Sexagesima Sunday (February 20, 2022)

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“What’s your biggest weakness?” It’s a job interview question potential employers always ask. “I care too much and I work too hard,” people often answer. We don’t like showing that we’re vulnerable. And, to be fair, a job interview is maybe one of those places where you don’t want to give your potential employer a litany of your personal foibles and insecurities. But the job interview crystalizes a human tendency: we want to project strength and to control how people perceive us. So we nicely tailor our resumes, LinkedIn pages, social media accounts, etc. so that we look the part we want to play, sometimes without making sure the outward projection corresponds to an inner reality.

Since this past fall, we’ve been doing a Bible study on Joshua-Kings on Friday mornings. We have just recently begun the book of II Samuel. At the beginning of I Samuel, Israel wants a king and God gives them Saul. 1 Samuel 9:2 describes Saul as being physically impressive: “And Saul, [was] a choice young man, and a goodly: and there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he: from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people.” Yet, in spite of his appearance, Saul was not a good king. One chapter later, when they’re preparing to anoint him king, Saul runs away and hides in the baggage train. Throughout his reign, he was repeatedly disobedient to God and became excessively paranoid, as demonstrated by his many attempts to assassinate David.

David is pretty much the opposite of Saul. He wasn’t the oldest in his family, but the youngest of eight brothers. Further, he was a shepherd. So in 1 Samuel 16, when Samuel the prophet shows up to the house of Jesse with a message from God that one of the sons would be anointed as Saul’s successor, David wasn’t even home; he was out tending the flocks. Samuel went to the first son of Jesse, named Eliab, who, like Saul, had an exemplary physical stature and prowess. But God makes it clear to Samuel (1 Samuel 16:7) “But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” So Samuel goes to the next oldest son, Abidinadab who was similarly dismissed because (1 Samuel 16:8) “Neither hath the Lord chosen this.” So they passed on to the third oldest, Shammah who was similarly rejected. The same pattern was repeated for the 7 brothers who were present. This caused Samuel to turn to Jesse and ask if all the sons were present. When Samuel found out that David, the youngest of the brothers, was in the field with the flock, he urged them to send for him and the Lord confirms that David is the successor.

There is another Old Testament story that I’ve always found interesting and it’s in 1 Kings 19. This occurred when Elijah was on the run from the evil rulers of Israel, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. He went into the wilderness to fast for forty days and nights, subsequently ending up in a cave feeling isolated and dejected. There, the Lord confronted Elijah and instructed him to step outside the cave and stand on the side of the mountain. A violent, rushing wind swept by, so forcefully that the rock crumbled; but God was not in the wind. A rumbling earthquake shook the ground; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then a fire passed by Elijah; but the Lord was not in the fire. Where was God then? He was not in the fanastical signs, but in a still, small voice.

These two Old Testament stories share a theme in common with this morning’s Epistle reading from 2 Corinthians 11. What we see, in all three passages, is that God shows himself to us in human weakness, all the places we don’t think to look, a theme which reaches its ultimate culmination with the crucified God on the cross, thirsting and in agony, as he exhibits his power in affecting our salvation through a radical kind of enemy love and self-sacrifice. What we see in 2 Corinthians is that Paul takes the same theme of God’s power in human weakness and applies it to his own ministry.

But it’s helpful to understand a little about the context of 2 Corinthians. If you read either of the Corinthian epistles, you can realize pretty quickly that they were not a perfect church. There were all kinds of partisan tensions, fault lines, loose moral and sexual conduct, and even abuse of basic Christian rituals like the Eucharist and spiritual gifts. To make matters more complicated, it seems that some false apostles had worked there way into the community and were challenging the authenticity of Paul’s ministry. Our reading this morning comes from a section where Paul is defending his apostleship from these accusations by his theological opponents.

Now Paul could have defended his apostleship by pointing them to his resume and by answering the interview questions just right: he did write most of the New Testament, and traveled the world preaching the Gospel, converting countless souls. Further, he quelled internal strife in the Church at large by making space for Gentiles to be considered full members of the Church, instead of insisting on an ethnocentric Jew-first policy. But that’s not what Paul does here. While he does claim that he could go toe-to-toe with the false accusers because he is a Hebrew, Israelite, descendant of Abraham, and servant of Christ, he doesn’t focus on that. The defense of his ministry is a laundry list of all the bad things that happened to him: he was whipped by the Jews five different times, flogged three times, stoned, shipwrecked three times, and put in danger on his many journeys from rivers, robbers, countrymen, Gentiles, in the cities and in the wilderness, in the sea, from false brothers, in hard work and toil, through sleepless nights, from hunger and thirst, and from exposure to the cold. On top of all these things, Paul tells us that he received daily pressure from anxious concerns for all the churches.

This isn’t a humble-brag: “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” he asks. “If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities.” But why are these weaknesses a point of pride? Why would Paul choose these things to pad his resume? Our Collect for today hones in on the answer: “O Lord God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do; mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity.” In his powerlessness and weakness, God’s strength is manifest through Paul. This is how God often works. It’s how he worked in the stories of David and Elijah. When God called Moses, Moses resisted because he was slow of speech. When God called Gideon, Gideon resisted because he was the least in his father’s house which was the weakest clan in Israel. When God called Isaiah, Isaiah resisted because he was a man of unclean lips. And when God called Jeremiah, Jeremiah resisted because he was too young. As if it’s not amazing enough that God, the Creator of everything, uses humans to bring about his desired ends, he chooses to use those who aren’t the strongest or tallest, or the most well-spoken. What this means is that God might also use us.

One of the great tensions in the Christian life is that between faith and works. Various Christian traditions and theologians often emphasize one at the expense of the other. One of the geniuses built into our lectionary is that it balances both these out. Last week, we began the Pre-Lenten season with a reading that compared the Christian life to being an athlete, encouraging us to train ourselves. This week, we are reminded of our inherent weakness, not as a way of shaming us, but to remind us where we should draw our strength: not from ourselves; we’ll just be disappointed when we look there. We draw our strength from God who bestows manifold grace on us so that his power can be manifested through our weakness. So as we prepare for Lent, it’s important for us to understand that our weakness is an opportunity, an opportunity for us to be living testimonies to God’s power.