Good Words

Past Sermons Archive

Sermon 07/09/2006

Melt Me, Mold Me, Fill Me, Use Me Part I ~ by Reverand Thomas Cary Kinder
July 09, 2006, Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 123; II Corinthians 11:21b-30, 12: 1-10; Mark 6:1-13

One person doesn’t come to church because during Joys and Concerns the suffering of other people feels unbearably heavy.

Another person doesn’t come because the sermons remind him of social and environmental troubles in the world that make him feel tense, sad and bad that he is not doing enough to fix them. Another person does not feel refreshed and uplifted enough at church and so drops out.

And who can blame them? Life is hard enough. Why come to church if it is not going to help? Why come if it only drags you down? The oldest generation among us grew up going to church because it was the right thing to do, it was duty or obligation, but generations since the 1960s increasingly come to church only if it provides what they feel they need.

So what should we do as a church if some people feel it is too heavy? To start, we could sanitize Joys and Concerns, reduce it to a list of names of people to pray for without any exposure to their suffering. Many churches do that. We could get issues of peace and justice out of the pulpit, and keep sermons strictly of the feel-good variety—“Chicken Soup for the Soul” straight out of the can.

We could get rid of the gritty old hymns of struggle and conflict, drop the lugubrious, soulful spirituals, convert to rocking songs of praise, and make services pure pep-rallies for Christ, as many churches have done. Above all we could tear out of the Bible the bummer passages like today’s—the moaning and whining of Psalm 123, for instance: “Have mercy upon us, O God…for we have had more than enough of contempt. Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, and its fill of the contempt of the proud.” We should scorn that Psalm with contempt and throw it out if we want our church to join the proud ranks of those at ease.

We can also skip over the story of Jesus’ painful rejection in his home synagogue. Let’s not have any reminder that the church can turn a deaf ear to the truth of its flaws and harden its heart against prophetic voices calling it to repent. And certainly let’s not hear about the radical simplicity of the disciples, and the vulnerability, hardship and rejection they had to endure.

Last but not least, we should ban forever any reading of Paul. He says in today’s passage “I am talking like a madman,” and we should ignore him on those grounds.

Paul is declaring himself the enemy here. He is the enemy of what he calls the “super-apostles.” These were followers of Christ who traveled around the Mediterranean much as Paul did, but preached a different interpretation of the gospel. Apparently they were more appealing than Paul was—more articulate, more visibly successful, with classier credentials. They were stars. We don’t know for sure who they were or what they preached, but we can guess that theirs was a more uplifting, easy, proud kind of gospel. We can guess from how Paul argues against them that they would be on the side of a feel-good church. If that is what we want, then Paul is our enemy, too.

He is a madman and a fool by his own admission, boasting of harder labors than other ministers, far more imprisonments, countless floggings, often near death. Five times he has received the maximum amount of lashes the Jews could give. Three times he has been beaten by rods. That was a Roman punishment and given only extremely rarely to Roman citizens like Paul. You had to be a real threat to the social order, a revolutionary, to be a Roman and be beaten by rods. These are just the beginning of Paul’s insane boasting. He has received a stoning, been shipwrecked, been exposed to all kinds of dangers, suffered hunger, thirst, nakedness, sleeplessness.

On top of everything else he suffers from anxiety about and empathy with the church. “Who is weak and I am not weakened? Who is made to stumble and I am not indignant?” Paul is the one who told us to weep with those who weep. The suffering and struggles we share during Joys and Concerns are all his fault. We could dispense with them if we could dispense with him.

We have to get rid of Paul if we want a church that does not drive people away because of the heaviness of the suffering we share here. We have to get rid of Paul and Jesus if we want a church that does not remind us of social and political troubles and make us feel that we have to address them. We have to get rid of Paul, Jesus and the Psalms if we want a church that refreshes and uplifts us. But how could this be? Haven’t people always looked to the church for comfort and encouragement? Haven’t they found it even in the Psalms and gospels and epistles—those same books that are so full of sorrow and suffering and confrontation? Paul may be speaking like a madman, but as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Much Madness is divinest Sense—To a discerning Eye.”

Paul talks about a “thorn in the flesh” that he suffers. Nobody knows for sure what this was—an addiction, an illness, a defect of some kind? Whatever his thorn was, like any sane person, Paul didn’t want it and prayed that Christ would remove it from him. Then Christ replied with those amazing words, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.”

This moves Paul to say, “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

Is this the confusion of a madman, the cockeyed reasoning of a fool, or is there some divine sense here that requires us to look more closely at our experience in church?

Forty-five years ago this month hundreds of Freedom Riders challenged segregation in the south. Blacks and whites together rode on buses and used the whites-only waiting rooms in bus stations. Many of them were brutally beaten, buses were shot at and burned, and more than three hundred of the Riders were arrested and served prison time in Mississippi alone. The people attacking the Freedom Riders were found innocent or not found at all, but the non-violent protesters of the unjust segregation laws suffered a litany of dangers, punishments and afflictions similar to what Paul recited: imprisonment, beatings, wrecks, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for one another.

Two of those Freedom Riders were Helen and Robert Singleton, an African-American couple who were in their mid-twenties. They lived in California, but they had traveled enough in the south to have felt the humiliation and terror and cold inhumanity of segregation. They came to Jackson, Mississippi that July of 1961 and they sat in the white-only waiting room of the train station there. They were arrested and put in jail.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine showed two sets of photographs of Helen and Robert Singleton. The first set is a pair of mug-shots. They each have a sign on their chest hanging by a chain around their necks saying, “Police Dept., Jackson, Miss. July 30, 1961,” and their prison numbers. The other two photos are of Helen and Robert today. Helen is an artist and a retired arts administrator, age 73, and Robert is a professor of economics, age 70. They have beautiful faces now, but more striking are their expressions forty-five years ago. They had every right to be afraid—two thousand miles from home, in the hands of armed, white Mississippians—but they show no trace of fear. Robert looks guarded, but determined and confident. Helen has a slight smile. Both are looking dead on through the camera into the eyes of the white police officer behind it. They are black, they are beautiful, and there is something else about them. Compared to the violence of segregation the nonviolence of the Civil Rights Movement seemed weak indeed, but you can see in these young faces an inner strength flowing through their weakness—a strength that comes from a higher moral power.

Last week’s Times included a very brief quote at the bottom of the photographs. Speaking today, Robert says of their experience, “It was the defining moment of our lives and our marriage. We wear our arrest like a badge of honor.”

Paul boasted of his sufferings. They were like a badge of honor for him, too. He, too, found meaning in labors and afflictions for the cause. The conflict with Roman society nearly killed him—in fact, in the end it did kill him. The sufferings of others weighed him down. The lack of relief, uplift and refreshment from his thorn tormented him so that he begged three times that Christ would make things easier for him.

But like the Singleton’s, Paul found that the grace that came to him from Christ’s higher power was sufficient. He found that in his weakness, strength flowed into him and was perfected so that he could not only endure but overcome and thrive in the midst of his suffering. He found his suffering to be redemptive, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it. It redeemed his pain, it redeemed his soul and it helped to redeem the society he was trying to change.

If people came to church and see only the surface of suffering and sorrow and socio-political struggles, then it makes sense that they think there is not enough uplift and refreshment here. But if they have the divine madness to see beneath the surface, they will find that the sorrow, suffering and struggles here are the labors through which come the grace and strength of Christ. Those who have ears to hear and eyes to see can discern that it is precisely in the weakness and hardships we suffer for the sake of Christ-like love that we find the defining moments of our lives. That is where we experience most fully the presence of God and all God’s gifts.

An Eastern Orthodox priest and monk named Damascene has written a poem that expresses this. It says in part:

Many say that [Christ] wishes us to by happy.
They try to make Him what they want Him to be.
The truth is, He cares not for that happiness,
For that happiness is not real, but a dream.
It…is like clouds,
Clouds that change shape and vanish into air.
Who remembers yesterday’s clouds?



Beneath the clouds is the ground we call sorrow.
This sorrow is our earth, the dust of the ground,
The very substance of life.
Unlike the clouds, it is solid and firm.



Beneath the earth are hidden reservoirs of water,
And this water we call joy,
A joy deeper than the happiness of the clouds.
But this water may not come to the surface of its own accord.
Therefore one must labor to dig the ground of sorrow
In order to tap it.

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