Unspeakable Journeys

I can’t really describe to you what I felt yesterday at the Franktown picnic. Every year on the 4^th of July the residents of downtown Franktown gather for a picnic and this year we were at the Sniders’ house just down the way here. There were hot dogs and potato salad and somebody slipped some vegetables in there. Great food.

Then there was this moment. I was sitting there talking to Harry Crandall, who was all decked out in red, white and blue. A few minutes before he had offered up this wonderful prayer where he gave thanks to God for this company, this food and this free land. Just hearing him say that made me tear up a bit, despite myself. We were there talking and I noticed over his shoulder that the kids had started playing croquet under the shade of those huge oak trees in front of the Sniders. And behind them I could see an American flag hanging on the telephone pole on the street blowing in the breeze. Beyond that was a cornfield in Philip Bernard’s lot with the stalks tasseling and looking a vibrant green.

I try not to be too sentimental but, you know, it was beyond words what I felt there. America, with all of its ideals, really existed right there for a minute. Norman Rockwell should have been there to paint it.

When you get beyond words you are heading for something that feels like truth. Think of the times when you’ve been left speechless. The birth of a child. In the presence of your first love. Watching a thunderstorm move across the bay. Seeing the peak of a great, tall mountain. At such moments you know that you are in the presence of something profound.

“I know a man,” the apostle Paul says. “I know a man in Christ, who, fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was actually in his body or not, I can’t say. Only God knows.”

This is how Paul introduces the passage from 2 Corinthians today. I’m pretty sure the man he’s talking about is himself. But he’s describing an experience for him that was so unusual and dramatically different from his normal life that he might as well be talking about someone altogether different.

To be caught up to the third heaven is a way of saying that Paul was taken up into the very presence of God. The ancient Hebrews envisioned the earth in such a way that there were three levels above us. Because God had separated the firmaments to create space for the land and for life, above us was sky – the first heavens, and above that the waters of the second heaven, and above that the realm of God’s fullness – a third heaven.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not how it really is! They taught me differently in astronomy class. There’s atmosphere and stratosphere and deep space beyond.” But Paul was talking with the structures he knew and if you ask me there is something beautiful in the image of a world between waters surrounded by the presence of God. It reminds me of the space that is created within the body of an expectant mother for life to grow. A space between waters surrounded by nurture and strength.

The third heaven, then, is the language Paul has for this place beyond. The other name he has for this is Paradise – a place where the harmony God intends for all creation is made real. A place like the place we humans knew when we were fresh-made from the mud of the garden of Eden. A place like Jesus promised the repentant thief when they were both being crucified. “Today,” Jesus said, “you will be in Paradise with me.” Paradise is the place where see Jesus and know Jesus and feel the presence of God.

“In this place,” Paul says, “this man heard inexpressible words which a person cannot speak.” Something beyond language. It’s not that Paul can’t speak the words because he has been forbidden to speak them or because they are too hard for him to say. Paul can’t speak about this journey to the third heaven because what he has heard and seen breaks every category of thought and language that he has known.

There’s a word for this experience – it’s rapture. Not like the rapture that they talk about in books like Left Behind, but the root of the word is the same. It means to be caught up and when we are caught up in a direct experience of God it is something that blows our minds and alters our reality. You can’t live in a state of rapture. Because of our finiteness and our limitations as humans we will always fall back into the world of language and reason. But once we are granted a glimpse of a God-filled world, it’s hard to forget that we are surrounded by glory.

The early church leader Augustine of Hippo, whom I’m prone to quoting, has an account of an experience of rapture in his most famous book Confessions. As he was headed to the coast near Rome, returning to Africa with his ailing mother, they stopped at the town of Ostia on the Tiber River. His mother was near death and yet she was very happy because her son, Augustine, had finally become a Christian after a long time of debauchery and exploration.

They were wondering what life among the saints was going to be like and they suddenly had an experience that gave them a glimpse of heaven. “We proceeded step by step through all material things, even the heavens, from which sun, moon, and stars brighten the earth.” On and on they go beyond speech and thought to eternity. “And while we speak of this,” Augustine says, “and yearn toward it, we barely touch it in a quick shudder of the heart. Then we sighed our way back down…into the sounds of our own words which proceed in time from their beginnings to their ends.”[i]

Then Augustine begins to reflect on what they had experienced and he wonders if they had touched something “in a quick shudder of the heart” that was so great and so magnificent that nothing in this life could match it. If you had that experience of rapture would you ever want to come back?

Augustine asks: If all the things of this world which speak to us “were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well all dreams and internal visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, “We did not make ourselves, he made us who never passes away;” if, after saying this, they too were silent, leaving us alert to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by himself, for us to hear his word…if this were to continue, all lesser visions falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip…and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words, ‘Enter the joy of your God’?—a joy that will be ours, when?—only when ‘all rise (though not all are changed).’”[ii]

What a wonderful thing that would be…to be able to see through the brokenness of this world to hear God’s voice directly! It’s no wonder that Augustine saw that moment as a great gift to him and his mother. It’s no wonder that fourteen years on that same sort of experience was so fresh to Paul that he struggled with remaining in the flesh. He wanted to dwell in that place beyond words.

Instead, Paul got the Corinthians--this quarrelsome, disobedient, conflicted group of Christians who were constantly questioning his credentials as an apostle. This group that were getting on his last nerve. And how could he use this mystical experience in the third heaven to convince them of his connection to God? He couldn’t. He wanted to boast on behalf of that Paul who went to Paradise, but instead he had to be the Paul who put up with the problem children of Corinth.

To top it off, he was also given a wound. “So that I would not get too high and mighty, an angel of Satan gave me a thorn in the flesh,” Paul says. What was it? We don’t know. Bible scholars have speculated for centuries. The early Church leader Tertullian thought it might be a pain in the ear or head. Others have said that maybe it was lust or stammering speech. Maybe an eye problem brought on by his blinding on the Damascus road. Maybe it was the people who opposed and persecuted him. I even found a scientific abstract that suggested it was a “visual migraine aura with the additional symptoms of…photophobia and anorexia.”[iii]

I’ll add to the speculation. I think the thorn in Paul’s flesh was his flesh. Paul talks about the flesh in a negative way in many of his letters and he talks in 2 Corinthians about the struggle he feels in remaining in the flesh. His rapturous experience left him longing to be with God and he began to despise the weaknesses and infirmities he felt in having to remain embodied.

He tells us that he asked God three times to take away this wound but God responded by saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is brought to its proper end in weakness.” And it seems to me that the whole passage turns on this phrase. God does not want Paul or any of us to despise our weakness, to think that we’d be better off somehow, that we’d be better servants somehow if we got rid of our weaknesses. It is in our weaknesses, in our bodies, in our difficulties and struggles and our stammering attempts to put God’s love into word and deed that the power of Christ can take up a home in us. And when we claim those things about ourselves we begin to realize that the love of Christ is meant to be incarnate, just like Jesus himself. The love of God does not despise the flesh. The love and power of God are shown through the flesh. This is the lesson Paul has learned through his suffering and maybe even through the things he is not able to do.

The theologian John Swinton tells the story of a course he was teaching through the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for people with disabilities. As part of the course, class members were sharing stories of their spiritual experiences. A young woman named Angela, who was deaf, was sharing a dream she had about meeting Jesus in heaven. “Jesus was everything I hoped he would be,” she said. “And his signing was amazing!” There was no expectation that heaven for her would mean losing her disability. In heaven it was the norm. Her ‘weakness’ was shared by Jesus himself.[iv]

So what’s the excuse you’re using? Where do you find yourself saying, “I would serve God better if it weren’t for…I would have more to offer the world if it weren’t for…I would be a good Christian if only this thing wasn’t plaguing me”? The truth is that the Jesus way is not meant to be an otherworldly thing for otherworldly people; it’s mean to be a this worldly thing for this worldly people – people who are messy and messed up and who have bad family histories and bad personal histories and who aren’t perfect and aren’t just right and haven’t got all the loose ends tied up and all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. But people who have had their lives turned upside down by Jesus and who want to offer their imperfect lives in service to their savior.

You think God can’t use imperfect people? Just look at David, the boy turned king who got intoxicated by his power. Just look at Esther the beauty queen who was goaded into action by her relative Mordecai to save the Jewish people. Just look at Peter, the passionate disciple who spoke before he thought and denied Jesus three times before becoming the leader of Jesus’ church. You don’t think God can use weakness? Just look at the cross and see if the savior who came to live among God’s people doesn’t look like every other dying criminal being executed on the hillside that day.

We’ve had people in our own congregation who have spoken powerfully to us through their lives and they did it through what some would call disabilities. Barbara Tankard in her struggles with cancer with her deep joy. Stephen before her. Christian and Cristina who did not let physical limitations like the lack of a limb keep them from being bright lights among us. And who would we be today as a Church without our Arc Angels?

We all have limitations and we imagine what it would be like if we could just be over them…if we could just shed them for some unspeakable journey to the heart of God. But the message from Paul today is that our weaknesses are part of that journey to God and we can discover the life God intends by leaning into them and offering them to God so that Christ can dwell within us richly. Thanks be to God.

2 Corinthians 2:2-10

I know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago - whether in the body of outside the body I know not, God knows - was raptured to the third heaven. I know that this man - whether in the body or outside the body I know not, God knows - was raptured into Paradise and he heard inexpressible words which a person cannot speak.

On behalf of such a man I will boast, yet not on my behalf except about my weakness. If I wanted to boast I would not be foolish because I speak the truth. But I refrain from this so that no one will think more of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional revelations. And, so that I would not rise too high, an angel of Satan gave me a thorn in my very embodiedness so that it would wound me and I would not rise too high.

Because of this, three times I called on the Lord that this should fall away from me. And he said to me, "My grace suffices for you, for my power is brought to its proper end in weakness."

Therefore, I boast gladly in my weakness so that the power of Christ can take up a home in me. So I am content in weakness, in insult, in distress, in persecution, in difficulties, on behalf of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

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[i] Augustine, Confesssions, 9.4.24, trans. by Garry Wills, [Penguin Books: New York, 2006], pp. 200-201.

[ii] Ibid., 9.4.25, p. 201.

[iii] “Headache Classification and the Bible: Was St. Paul’s thorn in flesh migraine?”, Wiley InterScience, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119248782/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.

[iv] John Swinton, introduction to the book by Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, [Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 2008], p. 13.