The Strength of Weakness
I think it’s safe to say that what the judgment of God and the fear of Hell were to people just a few hundred years ago, the judgment of society and the fear of failure are to people in our own time. The experience of somehow being found out as “weak,” of somehow “failing,” so obviously and so publicly, that a person is banished from association with those who hold the status of being “successful” in the community, is a terrifying prospect.
Some years ago I endured that kind of private Hell. I found myself to be truly weak, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When tragedy came I didn’t deal with it all that well for a while. I blamed myself for some secret, indescribable fault in my character that seemed to have let bad things happen to me. It took a while for me to realize that I had actually joined the human race, and was experiencing the kind of tragedy that most people experience at some time in their lives.
Some of you in this congregation watched the beginning of that experience unfold. I came down with what seemed at first sight like a typical case of the flu. But something in that flu virus caused neurological problems. My vocal chords were paralyzed, and for nearly two years I was virtually without a voice, except for a whisper, or a very high-pitched utterance. This voice disability resulted in my having to resign my one and only experience as a pastor, here at Critz.
Today is a special day for me. Not only is it the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of this congregation. It is also a very personal anniversary, of which most of you probably are not aware: it is the twentieth anniversary of my last Sunday as Pastor of the Critz Baptist Church.
During the course of my experiences, eventually I came to realize that actually, I had been somewhat fortunate, because others who had experienced that same flu virus were left totally paralyzed. A cousin of mine also had the same strain of the flu about the same time and lost all hearing in one ear. However, I didn’t consider myself lucky at the time. I got depressed, and I blamed myself, although I did not know what for. But God in His grace rescued me out of my despair and led me to see that what I had perceived as weakness actually could become in many ways an asset and a strength.
I now claim kinship with the Apostle Paul, who throughout his life had to deal with what he called a “thorn in the flesh.” Hear how he describes his experience in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10:
I was given a painful wound, a thorn in my flesh, which came as Satan’s messenger to bruise me; this was to save me from being unduly elated. Three times I begged the Lord to rid me of it, but His answer was: “My grace is all you need; My power comes to its full strength in weakness.” I shall therefore prefer to find my joy and pride in the very things that are my weakness; because then the power of Christ will come and rest upon me. Hence I am well content with a life of weakness, contempt, persecution, hardship, and frustration; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul in this chapter was asserting that the weaknesses, disabilities, and problems that we all encounter may actually become sources of strength to us, and can often work for us instead of against us, if we approach them rightly. And while it is certain that this kind of reasoning is completely foreign to what the modern world’s values say to us, we must remember that it has never been unusual for spiritual truths to contradict the world’s values.
I think there are at least two senses in which we may find that Paul’s approach to weakness is true:
First, our weaknesses can become sources of strength to us if we allow them to help us to get in touch, and to stay in touch, with reality, to come to terms with our human limitations. A fever is usually the signal that something is wrong in the body, that the body needs to rally its energies to a challenge. In the same way, a problem or a failure in life may call us to face something about ourselves that otherwise we might ignore; and thus it can become a form of strength for dealing with reality.
In my own case, when I lost my voice, I thought for a time that I had lost everything important. If you are a person whose whole sense of self-worth depends on the things you do, and if you do most of those things with a voice, for example—preaching, teaching, singing, leadership in public meetings, even personal counseling—and then that function dies away, what is left? Are you then worth-less? When you feel you have a lot of important truths to utter, but you can’t express them, or even get the attention of a potential audience, how do you cope? I wish I could give you a glowing report about how my steadfast and unwavering faith overcame all odds and led to a miraculous cure. But the somewhat high-pitched tone that you now hear is what you get, and you and I will have to make the best of it.
But there were some realities I encountered from that time in the darkness. I learned that God loves me, whether I win, lose, or draw in His world. I learned that God’s grace is indeed sufficient to sustain me, just as Paul asserted, and that my sense of self-worth must come, not from the things I can do, but simply from the fact that God loves me.
And I came to learn that it is far more important to be loved than it is to live without pain. I learned what a wonderful thing the love and the support of family can be for a person who is suffering. I learned that if I do have something worthwhile to say, patient friends will listen, no matter what quality of voice expresses the message. And I learned to accept my limitations and to be grateful for a God Who is so powerful that He doesn’t have to perform a miraculous cure on me to make me useful to Him and to others.[1]
I have come to understand that all of life is a gift—not just the mountain-top experiences when I “mount up with wings like eagles,” and not just the times when I am active in His work, and “run without being weary.” I have learned that sometimes the greatest gift of all is the ability to “walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31). One great reality I have come to see is that God does not spend a whole lot of His time saving people from suffering. More often God saves people in the midst of suffering, and even sometimes by means of suffering.
A second way our weaknesses can be a source of strength is in our attempts to be of help to other people. One thing that has amazed me in the course of learning to minister has been the discovery of just how complicated a process “helping” people really is. Have you ever tried to help somebody and found yourself rejected, and even counterproductive? I have. And when I look back at such occasions, it is now clear to me that certain unconscious assumptions at such times got in my way.
I had always assumed that a person was supposed to help other people out of a position of strength, that one must provide an example of strength. It seemed necessary show to people I wanted to help that I myself had studied the problem, and that I knew more than the other person, or that I had exhibited the strength of character to resist the temptations to which others had succumbed.
I think the beginning of my change in attitude came when, as a young minister right here in Patrick County, Virginia, our local ministers’ association requested Alcoholics Anonymous to locate a regular meeting at the Patrick Springs fire station. As I became acquainted with those wonderful men and women in AA, I observed the beautiful fellowship that they experienced as they helped each other as fellow strugglers to live with, and to control, the terrible sickness of alcoholism.
They reminded me of the best definition of the term “evangelism” I ever heard. “Evangelism” is simply one hungry beggar telling another hungry beggar where he has just located some bread. And I am becoming more and more convinced that the only strength we have in helping others is our willingness to acknowledge our own weaknesses and failures openly—that we are imperfect human beings, too, and fellow strugglers on this planet.
The most beautiful illustration of this that I have ever encountered occurs in a one-act play written in the late 1920’s by Thornton Wilder, The Angel That Troubled the Waters. Wilder imagines an incident at the Pool of Bethzatha, at which, as described in the Gospel According to John, chapter 5, Jesus healed a crippled man. According to the popular belief of that time, an angel would periodically stir the waters, and the first person to bathe there after the stirring would be healed of all infirmities. Wilder relates, “. . . a newcomer, a physician, has come to the pool after many years of bearing a crushing burden of sin.” He is standing beside the pool just as the angel’s hand is poised above the waters.
The physician pleads:
“My work grows faint. Heal me, long-expected Love; heal me that I may continue. It is no shame to boast to an Angel of what I might still do in Love’s service were I freed from this bondage.”
But the angel says:
“Draw back, physician. This moment is not for you. Without your wound, where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of mortals. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers serve. Draw back.”
As the disappointed physician turns away, another man tumbles into the healing waters and comes out shouting,
“Look, my hand is new as a child’s. Glory be to God!”
But this man is a distracted father. He approaches the physician to say,
“May you be next, my brother, but come with me first, an hour only, to my home. My son is lost in dark thoughts. I—I do not understand him, and only you have ever lifted his mood. Only an hour . . . My daughter since her child died sits in the shadow. She will not listen to us . . .”
The modern world may not understand this approach to helping. But it worked for Jesus, as it worked for Paul. Our Christian concept of “incarnation” has never meant that a human being became God. It has meant, rather, that God at one point in human history entered into the life and experience of a human being as a “fellow-struggler” to experience the worst that human experience could throw His way. Because of that we know that God understands us, and that God is not far away, “up there” unconcerned, but that “God is with us” and that God cares about us.
Likewise this approach to helping worked for Paul. And like Jesus and Paul, we too, sometimes find ourselves “broken on the wheels of living.” We, who gather in the Name of Christ, gather as an army of “wounded soldiers,” in the midst of a world that despises weakness and that condemns failure, remembering that, “in Love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.”[2]
The greatest strength that we Christians have to help others is the acknowledgment of our own weaknesses, and of our utter dependence upon the grace of God. And that is enough. God’s grace is always enough.
The church historian H. B. Workman once called attention to the fact that, in the first four centuries after the death of Jesus, the Christian Church endured ten great persecutions, from the reign of the Emperor Nero to that of the Emperor Diocletian. Workman reminded his readers, “In that great struggle, only one side was armed. And that was the side that lost!” When the Roman Empire finally fell in the fifth century, that “weak” Christian Church was still alive and well. And if Nero himself could return today and look for the Vatican gardens in Rome where he burned Christians, he would find in their place an enormous Church, named for Peter, who was probably one of his victims!
And so it has been for me since tragedy struck. God’s grace has done what human strength and ingenuity were powerless to do. And thus if someone were to ask me, “Mike, do you believe in resurrection?” My answer would have to be, “Believe it? Friend, I have experienced it!”
Further Reflections, March 2000
If I were delivering this sermon today, I would find some way to add some of the thoughts in the following paragraphs:
All of our understanding at any time is only partial. I probably was aware of some of these ideas over the last thirty years. But as I have moved more deeply into the field of career and employment counseling, the ideas began to crystallize, so that I would add some of these ideas to the original sermon on the next occasion I have to deliver it.
I have come to realize that there is no person who is not “disabled” in some way. All of us have things we cannot do. But when we go out to seek jobs, or to help other people, or to engage in any our life’s activities, most of us tend to focus on our abilities, rather than on our “dis-abilities.”
For example, I am terrible in math. That is a “disability.” I am “mathematically challenged.” So I don’t gravitate toward jobs or other activities requiring the use of a lot of math. I’m not especially physically fit, especially as I have gotten older. That is a “disability.” So I don’t gravitate toward jobs or activities requiring strenuous activities. Instead, I focus on my abilities—to share compassion, to analyze things and situations, to grasp and communicate ideas in writing, and to express them verbally, within my physical limits. So I seek avenues of work and service in those areas.
I will never be a singer again, or an orator, but I still cherish opportunities to speak in public (with a PA system, when possible). And I have learned to sprinkle some humor in with what I say, to distract people from my high-pitched monotone. We are all disabled, to some extent. The problem of all of us is that of finding a niche where we can function effectively with our abilities, while downplaying the limitations, even when we ourselves are so continually and even painfully aware of them.
Prior to writing this sermon I was aware that Henri Nouwen some years ago had written a wonderful book about helping other people, The Wounded Healer. But I had never taken the time to read it until recently. He takes his title from a couple of passages in the Jewish Talmud that suggest that the Messiah will be a “wounded healer”:
Our teachers have said: “His name shall be the Leprous One of the house of Rabbi” [i.e., Rabbi Judah the Patriarch; perhaps in reference to Rabbi Judah’s sufferings over thirteen years], as it says, “Surely he bore our sicknesses, and carried our pains: yet we esteemed him as one stricken with leprosy, and smitten of God” (Isaiah 53:4). (Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin. 98b).
A more familiar passage in the same tractate runs thus:
Joshua ben Levi met Elijah at the mouth of the cave of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai. He said to Elijah, “Shall I enter the life to come?” Elijah replied, “If it so please the Master [i.e., God].” Then he asked him, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replied, “Go, and ask him.” “But where is he?” “At the gate of Rome.” “And what is his mark?” [i.e., “How shall I recognize him?”] “He sits among the wretched, who are laden with sicknesses [sores and wounds are meant, and it is implied that he, too, has sores and wounds]; all the others uncover all their wounds, and then bind them all up again, but he uncovers and binds up each one separately, for he thinks, “Lest I should be summoned and be detained.’’ (Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin 98a).[3]
And maybe that is something we all have to do from time to time—to unwrap our bandages, to look at our wounds, and to bind them up again, and in the process, to be wounded healers, following the example of our Lord. That is part of the reason for this sermon.
Based on writings of the Rev. Dr. John Claypool, along with my own personal experiences.
[1] See Further Reflections, March 2000, below.
[2] See Further Reflections, March 2000, below.
[3] Both of these passages are quoted from C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology, Selected and arranged with comments and introductions, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938.
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