Grace In The Midst Of Weakness
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
Over the centuries rank and file church members have grown up in the presence of stained glass saints. Sanctuary windows throughout Europe and America have featured thousands of them -- monumental, brightly colored portraits of men and women whose lives were right with God. Their faces are placid and trusting. Their heads are often enveloped by golden auras or haloes. All of them were heroes of the faith, either from the Bible or from Christian history. They are spectacular representations of spiritual victory -- but also intimidating. How can an ordinary person grow up to become a stained glass saint?
We sense that our weaknesses disqualify us. Generic frailties cling to us. We wonder how God puts up with our erratic attempts to jump-start our own spiritual lives, and wonder how long God can possibly be patient with our efforts at mastering something as basic as sustaining a life of prayer.
Three ministers once sat together in a church study to discuss their views regarding the most effective ways to pray. In an adjoining room there happened to be a telephone repairman who was working on the lines. The first pastor said, "When I pray, I find it helps to hold my hands together like this, as a personal expression of worship." The second suggested that real prayer ought to be conducted on one's knees. The third pastor corrected him, saying, "The most biblically authentic posture for talking to God is to lie stretched out on one's face."
At that moment the telephone repairman, who'd been eavesdropping, poked his head around the corner and said, "I'd have to say the best prayer I ever prayed was when I was dangling upside-down by my heels from a power pole about forty feet above the ground." The most cursory venture into the stories of scripture reveals that most of the stained glass saints who filter the light of the world's great cathedrals prayed a lot more like the telephone guy than those pastors. In the Bible, the Big Names get into Big Trouble. Weaknesses abound in God's chosen servants.
Consider this excerpt from the book of Numbers, chapter 11. A key leader asks the Lord, "Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? ... If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once -- if I have found favor in your sight -- and do not let me see my misery." This seriously depressed man feels so flattened by circumstances that he literally prays, "God, if you love me, please kill me." Who prayed that prayer? Moses.
Here's a paraphrased cry of the heart from 1 Kings 19: "I have had enough, Lord ... I'm the only one left who really cares about you, I've done everything that you asked me, and what do I get for my trouble? Right now there's a posse out hunting for my head." Who is this whiner? The prophet Elijah.
Another prophet's name is attached to one of the longest books in the Bible. God worked through him in dramatic ways during difficult times. Yet he prayed, "Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, 'A child is born to you -- a son!' Why didn't he just kill me in my womb? Why was I ever born to see all this trouble and sorrow?" This is exasperation at a level beyond Prozac. Have you ever seriously concluded that the world would be a better place if you had never entered it? Then you can relate to the prayer life of Jeremiah.
The big names of the Bible frequently relate to God out of emptiness, not out of anything that resembles fullness. Where spiritual courage and trust are demanded, they routinely display weakness. By grace God's champions were destined to become whole people -- but only because they first were broken people.
Consider the opening lines of Psalm 32: "Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit ... I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave the guilt of my sin." Who offered that prayer? He was a politician who had had an affair and then used government employees to arrange a cover-up. His name was David.
Over in Ephesians, chapter 4, we read: "Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together" (is) ... "building itself up in love." That is a remarkable expression of the heart, especially from a lynch mob organizer and murderer of members of Christ's Body like Saul of Tarsus.
In 3 John verse 2 we read: "Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul." That's a surprisingly gracious wish from a man whom Jesus once took aside to scold for his outrageous temper, and who, while slouching toward the Last Supper, got into a heated argument as to whether he merited the best seat in heaven. His name was John. The Bible calls him "the disciple whom Jesus loved."
Can we walk with God in the company of stained glass saints? We most certainly can -- as long as we follow the path they blazed for us. We must acknowledge our essential brokenness, even as we reach out to receive God's grace in the midst of our prevailing weakness.
Paul frames our condition in verse 7 of our text: "But we have this treasure in clay jars...." In other words, God has chosen to store the riches of heaven in fragile containers. In the first century the most durable containers were carved out of stone. A rich family might keep their prized possessions in a box made of alabaster. Clay pots, on the other hand, were a dime a dozen. In a Jewish home, if a ceremonially unclean animal like a lizard accidentally hopped into a clay pot -- even if it held every ounce of dinner -- there was no negotiating the next step. That pot itself was now ceremonially unclean, along with everything inside it. Everyone who touched it would become ceremonially unclean. Therefore it had to be broken -- never to be used again. It was unthinkable that a clay jar should be the container of anything worth keeping.
Every time Christians gather to ordain a woman or a man to ministry with a so-called capital "M" or pray for God's blessing on the various lower-case "m" ministries that are carried out by every member of the Body, they aren't declaring that perfect servants have finally been identified, trained, and released. A congregation is instead acknowledging the grace of God, who is pleased to work in and through our weaknesses. What is this awesome treasure in jars of clay? At least three descriptions of it emerge from our text.
First, the treasure carried in the breakable containers of human lives is God's ministry. How pathetic and dangerous it is to conclude the work that God has uniquely placed within each of us is our responsibility -- that the kingdom of God is no more than 24 hours away from collapse if we don't keep all the balls in the air.
Die-hard basketball fans know the name of Stacey King, former power forward from the University of Oklahoma and a role player in the NBA who won a world championship ring as a member of the Chicago Bulls. When King announced his retirement from the NBA a few years ago, there wasn't a glitzy press conference. But a reporter did ask him a question. "Stacey, what is your most cherished memory from your days in the NBA?"
"That's easy," he said. "That would be the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score seventy points." Impressive, isn't it? And how many points did Michael Jordan score that night? Sixty-nine. Stacey King had hit one free throw. It helps when you're playing with the very best.
That's precisely where we stand -- except that any time we "score" in ministry it's by grace, not by skill. Those called to bring about God's work aren't so much partners with the Lord as servants who are awaiting their next command. The ministry belongs to God. As Paul puts it in verse 1, "Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart." Even on days in which it seems, in our humanness, that we can never possibly make a difference for the kingdom, we can know that God is still going to have God's way with us.
Second, the treasure that's been entrusted to jars of clay is God's message. Flawed as we are, we are called to be reporters of the greatest news the world has ever heard.
It's hard to watch television and not feel repulsed when a reporter maneuvers to become bigger than the story he's relating, or a hostess postures herself as an incomparably brighter star than any celebrity she might interview. Paul says that God's person must never go there. We instinctively flinch when evangelists or authors or the guy who lives just down the street somehow imply that the good news is all about them. Look at verse 5: "For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake." Obedient messengers never trump the message. Our task is to share the treasure. How do we do that? We choose to be servants.
In the movie The Blues Brothers, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi -- ex-cons and sometime musicians who are trying to raise money for an orphanage -- have a pat answer when someone asks what they are doing. "We're on a mission from God." They always say it as if it could actually be true. Author John Ortberg observes, "The very idea that two inept, unworthy human beings could be on a mission from God was, of course, the central joke of the whole story." Ortberg then asserts, "Here is the story of your life: You are on a mission from God." We must never fall into such despair about our own weaknesses that we lose the conviction that God will use us. Though we boast all the glamour of a clay pot, God has entrusted to us the reporter's role for the most important news that has ever been heard.
Third, and finally, the treasure that God has placed within the containers of our hearts and minds is God's power. Paul draws the essential contrast in verse 7: "But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."
In his remarkable book Great Souls, journalist David Aikman chronicles the lives of those individuals whom he believes exerted the greatest moral and spiritual influence in the twentieth century. Author Philip Yancey comments that of the six he chose -- Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, and Elie Wiesel -- only Graham may be said to have had what we might call a "normal," pain-free childhood. Again and again God's power explodes through what appear to be life-defeating circumstances.
God delights to work through unlikely characters. Moses was the original basket case. When he heard the call of God he said, "Here am I, Lord. Send Aaron!" Gideon gasped, "You can't choose me. I'm the least of the least of the least in my family tree." Jonah was told to head east, so he immediately jumped on a boast heading west. Peter had the original case of Foot and Mouth Disease, repeatedly putting both of his feet in his mouth at all the wrong moments. Every one of the Twelve seems to have had a bad case of spiritual amnesia. As Tevye, the main character in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, puts it, "Lord, I know we're the chosen people. But couldn't you choose somebody else every now and then?"
The answer we receive today is the same answer they received: No. God places heaven's greatest treasures and entrusts heaven's highest missions to jars of clay. Our adequacy is not the point. Our inadequacy is not the point. God's adequacy is the point. As Paul summarizes in verse 16, "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." That's why God's people need never feel afraid of fragility or weakness. God is the source of all the power we will ever need. We may think that being a cracked pot disqualifies us from God's service. But the truth is that failure, more than anything else, is what prepares us to receive God's gift of grace.
Ortberg recounts the moment some years ago when a junior executive at IBM went out on a limb in a risky venture and lost the company over ten million dollars. He was called into the office of Tom Watson, Sr., the legendary founder and CEO of IBM. The young man knew what was coming, so he cut right to the chase. "I guess you've called me in for my resignation. Here it is. I resign." Watson replied, "You must be joking. I just invested ten million dollars educating you. I can't afford your resignation."
Is there any prevailing evidence that the Twelve could have looked back on the last week of Jesus' life and felt encouraged by their performance? They had fallen asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when they should have been praying; they had run for cover when Jesus was arrested and crucified; one of them had shouted out loud that he had never even met Jesus; and when they first heard that the tomb just might be empty, quite frankly they didn't believe it.
Therefore when Jesus stood before them, incredibly real and alive, they knew what was coming. "You've come for our resignations," they were thinking. "Well, here they are. We resign." How might Jesus have answered? "You've got be kidding. I can't afford your resignations. I just invested an incarnation, an atonement, and a resurrection in you. Right now you're all I've got."
A God of limitless power can never be limited by our weaknesses. We can never finally say, with theological accuracy, that we're all that God has. The amazing thing, therefore, is that God chooses such self-limitation. God is eternally pleased to work through jars of clay. What Good News -- what gracious Good News -- that is for every one of us.
We sense that our weaknesses disqualify us. Generic frailties cling to us. We wonder how God puts up with our erratic attempts to jump-start our own spiritual lives, and wonder how long God can possibly be patient with our efforts at mastering something as basic as sustaining a life of prayer.
Three ministers once sat together in a church study to discuss their views regarding the most effective ways to pray. In an adjoining room there happened to be a telephone repairman who was working on the lines. The first pastor said, "When I pray, I find it helps to hold my hands together like this, as a personal expression of worship." The second suggested that real prayer ought to be conducted on one's knees. The third pastor corrected him, saying, "The most biblically authentic posture for talking to God is to lie stretched out on one's face."
At that moment the telephone repairman, who'd been eavesdropping, poked his head around the corner and said, "I'd have to say the best prayer I ever prayed was when I was dangling upside-down by my heels from a power pole about forty feet above the ground." The most cursory venture into the stories of scripture reveals that most of the stained glass saints who filter the light of the world's great cathedrals prayed a lot more like the telephone guy than those pastors. In the Bible, the Big Names get into Big Trouble. Weaknesses abound in God's chosen servants.
Consider this excerpt from the book of Numbers, chapter 11. A key leader asks the Lord, "Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? ... If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once -- if I have found favor in your sight -- and do not let me see my misery." This seriously depressed man feels so flattened by circumstances that he literally prays, "God, if you love me, please kill me." Who prayed that prayer? Moses.
Here's a paraphrased cry of the heart from 1 Kings 19: "I have had enough, Lord ... I'm the only one left who really cares about you, I've done everything that you asked me, and what do I get for my trouble? Right now there's a posse out hunting for my head." Who is this whiner? The prophet Elijah.
Another prophet's name is attached to one of the longest books in the Bible. God worked through him in dramatic ways during difficult times. Yet he prayed, "Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, 'A child is born to you -- a son!' Why didn't he just kill me in my womb? Why was I ever born to see all this trouble and sorrow?" This is exasperation at a level beyond Prozac. Have you ever seriously concluded that the world would be a better place if you had never entered it? Then you can relate to the prayer life of Jeremiah.
The big names of the Bible frequently relate to God out of emptiness, not out of anything that resembles fullness. Where spiritual courage and trust are demanded, they routinely display weakness. By grace God's champions were destined to become whole people -- but only because they first were broken people.
Consider the opening lines of Psalm 32: "Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit ... I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave the guilt of my sin." Who offered that prayer? He was a politician who had had an affair and then used government employees to arrange a cover-up. His name was David.
Over in Ephesians, chapter 4, we read: "Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together" (is) ... "building itself up in love." That is a remarkable expression of the heart, especially from a lynch mob organizer and murderer of members of Christ's Body like Saul of Tarsus.
In 3 John verse 2 we read: "Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul." That's a surprisingly gracious wish from a man whom Jesus once took aside to scold for his outrageous temper, and who, while slouching toward the Last Supper, got into a heated argument as to whether he merited the best seat in heaven. His name was John. The Bible calls him "the disciple whom Jesus loved."
Can we walk with God in the company of stained glass saints? We most certainly can -- as long as we follow the path they blazed for us. We must acknowledge our essential brokenness, even as we reach out to receive God's grace in the midst of our prevailing weakness.
Paul frames our condition in verse 7 of our text: "But we have this treasure in clay jars...." In other words, God has chosen to store the riches of heaven in fragile containers. In the first century the most durable containers were carved out of stone. A rich family might keep their prized possessions in a box made of alabaster. Clay pots, on the other hand, were a dime a dozen. In a Jewish home, if a ceremonially unclean animal like a lizard accidentally hopped into a clay pot -- even if it held every ounce of dinner -- there was no negotiating the next step. That pot itself was now ceremonially unclean, along with everything inside it. Everyone who touched it would become ceremonially unclean. Therefore it had to be broken -- never to be used again. It was unthinkable that a clay jar should be the container of anything worth keeping.
Every time Christians gather to ordain a woman or a man to ministry with a so-called capital "M" or pray for God's blessing on the various lower-case "m" ministries that are carried out by every member of the Body, they aren't declaring that perfect servants have finally been identified, trained, and released. A congregation is instead acknowledging the grace of God, who is pleased to work in and through our weaknesses. What is this awesome treasure in jars of clay? At least three descriptions of it emerge from our text.
First, the treasure carried in the breakable containers of human lives is God's ministry. How pathetic and dangerous it is to conclude the work that God has uniquely placed within each of us is our responsibility -- that the kingdom of God is no more than 24 hours away from collapse if we don't keep all the balls in the air.
Die-hard basketball fans know the name of Stacey King, former power forward from the University of Oklahoma and a role player in the NBA who won a world championship ring as a member of the Chicago Bulls. When King announced his retirement from the NBA a few years ago, there wasn't a glitzy press conference. But a reporter did ask him a question. "Stacey, what is your most cherished memory from your days in the NBA?"
"That's easy," he said. "That would be the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score seventy points." Impressive, isn't it? And how many points did Michael Jordan score that night? Sixty-nine. Stacey King had hit one free throw. It helps when you're playing with the very best.
That's precisely where we stand -- except that any time we "score" in ministry it's by grace, not by skill. Those called to bring about God's work aren't so much partners with the Lord as servants who are awaiting their next command. The ministry belongs to God. As Paul puts it in verse 1, "Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart." Even on days in which it seems, in our humanness, that we can never possibly make a difference for the kingdom, we can know that God is still going to have God's way with us.
Second, the treasure that's been entrusted to jars of clay is God's message. Flawed as we are, we are called to be reporters of the greatest news the world has ever heard.
It's hard to watch television and not feel repulsed when a reporter maneuvers to become bigger than the story he's relating, or a hostess postures herself as an incomparably brighter star than any celebrity she might interview. Paul says that God's person must never go there. We instinctively flinch when evangelists or authors or the guy who lives just down the street somehow imply that the good news is all about them. Look at verse 5: "For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake." Obedient messengers never trump the message. Our task is to share the treasure. How do we do that? We choose to be servants.
In the movie The Blues Brothers, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi -- ex-cons and sometime musicians who are trying to raise money for an orphanage -- have a pat answer when someone asks what they are doing. "We're on a mission from God." They always say it as if it could actually be true. Author John Ortberg observes, "The very idea that two inept, unworthy human beings could be on a mission from God was, of course, the central joke of the whole story." Ortberg then asserts, "Here is the story of your life: You are on a mission from God." We must never fall into such despair about our own weaknesses that we lose the conviction that God will use us. Though we boast all the glamour of a clay pot, God has entrusted to us the reporter's role for the most important news that has ever been heard.
Third, and finally, the treasure that God has placed within the containers of our hearts and minds is God's power. Paul draws the essential contrast in verse 7: "But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."
In his remarkable book Great Souls, journalist David Aikman chronicles the lives of those individuals whom he believes exerted the greatest moral and spiritual influence in the twentieth century. Author Philip Yancey comments that of the six he chose -- Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, and Elie Wiesel -- only Graham may be said to have had what we might call a "normal," pain-free childhood. Again and again God's power explodes through what appear to be life-defeating circumstances.
God delights to work through unlikely characters. Moses was the original basket case. When he heard the call of God he said, "Here am I, Lord. Send Aaron!" Gideon gasped, "You can't choose me. I'm the least of the least of the least in my family tree." Jonah was told to head east, so he immediately jumped on a boast heading west. Peter had the original case of Foot and Mouth Disease, repeatedly putting both of his feet in his mouth at all the wrong moments. Every one of the Twelve seems to have had a bad case of spiritual amnesia. As Tevye, the main character in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, puts it, "Lord, I know we're the chosen people. But couldn't you choose somebody else every now and then?"
The answer we receive today is the same answer they received: No. God places heaven's greatest treasures and entrusts heaven's highest missions to jars of clay. Our adequacy is not the point. Our inadequacy is not the point. God's adequacy is the point. As Paul summarizes in verse 16, "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." That's why God's people need never feel afraid of fragility or weakness. God is the source of all the power we will ever need. We may think that being a cracked pot disqualifies us from God's service. But the truth is that failure, more than anything else, is what prepares us to receive God's gift of grace.
Ortberg recounts the moment some years ago when a junior executive at IBM went out on a limb in a risky venture and lost the company over ten million dollars. He was called into the office of Tom Watson, Sr., the legendary founder and CEO of IBM. The young man knew what was coming, so he cut right to the chase. "I guess you've called me in for my resignation. Here it is. I resign." Watson replied, "You must be joking. I just invested ten million dollars educating you. I can't afford your resignation."
Is there any prevailing evidence that the Twelve could have looked back on the last week of Jesus' life and felt encouraged by their performance? They had fallen asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when they should have been praying; they had run for cover when Jesus was arrested and crucified; one of them had shouted out loud that he had never even met Jesus; and when they first heard that the tomb just might be empty, quite frankly they didn't believe it.
Therefore when Jesus stood before them, incredibly real and alive, they knew what was coming. "You've come for our resignations," they were thinking. "Well, here they are. We resign." How might Jesus have answered? "You've got be kidding. I can't afford your resignations. I just invested an incarnation, an atonement, and a resurrection in you. Right now you're all I've got."
A God of limitless power can never be limited by our weaknesses. We can never finally say, with theological accuracy, that we're all that God has. The amazing thing, therefore, is that God chooses such self-limitation. God is eternally pleased to work through jars of clay. What Good News -- what gracious Good News -- that is for every one of us.
