July 8, 2012 Proper 9, Year B

For Readings:

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp9_RCL.html

If any of you read your newsletter carefully in June you might have noticed that at seminary I wrote my master’s thesis about Paul. But I just wanted to take a moment to state publicly that it doesn’t mean I find his letters any easier to understand. The main thing I took away from an extensive study on the Pauline letters is just that, they are hard to understand. This is not a particularly helpful, nor a particularly hopeful sort of sentiment. The other thing about them is that they are especially hard to glean much from in the small little segments that are doled out to us in the lectionary. Context is important for Paul’s letters. The context of our segment to the larger letter, and the context of the communities that Paul was writing to. What we all need to know about Paul and his communities in order to begin to understand what is going on here is that Paul has gone around and planted some communities. Allow me a few minutes to make my theological education worthwhile. Paul’s communities are radical places: in them he imagines that Jews and non-Jews, or in his courser language, the circumcised and the uncircumcised maintain their identities, but also take on a new identity through their relationship with Jesus. His communities tend not to understand this. And we, as we look back on history think of these communities as early Christians. They and we are all confused by the idea that these communities were supposed to exist as one unit, but made up of distinct groups. They did not need to go through a sign (like circumcision) to become one. Rather it is by accepting the unity of the life of Christ that the community becomes one. The outward signs and symbols that had previously kept these people apart and fighting one another are trumped by their new inward unity in God.

          It’s no wonder than that these communities had so much trouble remembering their inward unity. And Paul is not necessarily the most reachable of group leaders. He starts a community and then goes off to start some more. When the communities ran into trouble they wrote him letters. And what we read as Holy Scripture are his replies. Oh course, we understand that Paul was not the only traveling apostle setting up churches all around. And we know that many of the letters that we have in the Bible are letters that are credited to Paul, but are really written by other people. His name ended up carrying a lot of authority. This particular part of the letter to the Corinthian community is a response about another group of religious authorities who came by and offered them some teachings that were contrary to Paul. So they then write to Paul and ask him what should they do. Paul mockingly calls these other apostles “hyper apostles” or maybe it is better translated as “super apostles.” They are apostles who tell stories of their strength in order to demonstrate their closeness to God. They do deeds of power in order to show both their power and God’s power.

          Paul begins the part of the letter we heard this morning with a very thinly veiled story about his own power. He is doing that thing that I vaguely remember from Junior high school, where a person says something like “my friend likes you” but really they mean that they do. Anyway, we get Paul telling us a story about “a person” who is totally Paul who was caught up into paradise—he sort of goes on to say that he won’t boast about this, which is silly of course because even bringing this up is really boasting about it.

          Paul wants to say that even though he has this experience that he could boast about—he tries not to because he knows there is strength in weakness. This is the primary difference between Paul and the super apostles. For the super apostles there is strength in showing their (and God’s) strength, for Paul there is strength in showing his own weakness.

          Paul is not just talking about spiritual or emotional weakness, he is also talking about a real physical injury. Paul not only reminds us of his humanity and physicality by talking about his physical problems but also of Jesus’ physical self.  As we read this letter today, I wonder about how we understand our strengths and weaknesses in a self-esteem culture. And as members of a capitalist society how does our understanding of rich and poor align with weakness and strength. And I wonder about who the super apostles might be for us today? What might be the message we take forth from this passage about the value of our weaknesses?

          In seminary they taught us to asses our ministry strengths and our ministry “growing edges.” I remember really disliking that sort of terminology. I have weaknesses after all. When Billy and I had our premarital counseling we learned about our relationship strengths and growing edges. But in the physical world, when I had shoulder surgery it was because of weakness and instability. After surgery I had to spend months on end in painful physical therapy in order to re-gain my strength. Right away, I have set up an unfair dichotomy between the physical and something like the psycho-social, spiritual. I think though that Paul is talking about both kinds of weakness. The sort of weakness in our physical selves that both reminds us of our limitations and reminds us of our mortality, along side the weakness we feel in our personal lives, or our spiritual lives that might remind us of our dependence on one another and on God.

          This admission that we are weak feels so very contrary to the sort of morals and maxims in our society. The sayings about positive thinking and the importance of a healthy sense of self, and a vision of us being able to accomplish anything you want. I don’t want to at all say that positive thinking and self worth are a bad thing. They are both totally ingrained in our society and have real value. Plenty of scientific studies show the benefits of positive thinking. There are a few counter-cultural examples holding up the importance of weakness, I think that AA and other similar recovery type programs often emphasize the weakness of the individual as a way of understanding addiction. The very fact of our weakness is necessary to understand in order to get to a point where one can admit that one is powerless, except by calling upon ones higher power. There does seem to be a real connection between weakness and dependence.

          On Wednesday, we celebrated our nations independence. As a city we celebrated with countless beach trips, barbecues and splashy fireworks. Our independence is not celebrated with our some recognition of changing identity in the world. We are certainly a world leader, but the double whammy of our personal, national and global economic slowdown along with the ambiguous wars that we did not win in Afghanistan and Iraq, has caused us as a nation to reflect a little on our weakness. Not much, of course, and probably not to the world. But it is at least a conversation we might be having internally. Our strength has largely been both military and economic. We certainly spend more money on our military than any other country. Our weakness are pretty clear though, when reports about education come out, they make it evident that smaller, poorer and developing countries are doing a better job educating their young people than we are. When we turn to health care, we learn that though we spend far more than anyone else the quality of care is not the best. But I suspect our greatest weakness might lie in the fact that we have a very hard time talking about weakness with out somehow betraying our country or our patriotism. Our weakness is that we want to seem strong in everything that we do.

          I think as a country we are on the precipice of something new though. Something that maybe is a result of the growing economic power of China, but maybe is a growing self awareness of our dependence. We are perhaps in a place where we can see the ways in which we are economically connected to other countries around the world. Globalization along with the world-wide economic downturn has us able to see that what happens in our jobs reports, and the greek debt are related. And global warming too shows us our physical connections to each other. How we each as individuals, and how we as a society treat the planet has profound implications for people on the other side of the globe. We are seeing that our country is both dependent and interdependent. It might be a while before we can see the strength in our weakness, but at least we know that we can’t, and frankly don’t, go it alone.

          In the gospel today we see Jesus’ strengths and weaknesses, and we see him recognizing the strengths and weaknesses in humanity. We see that as Jesus begins his public ministry there will be opposition, and it will not always be from the people we might expect. We see the inability of humanity and more specifically his neighbors and friends to see this new side of Jesus, not as a carpenter or as the boy they may have known but as messiah and king. Their imagination does not seem to be able to handle this change. But Jesus too sees the strength in humanity, and seems to realize in his rejection that he is going to need his disciples to take on some more roles. He asks his disciples to go out, in pairs, and proclaim that all should repent, cast out demons and anoint the sick with oils. As I think about what the repentance we are called to do today might be, in light of our dependence and independence in light of the strength in our weakness, we are called to repent for our boasting of our strength. We are called to see that even when we are most vulnerable and weak, we have Christ--the son of God--on a cross. Christ's utter weakness in that moment both assures us that he is with us when we feel weak, but also that there is something transformative that can come out of weakness. Out of Christ's perceived weakness on the cross, soon there is the triumph over death. But more locally--the repentance we are called to and are called to bring others towards as well is one where we might be more honest about some of the difficulties we might be having in our personal life, whether they are financial, interpersonal, or if we just don't quite feel like ourselves. We are called to understand what we might perceive as weakness has strength, and that by talking about our weakness with others we might be able to help us all see the strength of our community. Our weakness reveals the way we depend on one another, and that, friends, is a good thing. That dependence on one another and on God is what brings us here together.    And our potential strength as a community exists because we recognize our mutual dependence.