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| Photo Credit: Karen Smith |
...My power is made perfect in weakness...
Yesterday, I said a silent prayer. It wasn’t to God. Not really. It was to Dan’s Grandma Punky. She turned 100 years old this past March. And yesterday we got news that she’s not doing too great. She has a hospice nurse. She’s on pain meds. She fell the other day. And she’s been sick to her stomach for a few days now. On her 100th COVID Zoom birthday celebration, her whole family gathered together, through the magic of modern technology, to wish her a happy birthday. I asked her if she had any words of wisdom for us now that she’s 100. And with her no-nonsense, humorous, anti-sentimental perspective that she has had at least ever since I have known her she’d said, “Yes. Don’t live this long! It’s exhausting!” We all laughed that awkward laugh that you laugh when you hear something that is all the things: hard and true and funny and heartbreaking. She’s ready. She misses her husband terribly. It’s time. I think, maybe. Or, at least, it’s time as long as she gets to make the choice. So I said a little prayer, hoping that it would travel the 2,000 mile distance between us. “Hey Grandma. It’s just Jenn, your somewhat estranged granddaughter-in-law. You’re probably really angry at me still, and I don’t blame you. But maybe you can still know that I love you, and if it means anything to you at all, I want to tell you that it’s ok, you can go now. We are gonna be ok. Dan and I are gonna be ok.
Of course. You don’t need my permission. You’ve always done whatever you’ve wanted - in that good sort of self-assured-but-not-abusive sort of way. And I love you for it. So whenever you choose to let go, I will love you still. I just wanted to say that to you.”
I mean, who knows. Grandma Punky may still outlive us all. She’s always been so strong. So self-assured. So independent. The fullest embodiment of the matriarch of the family. I wonder what she is thinking now, as she looks back on all the little and big deaths she has endured that have brought her to this moment, as she looks back on all her blessings and the sheer luck that she’s been given. I have only known her for 1/5 of her life, but from what little I know about her, she doesn’t need my permission to do anything. So I think I was probably giving myself permission in that little prayer. “God, it is going to bring me to my knees to live in a world without Grandma Punky. So here I am. On my knees.” I’m too weak to survive her absence, but I’m going to lean in to that weakness, because I love her, because she deserves to make her own choices and not stick around just because we’re all so scared and sad and broken.
So I am going to boast about that. I am going to boast that I know a woman who had five kids, and a husband who fought in the war. And those five kids are as different from each other as five people can be. And yet they love. They agree to disagree. They agree to eat at the same table without mentioning religion or politics. I’m going to boast that she hiked the Grand Canyon in her late seventies, simply praying to God, “You pick ‘em up, and I’ll put ‘em down.” I’m going to boast that she took us out into the desert in her Geo Tracker to search for turquoise, and she was there the first time I’d ever eaten lobster tail. I’m going to boast that she is still reading new books even as she turned a hundred years old. I'm going to boast about her incredible memory and how she looks back on her life with gratitude. I am going to boast about her almost seventy year long marriage. About how, when Stew died, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, she’d said she felt like she’d gotten him back somehow. About how, when my own marriage was falling apart, I looked to her example, how I still wanted what she had. I’m going to boast that I could talk to her about Madeleine L’Engle and grace-filled theology and backyard roses and climbing Mount Baldy. I’m going to boast that she liked my sermons. That she encouraged me. She called me “dear.” I’m going to boast that even though I can’t say that I knew her all that well, I can say that I knew her. I’m going to boast that her death, whenever it happens, is going to bring me to my knees.
How lucky am I that I got to marry into a family that has a Grandma Punky?
I’m going to boast that because I could always see a little bit of myself in her, and I could always see a little bit of Dan in Stew, that somehow, because they’d made it so long, I could look to them and believe that marriage was true and good and possible, even after heartbreak and brokenness and betrayal. I could look to Punky and Stew and say, “That’s what I want. I’m not ready to give that up yet.”
I look to her, maybe a little bit like Paul looks to this unknown person who was “caught up to the third heaven” and was told a secret that they can never share, but a secret that is accessible to everyone. I look to her. I’ll boast about her. Because I think she knows the secret. She knows she can’t tell me the secret, but she gives me little hints every day that she lives her life.
I may never know the secret. But I get to know someone who does. And I’m not ashamed to boast about that.
I’m going to boast that I need Grandma Punky in this world. And then, when she is gone, I’m going to boast about how her presence forever changed me, and about how her absence is going to leave a wound that I will never recover from. I need Grandma Punky. In that I will boast. I will lose Grandma Punky. And in that, too, I will boast.
This needing of each other is such a weakness, isn’t it? We especially don’t like to think about it on Independence Day. But on this our nation’s Independence Day, Paul is proudly proclaiming that he is far from independent. In fact, he is passionately pleading with the Corinthians that they need him, and that he needs them. He can’t do this alone. He can’t spread the good news of Jesus Christ all by himself. He can’t be himself without them. They cannot be themselves, without him. Call it codependency or disordered attachment, but none of us can be who God made us to be without the fullness and freedom of others being who God made them to be. This is a communal effort, this living life thing. The Corinthians have broken his heart, again and again, over and over again, and still, he fights for them, still, he needs them. He is calling them into their better selves. He knows that they are calling him into his better self. But he also knows that we call each other into our better selves, not by boasting about all the things we can do well, or all the things we know, or all the things we’ve accomplished, but by sharing all those vulnerable spaces, places where our hearts have been broken, places where our stories intersect, places where we need each other. Places where we’re not enough on our own.
Unlike the so called “super-apostles” who have so much to offer and have caught the imaginations and the purse strings of the crowds, who have all the answers and all the resources and all the other worldly visions and all the community development skills and the perfect antiracist answers, Paul, even though he, too, probably has all of those things, and the certificates and diplomas and graduation tassels to go with it, Paul is going to boast in his weakness, in those empty places, in those spaces of need, in those questions and hurts and beatings and little crucifixions that life has brought him. This is no exchange economy where he gives and they get. He brings them his nothing. He boasts in this mysterious “thorn in his side” that has perplexed scholars for two millennia. He makes himself a “fool” for the Corinthians. Because he loves them. Because he needs them. Because he will fall to his knees and be forever broken when he is separated from them. Does he boast in his loneliness? Does he boast in his disagreements with Peter? Does he boast that he had it all wrong for so long and it took him going blind to finally figure it out? Even now, even today, as he himself is caught up in his own third heaven, does he boast that maybe he didn’t get everything right in all of his letters, or that maybe his words have been misconstrued and misinterpreted? That maybe people have twisted his words and that has hurt people? But also that these broken words, through the power of God, have put some people back together again. Does he boast that he tried, he showed up, and because of that, because he’s “just" a human, in some ways, he failed, but, because of Christ, that’s exactly where his power is?
He failed just as Jesus failed. According to the powers and principalities that rule our world Jesus was an absolute failure. An “L7 weenie.” He didn’t lead an army. He didn’t overturn the government. He didn’t give everyone healthcare and a two car garage. He didn’t ride his horse in the middle of the night to warn that the British are coming. He got himself killed. Killed on a cross. Horrific. Embarrassing. Shameful. Even his best friends betray him. Even those whom he has loved with all of his heart abandon him when he needs them most. He gets shoved into a borrowed tomb while peasant women weep at its door. And Paul, and Peter, and the other disciples, and the women, and the early followers of Christ, and all of us who profess that Jesus Christ is Lord, will follow in his footsteps. Not as perfectly. Not as dramatically. Not with such holiness. But still. In our weakness. In our brokenness. Just like Christ’s.
But this is power, Paul says. This is a different kind of power - the power of Christ dwelling in him. The power of weakness. The power of need. The power of what it means to love something so much that you would sacrifice anything, you would lift cars, race into burning buildings, hand over both of your kidneys and stand in front of bullets just so that this other can be, just so that this other can survive.
It’s the kind of power that has you weeping in a crappy apartment, calling out to God because you have nothing left, and you can’t bear to lose even that. It’s the power of the pleading mom at the hospital bedside. It’s the power of the seed that’s dying so something new can grow. It’s the power of those pinecones that need the heat of a forest fire in order to open up and let their seeds go. It’s the power of empty hands and open hearts. It’s the power of facing that you’ve really screwed up. It’s the power that comes from loving someone so much and so hard that you will never ever fully heal when they have to leave you. It’s the power of walking with a limp. It’s a blessing, this weakness. It’s power.
So, Grandma Punky, this sermon is about you, sure. But it’s also about all of us. It’s about how we will love and love and love and love until it kills us. And that, my friends, is the power of Christ.
So when you are mourning someone you love. When you are regretting your decision. When you are beating yourself up for those choices you’ve made. When you are terrified about your next steps. Recognize that that is the exact place where you need Christ. Where Christ needs you. The exact place where Christ has come and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. God tells all of us, in all the little and big concrete ways of our lives, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So we will boast all the more gladly in our weaknesses, in our need, in our relationships that make us so very vulnerable, so that the power of Christ may dwell in us. Therefore, we are content with weaknesses, with insults, insults, hardships, persecutions, calamities, deaths, separations, and all those places where we gave our hearts and they got broken, all for the sake of Christ; for whenever we are weak, then we are strong.
I love you, Grandma Punky. Whenever it’s your turn, whenever you’re ready, I’m going to be strong enough to fall apart.
Thanks be to God.
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