He had it in his pocket for 14 years and he never used it until this very moment.  How smart is that?  I mean, if you were applying for a coaching job of a gymnastics team and you had once gotten a perfect 10 on the floor exercises at a national meet, don’t you think that might be a good thing to mention?  Or, if you are applying for a broadcasting job at ABC News and you won an industry award for your reporting at a local station, don ‘t you think that might be good information to report?  We wouldn’t think of withholding things that would promote ourselves in matters like that, and what’s more, most people have to fight the temptation not to pad their resumes.  Lots of them lose that battle and brag on themselves for no cause, hoping to get ahead with people who won’t check carefully. 

But in the spiritual realm, the Apostle Paul gives us a little lesson in bragging rights (and wrongs).  Although he wasn’t running for office or applying for a job, Paul was appealing to the church at Corinth to listen to him.  He had founded the church and gone on to other places in his missionary work.  Four times he wrote to them, 2 Corinthians being the fourth time – the other letters lost to history. Paul is anguished that after leaving them, some super-apostles came through Corinth claiming authority on the basis of extraordinary spiritual experiences.  I can just hear their language now: While I was praying and enjoying this sweet time with Jesus, the Lord spoke to me in a voice that sounded like thunder, in the language of angels … whatever.  Or, I was asking the Lord for a sign, and all of a sudden I saw this bright light and was given this glorious vision … blah, blah, blah.  Now, maybe you think I ought to be a bit more generous toward things like this instead of giving them the whatever or the blah, blah, blah, and maybe you’re right.  But I’ve got to say I’m on Paul’s side of this one.  Whenever someone starts to tell me about their super-spiritual experiences, about how God told them this or that, I get suspicious about whether I am supposed to take note of them or God.  That’s why we try to keep the pious-sounding talk to a minimum around here, while not being afraid of God talk entirely.

Well, Paul is on the defensive a bit with the Corinthians.  They are young in the faith and impressed by spiritual claims of power.  Paul can’t hold his tongue any longer.  I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago ….  He has held back on telling anyone about this, but it did happen.  Paul had an ecstatic experience with God in which he was completely passive in the thing.  He was caught up into the third heaven, he says.  Paradise is another word he uses, synonymously, I believe.  The third heaven was a Jewish way of talking about the highest intensity of experience with God.  Paradise comes from a Persian word, which means a secret garden.  The image is God calling Paul into this Garden of Eden-like place to walk and talk with the King of Heaven personally.  Paul doesn’t even know how to describe what happened.  He doesn’t know whether it was an out-of-body experience or what.  He knows there are some things he shouldn’t even tell, or maybe that he cannot find words for.

So what really happened to him?  I don’t have any idea.  Frankly, nothing like that has ever happened to me, so I’m no good to explain it.  Maybe it comes as a blow that your pastor has had no such super-spiritual experience to confirm his authority, but it is what it is and I won’t make it up to satisfy you.  Apparently, Paul knows this was meant for his own experience with God and not for his aggrandizement before others.  It was meant for God’s glory, not his glory.

It takes work for the church to learn this, as well as for the would-be leader.  Although I have no special revelations to commend myself, I have always found it strange that my authority goes way up with some people in church settings when they find out that I played quarterback at the University of Miami.  Now just think about this: first of all, it was more than 25 years ago; second, I had a very forgettable career; and third, what in God’s name does that have to do with this?  I’m not embarrassed about it, and I’m kind of over it, but for years I have downplayed the football thing, thinking I ought to gain a hearing based upon whether I say anything worth hearing.  Our values are warped by this sports-crazed, entertainment culture.

Notice when Paul finally tells about the rapturous experience, he doesn’t refer to himself in the first person, even though every commentator agrees he is talking about himself.  As Hall of Fame pitcher and true Texan, Nolan Ryan, used to say, It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.  Paul says as much when he says, if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth.  In other words, Paul has bragging rights, yet he still considers it wrong to brag on his special revelations.  He knows that true or not, it tends to separate him from ordinary people, when he is always trying to find points of solidarity with them in Christ.

Anyone who has read Paul will hardly think humility his chief virtue.  And yet, who is?  Can anyone admit that about themselves and still be humble?  Humility is a virtue others assign to you, more than one you can claim.  I mean, if you finally think you have made progress in humility, isn’t that pride creeping in, undermining the humility?

Walter Issacson, former head of
CNN, has written a new book on Benjamin Franklin.  He was saying in an interview the other day that Franklin knew he was not accomplished in the art of humility, but he thought he was pretty skilled at the pretense of it.  It’s an oxymoron – fake humility.  But it isn’t a bad idea, actually.  If you are working at humility you are at least conscious of the choices you are making, putting yourself in proper perspective.  After a while, it might also become second nature to you, so that you are unselfconscious about it.

But not to worry, if you get too high and mighty, if you get to promoting yourself shamelessly, God has ways of bringing you back to earth.  Paul believes that is just what happened to him.  To keep me from being too elated, he says, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.  Twice he says in one sentence to keep me from being too elated.  The word for elated means to be puffed up, carried away with oneself.  And some of us have that tendency.  Some have the opposite problem, confusing humiliation with humility.  They need to rise up to their proper dignity.  But some of us haven’t struggled much in our lives and we come to think that happiness and an easy road is an entitlement.  We don’t compare ourselves to those who are less fortunate by the accident of birth, who didn’t have all the advantages we did.  We just think we ought to have a smooth and easy go of it.  But hello LIFE!  God doesn’t give any of us that privilege forever.  No sense moping about it, every last one of us is likely to live with some kind of thorn in the flesh to keep us honest.

We don’t know what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was.  Reams of speculation have suggested it was anything from gout to depression to bad eyesight to a speech impediment to sexual temptation to low self-esteem.  My father thinks it was directly related to the gnawing pain of people not taking him seriously.  No one knows for sure, and fortunately Paul isn’t telling.  Maybe the Corinthians knew as soon as he mentioned it, but they don’t give us any clues either – which is all the better for us.  Since we don’t know, we can sort of fill in the blank with whatever our particular thorn in the flesh is.  That splinter that rubs us the wrong way every time we start a new day.  We can do like Paul and pray that God will take it away so that we won’t be hampered in our ministry, but more than likely God will do with us exactly what God did with Paul and deny our request so that we can use it as a spiritual reminder of how much we have to rely upon God’s strength and not our own.

Ponder your own thorn in the flesh for a moment, as I ponder mine.  Is it your family upbringing, your weight, your height, your looks, your inability to control your tongue, your intelligence, where you grew up, your poor health, your alcoholism, your eating disorder, your marriage or your singleness or your sexual orientation, what?  Now, you have probably prayed many times for God to fix it for you, to take it away, and you wonder why God hasn’t done that.  Well, maybe it’s time to consider another way of looking at it.  Maybe the frustration of dealing with that one thing in your life over and over again is the one thing that keeps you from being too elated, too free of your need for God.  Maybe that is the one thing that reminds you that life is not all about you, that God has bigger things to worry about than your particular thorn in the flesh.  Maybe you are supposed to understand that if God doesn’t take it from you, God can make it useful in rounding you out and making your spiritually stronger.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a woman who had seemingly lost everything dear to her.  She goes to a friendly nun and asks for sanctuary at the convent.  My mother has just died, I think my father is an alcoholic, my marriage is falling apart, and I feel like I am going crazy, she says.  The nun has obviously had no training in pastoral care or Rogerian therapy and she blurts out, God must love you very much.  [“Perfect in Weakness,” cited in Lectionary Homiletics (June-July 2003).]

Right, well, sometimes some of us could use a little less love, don’t you know?!  But the point is that Paul wants the Corinthians to stop thinking you have to be a super-spiritual star in    order to be useful to God.  It is Christ in us that rules the whole of our lives, and nothing can stop the one who is risen from the dead from shaping all our infirmities into ways of glorifying God, if we will stop bragging on ourselves and brag on Christ.

I was talking to a good friend this week.  I was best man in his wedding years ago.  He is an exceptional musician, but he told me that he has gone through some very difficult times as he has often framed things as “me in the music” instead of “the music in me.”  When he plays for his own glory, the music takes a back seat to what he will get out of it.  But when he learns to turn it all over to Christ and play for his sake, he can play self-forgetfully and the music plays him.