Many ordinations are held in Anglican churches and cathedrals at this time of the year. Men and women of different ages and backgrounds with a variety of gifts, skills and experience, are ordained to serve the church as pastors, teachers and shepherds. It was the 30th anniversary of my ordination as a deacon a couple of days ago. Several of our friends have been ordained this last week, and Henry Hope, who many of you know here at St Ursula's, was ordained yesterday.
There is a joyful sense of purpose in taking up such a ministry, but there can also be the nagging question: 'am I up to this?' Certainly I felt that when I was ordained, and it's a questions which has come up again and again over the years. Left to ourselves, we are not up to it. We cannot take up any ministry within the church without being aware of our need and dependence on God. As the Bishop states in the ordination service: 'You cannot bear the weight of your calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God.' This is true for those in ordained ministry, but it is also true for all of us in our Christian lives and the different ministries God has called us to. Unless we are open to God's grace and life within us, and through us, we have nothing to offer. Indeed, far more important than any skills or gifts we may think we have, is our awareness of our need of God's grace. Our poverty may be our greatest riches: the more we know our weakness, poverty and dependence on God, the more open we are to God's life and grace filling us and flowing through us.
Paul is very aware of this and in his two letters to the Corinthian church, he emphasises again and again, that they must not rely on their own gifts, skills, and spiritual experiences. They must not boast in such things, but instead remind themselves that it is God's grace that brings life. And God's grace can work in surprising ways, through surprising people, upsetting our usual ways of thinking about power and success. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians: 'God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.' (1 Corinthians 1:25).
We can sometimes romanticise the early church, but Paul's two letters to the church in Corinth paint a picture of a very divided church with lots of different power struggles. Members of the congregation squabbled over who had the most impressive spiritual gifts. There were other leaders who opposed Paul and tried to assert their superior qualifications and experiences, and many in the church were mesmerised by their seeming power and authority. They looked down on Paul for not having a powerful presence or being an impressively eloquent preacher. Paul reminds them that God's way of seeing things, and God's way of working, may be different from their expectations. They are urged not to look at things, not to look at one another, from a merely human point of view, but to put their trust in God and his grace and live the way of love and humility.
Think of his wonderful words in 1 Corinthians 13 (again perhaps romanticised and domesticated through over familiarity and too many wedding services!) which profoundly challenge our egos: 'Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or rude....it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.' (1 Corinthians 13: 4-5. 7).
In the end, what matters most is not our education, our status, our qualifications, our strength, our self-reliance, our skills and achievements, but our openness to God's love and our capacity to live that love in our daily lives.
Paul brings this message home in the passage we heard earlier. He says that even powerful spiritual experiences are not anything to boast of; they are not where our strength and confidence lies. Our strength is in God's grace, and paradoxically that might be more evident in our weakness and suffering than in all our impressive qualifications and achievements, even our powerful spiritual experiences.
It may have been that in the Corinthian church, many of the leaders were parading their spiritual experiences as well as their other qualifications and credentials. Perhaps that's why Paul feels impelled to share something of his own. This is the only time in all his letters when he describes this remarkable mystical experience – one which can't really be put into words – of being caught up into heaven and hearing things that are not to be told. This is clearly Paul's own intimate personal experience, but he tells of it in an objective third person way. 'I know of a man...' he says, rather than 'listen to what happened to me.' He puts some space between himself and this powerful experience; he distances himself from it in some way. That's because in the end he doesn't view it as important. He realises that this is not something to boast of; it is not where his strength and confidence lie.
The great writers of prayer down the centuries agree. People like St John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the great Carmelites of 16th century Spain, experienced visions, trances, raptures of all kinds, but they both advised that no one should put too much value on such things. Such experiences don't prove a person's holiness or spiritual maturity; what matters much more is that we love God and love our neighbour.
For Paul, it is not just that he realises he shouldn't boast in these visionary experiences, but that he realises that God is actually closer to him, and pours his grace upon him more fully, in the midst of suffering and weakness. He speaks of a 'thorn in the flesh'; something which obviously caused him pain, suffering, discomfort or humiliation of some kind. We don't know what this was. Some commentators suggest some kind of physical disability; perhaps a speech impediment as he seems to be regarded on several occasions as a poor speaker. (2 Corinthians 10:10; 2 Corinthians 11:6). Whatever this 'thorn in the flesh' was, Paul wanted to get rid of it and he prayed frequently and earnestly for it to be taken away from him. We are told he prayed three times for it to be taken away – perhaps reminding us of the way Jesus prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane for the cup of suffering to be taken away from him.
But just as the cup of suffering is not taken away from Jesus, so the 'thorn in the flesh' is not taken away from Paul. Instead, Paul is told 'my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Paul learns, the hard way, that God's grace may be more visible in him when he is weak and facing struggles of various kinds, than when he is confident in his own strength. So he concludes, 'I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships...for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.'
Now I don't think that Paul is saying that weakness, suffering and hardship are good things in themselves; certainly we should never romanticise suffering. Nevertheless, it is true that it is often when we know our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, our smallness, our need, that we are more open to God's grace in us. And it may be that what most matters to God is not that we are always healthy and happy in our own terms, but that we are spiritually growing and being transformed in love in the image of Jesus Christ. On this spiritual journey, we may in fact grow more through times of trial, struggle and difficulty; perhaps sometimes bearing with our own 'thorn in the flesh'. Of course none of us want to suffer; we all want an easy, comfortable life. None of us want to be poor, weak, or small, but strong, self-sufficient, powerful and well thought of. However, it may well be that, in the long run, growing in the capacity to love is much more important, and being open to God in our suffering and weakness may be part of that journey.
So today, we are both encouraged and challenged:
We are challenged not to put our confidence in our own selves; our credentials, our qualifications, our strengths, our experiences, and not to judge others by how humanly impressive and powerful they seem to be. Not even to be mesmerised by our own, or others' powerful spiritual experiences. But rather to be open to God's grace and for that to be the ground of our identity, our confidence, our strength, our hope.
This is of course, also an encouragement. For it means that we do not need to despair of our weaknesses and failures, or the painful, constraining circumstances which we may face. If we can resist bitterness and anger at such experiences and turn our hearts and minds to God in such times, then we will discover the wonderful paradox which Paul speaks of: that God's grace can work most deeply in us, and be most visible in us, when we know our need of him.
'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'
Helen Marshall