2 Corinthians 12:6-10; July 7, 2024; Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
“Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.” – 2 Corinthians 12:7
My friends, what are the thorns in your life that keep you from being too elated? That keep you from feeling jubilant?
Is it the endless wars, genocides, and violence? Or, is it more like your job here at home that no longer satisfies? Or, is it maybe something even more local and personal than that; is it your spouse, or an ex, or the very person looking at you in the mirror, who hasn’t lived up to your own promise and promises?
Just who or what is it today that is keeping you from feeling happy? What is the thorn in your side that is preventing you from being elated?
I should say here that the word for thorn is likely different in meaning within the original Greek, where it appears as σκόλοψ (transliterated: skolops), which elsewhere is translated is as something like “a sharp stake; a pale.”
So, Paul is probably not thinking of a prickly little thorn bush here (like the colorful one on our bulletin cover), but rather like a wooden spear sticking in and out of his side, causing incredible torment and distress, turning both his and our own stomachs inside out.
And I don’t know about you, but these last six days have turned my stomach inside out. What, with our nation experiencing a decade in a week, and feeling like it’s all imploding from within (and around its birthday, no less).
I mean, I came back all elated, riding high from Cali only to be sent plummeting down into a briar patch of despair, wondering if perhaps I should start working on a visa application to Portugal. Now I’m joking of course. But others aren’t. Which highlights just how dreadful and frightening all of this is. The unknown of what may come. The torment, the distress.
Is there a thorn lodged somewhere in your own flesh today, squarely in your chest, assailing you and robbing you of your joy? If so, and if there is, know that you are not alone, and that I feel you. For I feel it too. Right here in my chest. Every passing day and each sleepless night.
But as we’ll hear in just a bit, sometimes it’s in that pain and distress, in our weaknesses and hardships, fears and calamities, that we can find strength. As crazy and irrational as that sounds, that’s what God tells us. That power is made perfect in weakness. In weakness. Of all things.
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When I was in college, I went with a friend of mine to this Christian conference whose overarching focus was on the power of the Spirit. More acutely, how God can help people move past the memories that haunt them, so that they could find motivation to begin again if not anew.
One of the speakers I remember listening to was this guy who admitted to being a recovering alcoholic. He said that he had drank every cocktail under the sun, and probably even those known only under an intergalactic sun. He did heavy drugs too, abused his body with needles and cheap sex. He did it all. Everything you’re told not to, everything you shouldn’t.
He doesn’t know how or why exactly, but one day when he felt like he was near rock bottom, a feeling came over him. Something like “a presence” he called it, which made him at first feel shame, but then brought him peace. Soon after, he stumbled into a shelter where he met a local priest who when doing his rounds and visits told him that this “presence” was in fact God, and that God adores all of his children, even if not especially those who were as lost and weak as him.
And hearing those words changed him. Not in an instant but slowly over time they worked on him. And with the church’s help, this man began putting the scattered pieces of his life back together and found that telling his story was better than running from it.
Through forums, he would meet others who were struggling like him, and he would both recant and share his lessons again and again. And in self-sacrificing his ego by talking freely of his weak-spots and torments before others, he felt ironically like he got stronger and more able to look at himself in the mirror. Accepting himself for who he was, faults and all.
At the end of his talk with us, he quoted Paul and said, “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may continue to dwell in me… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong… for wherever we are weak together, we can begin to find strength.”
Well, to all of this, I was moved, and admittedly also a little skeptical. I wanted to know more, and how he spoke with such confidence after everything he put his mind and body through. So, I said to my friend that we should invite this guy to coffee the next day, to ask him more questions, to which my friend immediately replied:
“Why on Earth would we do that? You heard his story… he’s made too many mistakes for me to waste another minute of my life on.”
To which I should have responded: “my friend, just what are your thorns that are keeping you from being elated, that are keeping you so arrogant and full of yourself?”
You see, interestingly, the Greek word for “elated” in our text: ὑπεραίρωμαι (transliterated: huperairōmai) seems to more precisely translate to feeling exalted, feeling haughty, if not, behaving insolently towards others.
Which suggests to me that Paul was intending to say: “To keep me from feeling too haughty, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from feeling too haughty.” Not elated.
Repeating himself in both the beginning and the end, and within the very same sentence, it’s as if Paul was making a confession; a complaint not about his joy being sapped from a prickly little thorn, but about a painful jabbing reminder to sit down and stay humble, so that he doesn’t relapse again and begin thinking of himself more piously than he ought.
For even though Paul himself admits to asking the Lord three times to remove this ailment from him, each time the Lord in infinite wisdom chooses not to do so. Because, as Paul learns (and as my friend still needs to) it is through the persecution of humility that his soul will benefit in the end.
It is through humility that all our souls benefit in the end.
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My friends, now more than ever, in these days of tribalism and division, narcissism and self-importance, it is critical to stay humble. To confess. To be willing to learn and be up front about our blind spots, our weak spots, our thorns.
For it’s not in pretending to be righteous, or in delusions of grandeur, that we will be made great nor strong. No, those “qualities” only lead to haughtiness and arrogance, and believing you’re something special even when you’re just a loud fool who needs to sit down.
No, it’s in admitting to our hardships, our errors, our inabilities and mistakes, that we can improve as persons and as a people; whereupon Christ can finally get to work on us and start changing us for the better. So that we might all, in the end, be truly elated.
For here at this table, where his presence still abides, he teaches us not only what humility is all about, but even more amazingly, that power can indeed be made perfect in weakness.
