2nd Corinthians 1:15-22       Isaiah 55:6-11

 

It’s startling to find the word “promise” hundreds of times over in the English translations of the Hebrew bible.             It’s startling for one reason: the word “promise” isn’t found in the Hebrew language.  In biblical Hebrew the verb that the English translators render “promise” is simply the verb to speak or the verb to say. In ancient Hebrew if someone merely said he would do something his saying it was a promise.

We are far from this attitude today.  Today we ask someone if he will do something; he says he will; then we come back, “Do you promise?”  Plainly we are asking him to promise he will do what he has said he will just because we can’t trust him; we can’t trust that his simple, unadorned word is trustworthy.  We can’t count on him inasmuch as he has spoken.

Our fellow-Christians who are Quakers noted all of this as early as the 1600s. Everyone knows that Quakers have consistently refused to take an oath in court to tell the truth; they will not swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — for one reason: Quakers believe that Christians tell the truth at all times and in all situations.  Why, then, would they make a special promise to tell the truth in one situation? For 400 years Quaker Christians have said, “To promise to tell the truth in court is to admit that we do not or may not tell the truth out of court; it’s to admit that our word can’t be trusted day-in and day-out. But our word can be trusted: what we say we perform.  Our simple word is our promise.”

In ancient Israel someone’s word was her promise for one reason: God’s word was his promise. What he said, he did. Promise guaranteed performance.

Since the characteristic of the living God is that he speaks, we can just as readily say that the characteristic of the living God is that he promises; and not only promises, performs.  Everywhere in the Hebrew bible God’s promise guarantees fulfilment. If the promise is made, performance is sure. Nothing describes God more characteristically than the fact that he is the promise-maker and therefore the promise-keeper.

 

I: — Then we should pay closer attention when we read in the newer testament (Romans 9:4-5) that the promises (of God) belong to Israel . Note the present tense: to Israel belong (there continue to belong, there belong right now) the promises. It isn’t suggested that the promises used to belong to Israel but do no longer.

It’s important to acknowledge this truth for several reasons, not least because of a remark that was made concerning my ministry in Mississauga . The remark was, “Why doesn’t Victor shut up about the Jews?  There is no place in Christian worship for his repeated references to the Jews. If Victor thinks so highly of them, why doesn’t he move over to the synagogue and join them?” I find it odd that no place is to be given to Yiddishkeit in Christian worship when Christian scripture insists that the promises belong to Israel still. According to Christian scripture (what we call the “New” Testament) Israel continues to have a place in God’s economy by God’s ordination.           Could it ever be appropriate to deny this truth in a service of worship?

My repeated insistence on Israel ’s ongoing place in the plan and purpose of God doesn’t mean for a minute that the Jewish people alone of all the peoples on earth have been spared the Fall. It doesn’t mean that they alone have pure hearts while we Gentiles are treacherous. After all it is a Jew, Jeremiah, who insists that the hearts of his own people are “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt.”(Jer. 17:9)  Jew and Gentile are alike creatures of the Fall.

It doesn’t mean that every last Jewish person is loveable or trustworthy — just as no one is silly enough to pretend that every last Gentile is loveable or trustworthy.

It doesn’t mean that every political move of the modern state of Israel is to be approved. The political moves of the modern state of Israel must be evaluated in accord with the moves of any nation-state.

It doesn’t mean that the history of ancient Israel has been whitewashed. The Hebrew prophets were tormented by a spiritual unfaithfulness in Israel that they described as harlotry; the same prophets were angered by a hypocrisy that they spoke of as a stench in the nostrils of God.

But — and it’s a huge “but” — while God’s next-to-last word to Israel (spoken through Hosea) is “Lo-ammi” (“Not my people”), “Lo-ruchamah” (“Not pitied”), God’s final word to Israel is, “How can I give you up?  And because I cannot give you up, I must call you “Ammi” (“My people”), “Ruchamah” (“Pitied”).

Centuries ago Jesus appeared before Pilate.  Pilate didn’t want to bother with Jesus, since Pilate knew that adjudicating Jewish squabbles was a no-win matter for him.  In a voice dripping with contempt Pilate asked Jesus, “Am I a Jew?” — meaning, “The whole world knows that I’m not one of your miserable people.”

When our daughter Catherine was fourteen (fourteen, not four, and not stupid either) she asked Maureen and me at the dinner table one evening in genuine bewilderment, “Are we Jews?”  Maureen and I quickly told Catherine, “No.  At least not exactly, but in a sense, yes, inasmuch as all Christians are honorary Jews; all Christians are guests in the house of Israel .”

Let us never forget the words of the apostle: “Until you Gentiles had embraced Jesus Christ in faith you were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel .”(Eph. 2:12) Since we have embraced Jesus Christ we now belong to the commonwealth of Israel .

 

What will happen if we Gentile Christians forget that the promises belong to Israel ? What will happen if we forget that we are guests in the house of Israel ?

We shall neglect Israel ’s book, what we call the older testament (it happens to be 78% of the bible), the first testament; and in neglecting it we shall ruin the Christian faith. Ruin it? Yes, utterly.

(i)           In the first place we shall forfeit the truth that the universe is God’s creation, created out of his oceanic love, ruled by his sovereign mercy, sustained by his incomprehensible patience and finally accountable to him. We shall forfeit this foundational truth inasmuch as the newer testament doesn’t yield a doctrine of creation.

(ii)           In the second place we shall fail to understand ourselves as human beings. It is only in Israel ’s book that we learn we are made uniquely in God’s image, have been made “response-able” to him and “response-ible” for our life with him and with other humans alike made in his image.

(iii)           In the third place we shall no longer know who God is.  We shall forget that
God is not identical with his creation or with any part of it.  (The biggest confusion at alal times is the confusion between God and God’s creation.) To say this is to say that God is holy, and apart from the older testament we can’t understand what God’s holiness means.

Apart from the older testament we can’t understand that God is person. Because God is person, according to Israel’s book, he is heartbroken like a husband whose wife leaves him for another man; he weeps like a wife whose husband won’t come home; he rages at horrors in the world that should find you and me raging too; he grieves over children who would rather be lost than found; he snorts like a labourer or an athlete whose exertion is at its outermost limit; he rejoices like a father whose child is the apple of his eye; he bonds himself to his people like a nursing mother whose breastfeeding brings as much comfort and contentment to her as it brings nourishment to her infant.

When we have ignored — or worse, disdained — our place in the commonwealth of Israel what shall we have left of God? Certainly not God as holy and God as person.  Then what? an abstract idea? a lifeless principle? a projection from our wish-list?

(iv)           In the fourth place unless we keep before us our membership in the commonwealth of Israel we shall invariably magnify the wickedness of anti-Semitism, which wickedness the world may politely denounce out of political correctness but secretly always aids and abets.  Need I say more?

“To them — Israelites — belong (present tense) the promises.” I am unashamed to take my stand with the apostle.

 

II: — In taking my stand with the apostle Paul I thereby endorse his conviction that “All the promises of God find their Yes in Christ.” (2 Cor. 1:20) Whatever God has promised throughout his centuries-long struggle with Israel ; whatever he has promised to Israel , or through Israel to the church, it is gathered up and fulfilled and crowned in Christ Jesus our Lord. In fact all the promises made to Israel , made through Israel , are promised afresh in Christ and performed in Christ.  “All the promises of God find their Yes in him”, says the apostle.

Because the God who incarnates himself in Jesus of Nazareth is the promise-making (promise-keeping) God, there are scores of promises arising from the earthly ministry of Jesus that we could take to heart this morning and sustain ourselves with until our struggle is over too. There isn’t time to probe scores of them; today we shall probe three only.

 

(i)             The first promise is that we are never unaccompanied.  “I am with you always, to the close of the age”, says our Lord.(Matt. 28:20) He has promised that he will never forsake us.  Note: he will never forsake us.  This is the promise. The promise isn’t that you and I shall never feel forsaken.  Christ’s people often feel forsaken.  Think of the sentence Paul writes in his second letter to the congregation in Corinth . He speaks of the affliction that savaged him and others in Asia . He doesn’t tell us precisely what the affliction was.  He does tell us, however, what the effect of the affliction was on him and his friends: “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.”(2 Cor. 1:8-10)  How much worse could anyone feel?  “We were crushed. We despaired of life itself.” Remember, our Lord has promised never to forsake us; he hasn’t promised that he will never allow us to feel forsaken.

It’s only fair that we let Paul finish his own sentence: “We felt we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.  Therefore on him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.”

Our Lord has promised that he will never leave us unaccompanied. Has he kept his promise? How can anyone know whether he has kept his promise?  Plainly there can be no proof.  It’s impossible to prove that Jesus never leaves his people unaccompanied. But lack of proof is no detriment. After all, in the profoundest matters of life there never is proof.  I can’t prove to anyone that my wife loves me.  At the same time, I have never doubted that she loves me ardently. In the profoundest matters of life there never is proof; but there is testimony, witness.

Then what testimony has been borne to our Lord’s promise-keeping? We must summon witnesses and allow them to speak.  How many witnesses will it take to convince us?  Myself, I always begin with my grandmother.           She was poorly educated (the eldest of 15 children), became a servant-girl in England at age 12, and then the wife of a factory-worker in early 1900s Canada . (In other words, she had only pennies.) Ten pregnancies, six live births, four surviving children; kidney removed in 1917; towards the end of her life she had to attend relentlessly to a husband whose limbs were as twisted as a pretzel and who was unable to get out of bed for the last 11 years of his life — which husband she managed to outlive for a year or two.  Perhaps you wish to say that her situation may not have been so very unusual for people of her era.  Nonetheless, what was unusual was her quiet testimony concerning the promise kept. “I am with you always; you are never unaccompanied.”  Proof is impossible in the nature of the case.  Her testimony (to me, at least) was so authentic as to be unrejectable. The final stanza of her favourite hymn was fixed in her heart and on her lips:

No tempest can my courage shake,

My love from Thee no pain can take,

No fear my heart appal.

And where I cannot see I’ll trust

For then I know Thou surely must

Be still my all in all.

In the latter part of the 1800s and in the early part of the 1900s Nathanael Burwash was a giant in Canadian Methodism.  Scholar, university professor, churchman, preacher, Burwash was instrumental in moving Victoria College from Cobourg to the University of Toronto with all that Canada’s pre-eminent university could do for Victoria and Victoria for it.  In addition Burwash was a major architect of the uniting churches of 1925. In one terrible week in 1889 he and his wife lost four children to diphtheria. What did Burwash do? Curse God?  Rage that God was merely a teaser and tormentor?  Conclude that there was no more substance or truth to faith than to a child’s imaginary playmate?  Just the opposite. His consistent testimony was that his Lord’s promise was kept.  Christ’s people are never unaccompanied.

 

(ii)           Never unillumined is the second promise we shall examine this morning.  “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”(John 8:12) He has promised never to leave us in the dark.

But sometimes we feel we are in the dark.  What’s more, we are annoyed at people who claim never to be confused or perplexed or stymied or ignorant; we are annoyed at people who never seem to recognize life’s complexity.

Then what does our Lord mean when he promises never to leave us unillumined? He means that he will always provide us with enough light to take the next step; only the next step, to be sure, but at least the next step.  He hasn’t promised to give us so much light as to let us see where we shall be and what we shall be about 45 years hence, but certainly enough light for the next step so that the only issue facing you and me is obedience. If we lacked all light we could readily excuse our sin; but as long as we have enough light for one step, the next step, then the issue isn’t light; the issue is obedience. To obey is always to find enough light for the next step again, and then for the next step after that. Not to obey, of course, is to find ourselves in a darkness that only grows darker.

We must be sure to note that the promise isn’t that no one ever walks in darkness; the promise is that whoever follows Jesus; this person won’t walk in darkness, for Christ is light.

 

(iii)           Never unaccompanied, never unillumined, never neglected.  Says our Lord, “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him.”(Matt. 7:7-11//Luke 11:9-13) Actually, there is a preface to the promise. “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For nobody asks or seeks or knocks in vain.           Is your heavenly Father a torturer?  Depraved as you are you wouldn’t treat your child like that.  How much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him.”

What are the “good things”?  “Goodies”? Trinkets and toys? Luke’s version of Christ’s promise helps us here: “How much more will your Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”

The Holy Spirit is God himself in his utmost immediacy, intimacy, intensity. He himself is the gift; he himself in his immediacy, intimacy, intensity.  All who ask, seek, knock find themselves flooded by the Spirit.

Is the promise kept? Proof is impossible. Testimony alone matters, as testimony alone pertains to the profoundest aspects of life.

With whose testimony do we begin?  Paul says, “I am rock-ribbed certain that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”Peter says, “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” Julian of Norwich (a 14th century woman), “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”  Martin Luther, when asked where he would be if everything he had agonized over and laboured for were overturned, replied, “I shall be then where I am now; in the hands of God.”  When a prison guard taunted Nicholas Ridley, the most brilliant of the English Reformers, on the eve of Ridley’s execution, “Do know what’s going to happen to you tomorrow, Mr. Ridley?”, Ridley had replied, “Yes, I know what’s going to happen to me tomorrow; tomorrow I marry. Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”  The prophet Jeremiah has testified, “God’s faithfulness is great; his steadfast love never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.”

There is no point in piling up testimonies ad infinitum.  Once we have heard them, all that remains for us is to take it all to heart. Which is to say, all that remains for us is to entrust ourselves to him who is Israel ’s greater son. Because he is a son of Israel and speaks Hebrew, he doesn’t have to say “I promise” in order to promise. All he needs do is speak. His word is his promise, his promise kept.

For all the promises of God find their Yes in Christ Jesus our Lord.

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                   

  June 2007

2 Corinthians 4:15

 

Aren’t you amazed at God’s magnanimity, his generosity, his large-heartedness? Clues to his magnanimity (but only clues) are seen in his handiwork. His creation abounds in examples of munificence. Think of the stars. There are billions of them in our galaxy (even as ours is not the only galaxy). Not only are there are innumerable stars, many of these stars are vastly larger and brighter than the star we know best, our own sun. The largest star is 690,000,000 miles in diameter; it is 800 times larger than our sun, and 1,900 times brighter. (Can you imagine a star 800 times larger than the sun?) And how vast is the star-world? Light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Other galaxies have been located as far away as six billion light years.

The creation is profuse just because the heart of the creator himself overflows ceaselessly. How many kinds of plants are there? And within the plant domain, how many kinds of trees? And within the tree domain, how many kinds of pines? Ninety! There are ninety different kinds of pine tree alone!

And then there is food. When I moved to the Maritimes I was astounded the first time I saw a fishing boat unload its catch. As the gleaming fish spilled out of the hold I felt there couldn’t be another fish left in the North Atlantic. And I was watching one boat only, an inshore-fishery boat at that, unloading only one day’s catch!

As much as we are inundated with fish we have to remember that only 1% of the world’s protein comes from fish. The rest comes chiefly from grain. And right now there is enough grain grown to give every last person 3000 calories per day. (We need only 2300 to survive.) When I was in India I saw tons of food piled at the roadside, in village after village. To be sure, there’s often a problem with food-distribution — since 15,000 people starve to death throughout the world every day — but there’s no lack of food-production. Let us never forget that France is the breadbasket of the European Economic Community, yet the nations of central Africa — where protein-deficiency diseases proliferate — produce more food per capita than France does. Even in its very worst years of famine India has remained a net exporter of food.

Whenever I reflect upon God’s overflowing bountifulness I pause as I think of food; I pause, but I don’t linger. I do linger, however, whenever I think of God’s great-heartedness concerning his Son. The apostle John cries, “It is not by measure that God gives the Spirit!” (John 3:34 RSV) [“God gives the Spirit without limit!” (NIV)] The rabbis in Israel of old used to say that God gave the prophets, gave each prophet, a measure of the Spirit; but only a measure of the Spirit, since no one prophet spoke the entire truth of God. Upon his Son, however, God has poured out the Spirit without limit. The Spirit hasn’t been rationed, a little here, a little there. No rationing, no doling out, no divvying-up; just the Father pouring out everything deep inside him upon the Son, then pointing to the Son while crying to the world, “What more can I say than in him I have said?”

It is not by measure that God has given Christ Jesus the Spirit. To know this is to know that in our Lord there is to be found all the truth of God, the wisdom of God, the passion of God — as well as the patience of God — the will and work and word and way of God. It’s all been poured into him.

If God has poured himself without limit into his Son, then you and I can be blessed without limit only in clinging to the Son. If God has deluged himself upon his Son, then we are going to be soaked in God’s blessings only as we stand so close to our Lord that what has been poured into him without limit spills over onto us as well.

I: — Paul tells the church-folk in Ephesus that the riches of God’s grace are lavished upon us in Christ. Grace is God’s love meeting our sin and therefore taking the form of mercy. (Eph. 1:8) Since God’s mercy meets our sin not once but over and over, undiscouraged and undeflected, God’s mercy takes the form of constancy. God’s constancy remains constant not because God is inflexible or rigid (and therefore brittle); God’s mercy remains constant not because he expects human hearts, now hard, to soften (some will, some won’t); God’s mercy remains constant in the face of our sin just because he has pledged himself to us and he will not break his promise to us even if every last human heart remains cold and stony and sterile. Grace, in a word, is God’s love meeting our sin, expressing itself therefore as mercy, and refusing to abandon us despite our frigid ingratitude and our senseless resistance. To speak of grace at all, in this context, is plainly to speak of the riches of grace. And such riches, says Paul, are lavished upon us, poured out upon us without calculation or qualification or hesitation or condition.

Several years ago in Cook County Jail, Chicago, the prison chaplain visited a prisoner on death row. The convict had only hours to live. Quietly, soberly, gently, sensitively the chaplain acquainted the convict afresh with the truth and simplicity and sufficiency of God’s provision for all humankind, and specifically for this one fellow who would shortly appear before him whom any of us can endure only as we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. The convict — angry, frustrated, resentful, envious of those not in his predicament, just blindly livid and senselessly helpless — the convict spat in the chaplain’s face. The chaplain waited several minutes until a measure of emotional control seemed evident and said even more quietly, soberly, sensitively, “Would you like to spit in my face again?”

When the apostle speaks of “the riches of God’s grace” he never means that God is a doormat who can only stand by helplessly while the entire world victimizes him endlessly. When he speaks of the riches of God’s grace, rather, he means that the patience of God and the mercy of God and the constancy of God — the sheer willingness of God to suffer abuse and derision and anguish for us — all of this cannot be fathomed. Two hundred years before the incident in Cook County Jail Charles Wesley spoke for all of this when he wrote in his hymn, “I have long withstood his grace, long provoked him to his face”. Because of our protracted provocation, God’s grace can only be rich, can only be lavished upon us. Little wonder that Paul exclaims, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Rom.5:20) The marvel of God’s grace is that as abhorrent as our sin is to God, it is so very abhorrent to him that he wants it to become abhorrent to us as well; therefore he meets our sin with even more of his grace.

Why does he bother to meet our sin with grace abounding? Because he knows that if only we glimpse how much more he can give us we should want nothing less for ourselves. Jesus insists, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Our Lord has come that his people might have life aboundingly, hugely, wholly, grandly, plentifully.

We should note that while Jesus urges “abundance” upon us, he doesn’t tell us in what the abundance consists. He simply says that what he lends his people is to be described as bountiful, copious, plenteous, profusive. Why hasn’t he spelled it out more specifically? I think he hasn’t in order to minimize the risk of counterfeit imitation. If our Lord had said, ‘Abundant’ life consists in a,b,c,d, then people would immediately endeavour to fabricate or imitate a,b,c,d — all of which would render abundant life, so-called, utterly artificial.

People crave reality; they won’t settle ultimately for artificiality, regardless of how useful artificiality may appear in the short run. They crave reality. Surely that which is genuinely profound and truly significant will also be attractive. And surely that which is so very attractive will move more people from scepticism to faith and the possession of abundant life than will a clever argument which leaves them unable to reply but more sceptical than ever.

A minute ago I said that when Jesus speaks of “abundant life” he doesn’t say in what the abundance consists. Nevertheless, from the apostolic testimony as a whole we can put together a composite description. If generosity is a mark of discipleship, then one feature of abundant life is ungrudging, anonymous generosity. If love is too, then another feature is uncalculating concern for others regardless of their merit or their capacity to repay. If forgiveness of injuries and insults, then a marvellous forgivingness and an equally marvellous forgetfulness. If seriousness about prayer is a feature of abundant life, then equally significant is a willingness to forego much before foregoing the time we spend with our face upturned to God’s. Nobody wants to reduce holiness, the holiness marking Christians, to sexual purity. At the same time, wherever the New Testament urges holiness upon Christ’s people the context nearly always pertains to sexual conduct. (This is something the church has simply forgotten today.)

Needless to say, in all of this we shall always know that the abundant life streaming from us arises at all only because of the riches of God’s grace proliferating within us.

II: — In view of all that God pours into us, generates within us and calls forth from us we are to “abound in thanksgiving”. (2 Cor. 4:15; Col.2:6-7) We are to spout — geyser-like — uncontrived, unscheduled outbursts of gratitude to God. Of course there’s a place for scheduled acknowledgements of God’s goodness to us as we offer thanksgivings at set times (including Thanksgiving Sunday). More frequently, however, and more characteristically, unplotted effusions of thanksgiving overflow even the channels of good taste and middle class demeanour.

Despite all the sporting events that can be watched on television, there remains no substitute for seeing them “live”. Saturday night broadcasts into one’s living room and the Maple Leafs “live” at the Air Canada Centre are simply not the same event. One thing that never ceases to thrill me at a live game is the crowd’s spontaneous eruption when the home team scores. A Leaf player “drains one” (as they say in the game), and 19,000 people shout with one voice. There are no signs that suddenly flash, “Applaud now.” There is nothing prearranged to cue the crowd. There is only uncontrived exclamation.

Surely you and I will “abound in thanksgiving” only as we are overcome yet again at God’s astounding munificence and we cannot stifle our exclamation. And on Thanksgiving Sunday in particular, is there anyone whose heart doesn’t tingle at blessings too numerous to count? Then of course we are going to abound in thanksgiving.

III: — To know we have been given so much, to be grateful for having been given so much, is to shout “Amen” instantly when Paul urges us to “abound in every good work.” (2 Cor.9:8b) Anyone who has been blessed profoundly, anyone who gives thanks profusely, will always want to abound in “every good work”.

The older I grow the more I realize how important the ordinary, the undramatic, the “ho-hum” (so-called) is everywhere in life. Often the dramatic is deemed especially important, if only because the dramatic is unusual. An automobile strikes a pedestrian crossing the street; the pedestrian’s leg is severed, and the throbbing artery spouts blood, quickly draining away life — when along comes a fellow in his brand-new Harry Rosen Italian wool suit; without hesitating, he rips up the sleeve of his jacket and twists on the tourniquet — just in time. Good. None of it is to be slighted.

At the same time, 99.9% of life isn’t dramatic. For every dramatic assistance we might render there are a million opportunities for the most undramatic, concrete kindnesses whose blessings to their recipients are priceless. Maureen and I in Brandenburg, Germany, for instance, (one hour off the airplane) trying to find the tourist information bureau (needed for a list of “Zimmer mit Fruehstueck” — Bed & Breakfast); we have made four circuits in our rented car of the downtown maze of a mediaeval city, know by now that we aren’t going to find the tourist information bureau if we make 40 circuits, know too that we don’t know how to stop making circuits; a woman who speaks German only saying, “It’s too complicated for me to describe how to get to the bureau from here; I’ll walk you to it” — and then walking the longest distance out of her way to help two strangers from a foreign country whom she will never see again. The young mother across the aisle from me on the train to Montreal; her baby is only six months old, too young to be left alone; the woman is exceedingly nauseated and needs to get to the washroom before; would I hold her baby until she has returned from the washroom? Of course.

Because the undramatic abounds in life (as the dramatic does not), the apostle is careful to say that we are to abound in every good work.

IV: — There is only one matter left for us to probe. What impels us to do all of this? To be sure we are commanded to abound in thanksgiving, commanded again to abound in every good work. We can always grimace grimly and simply get on with it just because we’ve been ordered to; or we can recall the riches of God’s grace that have been lavished upon us. But to have to recall something is to admit that we are lacking an incentive that is immediate; and to grimace grimly and do onerously what we’ve been told to do is to admit that discipleship is a pain in the neck. Then what impels us to abound precisely where we know we should abound? Paul says we “abound” from the heart as joy — joy! — wells up within us.

When Paul saw that the Christians were going to go hungry in Jerusalem during the famine there he asked the Christians in Macedonia for help. The Macedonian believers were poor, dirt-poor. And yet when the apostle asked them to help people they had never seen they “gave beyond their means.” (2 Cor. 8:3) Not only did they give beyond their means, they begged Paul to grant them the privilege of helping others in dire need.

What impelled them to do it? Paul says simply, “…their abundance of joy overflowed in a wealth of liberality.” (2 Cor. 8:2) It was their joy — not their sense of duty, not the obligations of obedience — just their joy in Christ, their joy at the mercies of God, their joy at the super-abounding grace of God in the face of their abounding sin; it was their abundance of joy that impelled them to give beyond their means, poor as they were, as soon as they heard of those who were poorer still.

Only a superfluity of joy renders us those who are willing to make a real sacrifice for the kingdom; and only a superfluity of joy allows us to see that alongside the wounds of Christ we shouldn’t be speaking of our sacrifice at all.

On Thanksgiving Sunday, 2002, I want such abounding joy in my heart as to attest the mercy of God lavished upon me and lavished upon me endlessly in the face of my all-too-abounding sin and undeniable need. For then abounding thankfulness will stream my lips, even as abounding kindnesses flow from my hands.

                                                                            Victor Shepherd   

October 2002

(A word-study in the Greek verb PERISSEUEIN, “to abound”)

Text: Colossians 2:7 — “…abounding in thanksgiving.”

 

 

2^nd Corinthians 6:1-10     Luke 18:9-14

 

For years I’ve been intrigued by the psychology of perception. What do people “hear”? What do they think they hear, that is, as opposed to what was actually said? What do people “see”, claim they see, even swear they see as opposed to what there actually is to be seen?

Laboratory experiments in the psychology of perception fascinate me. One experiment has to do with motion sickness and the perception of motion. A person is blindfolded and seated on a chair, the chair itself mounted on a rim that revolves. As the rim speeds up the blindfolded subject soon becomes dizzy and nauseated. After a few minutes, however, the subject begins to feel better. Soon he feels much better and is glad that the moving rim is slowing down and has even stopped. Now he’s completely relieved of his dizziness and nausea. Actually the rim hasn’t stopped at all. It’s moving as fast as ever. What’s happened is this: after the rim has spun for several minutes the subject’s inner ear has compensated for the motion. The blindfolded subject now feels he’s at rest when in fact he’s never stopped revolving. Little by little his inner ear has made whatever adjustment was necessary to cause a highly abnormal situation to feel perfectly normal.

Everywhere in life there are abnormal situations without number that we’ve learned to compensate for. What at first made us highly uncomfortable is now felt to be normal. Conversely, Christians who uphold what is right and good and true in the midst of the world’s opinion will find themselves feeling most uncomfortable.

Let’s return to the experiment with the blindfolded subject seated on the moving rim. As I said earlier, after several minutes have elapsed the subject feels he’s now at rest and is no longer nauseated. He can’t get off the moving chair, however, until it stops; and it won’t stop unless it first slows down. Therefore the rim is gradually slowed down. As soon as it begins to slow down, however, the subject feels dizzy again, nauseated too; as soon as the rim begins to slow down, the subject complains that it’s speeding up, and that is why he’s newly nauseated! When the rim finally stops, he feels it’s now moving at top speed. Now he’s exceedingly nauseated; nauseated, that is, until his inner ear adjusts once more.

There are many conclusions to be drawn here. For one, feeling is no indicator of actuality. How we feel is no guide to what is. For another, however upsetting the abnormal is, we soon adjust to it and look upon it as the way things ought to be. For another, any return to what’s normal is highly unsettling, at least initially.

 

Most people look upon the world “out there” as normal, the measure and standard of itself and whatever might come to be. The gospel, however, tells us that the world is capsized.

The world looks upon itself as replete with truth and the measure of truth. The gospel, on the other hand, insists that the world is riddled with falsehood and unable to measure truth.

The world looks upon itself as ultimately real. The gospel, we should note carefully, insists that the world is actual. To say that the world is actual is to say it’s not imaginary and not mythological. The world is actual, to be sure, but it isn’t ultimately real. Ultimate reality is the presence and power of God, the ascendancy of the kingdom, the living efficacy of Jesus Christ. (All these expressions mean the same.)

The world looks upon itself as the source of whatever meaning people discover in the world. The gospel insists that the meaning of the world’s life is given to it by the One who created it and won’t abandon it.

The world unconsciously assumes that whatever most people do is the measure of what humankind ought to do. The gospel insists that what most people do isn’t the measure of anything; God’s truth is the measure of what they ought to do but don’t, and his judgement is the exposure of what they shouldn’t do but do.

So who is right? Think of what it is to be dreaming and what it is to be awake. When we are awake we know indubitably that we’re awake. When we are dreaming we think we’re awake even though we aren’t. It’s only upon awakening that we know our dream of being awake to be an instance of self-deception. When our Lord grants sight to a blind man, the blind fellow knows two things immediately: he knows that he can see (no one could ever persuade him now that he isn’t seeing), and he knows who enabled him to see. When the disciples cry out at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is the Son of God, they know indubitably that he is this even as Jesus reminds them that they didn’t come to this truth by themselves. When the Christians in Corinth exclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord, they are as certain of this truth as an awakened person is that she’s awake, even as the apostle reminds them that only the Holy Spirit can bring them to this awareness.

So who is right? The kingdom of God and the world with its self-understanding contradict each other at virtually any point at which we care to compare them. A recent magazine article spoke of a “medical emergency” with the headline, “STDS ARE DEVASTATING YOUNG WOMEN’S HEALTH.” The article discussed the nature of STDs and pointed out that 12 million Americans are diagnosed each year with assorted sexually transmitted diseases. The article insisted that the responsibility for the prevalence and spread of STDs together with their attendant misery; the responsibility for all this lies with the federal government. The government hasn’t assigned sufficient funds to such problems, and government under-funding is the reason STDs continue to proliferate. Nowhere in the lengthy article was there even the hint that responsibility might rest with the women themselves. Why not? Because the article everywhere assumes that common access to sexual partners is as normal as common access to the air we all breathe and common access to the water we all drink.

The gospel engenders truth, substance, solidity. The world traffics in appearance, vacuity, froth. Recently a television program informed the Canadian electorate of how rising politicians are coached. Rule #1. Don’t wear a shirt (if you’re a male) whose collar is too large. A too-large shirt-collar makes a man appear terminally ill. (What does shirt-collar size have to do with serving the public good? What does it have to do with wisdom, integrity, trustworthiness?) Rule #2. Don’t say anything. Talk, to be sure, since all politicians have to talk. But don’t say anything, anything you might have to support or defend or account for. Rule #3. Remember that appearance is everything, substance nothing. A few years ago John Turner had the habit of licking his lips frequently as he spoke. A media-consultant publicly ridiculed him. “He looks like an ant-eater at a picnic!”, she sneered. Does the habit of licking one’s lips mean that one is intellectually deficient and ethically defective?

Anyone with a modicum of rationality would expect the world to recognise and honour honesty, decency, kindness, faithfulness, transparency. But the person who exemplifies this doesn’t even get noticed. On the other hand, when Meyer Lansky was the most powerful mobster in the underworld of the U.S.A., he received a personal invitation to the presidential inauguration of Dwight David Eisenhower. Then which is capsized, the world or the kingdom of God? Which is right side up and which abnormal, even perverse? In which do you feel more comfortable?

I am asked frequently about the paradoxes of the gospel. Such paradoxes abound beyond our telling. The arch-paradox of the gospel that underlies all other paradoxes, of course, is the paradox of the cross. We have to say something about this paradox because this paradox gives all others their force and efficacy and truth.

In a world preoccupied with power we can’t help asking ourselves “Where does God display his almightiest might?” God does his mightiest work, of course, at the cross. It was for the sake of the cross that he became incarnate in his Son. Everything in God’s 1200-year struggle with Israel came to its focus at the cross. Everything in the earthly ministry of the Son came to its fulfilment at the cross. The paradox of it all is that God does his unique work — God names himself, as it were — precisely where he’s indistinguishable from two criminals whose names the world has never known and never will. God does his most glorious work precisely where he’s most sunk in shame, for the only people the Romans crucified were enemies of the state, soldiers who had deserted, and rapists. God is most effective where bystanders deem him helpless. God is wise beyond the wisdom of the world exactly where knowing people nod their heads and commiserate concerning his folly. God is most exalted not simply where he’s most humbled but even where he’s utterly humiliated. God fashions acquittal for a world he must condemn precisely by subjecting himself to the selfsame condemnation. God displays his righteousness when the Son who knew no sin became sin for us, and God himself identifies himself with that sin which, say the Hebrew prophets, he cannot bear to behold. In sum, God brings life to the world by bringing death upon himself, a death that is the utmost alienation deep in his own heart, a self-alienation without which our reconciliation with him would never occur. The cross is one grand paradox gathering up a dozen paradoxes akin to those named, one grand paradox that is nothing but paradox.

Since the cross dominates and characterises the Christian story, every aspect of that story is therefore paradox as well. If the core of God’s self-involvement with the world is paradox, then every aspect of that involvement, every truth concerning it, is necessarily paradox too. Compared to the Christian story, the story that the world tells about itself appears back-to-front, inside out, upside down. Or is it the Christian story that’s ridiculous while the world’s is normal? Just who is crazy here, anyway?

In the time that remains today we are going to look at one or two paradoxes. A paradox, we must remember, is a statement that is inherently self-contradictory yet nevertheless true. Needless to say, a statement that is inherently self-contradictory can be true only if the ground of that statement is a reality that can’t be overturned or subverted or dispelled. The ground of every paradoxical statement in the Christian story is the cross. It is that reality which can’t be overturned or subverted or dispelled. Therefore the statements in the Christian story are not only inherently self-contradictory but also profoundly true.

“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled”, says Jesus, “and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” It’s the last line of our Lord’s parable of the two men who go to the temple to pray. (Luke 18:9-15) One man thanks God for all those things about himself for which he should thank God: he doesn’t extort, he isn’t unjust, he doesn’t commit adultery, he fasts and he tithes. Religiously he’s exemplary; morally, he’s faultless. There isn’t so much as a hint of hypocrisy or insincerity or duplicity in him. Every word he says about himself is true. He practises what he preaches. He’s a thoroughly good man. Surely no one wants to say it would be better if he were exploitative, unfair and a philanderer.

The other fellow, so the story goes, simply cries heavenward, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” And it’s this man, insists Jesus, who goes home “justified”, goes home rightly related to God and therefore exalted before God.

On my first pastoral charge I happened to mention, in casual conversation, that the situation before God of every last human being was the same. My situation before God was identical with that of the most notorious profligate any of us had heard of or could imagine. The reaction to my casually spoken line was swift and hostile. “No, it isn’t!”, church folk spat back at me, “Our condition before God is different. Since God is just (at least we all agreed on this point) our moral circumspection has to count for something.” “It does count for something”, I replied, “it counts for our condemnation.” Whereas a minute ago they had thought me ridiculous, now they thought me deranged. I pointed out to them that the fact I wasn’t a philanderer didn’t mean for a minute that I loved my wife. And my moral achievement (considerable, if I may say so myself) didn’t mean that I loved God at all.

In our Lord’s parable the man who exalted himself in view of his genuine virtue used his virtue as a bargaining chip before God, used it as leverage with God. He pointed to it and reminded God that he wasn’t like others. He was telling the truth: he wasn’t like others; he was morally superior to others. However, his moral superiority, a matter of his will, had blinded him to the condition of his heart. His virtue was a barrier behind which he hid from God; it was a disguise in light of which he thought his heart was unknown to God; it was currency with which he attempted to negotiate with God. Unquestionably morally superior, he also thought himself spiritually superior. More to the point, he was so preoccupied with himself and his achievement that he never grasped what the other fellow in the parable knew from the start: ultimately life isn’t a matter of the achievements we “tot up” but a matter of the relationships we cherish; supremely the relationship, our immersion in the heart of God. He never understood that morality boasted of, morality traded on, morality used as a perch from which to disdain those beneath us is a stench in the nostrils of God. And not only a stench in the nostrils of God, a blindness so thoroughgoing as to blind the boaster to the corruption of his heart and therefore to his vulnerability before God.

The other fellow in the parable had nothing of which to boast. Having nothing of which to boast, he wasn’t tempted to boast. Knowing himself surviving at that moment only by God’s patience and going to survive only by God’s pardon, he was without pretence, without pride, without self-deception. Humbled, he could only cry, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” He went home “justified”, rightly related to God, and thereafter exalted.

The humble, says Jesus, are the exalted; the exalted (self-exalted) are going to find themselves humbled.

Let’s look this time not at a paradox from the lips of Jesus but at one from the pen of Paul. To the Christians in Corinth he speaks of himself and his fellow-apostles as “having nothing yet possessing everything.” (2 Cor. 6:10) We have no difficulty understanding what it is to “have nothing.” To have nothing is to have nothing. But what’s the “everything” that the “have nothing’s” possess simultaneously? The apostle drops clues to this “everything” throughout his letters. “For me to live is Christ” he tells the congregation in Philippi. (Phil. 1:21) “The Son of God loved me“, he exclaims to the spiritually confused in Galatia, “and gave himself for me!” (Gal. 2:20) “Nothing can compare with the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord!”, he exults yet again. (Phil. 3:7) When he contemplates the Christians in Thessalonica, men and women sunk in paganism who had turned from prostrating themselves before idols to serve the living God, he glows, “You dear people in Thessalonica; you are my glory and my joy!” (1 Thess. 2:19) He sums it all up in the pithiest exclamation to the church in Corinth: “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Cor. 9:15)

Having nothing, the apostle yet possesses everything. His intimacy with his Lord is so very intimate, so very intense, that he finds no vocabulary able to do it justice and can only say, “I have been admitted to that which I can’t describe; I have heard what may not be uttered.” (2 Cor. 12:4) Still, he can say something, as his numerous letters attest. Having nothing, he yet possesses everything: an intimacy with his Lord that no one will ever take from him and no misfortune will ever eclipse. It’s an intimacy that is, ultimately, the only wealth he possesses, the only riches he has to share, the only gift he can hold up before his people. This gift (his admittance to innermost intimacy with Jesus Christ) is inexpressible; this gift was fashioned with him in mind; this gift is of surpassing worth (he means incomparable worth). As often as he reflects on this gift he “lights up.” As often as he thinks of people like the Thessalonians who have come to know and cherish the same gift for themselves he is reconfirmed in his vocation, and he recalls that on the day of judgement their intimacy with the Lord will be his glory even as it is his joy now. Because he possesses everything, he can minister out of his riches to others in their spiritual poverty.

I am moved every time I read John Wesley’s journal. At the end of a harrying day when he has ridden miles, exchanged his lame horse for a sound one, contended with smirking magistrates and angry mobs, preached to convicts on their way to execution and coalminers on their way to the pits, written yet another tract for public dissemination and sorted out squabbles among his assistant preachers; at the end of such a day Wesley writes four brief words in his journal, “I offered them Christ.” It was all he wanted to offer. It was all he could. And it was enough, everything in fact.

I began the sermon with an illustration from the psychology of perception. I pointed out that once we become accustomed to what is abnormal; once the abnormal seems normal, a return to what is normal upsets us considerably. At the same time, however much a return to what is normal may upset us at first, we know soon that the kingdom of God is the creation of God right side up, while the world at large is the creation of God upside down. And in the same moment we understand that the gospel is true and sound and sane while it’s the world that’s crazy.

The paradoxes of the Christian story are self-contradictory by definition and therefore nothing more than “gobbledegook” for those who read them through the spectacles of unbelief. But for us whose minds and hearts have been conformed to the peculiar logic of the cross – the grand paradox, the paradox that renders everything about the Christian faith paradox; we glory in that paradox which now makes perfect sense to us, even as we pursue that life where first is last and last first, where saved is lost and lost saved. We count it a privilege to pursue it and therefore will ever pursue it until the day when paradox disappears as the logic of the cross – illogic to the world at present – is seen to be the soul of common sense. For on that day the logic of the cross will be known as truth that never could have been refuted, truth that henceforth can never be refused.

Victor Shepherd    

February 2000

2^nd Corinthians 9:6-15

Deuteronomy 26:1-11     Luke 17:11-19

 

I: — The writer of Proverbs tells us that there are four things so wonderful as to defy understanding: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the seas, and the way of a man with a maid. These four are wonderful. At the same time, I am sure that the writer would never restrict the wonders of the universe to four. So rich is the creation, so marvellously diverse, that the universe is wonder upon wonder without end.

Vast and rich as the creation is, the Creator himself can only be vaster and richer. Today, on Thanksgiving Sunday, I am led to wonder and gratitude and adoration as I ponder the universe which has come from God’s hand.

Think of the navigational instinct of birds. Myself, I have the poorest sense of direction. Following a road map is almost an insuperable challenge to me when road maps are supposed to render a sense of direction unnecessary. So poor is my sense of direction that I have difficulty recognizing streetscape or landscape that I saw only five hours earlier. Yet the homing pigeon can always get home.

The best navigators are sea birds. Best of all is the shearwater. One of them, taken from its nest and transported 3,200 miles away, returned to its nest 12.5 days later. In other words, the bird had flown, on average, 10.5 miles per hour, 24 hours per day, 12.5 days, and had found its way to the nest from which it had been taken.

Bees aren’t birds, but bees are top-notch navigators as well. In order to orient themselves bees need to see only the tiniest bit of blue sky. You see, light from blue sky is polarized. (Polarized light has different properties in different directions, whereas the light that shines through cloud cover isn’t polarized.) As long as bees have access to polarized light from the smallest patch of blue sky they will never lose their way.

 

Then there is the brain. The neural complexity, the cellular complexity of the brain astounds me. More marvellous than the structure of the brain is the functioning of the brain. Brain is connected to muscle by means of nerves. Nerves, muscles and brain work together in such a way that we can will to do something and do it!

More marvellous still is the realm of thought. In the creaturely world there is no thought without brain. Yet thought isn’t mere brain-activity; “thought” isn’t just a fancy term for electrical connections among brain cells. While mind, at the creaturely level, never occurs without brain, mind is never reducible to brain. After Albert Einstein had died his brain was sliced ever so finely and examined under a microscope. His brain was found to be no different from anyone else’s. Yet his mind was startlingly different. Why? How? No one knows.

Brain-researchers tell us that one part of the brain has to do with hearing and smelling and seeing, while another part has to do with locomotion, body-movement. It’s easy to confirm this every time someone sustains brain-damage. The area of injury is correlated to loss of sense-perception or loss of movement. Still, the most sophisticated brain-research hasn’t been able to unearth the exact seat of consciousness or how consciousness functions. We know that consciousness is related to the mid-brain, but we don’t know at all how what is organic (brain) is related to what isn’t organic in any respect (consciousness). The everyday commonness of consciousness renders the marvel no less marvellous.

I am rendered near-speechless as well every time I contemplate the heavens. There are 100 billion stars in “our” galaxy alone. A star, as you know, is actually a sun. Stars, unlike planets, are self-luminous. “Our” sun, the sun without whose light and warmth life would never have appeared on earth; “our” sun is 92 million miles away — very close, really, since the next closest sun or star is 270,000 times farther away again (i.e., 270,000 times 92 million miles.) The only reason “our” sun seems so much brighter than other stars is simply that “our” sun is so much closer to us.

You might think that the sun is solid, like hot volcanic rock. Actually, the sun is gas, pure hydrogen gas, held together by gravity. While we usually think of gas as light and airy, the hydrogen gas of the sun is heavy, so dense that there isn’t a person here who could carry a four-litre milk bag of it — since a milk bag of the sun’s hydrogen gas weights 400 pounds.

While the earth revolves around the sun, the sun itself is never standing still. The sun revolves around a point in our galaxy, and revolves once every 220 million years.

We mustn’t think of the sun as the brightest star. Another star in our galaxy, Orion, is 18,000 times brighter than the sun, but it only seems to twinkle inasmuch as it is 545 light years away from us (a light year being approximately six thousand trillion miles.)

So far we haven’t moved outside our galaxy. If we move next door to an adjacent galaxy, we find a tight cluster of stars that is a billion times brighter than “our” sun.

II: — And yet so rich is God that he has made something more marvelous than the firmament: he has made you and me and countless others. For a long time I have known that other people energize me. I don’t have to know these people; I need only be around them, in the midst of them. Just why they energize me I’m not sure. But I think it has something to do with the marvelous diversity in human beings who are, after all, the crown and the glory of God’s creation. In the old creation story in Genesis 1 we read that after God created anything he pronounced it “good.” He created planets — “good”; vegetation — “good”; animal life — “good”. But when he created humankind there were two uniquenesses in the old story: one, God blessed man and woman — blessed them in that they alone were created in his image and appointed to fellowship with him; two, he pronounced what he had done “very good.”

The people, the crowd or the throng that energizes me; they are nameless to me, but they aren’t nameless, and certainly not nameless to God. They are the crown of God’s creation. Every last one of them is a beneficiary of our Lord’s sacrifice. He surrounds them arms and hands whose nail prints they may ignore for now but can never finally deny. Again and again, therefore, people whom I do not know at all are an occasion of thanksgiving for me.

And then there are those who do something extra-special for me: children. On several occasions I’ve travelled overseas to attend international conferences. When I went to Korea in August 1998 for the meetings of The International Congress on Calvin Research I had to get there two days ahead of the conference on account of airline scheduling. I felt lonely. I felt lonely in the same way upon arriving in both Stockholm and in Frankfurt when I was in Europe for meetings of the World Council of Churches. I did in Korea what I had learned to do on my earlier forays: I went looking for children. Finding children isn’t difficult in Seoul, a city of 13 million. The children there were like children everywhere: eager, energetic, oblivious of so much that renders adults cautious or jaded or cynical or hesitant. On an even earlier jaunt to Germany with the World Council of Churches I had felt lonely at the start of my stay. I hadn’t become acquainted with anyone at the conference yet, and in any case it soon appeared that they all knew each other from previous conferences, while I was new and strange. I went for a walk through Arnoldshain, a suburb of Frankfurt, aware that if I could just see some children I should no longer feel lonely or strange. In no time I came upon them. A few rosy-cheeked four year olds were sliding down snow banks. Some were throwing snowballs. Others were waving to their mother as they set off for afternoon classes. Two were locked in a life-and-death dispute. I was far from home, in a country whose citizen I was not, among children who spoke less English than I did German. Nonetheless, they were children. They typified promise, as surely as Isaac had typified promise to Abraham and Sarah, as surely as John the Dipper had typified promise to Zechariah and Elizabeth. They were cherished. Parents had counted the days until they were born and now felt that nothing mattered in all the world as much as their child. Suddenly I was no longer lonely. For me, to be among those who are cherished and the bearer of promise is to understand afresh how much I am cherished and what promise there is about me.

And then there are the men and women I meet in ways that leave me amazed. It happened to me with most poignant profundity when I went to a funeral at Temple Sinai, a synagogue in the Bathurst and Wilson area of Toronto. Because I had arrived 45 minutes early I went to a Jewish restaurant, Marky’s Delicatessen, for a cup of tea. The sign inside said, “Please seat yourself”. I noticed two things. One, there were no seats available. Two, I was the only man without a hat on. All the other men were wearing either a yarmulke or a fedora. It was obvious that I was in an Orthodox Jewish stronghold, and I stood out as the only non-Jewish man on the premises. I waited for a minute, not knowing quite what to do, when at the back of the restaurant an old, thin Jewish man with the warmest smile and the face of an angel moved over on his seat and beckoned to me as he called out, “There is room for us both!”

My heart melted. I had grasped the double meaning he had uttered deliberately when he had said, “There is room for us both.” I sat down beside him and we began to talk. His older sister had brought him to Canada prior to World War II. He and his sister were the sole survivors of his family. I asked him what he had done for a living. “I was a simple peddler. I went door-to-door peddling tablecloths, sheets and pillow cases.” Now he was old. He went to Marky’s Delicatessen every day for lunch. Every morning when he got up, he told me, he did his house cleaning. “I clean my house as well as any man can”, he said with his eyes dancing, “not as well as a woman could, but as well as I can.” I asked him where he had grown up. Southeast Poland. “But I shan’t tell you the village, since it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.” He told me next that small and insignificant as his village was, it had had a famous rabbi, a most famous rabbi. “It’s a tradition”, he continued, “that a rabbi remain in the place where he begins his work. Now a minister has to go wherever he is sent. But our rabbi stayed in our little village, even though he could have gone anywhere at all, because the tradition meant more to him than the money; and besides he loved us so much.”

I hadn’t told the old man that I was a minister. Was he psychic? It wasn’t anything psychic at all. It was spirit resonating with spirit. It was heart responding to heart. I told him that in fact I was a minister. “Oh, I knew that already”, he said as if it need not have been mentioned.

In view of the fact that words like “minister” and “Christian” are synonymous with persecution going back for centuries in Poland, do you have any grasp of what grace floods that old man’s heart for him to have said to me, “There is room for us both”? He knew I represented that institution which has afflicted his people for centuries.

As the thin old man finished his lunch and I finished my tea he told me that he had had the most wonderful grandmother in Poland. Every night throughout his childhood his grandmother had asked him the same two questions: “Have you prayed? Have you worked?”

I’ll not see that dear man until the day when Messiah tarries no more. But for my meeting with him I shall thank God for the rest of my life.

If people whom I meet once are an occasion for thanksgiving, what about friends? And beyond friends, what about those people — one or two or perhaps three — who are soul mates and who know us even when we are silent and love us even when we are obnoxious?

Today my heart overflows in gratitude to God for the people whom he has brought before me, people from the big city as well as the tiny village in southeast Poland, not to mention soul mates because of whom I shall never be forsaken.

III: — Neither shall I ever be forsaken by our Lord himself. “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Cor. 9:16), exclaims the apostle Paul. The inexpressible gift is plainly Jesus Christ. He is inexpressible inasmuch as his sacrifice grants us access to the Father himself, and it is his face which mirrors the face of God so as to give us the knowledge of the glory of God. (2. Cor. 4:6)

I do marvel at the vastness and richness of the creation. At the same time, I’m aware that the creation which came forth from God’s hand isn’t exactly the creation which confronts us now, for the creation now exists in the era of the Fall. Certainly I relish all that children give me. At the same time, everyone knows that to be among children, whether as parent or as schoolteacher, is to shed all doubts concerning the doctrine of original sin. Of course I’m enriched by the people whose lives flow through mine like osmosis. But I also have no illusions about the human heart; I haven’t forgotten that the 20th century, just concluded, is the most murderous in the history of humankind. Nature is beautiful; and in a fallen world nature is also blood red.

The gift of Jesus Christ is inexpressible just because it is the one gift, the only gift anywhere in life, which isn’t marred by the Fall. This gift has no downside, no qualification, no reservation, isn’t impaired in any way. In giving us what is dearest to him — his eternal Son — God has given us himself. At what cost we can only glimpse dimly, yet glimpse enough to know that the cost is as inestimable as the gift is inexpressible.

The apostle’s exclamation is effusive — “inexpressible gift!” — just because the apostle’s experience of the gift is so rich. He knew that as the risen Lord stole into his heart the myriad confusions and contradictions in his life disappeared. No longer did he think it was God-honouring to persecute Christians. No longer did he think that only his ethnic group made up the people of God. No longer did he think that favourable standing with God was something he had to achieve, could achieve, or had achieved. He knew himself gathered up in an embrace that freed him to give up his misguided frenzy.

On many occasions in my life different people (as well as the same one or two people many times over) have forgiven me, cherished me, waited for me, refused to reject me or humiliate me when they had ample ground for despising me or dismissing me. What these people have done for me has left me knowing that I am blessed inexpressibly. I also know that what they have done reflects a vastly greater blessing from God himself. When Paul writes with amazement and brevity, “He loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20), he uses so few words just because he knows that the inexpressible can’t be expressed.

Can’t be expressed, but can be held in one’s heart, can become the truth which quietly transforms us and informs us for the rest of our lives, can become the foundational certainty which sustains us in our living and will see us through our dying. “He loved me, and gave himself for me.”

To know this gift is to know that the gift will be pressed upon me until God completes that good work which he has begun in me. (Philippians 1:6) To know this gift is to know that God will indeed heal that creation of his which, although fallen now, still exhibits splendour and marvel everywhere.

Knowing the One whose depths are unfathomable and whose gift of himself is inexpressible, I am rendered ever more grateful for people whose richness is inestimable, and for a universe whose wonders are endless.

                                           

                                                                 Victor Shepherd     

October 2001

 

2 Cor. 12:2-10    Mark 9:2-9    Col. 1:9-14   Luke 11:24-26

 

1] We live in an age which craves psychedelic extravaganzas; we crave the most intense experiences. The movie theatre we patronize is the one with quadraphonic sound: the huge speakers, strategically placed, cause us to feel that we are at the foot of the mountain when the volcano erupts.

Then there is the IMAX picture screen at Ontario Place. To see the movie of the stunt flier is to feel you are a stunt flier yourself. (Also to learn that the movie is best not seen on a full stomach!)

We must not overlook the proliferation of sex manuals. Sex is now a high-skill performance ostensibly issuing in a high-intensity experience.

And then I hear the preacher say to young people, “Don’t get high on drugs; get high on Jesus.” I wince. Is not Jesus demeaned (to say the least) by speaking of him as a non-criminal substitute for a chemical hit?

People tell me they have never had a “religious experience”. Do they know what they are looking for? How would they know? How would a religious experience differ from a psychological experience or a human experience? Many such people flit from church to church, sect to sect, guru to guru, pursuing the ever-elusive religious experience.

Nonetheless, I understand what underlies their quest. A divinely-placed longing for the transcendent underlies their quest. We are made for God. Insofar as we do not know God we are aware of an emptiness, even though we cannot identify what is missing. A secularized world in fact cannot identify it as spiritual emptiness, but even a secularized world has an emptiness amounting to a vacuum.

A vacuum, everyone knows, does not remain a vacuum if there is anything ready-to-hand which can fill it, even fill it in the sense of clutter it. Paul insists that God has created humankind with a longing for God. Yet humankind is fallen. In the wake of the fall and the human distortion arising from the fall the longing for God is not recognized for what it is. As a result the vacuum gets cluttered with debris. The bottom line is a hunger for God which is always being fed with substitutes which are less than God.

 

2] You have asked for a sermon on spiritual experiences. My question to you is this: Do you want spiritual experiences (so-called), or do you want GOD, the holy one of Israel? Do you want a psychological “light-up”, or do you want to be known by and know, be embraced by and embrace the one who is indeed the creator, rescuer and sustainer of the cosmos and of your own existence?

In scripture the commonest metaphor for faith is marriage. I think we can help ourselves in sorting out the question which has given rise to today’s sermon if we ponder the nature of marriage. Do I want to be married or do I want an experience? I want to be married; I want the state of being married, the actuality of marriage. Insofar as I am married, then certain experiences appropriate to the actuality of marriage will follow naturally. But if I start by pursuing an experience which seems to be something like the experience of those who are married; if I start by pursuing an experience, then achieving this or that experience will never render me married, never confer the actuality of marriage. At best I shall be left with an experience which can only be described as an experience of “as if married”. “As if” gives it all away; “as if married” means “not married at all”. Therefore, whatever my experience might be, it could never be an experience of being married.

I must put my question again. Do you want a “spiritual experience” (whatever that might be) or do you want God? The quest for religious experience is not new at all; in fact it is as old as humankind. Think of Mexican peasants eating peyote beans. The peyote beans gave then a drug-induced “high” to which they attached religious significance.

Think of the techniques used to get people into trances. You follow a formula and repeat a sound self-hypnotically until you move into unusual mental space.

Even in the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry there were devotees of Greek mystery religions. One such religion had a practice which you would not find appealing but which the devotees swore by. The devotee stood in a pit covered by a lattice-work grill. A bull was led onto the grill. The bull’s throat was slashed. Blood poured through the grill onto the devotee. She was then pronounced “reborn for eternity”. Was she? Or was this exercise a substitute, a clutter-substitute, for that renewal at God’s hand in virtue of the sacrifice of God’s Son? It should be obvious by now that the quest for “spiritual experience” is fraught with danger. After all, there are contemporary equivalents to the lattice-work and the bull’s blood. The cults are the modern equivalent, not to speak of the occult. In other words, if we are going to speak of “spiritual experience” we should understand that not all the spirits are holy. Scripture says as much as it does about spiritual conflict just because it recognizes that not all the spirits are holy. And even where they are not especially unholy, they may yet be decidedly unhelpful.

Frankly, to seek spiritual experiences is to be looking in the wrong direction. The prophet Isaiah cries, “Seek ye the Lord…”. Nowhere are we urged to pursue experiences. We are to seek that God whom we can seek at all only because he has first sought us and found us in Christ Jesus his Son.

 

3] Let’s look again at the analogy of marriage. To be married is to live in a relationship. The relationship is the reality of marriage. Within this relationship experiences come and go, a great variety of experiences. There is also the “experience” of not being conscious of anything marital at all. I remain married when I am in my study writing a sermon, even though I am not conscious of being married. There is also the experience of quiet contentment in the presence of my wife. There is also a more intense excitement as we share something extraordinary together. And of course there are moments of ecstasy. But no marriage is sustained by ecstasy. You can’t be ecstatic 24 hours per day. Marriages are sustained by commitment.

There is another dimension to marriage about which far less is said these days than needs to be said. When two lives are fused together the suffering of one becomes the suffering of both. If one suffers and the other refuses to have anything to do with that suffering or to make any accommodation at all, then that marriage is listing and in danger of sinking.

The truth of the matter is that 90% of the time being married is to be unaware of any particular experience at all. When I see my wife at the supper table the “experience” I have (if it can be called that) is simply that I am glad to see her. But this is scarcely extraordinary. 90% of the time to be married is to live in each other’s presence without experiencing anything unusual, whether positive or negative. If you were constantly taking the temperature of your marriage by asking yourself, “What kind of experience am I having at this moment?”, you would soon have no marriage at all; and soon you would not be sane.

This “90% of the time” does not mean that nothing is going on at such moments; the relationship is going on; it’s always going on, and the relationship is everything.

 

4] So it is with that relationship with God which we call faith. In this relationship everything is going on, regardless of how we feel. Nonetheless I should never deny that we do feel.

In the relationship of faith, where everything is going on at all times , there are in fact moments of heightened awareness, moments of greater intensity, and occasionally, moments of inexpressible ecstasy — as well as moments of piercing pain.

Let’s start where you would never expect me to start: “moments of piercing pain”. On the day of Pentecost Peter, spokesperson for the apostles, is preaching the truth and reality of Jesus Christ, crucified, raised, now ruling. Peter acquaints his hearers with him who is the sinner’s judge, the sinner’s only saviour, and therefore the sinner’s only hope. Luke tells us that as all of this strikes home with the hearers they are “cut to the heart” and cry, “What are we going to do?” “Cut to heart”. They felt as though they had been stabbed in a surprise attack. “What are we going to do?” Sudden, stabbing conviction of sinnership doesn’t come to everyone with this intensity. But whenever it does I should never pretend it isn’t genuine spiritual experience. Any experience which impels people to embrace Jesus Christ is of God.

While we are looking at experiences of unusual intensity we should look at an experience of ecstasy. Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that on one occasion he was “caught up into paradise”, and there he “heard things that cannot be uttered”. The experience was so unusual, and so intensely pleasurable, that he does not have adequate words for it. In my reading of Christian biography I have come upon several similar incidents. I have no reason to doubt their veracity.

At the same time, Paul never urges people to pursue the ecstatic experience he had. He never tells them to try to work it up or put themselves in the mood for it. Worked-up artificiality would guarantee that it wasn’t an experience of God. Instead he immediately tells the congregation in Corinth of another experience of his which he does want them to have for themselves; namely, that in the midst of chronic discomfort and chronic weakness he learned that God’s grace would ever be sufficient for him, just as he learned that God’s strength will ever be made perfect not in our strength, but made perfect precisely in our weakness. This is what he wants them to know and find validated in their lives one hundred times over.

We find the same thing when Peter, James and John are with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration. The three disciples are given a vision of Moses and Elijah (the two greatest figures in Israel); they are also made privy to that Word which insists that Jesus is greater than Moses and Elijah inasmuch as Jesus alone is the Son of God. It is an ecstatic experience and they want to freeze the moment, build a shrine, consecrate the spot then and there, relive the experience over and over. Jesus, however, won’t let them do any of this. Jesus takes the three men down the mountainside to a village where an epileptic boy is convulsing, parents are distraught, church people (disciples) appear helpless and feel bad about it, and some religious leaders are agitating a crowd. Jesus tells the three men that the experience on the mountain was good; of course it was good, since it was God-given and they were meant to have it. Still, among the convulsing and the agitated is where his followers belong.

And then there are experiences which are so quiet and undramatic as to be virtually the constant background to our lives. Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me”. Needless to say Jesus doesn’t mean that we are constantly “hearing things”, as though we were undergoing auditory hallucinations. He means that his people are unremittingly possessed of the conviction that he is the one to be followed. They continue to hear his voice inasmuch as they are never without the conviction that he is the good shepherd and ever will be. It is not a startling experience; it is not an ecstatic experience. But it is the foundation on which the life of any Christian is built. “My sheep keep on hearing my voice; I continue to know them, and they keep on following me.”

Surely most of our Christian experience is of the non-startling, non-ecstatic order. Most of our Christian experience is so very ordinary that it becomes second nature to us; in truth it is our new nature. Paul writes to the Christians in Colosse, “God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” There is nothing dramatic about this. While a few people can certainly point to a datable, never-to-be-forgotten moment when they were delivered, most cannot. All that matters is this: as we read newspapers and listen to newscasts, as we observe social trends, as we ponder all that tends to confuse people, beguile people, humanly impoverish people, we know in our hearts that we have been delivered from the dominion (the illegitimate rule) of darkness and have been transferred to the kingdom of Jesus Christ; and in him we know ourselves to be forgiven people. This too is experience; elemental experience.

 

So far today we have seen that some experiences are intense and momentary, some are throbbing and of greater duration, and some are so quiet as to be unnoticeable most of the time. There is another kind of experience which is genuinely of God; what’s more, it is an experience which all Christians are to own without exception. A few minutes ago I said that when two people are fused together in marriage the suffering of one partner must become the suffering of the other. By faith you and I are fused to Jesus Christ; our being fused to him makes cross-bearing inevitable. The analogy with marriage breaks down here, in that although fused to our Lord we are never called to bear his cross (only he can do that); but in his company we are most certainly called to bear our cross. Which is to say, our discipleship requires a sacrifice of us which we readily make for our Lord’s sake.

You asked for a sermon on spiritual experiences. Yet it is not spiritual experiences that we need. It is God himself. To be rightly related to him is to be acquainted with what St.Peter calls the “many-splendoured grace of God”. Just because God’s grace is many-splendoured what steals over us when we neither look for it nor cultivate it will be richer than anything we have anticipated; rich enough indeed to satisfy us until the day when faith gives way to sight and we know even as we are now known.

 

                                                                             Rev. Dr. Victor A. Shepherd
17th March, 1991

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

 

Contradictions riddle life everywhere.  At home you are soaked in so much love it’s like being immersed in a warm bath. In the workplace, however, the bathtub becomes a shark tank, and only your wits keep you from being eaten alive, even as you know your wits might not save you from the workplace sharks forever.Again, you are amazed at the affection so many people lavish upon you, and amazed once more that the people who cherish you are often the ones you wouldn’t expect to. You are just as amazed at the hostility of people who don’t like you, and don’t like you for reasons you’ve never been able to figure out.

Life is like this; life abounds in contradictions.

The contradictions of life are all the more startling when we move from the horizontal plane to the vertical, when we move from the contradictions found in our life with our fellows to the contradictions confronting us as the truth and reality of God seizes us. One such contradiction stood out in the life of the apostle Paul.  On the one hand he was exhilarated at being “caught up to the third heaven”, as he put it, “the third heaven” being a Hebrew expression for utmost intimacy with God; unmistakable, unsurpassable, unforgettable. On the other hand he was tormented by his “thorn in the flesh”, an occasion of chronic pain that tortured him relentlessly.         On the one hand, an exposure to God so very vivid and ecstatic as to leave him speechless; on the other hand, an infirmity that continued to bring him anguish comparable to being speared.         What did it all add up to?

 

I: — Let’s begin by looking at his ecstatic experience.  It wasn’t the only instance of spiritual vividness in his life.  Paul appears to have had uncommonly rich visions, revelations and ecstasies. His encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus had certainly been one of them, foundational, in fact.  Later he had been praying in Jerusalem when he had fallen into a trance and was mystically told to leave the city before he was beaten to death.  Another day he had had a vision of a man from Macedonia crying out, “Come over here and help us.”  Yet again he had had a “visitation” in which he had been told to speak boldly in a particular city in that God was going to bring many people to faith there through his proclamation.

If the Damascus road experience was foundational in the life of the apostle, his experience fourteen years before his first visit to the congregation in Corinth was the climax of all such experiences: “Caught up to the third heaven.” He means “Admitted to intimacy with God, an intimacy whose intensity defies description.” “Caught up to paradise”: he means “Given, amidst the savagery and sorrow and frustration of this earth, a vision of God’s final restoration of the creation, all of it enveloped in an ecstasy no language can capture.”

Unlike religious exhibitionists today who are only too eager to chatter and prattle on TV talk shows, Paul didn’t yammer on and on about this. What, after all, is to be said if an experience is beyond words?  Then why did he speak of it at all?  He attempted to speak the unspeakable in that his detractors goaded him into speaking. His detractors in Corinth snickered that he was a kindergarten Christian, a spiritual midget, someone the shallow Christians there could laugh at one minute and dismiss the next. It grieved the apostle to hear this. When they kept it up, however, and used it as the pretext for dismissing what he had to say to them, he felt he couldn’t turn a deaf ear to it any longer: he would have to refute them if he was going to minister to them. “Listen to this”, he told them; “fourteen years ago I heard what cannot be uttered; I saw what cannot be described.”

We mustn’t trivialise Paul’s experience and pretend that it was merely short-lived psychological fireworks, a Queen Victoria’s Day sparkler that coruscated in his head for a few seconds and then fizzled out cold. I’m convinced, rather, that his experience fired his apostolic work for the rest of his life. Whenever he was ridiculed, slandered, beaten up; when he was afflicted with the worst affliction of all, simply being ignored because not taken seriously; in any and all of this all he had to do was recall the event of his immersion in the innermost depths of God and his zeal for the gospel was renewed again. It wasn’t a thirty-second “rush” as if he had inhaled a lungful of “wacky-baccy”; it was a disclosure of God so intense and so vivid that he never lacked its light and heat for the rest of his life.

If his detractors in the Corinthian congregation had been half as smart as they thought they were they would have known they had a spiritual giant in their midst, someone as huge as Elijah with his experience of earthquake, wind, fire and still, small voice; someone as huge as Elisha with his “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit; someone as huge as Daniel with his prostrating vision of the awesome Son of Man; someone as huge as Ezekiel when, in Ezekiel’s own words, “the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God”.  The Christians in Corinth , however, weren’t even half as smart as they thought they were.  They were the spiritual midgets.

Since Paul’s innermost ecstasy was private and ultimately inexpressible, he referred to it at all and stammered out the most inadequate expression only because his detractors forced him to.         Having mentioned it once to make his point and establish his credibility, however, he wanted to get off the topic lest anyone think him to be posturing himself as other than, greater than, the fragile, frail creature that all of us are. Just in case he was ever tempted to imagine himself lifted above the mundane existence that no one is ever lifted above, “third heaven” experience or not, he told the Corinthians of his thorn in the flesh.  His “thorn” wasn’t a sliver; in classical Greek skolops meant a sharpened stake. The sharpened stake could be anything from a sharpened tent peg to a sharpened fence post to a sharpened instrument of torture and execution on which someone was impaled. It wasn’t a sliver. In other words, there remained in the apostle the twin vividness of his “third heaven” ecstasy and his ceaseless torment.  Regardless of his immersion in the heart of God, he suffered the pain of any human being; and suffered it not once, not even occasionally, but relentlessly.

 

II: — His inescapable torment: what was it? We don’t know. Some people have guessed epilepsy; some have guessed recurring bouts of malarial fever accompanied by fierce headaches.  In any case we don’t know.  Neither is it important to know.

But it is important to know what his pain-riddled weakness meant to Paul. It meant that regardless of how strong he might appear to some people all the time, or how strong he might appear to all people some of the time, in fact he was weak and would always be weak. Unlike so many others, however, he owned his weakness.  Unashamed of his weakness, he didn’t attempt to deny it or disguise it. Own it?  He did more than own it; he even gloried in it.

It’s important that you and I own our weakness.  Before we even think of glorying in it, we are going to have to own it. Regardless of whether the pain attending it is slight or severe; regardless of whether the impediment surrounding it is little more than a nuisance or nothing less than disabling; regardless of whether it occasions minor embarrassment or major humiliation; in any case it’s important that we own it. For if we don’t own our weakness, then we are denying something that everyone else can see in any case, and we are living in a world of make-believe.         If we don’t own it then we are consciously suppressing or unconsciously repressing something that will fester until the ensuing “infection” distresses us.

But in the church we shouldn’t pretend that psychological categories are the last word; in the church we must admit that theology is the last word, the truth of God.  Then we must say that if don’t own our weakness we are plainly more concerned with looking good than with doing good; more concerned with how we appear than with who we are and how fruitful we can be in the service of God.

What’s more, if we don’t own our weakness we shall always be thrusting people away from us; not deliberately, I admit, yet holding them off none the less. You see, in a world where everyone is weak somewhere, it’s our weakness – owned, joked about even – that endears us to people.         Where we are weak we endear them; where we are strong we intimidate them. To pretend that we are always strong, everywhere strong, nothing but strong is to barricade others from us. Not to own our weakness is forever to be deceiving ourselves and forever to be repelling others.

The saddest thing about not owning our weakness, however, isn’t that we isolate others and falsify ourselves, sad as these are; the saddest thing, rather, is that we prevent the power of Christ from resting upon us. Paul insists that it’s precisely at the point of our weakness that the power of Christ rests upon us. So certain is he of this truth, so consistent is the evidence supporting this truth, that he finds himself going one step farther: he glories in his weakness. He wears his weakness like a badge of honour.

 

I am moved every time I ponder today’s text.  I am moved whenever I think of the woman I sat with on the Board of Directors of the Peel Mental Health Housing Coalition. The coalition endeavours to procure living accommodation for those who are chronically wounded psychiatrically.  The woman I have in mind has, in the course of a year, several good months, several bad months, and several months whose horror is indescribable. She is schizophrenic herself and moves in and out of the episodes that most schizophrenics know. She suffers terribly. But she isn’t ashamed of her illness. She doesn’t try to hide it. (She’s not so foolish as to think she can.)  She doesn’t pretend she’s non-schizophrenic, doesn’t pretend anything at any time. She does, however, have a credible word to speak to people who suffer as she does; she has a believable word of encouragement, a weighty word of the gospel – a word that you and I can’t speak in the same way to such sufferers in that their weakness isn’t ours and ours isn’t theirs.

We all want to think we’re of greatest use to God at the point of our greatest strength. Just imagine how super-effective God could render my strongpoint, already effective in itself (I like to think.)         Just imagine how fortunate God is that my talent is available for his kingdom. This is what we all want to say, even though our postured modesty prevents us from saying it loudly. The truth is God is nervous about so much as acknowledging my strength.  He knows I’m always one step away from being a show-off; he knows my lurking pride would inflate insufferably if my strength were given the recognition I think it deserves.  For this reason the apostle’s declaration is as sensible as it is startling: our strength is of some use to God, to be sure, but only of moderate use to God; our weakness, on the other hand, is simply indispensable to God – for it’s our weakness which God suffuses with that power which raised his Son when his Son was so weak he couldn’t have been weaker.

On several occasions I’ve been asked to speak at services for physically disabled adults. One evening I noticed a fellow with severe cerebral palsy, twitching in his wheel chair, who seemed inconsolable.  The music that night was brought by a husband and wife who could sing like larks. They could both sing, but only one could walk: the wife.  Her husband was in a wheelchair, paraplegic, the result of a hunting mishap. (His hunting companion had accidentally shot him in the spine.)  The paraplegic hunter sang with his wife, spoke briefly, noticed the distraught c.p. sufferer. A few minutes later he wheeled over to the distraught fellow to speak and embody and bestow a solace that no one else in the room could have.

Dr. James Wilkes, the psychiatrist under whom I studied and from whom I learned more than I can tell you; Jim’s wife worked as a nurse at Princess Margaret Hospital after she had been diagnosed with cancer herself, and continued nursing there until she was too ill to work.  Clearly she had something to share with the patients at Princess Margaret that I don’t have – yet.  I spoke with her at home when she had become too ill even to attend church. She told me that housebound as she was, and growing sicker every day, she spent much time praying for others. “Intercession is the one ministry left me”, she remarked, “but it’s ministry enough.”

Moses stuttered. Because he stuttered no one ever confused that Word of God which he uttered – most noticeably the Sinai pronouncement that has forged and formed the consciousness of the western world – with the words of Moses.

Hosea was heartbroken and humiliated when his wife became a “hooker” and flaunted it. Out of his heartbroken humiliation Hosea became the prophet who spoke unforgettably of God’s heartbreak at the waywardness and infidelity of Israel . “How can I give you up?  How can I give you up?”

All of us have weaknesses both great and little.  Our weakness can be something as obvious as physical disability.  Or our weakness can be something less evident (or something we think to be less evident, since there are never as many secrets about us as we pretend there are.) Our weakness can be something tinged with shame.  Like the aftermath of sexual abuse endured in childhood; like the psychological vulnerability acquired through who knows what assaults in life; like – like what? Our weaknesses are as varied as any other feature of humankind.         Ownership of our weakness would give us access to others who’ve been victimised in the same way; ownership would give us a ministry that others will never have.

Perhaps our weakness concerns a besetting temptation with which we’ve struggled for years. Beset with it, we have had to continue resisting it.  Most likely we’ve thought we were alone in our struggle with this particular matter. To own it and shed our shame concerning it would also end the isolation of another lonely, frightened struggler who has also thought she alone had to contend here and wondered why she had to and for how much longer she’d be able to. Let’s never forget that to find ourselves tempted relentlessly somewhere in life is to be saddled with additional temptation, the temptation to self-rejection. Think of how we could be used of God right here on behalf of someone else.  We have to get beyond thinking that our weakness is the like the sign on the empty, darkened bus, “Out Of Service”.  Remember, the apostle glories in his weakness.

 

III: — We shouldn’t be surprised that he does.  After all, he tells us elsewhere that he glories in the cross; the cross of Jesus, that is. He knows that the power of God is simply the efficacy of the cross.  Of course he knows this: his apostleship is the result of it.  Furthermore, it’s no accident the apostle tells us he pleaded with God three times for the removal of his affliction.  He has in mind his Lord’s torment in Gethsemane when Jesus pleaded three times to be spared having to drink the cup to the dregs. Yet so unforeseeable is God’s power, so insuperable, so startling is God’s power that not even the cross – and apparent victory of the evil one – not even the evil one’s gloating could frustrate the purposes of God. And just as grace was sufficient for our Lord in Gethsemane, just as God’s strength remains effective in the weakness of the crucified one, so you and I must trust God’s grace to be sufficient for us and trust his strength to be effective in our weaknesses, whether those weaknesses are great or little. Ever since the Damascus road event the apostle had known the resurrection to be the efficacy of the weakness of the cross; and ever since Damascus road event he had known he could glory and must glory in his own weakness, for to be ashamed of his weakness would mean he was ashamed of his Lord; and this he was never going to be.

 

Unlike Paul I’m not going to say that I’ve been caught up to the third heaven. But I want to say I’ve been caught up to the first.  My exposure to God, my experience of God, my vocation to the ministry; it’s all rich enough to find me resonating with the apostle’s experience and affirming the apostle’s declaration.

 

“About my thorn in the flesh”, the little man from Tarsus said, “It hurts; it hurts terribly.  But I’m stuck with it. Still, I know it to be the occasion of God’s grace and the venue of his strength. Therefore I regard my weakness as no impediment at all to my usefulness in that kingdom which is like no other kingdom.” So said the little man from Tarsus to the congregation in Corinth .

Did the congregation in Corinth ever hear him?

 

Victor Shepherd     July 2007