March 10, 2013 | 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. | Fourth Sunday in Lent

Prayers out of Our Weakness

The Fourth in a Series of Sermons on the Apostle Paul

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

2 Corinthians 12:1–12

Today’s scripture lesson is a continuation in our 4:00 series on Paul and highlights a topic Paul discusses frequently: his weakness. This is not about sin or moral failure as you might expect; it’s mostly about physical illness. As often as we acknowledge physical illness in our prayer requests each Sunday, I think it’s important for us to take this passage where Paul talks about physical illness and ask what it means for us and for our prayer requests.

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Will Willimon, a Methodist minister and professor at Duke, wrote an article a few years ago that generated a lot of talk, at least among ministers. It started out as a story about a chainsaw he got for Christmas and the subsequent accident he had with said chainsaw, which tore his arm apart and landed him in the emergency room, followed by months of physical therapy and plenty of pain.

The part of the story that got people’s attention was what the experience led Willimon to say about prayer. He recalled people who said they were praying for his recovery, and he also remembered his own words, to God, wondering why this calamity had been visited upon him, a bishop, of all people. He resisted desperate bargaining in the ER: “God if only you’ll take this pain away, I promise I’ll . . .” Willimon was ashamed of this kind of praying because he thought of himself as pretty theologically sophisticated and didn’t wish to lapse into a place of negotiating with God about his petty needs. He remembered his conviction that God is much more concerned about world hunger and gun violence and chemical warfare than a careless accident with a power tool. I tend to agree with that stance, but the fact is, in the midst of pain, most of us are prone to bargain with God for health when we are sick. We do it for ourselves and for other people as well.

Every week at the 4:00 worship service, we pray for people who are sick or hospitalized or have been in an accident. It seems worthwhile to ask what it is that we’re doing or what we expect out of those prayers. Let me tell you what I mean:

On one hand, I believe that God is deeply concerned about physical ailments, wants people to be healed, and that prayer does work. Jesus heals people all the time. The book of James in the New Testament explicitly states that if people in your church are sick, you should pray for them (James 5:13–16). In our own modern day and age, scientific studies administered by people with no interest in faith frequently conclude that, overall, sick people who are prayed for tend to do better.

On the other hand, while Jesus heals some people, there are countless others who remain sick. And in the same way, both in the past and in the present, faithful people pray for loved ones who don’t get better. So again I ask, what are we doing when we lift up these prayers?

One answer might be found in the passage of scripture we read today from 2 Corinthians 12. This is another passage from Paul’s letters that, like the one we read last week, requires some context and explanation. Otherwise it makes little sense to us. It begins with this business about someone Paul knows “being caught up in a third heaven”—having some sort of special vision or revelation of God and then moves on to Paul’s acknowledgment that he’s had those kinds of special experiences himself. But then Paul shifts gears: he says he doesn’t brag about these experiences. Instead, he talks about what he calls his “weakness”—a subject he brings up on a number of occasions.

Krister Stendahl, a well-known Paul scholar who studied this subject extensively, noted that Paul tends to talk about his weaknesses as limitations that keep him from being able to do things. He talks about not being able to travel. He talks about his weakness being a liability because people think that his ministry might not be blessed by God. He talks about it in enough detail that Stendahl ultimately came to think that when Paul talks about his weakness, he’s talking about some kind of chronic illness. Some who go along with this school of thought believe Paul might even have had epilepsy (Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, p. 42).

Paul references weakness many times in the Bible, and it is in these passages that we get the most personal look at the man Paul: we see something he has in common with us, because we all get sick, and not all of us get well.

Willimon’s article talked about this. He stated it this way:

We are captive to a lie: I got sick, I went to the doctor, the doctor fixed me, and now I’m well. It’s a nice story, one in which we confidently invest billions, but it isn’t true. Most of those who get sick in my church go to the doctor, are subjected to this and that treatment (which may at best be somewhat analgesic), and then are sent home, sometimes for a lifetime of discomfort and decreased mobility. Health is always temporary. Some get better, some get worse; none is fixed. The Creator has decreed that no one gets out of this alive.

It’s true. No matter how talented the doctor is, no matter how thorough our recovery may be, even if we get better, there is always the reality that another accident or another illness is somewhere out on the horizon, and that at some point, every one of us will die.

Paul thinks about his weakness differently than many of us are willing or able to do, in several ways: First of all, it’s important to note that Paul never seems to feel guilty about this weakness. This weakness is very different from suggestions the Bible makes about sinfulness or wrongdoing of any kind. Paul is simply weak in his body, and acknowledging that every one of us will one day lose the strength of our bodies, he is not embarrassed by it. It’s also important to note, however, that Paul doesn’t choose weakness. He doesn’t go looking for discomfort or insinuate that anyone should want it. It is what it is. So, not guilty or regretful, Paul sees his weakness—his illness—as an opportunity. Weakness is an opportunity to be reminded that, even in the midst of his special experiences of God’s presence, he is still a fragile human being. For Paul, that is a very important reminder. Out of his weakness—his illness—he finds something valuable. What is it?

A very thoughtful friend of mine recently went through a very frightening hospitalization. He became quite weak, and at one point, he and many of those who were around him thought he might pass away. Instead, he recovered, and about a week later, I was sitting with him in his hospital room as he contemplated what he would do when he was released. It probably won’t surprise many of you to know that he was reconsidering his priorities. He was thinking about how he could reorganize his schedule, how he could spend more time with his wife and his children. He was thinking about how he could focus his time at work to be less concerned with trivial matters and more dedicated to the things he thought really made a difference in the lives of others. His brush with death, his experience of his own weakness, helped to remind him of what was really important.

On some level, don’t we all experience this? When we are well, we don’t spend much time being thankful for our good health, glad for the things we are able to do and the capabilities we have even on the most average of days. Instead, we worry about trivial matters; we sweat the small stuff; we mistreat others. But as soon as we get sick, the longing to just be healthy again quickly reminds us that many of the things we worry about really aren’t as important as we usually think.

So it was with Paul, in a sense. His ever-present weakness reminds him of the greatest priority in his life. He is reminded by his fragility that he needs God, and so he speaks about his weakness often so that others might see that they too need God.

Taking all of this together, it seems like there’s something of great value in praying for the things that are wrong with our bodies, even if the outcome of the particular prayer isn’t good. When we prayerfully remember the ways in which we human beings are weak, we have an opportunity to remember what is really important. In the best-case scenario, praying for ourselves or for someone else who is sick reminds us to be thankful for that person when they are well. And it might even remind us to take better advantage of the times when we are well, to spend less time on trivial and meaningless wastes of our days and more time on those bigger issues: hunger and violence and acts of war. When we remember what is important, we pass on to others the opportunity to know and appreciate the good things in their own lives.

This was certainly Willimon’s discovery. Out of his time of illness, he found himself thankful for the health workers who cared for him rather than just being demanding of them. He found himself more thankful for the family and friends who cared for him. He found himself aware of the cost of health care and aware of the fact that, without health insurance, he would be in much greater trouble.

Willimon told one more story that indicates our weakness, though in a different way. He talked about a teenager who greeted him after he gave his first sermon after the injury. Willing to ask the question most adults would have found impolite, the kid asked, “What did you do to your arm—carpel tunnel?” “No,” replied Willimon, “chainsaw injury.” “Bummer, man,” said the kid, “you’re just like me.” “How do you mean?” asked Willimon. The kid told him about a skateboard injury, cracking an elbow, not being able to skate for months. He said he’d prayed to Jesus in the midst of the pain, “Get me out of this and I’ll never skate again.” Willimon asked if he kept the promise, and the kid said, “Naw, all I learned was next time to be more careful about making any promises to Jesus.” And Willimon replied, “Yep, I learned a lot too.”

We don’t always recover; we will inevitably find ourselves fragile; we sometimes have to wonder if our prayers work. But our weakness gives us an opportunity to think carefully about the blessings in our lives, to carefully consider our priorities, to appreciate the struggles of others who are weak, and to do the best we can with whatever health we have for however long we have it. May that be a reminder to each of us, fragile, weak creatures that we are: to do the best that we can today in this blessed life God has granted us. Amen.