Sermon for Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Year B 5 July 2015 Sufficient Grace for You and Me

Transcription

1 Sermon for Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Year B 5 July 2015 Sufficient Grace for You and Me Nearly seven years ago now, a dear, dear friend of mine took my breath away when, after she had told me about her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, she told me she felt so loved. She was not speaking about the love of her family and friends. No, she was speaking about how loved she felt by God. She wasn t paraphrasing the many platitudes that people of faith often use in times of trial and tragedy that personally I don t feel all that comfortable with, like God never gives you more than you can handle. Or I know that God is testing me. Or I know this is God s will and I just have to accept it. Or even, We all have our crosses to bear. Of course, we are trying to explain a situation that really has no explanation. So, when Paul writes things like, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, and when he tells us God s response to his prayer was, My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness, for whenever I am weak, then I am strong, I have to take a deep breath and look carefully at his words to get at their meaning. And my dear friend and her astonishing statement of faith in the face of incurable cancer helped me to begin to unpack his meaning. 1

2 First, I think that Paul is most emphatically not saying here that God wants us to be weak, or sick or suffer insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ. He s not saying that it s good or God s will that we suffer. What he is trying to tell us is that God works through our weaknesses and our hardships, our fragility and our failures. As when Paul writes in Romans: We know that all things work together for good for those who love God... Paul isn t saying that all things are good, but that God can work for good in all things. Whatever the thorn in the flesh was and scholars have spent a lot of time speculating on just what kind of ailment this was Paul came to see it as a way to keep him from becoming too haughty or conceited from thinking he was better than others. Paul says that he prayed three times for God to remove this ailment, but God said, No. More specifically, God said, My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. God called on Paul to trust in the sufficiency of grace. And God used Paul s weakness to make his power perfect, or complete, which is the meaning of the Greek word translated as perfect. What the Corinthians who were opposing and rejecting Paul would consider weaknesses in Paul, he turns around; he says these very weaknesses are what God uses to further the gospel. The weaknesses become his strength through the power and grace of God. 2

3 What does it mean for us as the church that God s power becomes complete in weakness? To answer this we need to look to the Cross. The cross is the ultimate example of God s power being made complete in weakness. What seems like defeat, like the death of God s only begotten son, is really the death of death itself, the way to victory over death. Let s face it, isn t it in our weaknesses rather than our strengths when we usually turn to God? It seems that our weaknesses allow God in. And they give us perspective, just as Paul s thorn in the flesh gave him perspective. Our weaknesses remind us that we are not self-sufficient; we are not powerful in and of ourselves. It is often through out weaknesses that God is able to work. For example, people in AA are able to be sponsors to each other and provide support in ways that no non-alcoholic could provide support. People who become powerful spokespersons for others who have the same condition are able to raise the public s awareness in ways that others cannot. My dear friend, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, supported and encouraged someone else who has just been diagnosed with cancer in a way that no one else can like my dear friend, who not only supported others who are living with cancer but who was a living example, a sermon of a greater healing taking place within us even through her dying and eventual death. 3

4 I imagine most of us question at one time or another, if not most of the time, whether God s grace is really enough to see us through, to sustain us, to keep us, and to empower us. We work hard to provide security for ourselves and our families, to protect ourselves and those we love from hardship, pain, disease, and tragedy. But ultimately, we are not in control as much as we d like to think. Our best laid plans and all our hard work cannot ensure that we and our children and families will make it through this life safe and sound, happy and untroubled. Ultimately, all we have and all we need is to rely on is God s grace. That s a lesson that Jesus teaches the disciples in our gospel text from Mark. Jesus sends them out on a mission and all they have to rely on are each other, on Jesus authority and on, well, the kindness of strangers. Jesus sends them out in pairs and gives them authority over unclean spirits. They will be healing people just as he has been doing. He tells them to take no provisions with them they literally go with nothing but the clothes on their back, a staff, and sandals on their feet. They will not be able to provide for themselves on this mission trip, but will be completely dependent on the hospitality of others. One of my favorite theologians, the late Henri Nouwen, suggests that the Christian community is gathered together to experience our true condition which is that we are sinners in need of grace... 4

5 To be in Christ, that is in Christian community is to counteract the tendency to become settled in a false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people... [we grow] in our recognition of our inner brokenness and this brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings. In Christian community we can experience our common human brokenness and our common need for healing. Nouwen and Paul remind us that faithful people live in an interdependent way with other members of the faith community. Faithful people understand that life is not something they have earned or made, but it is a gift from the creator, redeemer and sustainer. The arrogant strong look only to themselves and boast of their achievements and power over others; the so called weak look to God for a word of sustaining mercy and grace. It is counter-cultural for us to believe and live as though God s grace is enough. To live as though we believe that God s grace is really enough is both a challenge and a powerful witness to our faith. It doesn t mean we abandon our responsibilities, our careers, or our homes, but it does mean that we put them in perspective, asking ourselves through the course of each day what really matters here? and reminding ourselves in every major decision and in every difficulty we face that God s grace is sufficient. If we are relying on God s grace, that trust will be reflected in our values and in how we live together in our homes, in our workplaces, as citizens of a nation, and, most especially, as a Christian community. 5

6 God s grace is sufficient and wondrously and freely and sufficiently given. God s grace, is, as Paul confessed long ago, the love that makes us more than conquerors. When my friend told me she knew how much she was loved in the midst of all the devastating and debilitating pain and suffering of cancer, she was confessing that she was convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation not even her cancer will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So it s all grace, all the time. I have pondered this often, especially when I am tempted to fall into despair. Out of this statement, the many conversations and dialogues with saints past (like Paul and Nouwen) and saints present (like my dear friend), and the psalms, all of which reorient me to look at the brokenness and evil in the world through the lens of Jesus of Nazareth s life, death and resurrection, I have come to view our human condition not so much as a fall from grace, but a fall into grace. Thanks be to God, his grace is sufficient for you and for me. 6