Here is one of Paul’s most tender passages. Yet, there is in it a harshness to it. Paul is firm in his confrontation, and calls a spade a spade. Listen to him again in verse 16:
“Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?”
But despite that tough confrontation, Paul pulls back the curtain of his own inner soul, revealing his anguish and pain, his personal limitations, his feelings of failure, his overwhelming sense of appreciation. Can’t you just feel the deep emotion and tenderness in verse 14?
“And my trial which was in my flesh you did not despise or reject, but you received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.”
Short through this passage is Paul’s overarching commitment to those he considered his spiritual children. He is pulling out all the sops in the organ of his soul as he appeals for a response to himself as a person. For that reason, our sermon today, as we continue this preaching journey through Galatians, is centered in the theme, Making the Gospel Visible.
There are three lessons:
1. The power of the person and the personal
2. Limitations do not have to limit
3. We can be tough but tender
Look first at the power to the person and the personal.
The Gospel must be seen in the person who seeks to communicate it. “Brethren I urge you to become as I am” (v.12). What a bold plea. It could be seen as arrogance except that Paul had been willing to reveal his full humanity. His physical infirmity must have been serious. While we do not know what the affliction was, we know that it was chronic, very painful, humiliating and repulsive.
Paul rejoiced that the Galatians did not “despise” or “reject” him. The literal translation of those words may be “spit out.” The Galatians did not spit in Paul’s presences as people were accustomed to doing when they wanted to ward off an evil spirit. This kind of language indicates the extremity of Paul’s affliction and the fact that his malady must have been repulsive. What Paul actually says here is, “You did not scorn me and reject me, although my physical condition was trying to you.”
With those strikes against him in his person, Paul still appeals through himself: “Become as I am.” It is Paul’s ultimate appeal: “If you will not hear me through who I am and what I have been to you, and you to me, I have no other argument.” This is the gospel’s ultimate appeal.
My friend, Lloyd Ogilvie, once observed that only the things that have happened to us can happen through us. Let that sink into your mind, because that’s a cryptic commentary on the meaning of the visible Gospel. Only the things that have happened to us can happen through us.
Henry Nouwen shares an old legend out of the Talmud, which gives a graphic picture of this image. Rabbi Yoshua Ben Levi came upon Elijah, the prophet, and asked him, “When will the Messiah come?”
Elijah replied, “Go and ask him yourself.”
“Where is He? asked the Rabbi.
“Sitting at the Gates of the City.”
“But how shall I know him?”
“He is sitting around the poor, covered with his wounds, The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again, but He unbinds only one at a time and binds it up again, saying to Himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed. If so, I must always be ready, so as not to delay for a moment.”
I believe that story suggests the secret of ministry — but more than that, the secret of the Christian life — to attend to our woundedness, and be a healing presence for the wound ness of others. The one dynamic that facilitates that process more than anything else, for the preaching, I believe, is confessional preaching. And the one dynamic that facilitates it on the part of the laity is for you to be willing to open your life to others, to be transparent as a visible reminder of what the Gospel is all about.
The word of the Gospel is always a personal word. The issues of the Gospel — heaven and hell, peace and justice, good and evil, estrangement and reconciliation, sin and righteousness, though expansive in their dimensions, are personal in the response they demand and judgment implicit in them.
Personal must not be mistakenly interpreted as private. Jesus addressed some of his sharpest condemnation against those who saw spirituality as private or self-indulgent religious discipline rather than concern for the poor and suffering. “Woe to you for you carefully tithe mint and dill and cummin, but have neglected the weightier matters of the law - justice, mercy and faith” (Matt. 23:23). He was making it clear that central concern religion was not self-indulgent, private introspection, but loving service for others. Christianity brings peace, but it is often only Christ’s presence in our Gethsemane. Christianity brings strength, but more often than not it is the strength to bear our pain when our thorn in the flesh is not removed. Christianity comes on the Jericho road where we have been beaten down or when we identify with and lend our hearing ear and helping hand in love to a bleeding stranger.
The truth of the gospel is always personal, but not private.
So that’s the first lesson – the power of the person and the personal. Now the second.
II
As already indicated, we do not know what Paul’s affliction was, whether malaria, epilepsy, eye trouble, migraine or some other malady. Whatever it was, it was bad. Since in that day sickness was regarded as God’s punishment for sins, it would have been natural for the Galatians to treat Paul as if he were a devil, not an angel of God. It must have been that Paul handled his affliction in such a Christ-like manner that even his limitation became an asset. “You received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.” (v.14).
What we do with our limitations is not only a measure of our faith, but determines the effectiveness of our ministry and witness. Here it is in the life of a modern saint who refused to be limited by her limitation.
Lizzie Johnson made thousands of bookmarks, and she sold them to raise money for missions. Lizzie injured her back in an accident, and she was to spend the rest of her life, twenty-seven more years, flat on her back. Her only view of the world was from a mirror mounted above her head. But she still wanted to do a great thing with her life, so when she heard in those days that you could free an African slave for $40, she made a quilt and tried to sell it for $40. Nobody would buy it. So she turned to making bookmarks, and she raised $1,000 a year for each of the 27 years remaining in her life. She gave every penny of that to projects in this world that go to building up rather than tearing down.
What about the quilt? One day a bishop from India was traveling through Illinois and she gave it to him. He took that quilt with him on his speaking tour around the country, and he told the story of Lizzie Johnson. Then he asked people if they would place an offering for missions in the quilt. He raised $100,000 for missions. You talk about how God creates miracles through modest efforts!
One day after Lizzie Johnson had died, her sister, Alice Johnson, heard that a man named Takuo Matsumoto was coming to Champaign, Illinois, to speak. He was one of the most prominent Japanese Christians after the Second World War. He had been principal of the Methodist Girls’ School in Hiroshima during the bombing. In John Hersey’s book about tragedy, he is mentioned prominently as one of the heroes of those days.
Alice Johnson remembered that her sister had given money to support the education of a young boy in Japan named Takuo Matsumoto, and she wondered if this was the same person. She resolved to go to Champaign to hear him speak, but she got sick that day and had to stay home. That night someone told Mr. Matsumoto about her, and he said, “You mean that she is Lizzie Johnson’s sister? All that I am I owe to Lizzie Johnson.” That night he went to see Alice Johnson. The next morning he went to the cemetery to put flowers on the grave of a woman who could not leave her bed, who was weak and helpless, but who stitched up her love in bookmarks and quilts, refusing to let her limitations limit.
Limitations do not have to limit.
Paul taught us about the power of the person and the personal, that limitations do not have to limit us – and now a third lesson.
III
Paul showed us that we can be tough yet tender.
Paul loved the Galatians. He saw them as his spiritual children. This was no surface bond, no sentimental affection. It was the kind of love that was tender, but tough. Integrity was preserved in the honesty of an open and trusting relationship. Try to feel the depth of that relationship. “If it had been possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me.” (v. 15). What love! And sense the probing honesty. “Have I therefore become your enemy because I speak the truth?” (v. 16).
Paul was risking everything - laying on the line the relation ship which had been so supportive and gratifying to him. He had to tell the truth at the risk of turning his friends into enemies.
Within the Christian community we are always endangered by two pitfalls. One is a Pollyanna tolerance that makes no demand and this reaps no harvest - a kind of religion – in general stance that says, “I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe: Either belief is as good as the other; let’s respect a person’ rights and not seek to convert.” The Christian missionary enterprise and world evangelization responding to Jesus’ Great Commission does not allow such Pollyanna tolerance.
The second pitfall is a rigid intolerance that contends, “We have the true gospel. There is no freedom to err. You must believe as we believe, and you cannot propagate a gospel contrary to ours.”
Either stance is a threat to the spread of the Gospel. What we need is to be tough yet tender. We need to be tough in holding on to the centralities of the faith: God’s love for us, clearly demonstrated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; salvation which comes alone by grace through faith in Jesus Christ we need to hold toughly to those convictions, but we need to be tender tender in our love for those who have not yet grasped what we have grasped, or better, who have not yet been grasped as we have been by the wooing love of Jesus Christ.
And that’s a stance we can take in a lot of areas of our life - we can be that way with our spouses tough but tender.
We can be that way with our children - tough but tender. We can be that way with our friends, those for whom we have a responsibility - a responsibility to hold accountable and to speak the truth in love, and to call them to the very best that under God they can be tough but tender.