7th Sunday of Pentecost Sermon

“I know a guy,” writes the apostle Paul, “who was caught up to the third heaven. It was so real even he doesn’t know if he actually went there physically or it was just a vision.”

Who is this guy Paul’s writing about, with his private tour of “the third heaven?”

You know what I think? I think it’s Paul himself. I think he’s writing about a mystical experience he had. But because it was an utterly private experience – not to be shared or defended or used to convince other people – he deflects any ownership of it: “I know a guy…”

Now, I have no idea what’s meant by the “third heaven.” (Is there a first and second heaven? Who knows?) Clearly, Paul’s not telling us. That’s not his point.

By referencing this vision at all (or whatever it was), the point isn’t the details of the experience, but the power of the experience itself. Fourteen years ago, something happened for him spiritually that was incredibly impactful – something so real he could hold onto it for the rest of his life: “No matter how hard things get, I know this to be true. And I am all in.”

‘Cause you know, when I read Paul’s letters, this is what always strikes me most: he absolutely believes. He has given himself entirely over to his conviction that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus changed everything.

And with this conviction, Paul was the absolute radical of his day. The Jews wanted to kill him. And he kinda freaked out the Christian community, too. They were very much of the “slow down, don’t go too fast” school of thought.

“Oh no,” said Paul, “we will go this fast.” And what this “too fast” meant was the abolishment of the Old Testament law and all the ways it insisted and reinforced the belief that the people of God were the Jews only, and that by keeping their law, they alone had God’s favor. You cannot overestimate how central this mindset was to their whole culture and identity.

St. Peter and the rest of the fledgling first-century Christian community still very much viewed themselves as Jewish. They couldn’t conceive of being the people of God – even with their faith in Jesus – without these boundary-markers that were so entrenched and necessary to Jewish identity.

And Paul’s urgent, message was, “You don’t get it. Those days are over! Through Christ, God has blown those walls down. You’re all caught up in keeping the rules and God has chucked the rules out!”

It’s fascinating to me how, in our generation of the church, Paul is viewed by so many as that old, misogynistic, homophobic curmudgeon who needs to be shot down (or simply ignored). But I’m beginning to suspect it’s time for the very people who view Paul as their adversary to rediscover Paul … as their advocate and friend.

For centuries, the church has taken the contents of Paul’s letters and made of them a new kind of law – full of rules and prohibitions. And in so doing, they’ve projected upon him a spirit of legalism and hatred that probably says more about them than it does about Paul.

Yes, sure, Paul was strident and cocky and impatient (all those things!). But what energized him was a passion for the triumph of God’s love and grace and forgiveness that overcomes everything – especially any form of legalism, that very human tendency that keeps reverting, keeps grasping, at that small-minded idea that by keeping the right rules we can meet God’s standards or appease God’s wrath.

“No!” says Paul. “Stop it! It’s so much bigger than that. And infinitely better.”

And it was this “infinitely better gospel” that Paul had discovered and given his life to.

He began life as a pharisee: this very earnest segment of Jewish society that kept the law feverishly as their highest expression of faith, upholding the covenant. Paul was zealous for keeping the law. In fact, he saw the early followers of Jesus as a threat to this law, so much so that he was a persecutor of the early church.

…Until he had a major conversion experience of his own. He was on the road to Damascus – intent on arresting some Christians there – when a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell on the ground and heard a voice: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” he asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

And so, this pharisee, this zealous protector of the law, this man who wanted to do all things right, suddenly found himself to be absolutely in the wrong.

But beneath his pharisee-ism, ran a deeper fidelity: He wanted God. And in meeting the risen Christ on the road, Paul was able to make a complete one-eighty because his truest allegiance was unwavering. He just realized he’d been going the wrong way.

It reminds me of my spiritual director: I was exploring new theological ideas and anxious I was heading in the wrong direction. “Eric, do you want God?” she asked. “Yes.” “Then stop worrying,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.” Seeking God with integrity is the needful thing. We can trust God to meet us in our desire.

The next few days were pretty intense for Paul, as you can image. He was actually blinded by the experience. He fasted and prayed for three days until Jesus sent a Christian named Ananias to pray over him for healing. Ananias was not at all excited by this command, knowing Paul’s reputation. But he did it. Laying his hands upon him, he said, “Brother Saul.” I love that. “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Then something like scales fell off his eyes, he regained his sight, and was baptized.

His conversion was immediate. And, like with all of us, his process of being converted was ongoing for the rest of his life. In fact, he laid low for a long time. He spent three years in Damascus, then made a brief trip to Jerusalem where he had a private meeting with Peter for fifteen days. Then he spent fourteen more years in Syria.

Seventeen years went by. Imagine how much transformation was taking root in him: how much dialogue with the Christian communities there; how much prayer and availing himself to God; how much theological exploration – aligning his faith from the Old Testament with this new revelation of Christ, crucified and resurrected. (He did have an extraordinary mind!) All this was forming him to be and become the church’s first major theologian and witness to the gentiles to whom this gospel would spread. And, I suspect, there might well have been some mystical visions as well – his “third heaven.”

Because I make this point again: When Paul begins his life as a missionary, he does so with absolute conviction, not just as a “disciple,” but as an “apostle,” as one called directly – and personally – by the resurrected Christ. Of this, he was insistent. And this conviction of his was stronger than any of the suffering he endured as a missionary – which were many: he was stoned, whipped to an inch of his life (several times), ship-wrecked, and on and on. Ultimately, he was beheaded on a road just outside of Rome. But his faith was unswerving. He knew something, frankly, in a way that vastly exceeds what most of us refer to as “faith.”

God chose Paul for a distinctive role in the development of this faith we have all inherited. And, I suspect, in our day, Jesus is not done using this apostle he called so long ago on that road to Damascus.

But there’s something else about Paul’s story that’s worth considering: his “thorn in the flesh.” There was something in his life that was exceedingly painful for him, something quite distinct from the physical sufferings he received at the hands of his persecutors, which he seemed able to endure as a matter of life and faith. This “thorn” is different. He doesn’t tell us what it was, only that he wished very deeply for it to be removed.

Whatever it was, I suspect it was something shameful to him. Just like it is with us. We’ve all got our “thorns in the flesh” – those secret things within us we can’t seem to shake, addictions we crave and are ashamed of. We’re certain that if we were “better Christians” we could be free of them, certain that the weight of our shame is only exceeded by the weight of God’s disappointment in us, certain that what God wants of us is to get our mess together.

And yet, Paul is doing everything he can to “get his mess together,” making his appeal directly to Jesus (which one would think is the right way to handle such things as a person of faith). “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this,” he writes. Most likely, these were three very deliberate occasions: on a retreat, with days of prayer and fasting, making his case before God.

And three times he was rejected. As clear as his conversion experience had been and as clear as his vision of “the third heaven” might have been, so clear was his rejection: “No, Paul, I am not going to do this for you.”

But it is not “No” by itself – as if Jesus were some miserly Scrooge, withholding his powers to heal. Rather, it is, “No, my grace is sufficient for you.”

There’s something incredibly powerful at play here.

The core of Paul’s gospel is one of grace: that God’s forgiving love through Christ overcomes everything – every rule, every law, every sin, every death. “Grace,” for Paul, is God’s final word. But we need only look at the history of the church to see how easily we’ve smothered and regulated God’s grace with a barrage of our own words – our doctrines and theologies, our rules and sacraments – turning grace into a commodity for the church to define and dole out, sparingly.

And so it might have become for Paul. He was cocky and strident and determined; what a misery he might have been had he not also been so desperately in need of grace. His thorn in the flesh, his painful weakness, became that place in him where he experienced God’s grace, again and again and again.

Paul, “the great missionary to the gentiles;” Paul, “the great defender of faith,” was also Paul, “in daily need of grace.”

And so may it be for us, whatever our besetting sin may be. May it no longer be the shame that shields us from God, but the very place we know and experience the grace and love of God, day after day after day.