently speaks of people that struggle with their faith, just as we also struggle.  Having seen miracles performed and having performed miracles himself, Paul must have been convinced the Lord would deliver him.  When the deliverance didn’t happen, Paul was confused: “Why, Lord?  Hey, take this stake from me!” The beauty of Paul’s response is that he didn’t give up when God’s answer was not what he wanted.  Paul’s faith was persistent.  Paul’s relationship with the Lord was such that he trusted God to hear him and answer him.  And God did answer Paul.  But instead of taking the stake away, God’s answer was: “My grace is sufficient, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

 

At this point, Paul had a choice to make: either accept God’s answer and grow through the grace God was going to give him, or wash his hands of God for not being “God” enough to care for Paul’s needs.  Have you ever met someone who made the latter decision?  It is a sad thing to see, for such folk often become bitter or cold or indifferent.  But Paul makes the former decision, he accepts God’s answer for him, but not only accepts it.  In classic Pauline overstatement, Paul delights in his weakness.  It is biblical truth and a great curiosity that God chooses the weak things of this world through which to make his power known.  God chose a small, nomadic tribe of people known as the Hebrews to be his people.  God chose to conquer evil by dying on a tree.  And most perplexing to me, God chose to spread the message of unconditional love and resurrection to eternal life through the Church!  “My strength is made known in weakness,” says the Lord.

 

It does not take a genius to realize there are more efficient means for God to get the job of world-wide, history-long, love-deep redemption completed than to use the Church for the job.  If the Church were less hypocritical, more committed, used better marketing strategies, had better looking and more intelligent senior pastors, well then maybe God’s job might be done by now and we wouldn’t have to worry about evangelism and stewardship drives.  Unfortunately – or so it seems – God has chosen to work through the weak things and weak people of the world to make us strong.  Paul not only accepts his own weakness, Paul revels in it.  Why is that?

 

I believe Paul understood that when we are weak – and sometimes only when we are weak – is it that we get out of the way and let God be God.  How many times have you or I thought to ourselves, “I need to trust in the Lord for this problem,” only to work really hard to depend upon our very own self to manage, control or ignore a problem as best we can?  Sometimes, we need to clear the path to our heart so that God can deliver us from ourselves.  Only then, once we realize our own strength is insufficient, are we open to allowing God to be God.  And this was Paul’s delight: God is revealed as God where from a human standpoint there is no hope.  God gives strength to the weak, life to the dead, and calls into existence things that from a human point of view should not be.  “My grace is sufficient, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” says the Lord.

 

            When I was sick my wife was surprised that I was a good patient: I listened to the nurses, was cooperative, didn’t resist help, those kinds of things.  There was nothing in my background that suggested I would be this way.  In fact, just the opposite is true. When I’m sick at home, I often don’t accept Laura’s offer to help.  “No, that’s ok, I can do it myself.”  So one night after I got out of the hospital Laura said to me, “I was surprised you were such a good patient.  What got into you?”  My answer to her was: “When you can’t do anything, when you’re too weak to tear even toilet paper, you have no choice.  I had no choice.” Because I was weak, I had to rely on someone else to make me strong.  Thank God for the nurses, doctors and your prayers. “My grace is sufficient, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” says the Lord.

 

*****

 

            There is a saying I have heard that states, “God will not give you more than you can handle.”  I have heard people say this time and time again.  It’s not biblical, and I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I think the saying is spiritual toxic waste.  It implies that all those people I alluded to at the beginning of this sermon – the parents who lost their son in a car accident, the parents of the drug addicted teen, the woman whose mother and husband were both wracked with cancer – it implies that these people’s situations were given to them by God.  It implies that God thought they were strong enough somehow to handle it.  It implies that God was willing to give this to them because, by golly, they needed some toughening up!  Uh, no, no and no.

 

            As I said, I don’t know where this saying comes from, but I have a guess.  I think people have combined a verse from 1 Corinthians 10:13 – “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to all, and God is faithful: he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear” – with this passage from 2 Corinthians 12:9 – “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  But the 1 Corinthians verse refers to the difficulties of being a
Christian in a pagan culture; Paul is saying there that God will show you how to maintain your integrity no matter what kind of secular challenge with which you are confronted.  In 2 Corinthians Paul states clearly that it is not God who gives the stake; it is God who gives the strength.

 

When we are weak, God will make us strong.  God, who loves us as his very own children, for indeed that is what we are, is with us every step of every mile, every mile of every journey in our journey of faith. 

 

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