Gracious and loving God, may only your Truth
be spoken and only your Truth be heard ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.” Many of us learned that song as children, but little did we know that it’s not some simple Sunday School song – it’s actually the sort of deep theological truth that St. Paul is writing about in the passage we heard from 2 Corinthians. Yes, “Jesus loves me” is an important message and you’ve heard me preach on that idea many times. Today, I want to focus on the other part of the song – “they are weak, but he is strong.”
As
we heard, “On my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses… So, I
will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ
may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships,
persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak,
then I am strong.” I’ll get into the context of what is going on in this
passage in a minute, but let’s just sit with the idea of weakness first.
How do we feel about
weakness? Do we dream about driving a car with less horsepower? Are we proud
when our team loses by double digits? Do we hope that after the next election the
party we vote for will be in a weaker position? Do we go to the gym to build
weakness? Do we look up to leaders who are impotent and feeble? Of course not!
We
glorify strength and despise weakness. Whether it’s a job interview or college
application, we rename weaknesses as “growing edges” or “opportunities for improvement.”
Or when a bully talks about others, they often portray their victims as weak.
The entire logic behind Instagram and Facebook is the promotion of strength, even
when everyone knows that every photo is carefully staged, edited, and agonized
over. Our society values might, independence, strength, loudness, violence, winning,
and greatness while dismissing the more godly virtues of humility, reserve,
peacemaking, deference, mutuality, or weakness.
The
issue for us as Christians is that, from start to finish, ours is a story of
weakness. Abraham and Sarah were an older couple for whom the legacy of
children had passed them by until God stepped in. Moses was a fearful and
ineloquent leader. Israel was a small and ragged nation and if it were not for
God’s election of them, Israel wouldn’t even register as a blip in a survey of
world history. Mary was a young and powerless girl. Peter was an uneducated
fisherman. Jesus, well, no one expected the Messiah to be born in poverty, to flee
as a refugee as a child, or to be executed as a criminal in his early 30s. And
on through the centuries, the story of the Church is the story of a bunch of
underfunded, underequipped, underqualified people doing more than they could
ask or imagine because of the grace of God. They might have been weak, but God
is always strong.
And
the strong? Where are they? All those people who had money, status, and power
throughout history – most of them are viewed as villains, as Scrooges, as
people who let their ego get in the way of living the life of love, which is
the only life worth living. So what we think about weakness and strength really
does matter, because it’s a question of whether or not we accept God as our
saving grace, or push God off to the side because “I can handle this myself.”
Though
we think of St. Paul as the great New Testament author and the leading
theologian in all of Church history – that is not how he was viewed in his own
time. He had been a fairly well-regarded rabbinic scholar, but he gave that all
up to become an itinerant preacher for this crucified Messiah, which got him ostracized
from his Jewish community. Christians though were skeptical of him – for one,
he had been persecuting the Church in his former life. And he also never met Jesus,
nor did he sit at the feet of the apostles and learn from them. Paul claimed
that he had received his commission and apostleship from the Risen Jesus in a
vision. But, understandably, not everyone bought what he was selling.
So
he really couldn’t operate in Jerusalem, as he had enemies and skeptics on all
sides. So he embarks on bringing the faith to Europe – and sets sail for Greece
and is rejected in a few cities before finding his way to Corinth, where he
seems to have made some inroads. After establishing a church there, he goes on
to plant other churches around the Mediterranean. But after his departure from
Corinth, conflicts arose and so he had to write letters to try to handle things
from a distance.
While
he was in Turkey planting churches, some new Christian teachers showed up in Corinth
and learned about what Paul had been saying. They rejected Paul’s teaching and
said “Paul had no idea what he’s talking about. Did he tell you that he never
actually met Jesus? Did he tell you that he got kicked out of synagogues?”
These new teachers called themselves hyper, or super, apostles. And when asked
for proof of their message, they said – look at how wise, powerful, and
beautiful we are – if God wasn’t on our side, how else can you explain our
sophisticated arguments, good looks, and surpassing wisdom? And the Corinthians
were persuaded by this show of strength, especially when they thought back to
St. Paul.
While
we think of Paul’s writing as soaring rhetoric, he wasn’t known for being a
great preacher or the sort of person who knew how to win friends and influence
people. In today’s passage, he speaks about his “thorn in the flesh.” Now, we
don’t know what that means exactly, but it’s widely assumed that he might have
had what’s called ophthalmia – essentially progressively worsening cold sores
in the eyes. It would have impacted his vision, but also made him look
disfigured and caused discomfort. “If Paul was really God’s chosen,” the
argument went, “why would God allow him to look so miserable?”
And
so St. Paul responds in 2 Corinthians, a letter that sometimes reads more like
a rant. “So these ‘super-apostles’ say they’ve had visions? Good for them. I’ve
been, I mean, someone I know, has been taken up into the third heaven,” he
quips. This is an idea that comes from Jewish mysticism – but the point is that
Paul has been chosen to see things that cannot be fully explained. “If you want
to know where I get my authority from, it’s from this goop coming out of my
eye, it’s from my weakness, it’s from my imperfections,” Paul says.
In
the same way that God became weak in Jesus Christ, Paul claims a power that is
derived from such weakness. This is the God who, after all, seems to have a
propensity to work through the lowly, the rejected, the weak; the God who said
“blessed are the meek and the persecuted;” the God who was born of lowly Mary
who sang that God “lifts up the lowly and casts down the mighty from their
throne;” the God who taught us that love is about laying down one’s life and
taking up a cross.” God is a God of weakness. And from this lowliness, God has
exercised the almighty power that created all that is, that split the Red Sea
so that the people might walk through on dry ground, that raised Jesus Christ
from the dead, that sent the Spirit of God to dwell within all people.
Knowing
the great power that comes out of weakness, Paul does not run from his
weaknesses, rather he embraces them as the source of his hope, his joy, his consolation.
And in his prayer to be healed of his thorn and sufferings, he heard the Lord
say to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in
weakness.” Grace is sufficient for us and power comes through our reliance on
God alone. You know, a lot of people like to wear shirts and get tattoos of
another phrase from St. Paul: “I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me.” And that’s fine. But the way we do all those things is through
weakness, through lowliness, through humility, through service, through losing.
The
super-apostles and all those who chase greatness are going to miss the saving
power of God. Previously in his correspondence with the Corinthians, Paul has
written, “Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ
crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles… God’s foolishness
is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
And it was Jesus who said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but
those who are sick.” It is weakness that prepares us to accept the grace of
God. And, as Paul wrote to the Roman church, we know that “There is no one who
is righteous, not even one.” In other words, we are all sick; it’s a question
of whether or not we admit our weakness and receive with gratitude the medicine
of grace. We don’t need to be strong, because our strength will eventually give
out or not be enough. Rather we can let God be our strength and that’s what
grace is all about – being given all that we need when we haven’t asked for it
or earned it.
Grace
is amazing and it is wonderful. Grace can absolutely transform the hearts of
super-apostles and greatness-seekers. But grace does its best work when we
stretch out our hands, as we do at the Eucharist, to receive our salvation as
the weak and needy people that we are. When we have the façade of strength and
greatness up, we might not yet be ready to receive the saving power of God
because we aren’t in touch with the truth that we need saving. Don’t run from
weakness, don’t run from losing, don’t run from the ugliness of life, don’t run
from lowliness, it just might be the path to knowing the power of God’s amazing
grace. Talk to anyone that’s been to AA, or been homeless, or struggled with
depression – sometimes you have to go through the sewer to find salvation. Grace
is the gift of life to the dead, the gift of forgiveness to the guilty, the
gift of hope in despair, the gift of strength to the weak.
The
Irish band U2 has a song called “Grace,” in which they sing “Grace; she takes
the blame; she covers the shame; removes the stain. Grace, it’s a thought that
changed the world… What once was hurt; what once was friction; what left a mark
no longer stings; because grace makes beauty out of ugly things; grace finds
beauty in everything.” And I’d add, “Grace makes strength out of weakness,” or
as we all learned as children, “we are weak, but he is strong.”
