As you may have heard, for the past dozen years I worked in a school in Calgary. One day about ten years ago young boy – grade 2 or 3 at best – was summoned to the office first thing in the day. Never a good sign. He had to meet with my office compatriot, RC, who handled most of the student discipline issues.
So, RC asked him, “do
you know why you’re here?”
The boy nodded and
said, “yup, it’s cuz I stole a pencil case from a boy in my class”.
“No, that’s not it”,
prompted RC, “anything else come to mind”?
Looking down at his feet,
the boy nodded again. “Well, I pulled my
sister’s hair really hard at recess.”
Well no, that wasn’t it
either, so RC gave him another chance.
The boy offered up seven or eight more things, any one of which would
have landed him in the office if they had seen the light of day before
now. Finally, RC intervened. “How about
something that happened on the bus on the way to school this morning?”
“Oh, THAT” said the
boy, wincing, grimacing, and avoiding eye contact.
I’m not big on titling
sermons, but today’s would be entitled, “Paul has a problem.” Identifying Paul’s biggest problem is about
as easy as trying to tease out what had landed that kid in the hot seat in the
school office, because the gentleman we know as the Apostle Paul or Saint Paul
was a very complex man with a number of issues that repeatedly landed him in
conflict.
So, Paul, we might ask,
what brings you to the office today?
Is it his phenomenal
ability to gain enemies? There’s no doubt that he would have come across as a
know-it-all, but he lived in a time and place where blunt, direct leadership
was needed to ensure that the Church would survive its early years. No, that’s
not the big problem of the day.
Is it the fact that
quite a few of Paul’s writings seems to be really sexist? Well no, it’s not that – though some Sunday I
suspect we’ll delve into this topic. There’s some recent scholarship to suggest
that while Paul may not be up to 21st century expectations, he was a
man well ahead of his time and culture when it came to the treatment of women,
slaves, homosexuals, and other marginalized persons. One author, Sarah Ruden, goes so far as to
say that in his navigating questions around sexuality, Paul shows an “ingenious
combination of common sense and radical defiance for dealing with a very tough
set of issues.” (Ruden, p.87) So no, it’s not that.
Was it the financial question? Paul’s opponents were happy to raise suspicions about how Paul funded his church planting mission all around the Mediterranean, wondering aloud if he was skimming from the offering that was supposed to be sent to Jerusalem. Paul defends himself on this point, underlining the fact that he was a tentmaker by trade, and that trade came with him everywhere he went. In a bizarre twist of logic, his opponents used that against him, claiming that if he were a REAL prophet he’d be happy to take a legitimate salary for this Church-planting work, rather than raising money from more questionable means While these financial questions dogged him, they aren’t the big problem I’m thinking of today.
Is it the fact that in
his earlier years, when he was still known as Saul, Paul was a vigorous
persecutor of Christians? While some of
his contemporaries were impressed by his thorough conversion, I hunch that just
as many would be turned off by it: the Pharisees
who used to hunt down Christians alongside him would certainly view him as a
turncoat, and anxious Christians who used to hide from him would have their
suspicions about his sincerity now.
That’s definitely a problem, but not THE BIG problem.
Could it be that Paul
had a maddening, debilitating physical ailment?
Could THAT be the problem? Well, we’re getting warmer. Paul did address that in the reading we heard
this morning from 2Corinthains. For years,
my inner 13-year-old has enjoyed knocking around the most embarrassing
possibilities of what threatened to derail Paul’s mission: did he have really
bad gas? Was there something in his manner of speech that was easy to
mock? When he moved, was it directly out
of the Monty Python “Ministry of Silly Walks?”
Paul is pretty cagey when it comes to telling us exactly what it was,
but the common English translation “a thorn in the flesh” doesn’t really
express its full intensity.
A couple of theologians
who I hear are familiar to you, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, take a
stab at the question by suggesting that Paul suffered from a form of chronic,
recurring malaria which would have incapacitated him with blinding headaches,
intense nausea and bone-shaking spasms. (Borg, Crossan, pp. 63-64) Apparently, malaria was not uncommon around
Paul’s home town of Tarsus, and if he was unfortunate enough to carry it around
with him, it would have been enough to challenge his will to live, let alone
his ability to carry out such a broad ranging ministry.
There is great
significance to Paul’s infirmity.
Throughout much of his writing to the Corinthians, Paul contrasts human
boastfulness with true, divine wisdom and power, and one of the ways he has
learned to deal with his own physical struggles, is to view it as a rather
brutal reminder that God, not he, is the one with the final say. But even with this in mind, I think that this
major physical problem points to Paul’s BIGGEST problem.
As I was preparing for
this first Sunday of continuous ministry with you, I kept coming back to the
other part of 2nd Corinthians 12 as something that all of us need to
take note of. Paul’s biggest problem, as
I see it, was that he’d had this amazing direct experience of Jesus, and from
then on was pestered by the need to share that experience. Paul had an ecstatic
religious experience, and while he doesn’t want to brag about it, he’s got to
do something with it.
We know, from the book
of Acts, that Paul had a knock-me-down experience on the road to Damascus,
where the risen Christ confronted him and converted him. Whether he’s referring to that same
experience here is unclear. But what is
clear is that he’s still shaken by it, fourteen years later. In the tradition of the prophets of old, who
spoke of their experiences of God’s Holy presence, Paul had one of those deep,
soul-altering experiences of God. And
that makes that wretched malaria, or whatever it was, that much more
frustrating, because not only does he have the burden of this message from God;
he also has an affliction that makes it nearly impossible for him to deliver
the message in a continuous and predictable manner.
Paul, in fact,
confronted Jesus with this two-pronged problem.
He prayed repeatedly to have the affliction taken away from him so that
he could be more fully present to spreading the word, and got this reply: “My
grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” Or
in the words of the hymn-writer (VU 660), “when through fiery trials your
pathway shall lie, my grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply.” It appears
that for Paul, there is a necessary interrelationship between the powerful
message of Christ, which Paul is burdened to deliver, and his physical
affliction, which reminds him time and again that it is Christ’s power, not his
own power, that drives the message.
On this first Sunday of
what I hope will be many Sundays with you, I want Paul’s deep agitation to tell
the world of his direct experience of Jesus, to plant a seed in us: I want it
to plant a seed in our hearts as individuals, in our spirit as a congregation,
in our relationships with those closest to us. I want us to identify the Divine
moments in our lives, and let those moments change us.
I am convinced that
even if we’ve not had any kind of mystical, ethereal encounter with the divine,
everyone has had times when the presence of God has been tangible, and
personal, and has presented you with a new way of thinking, doing or
being. It could have been in an
unexpected kindness from a stranger, or a time when you reached beyond your
usual limits to include or support someone… and you knew, in the moment, or
shortly thereafter, that the Holy One had been specially and specifically in
that moment. It could have been a
devastating experience, a loss or a tragedy, or perhaps a moment of profound
beauty, that shifted your foundation from self-reliance to reliance on God. It could have been an ordinary moment in the
midst of a normal workday, when Christ opened your eyes to the wider
implications of your actions on your community and your world. Or maybe you have
had an intensely personal, mystic experience of the Lord, and are struggling to
bring that indescribable moment into the mundane realities of daily
living. Whatever it looks like in your
life, I am convinced that we HAVE encountered the risen Christ, and need to let
that encounter “be a problem” to us, which prods and goads us into life-giving
beliefs, deeper connectedness with the moment, radical forms of welcome, and
meaningful acts of service.
That’s not a problem to
be relegated to one sermon on one Sunday morning. It’s a daily challenge for
every Christ-follower, and a topic I hope will infuse our conversations in our
time together here at Ralph Connor Memorial United Church. Friends, in the context of that challenge,
may I say: it is good to be here, with God, with you. Amen.
Works cited:
Borg, Marcus J. and
Crossan, John Dominic. The First Paul. NYC: HarperOne, 2009.
Ruden, Sarah. Paul Among the People. NYC: Pantheon, 2010.
© 2012 Rev Greg Wooley,
Ralph Connor Memorial United Church, Canmore AB
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