Positive Faith in Scripture: Strength for the Weak

Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the creator of the ends of the earth.

He doesn’t grow tired or weary.

His understanding is beyond human reach,

giving power to the tired and reviving the exhausted.

Isaiah 40:28-29, CEB

I blame everything on culture and I’m going to try to stop doing that because it’s lazy. But maybe I’ll start tomorrow. Our culture teaches us that we shouldn’t show weakness, that strength is a virtue, and that strength and weakness are opposites. We’re also taught that some people are strong and some people are weak, as opposed to something like: everyone has strengths and weaknesses.

The latter seems more accurate to me. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Everyone’s strengths should be celebrated and nobody’s weaknesses are a problem.

This seems to me to be closer to the biblical view of strength and weakness anyway. In scripture, weakness is inevitable. Everyone will experience it. And, it’s not a problem. God can work with it and he can work with it. He has enough strength to spread around such that his plans will never be held back by our weakness (or our perceived weakness, or our perceived lack of strengths).

God doesn’t hoard his strength either. It’s not something to boast about or lord over humanity. It’s something to be given and shared so that we will have all that we need when we need it.

Weaknesses are not shortcomings- they’re little signs and reminders that we both need God and community.

Together, we have all the strength(s) we would ever need.

Suffering is not Strength…

During my five years of intense suffering, I ultimately learned to surround myself with people who could focus on what was working, not ONLY what was broken. Maybe you need someone to kick your ass and get you into gear. I did not. The world was already kicking my ass. My father was already breaking my heart into a million pieces. My community, thanks pandemic, was in a state of flux and not everyone handled that well. All of it was TOO MUCH. But even in the midst of a fair amount of bad behaving, little lanterns of light were present.

This is a moment where I want to be brutally honest with you. I honestly have come through this tunnel with the strongly held conviction that no one needs an ass whooping. No one. I do not think it works. So maybe you think you need that, I would ask you to reconsider. I once had this young woman in my life who went off to college and came back....different. She had found a church near her college campus and she was thrilled with it. She reported to me saying, "You know, I realize that I need to go to a church where the pastor makes me feel ashamed each week so that I can be inspired to do better during the week." My heart sank. These were the days before I myself was a pastor, but even in all my ignorance, something about that just felt off to me.

This is a powerful human in her own right. She is assertive and strong and hears the cries of the marginalized and hopeless and DOES SOMETHING to alleviate their suffering. If anyone could take a licking and keep on ticking it's her. But this is not sustainable, in my opinion. One day, she will feel her vulnerability. And when that day comes, she may need something quite different. And if I may be so bold, she needs something quite different even when she feels strong and in control. Because all this shaming and her certainty that she can rise to the challenge actually strengthens her weaknesses. It makes her less vulnerable. It makes her more judgy and critical and I could see my younger self in her intense and sincere features. So I went home from our coffee date and cried.

Our Strengths Can Be Our Weaknesses

"Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?'"

Margaret Thatcher

When our health insurance provider cancelled our insurance on the day I had an expensive medical test, my patient beloved spouse rose above his limitations to advocate for the company to take responsibility and fix the problem they created. This required him to go against his natural inclination to listen to others and accommodate their points of view.

When the customer service representative told him to call his human resources department, Pete went against his natural inclination to not act decisively and advocate for his own agenda. Now, it's not like we need to bring out a band to celebrate his tenacity - we do not have a human resources department at Northstar Community - which helped Petestand firm.

The point is this: our strengths can also be our weaknesses. Could this be you? What strengths do you have that are also your weaknesses?

A Word of Encouragement

I want to encourage you with the encouragement that has been offered to people from Jesus...by example and exhortation and through story. There is nothing in the gospel about being successful. Preach him crucified. The confounding mystery of the resurrection - God breathing life into dry, dead bones, continues to be mysterious. God does not show us everything. But way beyond our capacity to know and see and understand and articulate is this true thing: God can work with whatever we give him. He takes our weakness our fear, our trembling and says, "I can work with that."

But let's not get but so excited about this. We do not what a sneaky form of heresy to slip in among us. We do not want to confuse God's mysterious work of resurrection with a form of narcissism that claims that God's power to save us includes God's willingness to make us rich or better than those "other people" - you know, the ones who sin. Not our sins, but the BIG sins. (Please know that this is sarcasm.) The gospel message is not one of "I was once dead but now I am alive and that makes me able to decide who the real sinners are among us." That is not the story.

So you ask - what do we do? What does it mean for us to live Jesus crucified? Here is all I have to offer. We try. We do the best we can with what we have to work with. We use the resources we have to figure out what that means. WE JUST SHOULD NOT KID OURSELVES INTO THINKING THAT WE KNOW WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON. (A paraphrase of Barbara Taylor Brown from her sermon, "In Weakness and Much Trembling".) If no one else will tell you this, hear me loud and clear: some of our most dismal failures please God very much. And I want you to know that in our community, we will be known and maybe criticized for who we love and that's ok. We know that we do not know what we are doing and that no one really knows what this resurrection life really means, wrapped as it is in the grand mystery of God. So even if we are dead wrong - God loves to bring dead things back to life.

Jesus was a huge disappointment in his day. So was Paul. So are we all. There will always be someone who is disappointed in you and me. But here's what I want us to join together as a community and preach: that when people hang out with us, in spite of all the ways we are a disappointment - no handbell choir, no stained glassed windows, no fancy preachers, in all those limitations here is one thing we do: we welcome the stranger. We offer the gift of hospitality. We do not kid ourselves into thinking that we know what is really going on but we never forget that God works with whatever we offer Him.

The Post-Christian Era

Did you know that many observers of all things Christian have labelled the age we live in the post-Christian era? They make a compelling case that we have lost our consensus about what it means to be Christian. We have lost the language of faith that we once thought we had in common. Every major denomination in our country today is in a fight of some sort or other that proves that we have lost this thing called consensus.

In response to all this deconstruction, the modern day church has turned to business techniques like market studies, mass mailing and telemarketing to increase church membership. It works too! There are plenty of examples of mega churches who do fill those pews and the coffers to the brim. They host Easter egg hunt using air drops to spread the good news - a modern day tradition I am totally fascinated by! And let's get real here - don't we have the same concerns at Northstar Community? How will we fund our mission we ask? Isn't that question awfully close to the one about getting lots of butts in the pews? These are legitimate questions that people in charge of such things must ask. But at what cost?

Barbara Brown Taylor says this about such things:

"All of these developments have given me reason to think hard about all the things we do to get people into church. Does the end justify the means, or are we playing a dangerous game with the gospel, by substituting our own expertise for the power of God?"

p.132, Teaching Sermons on Suffering

Paul's response? Preach him as crucified. Now, is that guy crazy or what? Here's more about Paul. The guy had limitations! He had a mysterious thorn in the flesh that served as a big limiter. He was not considered a great preacher, although people did not criticize his writing too much. A second-century source "The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Tecla" described him as "a man of small stature, with bald head and crooked legs...with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked." And yet, with all these limitations the guys still managed to start at least 7 churches, write 13 letters quoted even today and several speeches found in the book of Acts that were impressive by any standards.

So why preach him crucified? Maybe it was because Paul also assessed himself like this:

"I stood in front of you with weakness, fear, and a lot of shaking. My message and my preaching weren't presented with convincing wise words but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. I did this so that your faith might not depend on the wisdom of people but on the power of God."

1 Corinthians 2:3-5 CEB

What, I wonder, is so terrible about acknowledging our own weakness, fear and shaking? What have we misunderstood, or forgotten about the Easter message that holds us back from expressing our own vulnerability and limitations?