God Must Laugh

Text: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Author’s Note: No audio or video for this one, as I was a guest preacher.

It’s an honor and a joy to fill the pulpit of 2nd Congregational Church again.  Thank you for inviting us to be a part of your 150th anniversary celebrations.  It does my heart good to see so many familiar faces, signs of stability and strength.  But even more, I’m excited by the many faces I don’t know, signs of growth and vitality in a church that is no longer our home but is never far from our hearts.

Almost a decade ago, I graduated from Minnesota Bible College.  I had a major in Biblical Studies and Theology, another major in Pastoral Leadership, and a minor in Biblical and Classical languages.  So, I did the obvious thing and got a job as a carpenter.

I wasn’t just any carpenter, mind you. I was the world’s worst carpenter.  I showed up on that first day with a measuring tape that didn’t measure right, the wrong kind of hammer, no pencil, no speed square, and a hand-me-down tool belt that was so old that we couldn’t decide if it was made out of leather or mastodon hide.

My boss paired me up with an experienced carpenter who started showing me the tricks of the trade.  I learned to mark distances with an arrowhead instead of a line, to cut on the outside of the line so that the board isn’t short the width of a saw blade, and most importantly I learned to measure twice, cut once.

At the end of two weeks, I was really getting the hang of things, when I noticed something.  A lot of my friends were wearing carpenter cut jeans.  You know the kind, with the extra pockets on the side and the little loop of denim.  I go into work the next day and I start joking around with my trainer.  “Hey, you see all those stupid kids running around with carpenter pants?  What’s with that? Do they expect that tiny little loop to actually hold a hammer?  Ha ha ha, stupid kids.”  And my trainer smiled and kind of chuckled, and said, “Yeah that sure is funny.”

It wasn’t until about three months later, when I quit carpentry to serve under Dick Adair, (who incidentally, was very impressed that I was a carpenter.   I conveniently forgot to mention how awful I was.)  Anyway, it wasn’t until three months later that I realized that my trainer wasn’t laughing with me.  He was laughing at me.  The joke wasn’t those kids out there who got hooked on a fashion trend.  The joke was me standing there with my framer’s hammer, my speed square, and my brand new measuring tape hanging off my leather work belt, thinking I was a carpenter.

I was talking to a man who, if you gave him supplies and a slab of concrete could build an entire house, floor to rafters.  And when he was done it would stand square, plumb, and level.  You know how many people can do that?  I Googled it.  0.3% of the American populace, that’s three out of a thousand.

He was an expert and I was sophomore.  In Greek, it means wise fool, as in someone who knows just enough to be arrogant, and not enough to be useful.  Look back over your own experience, and you tell me if it’s true.  The ones who know the most are the ones who realize how much they don’t know.  Humility is the hallmark of greatness.

Now don’t misunderstand that word.  People hear humility and they think humiliation.  They hear humble and they think doormat.  That’s not it.  Jesus was humble, but he was no doormat.  No one stole anything from him.  He gave it away.  No one forced him into a corner. He chose his path.  He knew who he was and what he was here to do, and it really didn’t matter what anyone else thought.  That’s humility.

When you understand humility, then the twin problems of self-hatred and arrogance become clear.  They’re just two sides of the same coin, failing to recognize yourself for who you are.  This explains why someone who constantly puts themselves down is just as annoying as someone who constantly brags.  It also explains how we can be arrogant and hate ourselves at the same time.  We don’t know ourselves.

We don’t know who we are and so we are constantly being swayed.  Someone says good job, and I feel like the king of the world.  Someone gets critical and I feel like a fool.  And it’s not just external.  My subconscious feeds me memories. My body feels strong or weak.  My emotions are running high or low and I’m flapping back and forth like a flag in the wind, the object of every passing breeze.

This is where the Bible becomes so practical.  This isn’t a modern-day problem.  This is a human problem.  We don’t know who we are.  We were made in the image of God, but we’ve lost the likeness.  The ancients used to say that we’re like a painting that has been smudged and faded over time so you can’t recognize the face anymore.  You just see a figure on the canvas, with no definition.

But then Christ comes along and wipes the filth away and the likeness underneath begins to shine through, and we feel joy.  We lose the burden of our shame and feel the lightness of new life.  It’s as if we are caught up into the third heaven, and God is speaking words so true that we dare not repeat them aloud.

We call it a mountaintop experience.  But you know what comes next right?  You have to come back down into the real world, and it’s so easy to get cocky.  As if this mountaintop experience were all about you, as if the whole world would be a better place if they would just get with the program like you did.

It’s just as easy to get depressed when you have to go back to the daily grind and you can’t feel God’s hand anymore.  That closeness and sweetness is just a memory and you begin to wonder if it was ever real at all.  Or you slip back into a habit you thought was in the past, and you feel like your hope is gone, like you’ll never be free.  Either way, the root is the same. You’ve forgotten who you are.

So does God take you back up to the mountaintop?  Does he pat you on the head and say, “There, there, it’ll be ok.”  Nope.  The old bluesman Albert King had it right, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Everybody wants to laugh, but nobody wants to cry. Everybody wants to hear the truth, but still they all wanna tell a lie. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”  God doesn’t send comfort.  He sends a thorn.

Paul says, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Here’s the strange part.  No one knows what Paul’s thorn really was.  Did he have a stitch in his side, like what you get from running too much?  Was his eyesight failing?  Did he walk with a limp?  No one knows, and at least one theologian believes that it might not be physical at all.  Maybe the thorn in Paul’s flesh was another person.  Maybe we’re not meant to know, so that we can put our own problems into the story.  What wonderful theologian would come possibly come up with such an interesting and helpful idea?  Her name starts with C and it rhymes with Arol Taylor.

When Paul uses the word flesh, he means that part of us that fights against God’s renewing work in our lives.  The flesh doesn’t want new life, because that means giving up the old.  The flesh doesn’t want freedom because freedom means responsibility, and responsibility is hard.  The flesh much prefers slavery to selfishness and addiction because then you can do whatever you want to do and it’s still not your fault!

Once upon a time, a young Cherokee asked an elder, “What must I do to become a wise? And the elder replied, “There are two wolves fighting within you.  One fights for evil, the other for good.  Every day one of them wins.”  The child asked, “Which one wins?”  And the elder responded, “Whichever one you feed.”

The only problem with that story is what happens on the first day that the good dog wins?  Suppose you’re stuck in an old habit you hate, and through a combination of good luck and hard work, you manage to go an entire day without doing it, or maybe even a week.  What happens next?  You start to forget that the only reason you beat this thing was good luck and hard work, which is really just another way of saying God working around and within you.

So God hands you one tiny little victory.  One day. One week.  And what happens?  Suddenly, you’re Alexander the Great. Ready to take on the world.  Suddenly you’re giving people advice and looking down on people who aren’t quite as together as you.  And in that instant, in that very moment of our success, we fail.  We might fail low and fall back into old habits, or we might fail high and become religious.  Doesn’t matter.  We’re not growing closer to God, we’re slowly killing ourselves, and we’re making everyone else around us miserable. We’re right back where we started.

Now do you understand why that thorn is so important?  That thorn is your best friend, because it reminds you of who you are.  You are a child of the king, chosen, forgiven, and loved by God.  You have a hope and a future.  God created you, God redeemed you, and God is perfecting you, every day in every way.  There is enough pride in that to lift the head of the lowest peasant, and enough shame in it to bow the head of the highest king.

So do not boast in yourself.  Boast only in your weakness, and let your actions speak for themselves.  Then your friends and coworkers will come to know you and trust you for who you are, not who your words convince them to expect.  When they indulge in arrogance or self-hatred, your simple self-awareness will shine all the more brightly by comparison, and people will seek you out to find out more.  When they do, your thorn, that thing you begged God with tears three times to remove, your thorn will give you words to speak, words they will tremble to repeat, words that lift them up to heaven.

Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven… by Rev. R.J. Brink is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.