Pentecost V

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen. 

THIS past Wednesday we started a new run of the Alpha Course, and if you hear “Alpha Course” and you don’t know what it’s about, you should come and see.  Every Wednesday at 7 we meet next door in the parish house, share a meal, watch a short video about something fundamental to Christianity, then talk about it over coffee and dessert.  It’s simple, it’s accessible, it’s great; end of advertisement.  Alpha gets into this sermon it’s where I heard about a satirical story in a London newspaper entitled "God to Leave Church of England":

Following the example set by leading Anglicans, God recently stated that He intends to leave the Church of England.  According to sources close to God, “He’s been unhappy for some time with the direction the Church of England has taken and He’s finally had enough.”  Responding to this announcement, a Church of England official replied, "Losing God is a bit of a blow, but it’s just something that we’ll have to learn to live with."[1]

More serious than satirical is Jon Meacham’s “The End of Christian America,” in an April issue of Newsweek,[2] which cites a study that says the number of self-identifying Christians has fallen 10% since 1990, while the number of people with no religious affiliation has doubled.  Meacham quotes an obviously troubled Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: 

A remarkable culture-shift has taken place all around us . . . .  The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered.  The . . . Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.

Meacham doesn’t share Mohler’s anxiety, but agrees that God “is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory.”  I think the Apostle Paul might say that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because although Chapter 12 of 2 Corinthians is about “boasting,” Paul didn’t “boast” about numbers or influence.  Part of what Paul is doing in this letter is responding to opponents he derisively calls “super apostles” (11:5), who boast about their curricula vitae, resumes of their achievements, not the supremacy of God and the centrality of the cross.  Paul could boast right back about country (Roman), bloodline (a pious and zealous Jew) and church party (a Pharisee among Pharisees).  At the approach of the end of American Christendom, we may be tempted to circle the wagons and boast of things like church (our membership in the Anglican Communion) or church party (our Anglo-catholicism).  But a strange thing happened by the end of chapter 12:  Paul came to boast only “in insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”  (12:9-10) 

What?  How does that work?  What happened to make Paul say the weaker he gets the stronger he becomes, and can we do it too?  What happened is (1) Paul experienced the living God; (2) he heard God’s “no”; and (3) he learned the paradox of power. 

First, he experienced God.  I know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago – whether in the body I don’t know, whether out of the body I don’t know; God knows – was stolen away to the third heaven.  (12:2; my trans.)  Paul’s history of weird experiences with God goes back more than fourteen years, back to the dramatic confrontation with the ascended Christ Paul had on the road to Damascus.  With “threats and murder” on his breath (Acts 9:1), Paul had warrants to arrest Christians, probably death warrants.  But on the road, Jesus showed up, and suddenly the things that made Paul special – his bona fides as a Pharisee, his zeal to persecute Christians, his religious experience and discipline – none of that mattered anymore.

That’s what happens when God shows up.  We can’t boast about what we used to be.  The word kaukaomai (kauca,omai), or “boast,” can be synonymous with “trust,” and self-boasting or self-trust is the basic attitude of the fool. [3]  The fool trusts in what he can accomplish and control.  For an example, look at Psalm 52, which compares two figures, “the fool” and “the righteous man.”  “Why do you boast, O mighty one, of mischief done against the godly?  All day long you are plotting destruction.  Your tongue is like a sharp razor, you worker of treachery.  You love evil more than good, and . . . you love all words that devour . . . .”  (Ps. 52:1-4a)  That was a pre-Damascus-Road Paul, who boasted or trusted in schemes and plots to destroy Christians.  But compare that to the righteous one, who the psalm says trusts “in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.  I will thank you forever, because of what you have done.”  (Psalm 52:8-9)  That’s Paul post-Damascus-Road, trusting in the covenant love (chesed) of God, thanking God for what he has done. 

None of us (that I know of) had a dramatic conversion like Paul’s, but is our experience of God over time leading us to boast more in him and less in our accomplishments, our piety, our orthodoxy, even the numbers of people in our churches?  If we answer “no,” then maybe we haven’t really been meeting God at all, we’ve just been going to church.  Recently I ran across an illustration I’d read a while ago from a book by Annie Dillard: 

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?  . . . On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats . . . to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake some day and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. [4]

Have you met a God who resets your priorities and reduces your boasting to ashes?  Paul did, and it drew him out to where he could never return. 

I spent most of my time on the first point; don’t be afraid.  The second thing that changed where Paul put his trust is that Paul heard God’s “no.”  To counter his glimpse into the “third heaven,” whatever that is, Paul was given a “thorn in the flesh . . . to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure,” (2 Cor. 12:7-8, KJV) and he prayed three times for God to take it away, but God said “no.”  A “thorn” or splinter just constantly irritates, [5] and its effect “was to cripple Paul’s enjoyment of life, and to frustrate his full efficiency by draining his energies.” [6]  Nobody knows what Paul’s thorn was, but the very fact that we don’t know makes it easier to see ourselves in Paul’s letter.  What cripples our enjoyment of life and drains us?  Something – a physical condition, your social setting, something psychological; or something more applicable to a church, like decreasing influence and dwindling numbers – something shows up, and when we ask God to fix it, he says “no.”  But it’s a gracious “no” because it frees us from thinking we have to rely on our own power, and the thorn keeps us pinned to God. [7]

That’s the paradox Paul learned – our power or lack of power isn’t what matter.  When it decreases, God’s power in us becomes “perfect,” (2 Cor. 12:9), which means it’s exactly sufficient to accomplish his goal to redeem the world. 

So can we ever be free enough to be weak and boast about it like Paul?  We can, if we remember this:  Do you know that the God who flung the universe with just the power of his words once became supremely weak?  Jesus Christ heard God’s “no” in a garden.  He got not just a thorn in his flesh but a crown of thorns.  The God whose power should make us lash ourselves to our pews had his own back laid bare to the lash.  Why would he do that?  Because of his covenant love, the chesed the Righteous One boasted of in Ps. 52.  That’s how much Godloves us.  So we can trust his “no” when life is  complicated and we seem to be getting weaker.  He never said he’d use his power to make us successful; he’s using his power to renew the world, and our weakness is the “envelope” [8] that perfect power comes in.

Paul would tell us:  Boast in that, and that alone. 

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.