Power Perfected in Weakness: a sermon for Year B, Proper 9

Preached on Sunday, July 8th at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found by clicking here. 

The relationship between Paul and the church at Corinth is a complex one, and the two letters we have in our New Testament from St. Paul to the Corinthians don’t tell the whole story, or so it seems. 

As best we can tell from accounts in the two Corinthian letters and from the book of Acts, Paul founded the community at Corinth. The community later wrote to him with questions, and he replied in a letter that is now lost. He wrote them again at some point, and that letter is our First Corinthians. Later Paul sent Timothy to Corinth as his emissary, and Timothy found that a group of Jewish-Christian missionaries had arrived at Corinth and seemed to be undermining Paul and his teachings, and his apostolic authority. Paul referred to these interlopers ironically as ‘super-apostles’ when he wasn’t calling them ‘false apostles’ and ‘Satan’s ministers’.

Paul visits Corinth a second time to straighten things out and winds up leaving in a huff after running afoul of at least one member of the Corinthian church. Paul called this the ‘painful visit’ and in response he wrote what he calls a ‘letter of tears’ that is also now lost. But the letter of tears seems to have worked because Corinth returned to Paul’s teaching and rejected the other missionaries, at least for a while. Paul responded to this turn of events with a more conciliatory letter, parts of which are included in our Second Corinthians. The Scripture scholars think that Paul then wrote two additional letters to the Corinthians, about the collection for the church at Jerusalem, which comprise 2nd Corinthians chapters 8 and 9. And yet another polemic against the false ‘super-apostles’ comprising chapters 10, 11, 12 and 13 of 2nd Corinthians, from which our epistle reading is taken today.

So you can see, and you will if you read 2nd Corinthians straight through, this is a rather strange letter, that goes off in a few directions, and contains some fascinating and challenging passages.

I’ve always been fascinated by our passage this morning, it’s intriguing, isn’t it? Paul speaks of a certain someone whom he says has been caught up and taken to the third heaven. A third heaven, huh? My Sunday school teachers only taught me about one heaven, and it was called ‘heaven’, not the first heaven. Just how many heavens are there?

Well, it turns out that in some Jewish cosmologies of Paul’s day there were as many as seven heavens. But in other sources, there are three, the realm of the earthly atmosphere, the realm of the stars, and then, beyond the stars the third heaven, Paradise itself, where God is known to dwell.

Paul speaks very convincingly about this mystical experience -- in the third person. But all the scholars agree, that Paul is most certainly speaking of his own mystical experience, though by convention, he’s describing it in the third person.

Paul is in the midst of presenting to the Corinthians a lesson in authority, power, weakness and grace. They’ve been seduced and led astray by those who have claimed to be not just apostles of Jesus, but apostles that have been especially gifted by God with amazing visions and revelations meant only for themselves, revelations and visions that, they claim, give testimony to their special authority in the church. They are claiming this authority for themselves, and are trying to get the Corinthians to abandon Paul’s teaching and leadership, for their own.

But Paul turns their argument its head. Paul refers to the revelations he has received and then discounts them, saying that he will not boast of them. Instead he says, “But I refrain from (boasting), so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me.” (12:6b) In other words, don’t listen to me because of my uniqueness, or special status, rather look to what I have done among you. Look to what you have seen me do and heard me say to you.

But even more to the point, Paul does not claim an elevated status for himself, but a lowly one. Paul admits to having his own troubles, his own thorn in the flesh. 

This ‘thorn in the flesh’ is the subject of much debate among Scripture scholars. Was it a physical ailment? We know the Greco-Roman world prized physical beauty, much as our own world does. And gods and emperors were always depicted as perfect physical specimens. Was Paul’s thorn in the flesh a disfiguring affliction of some kind? As we know, Paul was a notorious prude; was his thorn in the flesh his sexuality which he was never truly comfortable with? Whatever it was, it troubled him and he begged God to rid him of what he perceived as a malady. But God had a different plan for Paul. The Lord tells Paul that “power is perfected in weakness.” And Paul’s weakness, whatever it was, is to support his witness as an apostle of God. Because in his grace, it was to such a one as Paul that God sent the visions, that God specifically called to be an apostle to the Gentiles. One with troubles, one with a thorn in the flesh, a weakness, but it is with such weakness that God choses to perfect his power.

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Then we come to our gospel reading today. Here Jesus has returned home from a journey; a journey on which he has done much and become somewhat famous. For he comes home from having raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, cured the woman with a hemorrhage, cast the demons out of the Gerasene madman. But when he returns home, he runs in to a hostile hometown crowd. Jesus comes preaching as one with authority, with some miraculous deeds of healing under his belt, and his fellow Nazarenes say, ‘Hey, wait a minute! Who do you think you are? You’re not a preacher or rabbi or prophet! You’re the carpenter, aren’t you? We know your mother and brothers and sisters. Who gave you the right to speak to us this way?’

When Jesus’s neighbors looked to God for one possessing the power and authority of God, they looked for a savior, a messiah. And that messiah was expected to be one as ruddy and beautiful as David, one as wise and majestic as Solomon. They sought a mighty warrior to banish the Romans and return Israel to its former glory among the nations of the world. Instead, they got a carpenter from a small town in the ignoble province of Galilee.

And we know how his story goes, don’t we? Beginning in Galilee, and ending on Calvary. It will be the case that, in the end, very many could not believe that the power and authority of God could be made perfect in a carpenter-messiah, a rabble rouser, who wound up, not conquering the Romans, but put to death by them, one who wound up not on the ancient, glorious throne of David, but on a cross.

‘Power perfected in weakness…’ When we think of perfection, we think of something, well ‘perfect’, without a flaw or blemish. But there’s another meaning to perfection. When something is perfected, it is completed, it is brought to it’s conclusion, to a wholeness.

In Christ, God’s power was coupled to our weakly human flesh, and in the grace of the Incarnation, creation was perfected and completed in a way. For in Christ, the creator and creation were joined in perfect unity. The lover God was joined inextricably to the beloved, to you and to me. In the new creation of Christ Jesus, those with thorns in the flesh become mighty apostles, and a carpenter can indeed be the messiah. In the new creation of Christ Jesus, the weak are made strong, and though we are riddled by our sins and shortcomings and many thorns in the flesh, in the completion and perfection of Christ, we are redeemed and made new, we are saved and granted our place in the perfecting love of our God.

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And if you want to know what power perfected in weakness looks like, look once again to our gospel today. When confronted with the hostility of the hometown crowd in today’s reading from Mark, Jesus is unable to do any deeds of power. Notice what he does. When faced with his own weakness, Jesus shows that he knows that God’s grace will prove sufficient. When Jesus runs into a headwind, a difficulty, when he encounters his own weakness, he doesn’t give up. Instead, he looks to others for help. When his ministry is challenged, he turns to his apostles, his friends and tells them, “Ok, well, you guys give it a shot, how about it?” He sends the apostles out and tells them, “Spread the word, heal the people.”

The power manifested in the Word made flesh is the Word, not the flesh, which will always fail from time to time. He tells the apostles to go to work, but notice too. He tells them, “Look, if you run into trouble, don’t worry about it. Shake the dust off and try again.” Though we experience weaknesses from time to time, it is in weakness that power will be perfected. And no matter the current struggle or difficulty, God’s grace will be sufficient in the end.

The power of God’s love, of God’s healing, of God’s grace is perfected, completed, made whole in weakness; God’s love is for us, his beloved, his healing is for us, the weak, the overwhelmed, the thorny fleshed. God’s grace is perfected when it joins itself with our humanity, and God’s grace is sufficient for all of us. +Amen.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins