Thoughts on 1:8-11

The literal meaning of the words thlipsis (affliction) is "pressure." We are pushed and shoved and buffeted by the pressures of affliction. It is highly likely that the false teachers who are leading the Corinthians astray and prodding them to question Paul and his credentials are teaching that Christians are individuals who are free from affliction and suffering. This is a heresy that pops up again and again through church history, and is very prevalent among Christians today. I have had several ministry disappointments in the past as people have walked away because I cannot promise them ease and prosperity.

What Paul does in this short paragraph is to tell us just how painful his own thlipsis is. Eugene Peterson paraphrases Paul in 8b-9a as "It was so bad we didn't think we were going to make it. We felt like we'd been sent to death row, that it was all over for us." Peterson is being pretty colorful there, but which of us when under ministry stress has not felt this way? How may of you dread that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach which refuses to go away, or that intense sense of nausea that accompanies the anxieties that go with being a leader in Christ's church?

Paul could well have been dealing with all sorts of other things that were burdening him besides his concern for the churches, and what seems to be amiss in all of them, but his responses to stress were very similar to ours. I recall not long ago our bishop, Bert Herlong, saying that for several months after General Convention he would wake up at 2.42 a.m. worrying about what had happened and what was going on. Sleeplessness and feeling like death warmed over are very much part of the ministerial life and lifestyle -- and I wonder why no one told me about that in seminary. Or, did they tell me and I conveniently overlooked their words?

Yet for Paul this affliction is not "unto death," because he goes on to say that we are dependent on the God who raises the dead (9), and he delivered Paul from this excrutiation (10a). It is, therefore, upon him that we set our hope. I fear that too many Episcopalians in the last 18 months have set their hope on something that will fail them -- church politics and intrigue, walking away from the field of conflict and hoping being out of ECUSA will reduce the stress, denial, and so forth. Our hope is the Lord who raises the dead, and he will deliver us, although we walk in darkness now because we do not know how this can be.

This week, while preparing my sermon on Abraham for Sunday I was reading John Goldingay's book, After Eating the Apricot. In that he talks about the way that Abraham and Sarah are guided by God to live by his promise. However, Goldingay goes on, Living by God's promise regularly means living by a word that seems more than somewhat unlikely to be fulfilled. Think about that for a moment. We live in hope, therefore are dependent upon God's promises to us, but how often does it seem that those promises are unlikely to be fulfilled. Yet, and here is an element of discipleship that gets forgotten, we just plod on. Plodding is something 21st Century people are not good at -- so pastors should model it.

In the light of all this, Paul calls upon us to pray (11). During the last few months I feel as if affliction has stripped me of reliance on my own gifts and abilities, they were clearly doing no good to our little congregation. It was only when I was afflicted to the point of feeling I was under sentence of death and that this mission congregation could not survive, and I threw myself on God's mercy and grabbed at any mite of help and comfort that I could get, that God said, "OK, now I am ready to work..."

There is a long way to do, but I am staggered what the Lord has done so far. Now I understand the dynamics of some of what has been going on, but behind those dynamics is the hand of the Comforter, the one who draws near, and who says out of affliction I am able to bring hope, from the blood shed on a Cross I am able to bring life.

2 Corinthians 1:8-11

8For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers,[a] of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. 11You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.

2 Corinthians 1:1-7

1Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To the church of God that is at Corinth, with all the saints who are in the whole of Achaia: 2Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. 7Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

Thoughts on 1:1-7

I began reading 2 Corinthians in my cycle of daily bible readings on August 26th last year. The weather was hot and exceedingly humid, and in that week it had felt as if one freight train after another had been rolling over me. In my journal a day or two earlier I had prayed, "Quieten my fears, O Lord," and again on that particularly day I was worrying over finances, several families who were leaving our congregation, and a woman who had gone off on an alcoholic bender. Added to all this, I was having trouble sleeping, there were difficulties in the diocese, and I was beginning to wonder whether the Church of the Apostles would survive -- and if it did, whether I would survive the burden that was crushing me.

Any priest who has been doing this job for more than five minutes knows the toll that the accumulation of things takes on both your health and your sanity. I suspect I was looking for a word from the Lord when I picked up my bible that August morning. I wanted comfort, I wanted Someone to stroke me and tell me that everything was going to be alright. Instead I got Paul pouring out his soul onto the page -- but what startled me was that his soul was in as many tatters as my own.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all mercies and God of all comfort," (1:3) he begins after his familiar introduction of himself to the Corinthians. Then he goes on to speak of this God being the one who comforts us in all our afflictions, and in the following handful of verses the Apostle tells us just what he is going through.

"We share Christ's sufferings... we are afflicted... we suffer" and he urges the Corinthians to share his sufferings.

As I read these words I knew they were being written by a man on the very edge. He was torn apart over what the Corinthians were up to, and there were all sorts of other ministry and pastoral burdens that were weighing him down. There are those moments in all our lives when everything is just too much for us, and that, I think, is how it was for Paul as he poured out his soul to the Corinthians who he loved so much, but who were causing him such pain and anxiety.

The word which really caught my attention, and which Paul uses over and over again is affliction, or thlipsis which is the word used in the original Greek. During one of my readings of 2 Corinthians during the fall I found myself going through the whole letter in one sitting and circling every time that Paul uses the word. It is a perfect word to describe the agony of the burden of ministry. The KJV translates it tribulation, and one of the older commentators calls it "the anguish of spirit caused by the revolt and estrangement of Paul's Corinthian converts."

Some of those writing about Paul's response to the news from Corinth have tended to dismiss this as much too strong a response, but I would hazard that those scholars have never found their souls caught in the mangle of pastoral life at a time of crisis in the wider church. One of the things that strikes me about the responsible pastors I have known all over the world through the years, is that they are intensely involved with the lives of those in their congregations, however small or large those congregations might be. There are few faithful clergy I know who in the last couple of years have not suffered sleepless nights and nailbiting days which have brought them to their wits' end. So was Paul as he churned his "anxiety for all the churches" (11:28).

But Paul does not dwell on his pain, his agony, and his suffering. Even in these early verses when he seems to be having trouble keeping his emotions under control, he points us back to the God "who comforts us in all our afflictions" (1:4), telling us that although we share in Christ's sufferings, we also "share abundantly in comfort too" (1:5). Perhaps Paul had in mind the words of Jesus on the night before he was betrayed that the Comforter would soon come, and maybe this is who he drew upon as he prayed over the circumstances in which he found himself.

Dependence upon God came no more naturally to Paul than it does to us. It was, as Mike Thompson points out in his commmentary, "something he learned repeatedly through the 'ups' and especially through the 'downs' of his Christian experience. Recollection of how God had rescued him in the past fuelled further confidence that God could be trusted to deliver him in the future" (Thompson p. 19).

Which brings it back to us and our struggles. The afflictions at the grassroots and in the wider church are not going to go away. I suspect that those of us who are by nature worriers will continue to worry, occasionally (like me) catastrophizing over the outcomes from all that is happening. We want our circumstances to change, God wants us to be transformed by our circumstances. We might think that what is happening is the worst kind of disaster, yet in the divine economy it could very well be that this is precisely the pruning we need by the Spirit so that we can bear more and healthier fruit.

There is a funny little saying that I sometimes use. It is that we have been sold a pup. What it means is that when we purchase a puppy we don't have the slightest idea what we are getting. There are few clues about the temperament, size, or appetite of this little creature when it is placed in our hands as a small furry bundle. Only as it grows us do we discover that it was a cross between a Great Dane and a Rottweiler, will eat you out of house and home, and ought not to be allowed to be left unattended around children!

So is the ordained ministry. I remember my ordination to the priesthood in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, well. It was Anglican pomp and pageantry at its finest and I thought that with the bishop's hands laid on my head I was going to be able to change the world and all would be on the up and up from here. Very quickly I realized that this would not be the case as I found myself working for an unbalanced man who was sinking into deep mental illness. In three and a half decades of ordained life I have discovered just how untrained and demanding the pup that I was handed on my ordination day is. We need to face its realities, but we also need to recognize that as we set about this work, we do not do it alone but have the Comforter who is with us forever (John 14:16), and he will guide us into all truth.

Getting into 2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians is not an easy epistle either to read or to study. Because Paul wrote a number of letters to the church in Corinth, at least four, the modernist scholars of the past, with their scissors-and-paste approach to scholarship have opined that 2 Corinthians is a compendium of these offerings because it has so much discontinuity within it. As I read it and then read it again during a period of intense anxiety, I realized how wooden such scholarship is -- and these scholars clearly had a low opinion of the intelligence of these who supposedly constructed 2 Corinthians from various bits and pieces, because they didn't drop the additions and digressions into what would have been the most appropriate places!

No, this is the produce of a brilliant mind that was deeply disturbed. His "anxiety for all the churches" (11:28) drove him to dart all over the place, lose the thread of his thoughts and then pick it up several chapters later, and to spill onto the page his raw emotions. When you are experiencing such anxieties as a result of ministry yourself, then the discombobulation of the letter makes perfect sense because you realize this is exactly how you are responding to the pressures that are upon you.

The situation is that the Corinthians were not only being pestered by super-apostles who were calling Paul's credentials into question, but they were tending to give into these interlopers' ideas and attitudes. The Corinthians were oh so 21st Century, for Corinth, in a more exaggerated manner than most of the Greek world, was into style and presentation -- and image was not something that Paul was particularly good at.

I imagine Paul as being like one of the most effective priests I know -- short, dumpy, of questionable health, with a scraggly beard and a far from attractive balding pattern! In this he was probably quite a contrast to these troublers who had come in from outside and who were rhetorically clever, had well-buffed bodies, and knew how to smooth-talk their way into peoples' hearts and lives. The truth is that some of the most wonderful Christian leaders I have ever known have been physically non-descript and usually have not been recognized by the wider church for the extraordinary things that they have achieved in Jesus' name. Paul, today would fit into that category.

What Paul is doing in 2 Corinthians is plead with the church that they do not turn aside from the gospel that he brought to them. He is asserting his own qualifications as an apostle of the heart set free, and encourages them to return to the essence of the faith that he had brought to them.

This is a difficult book because it covers the whole waterfront of emotions, and yet imbedded in it is some of the most profound theological truth about God's nature and our obedience. We see into the heart of a pastor and an evangelist. As Mike Thompson puts it, "We find him describing the shape of his ministry and revealing what makes him tick. We watch him work in crisis with a congregation surprisingly similar in some ways, perhaps, to our own" (page 7).

It is this collegiality with Paul that has drawn me to this letter, and which makes 2 Corinthians a crucial tool in forming and encouraging pastoral leaders in these difficult times. Did Paul mishandle the Corinthians occasionally? You bet he did -- much as you and I mishandle relationships in our congregations on a pretty regular basis. Have you and I ever had folks in the parish gang up on us and want to run us from town on a rail? Yes, and so was the attitude of many of the Corinthians toward the Apostles.

This, brothers and sisters, is heavy stuff!

Welcome to 2 Corinthians

Last year was probably one of the most difficult I have experienced in 36 years of ordained ministry; this is saying something, because I have never settled for options that were comfortable or on the easy side of the street. As I struggled during the hot sweaty dog days of summer to find something in Scripture that would speak to my aching soul, I found myself in the course of my daily readings working my way through Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians.

2 Corinthians was probably the Pauline epistle that I knew the least well, but as I began reading it in the midst of circumstances that were taking me to the end of my tether, I found myself riveted by the apostle's words. Not only had he experienced some of the same agonies as myself in his wrestlings over the Corinthian church, but he was speaking about them in language that I understood. From having hardly ever read this letter with much care, I have now read it through at least a dozen times and my bible is marked up with observations I have made and emphases that have spoken volumes. I have looked at it in both English translations and the Greek text.

I hit bottom in late October, early November, and at that time I thought the Church of the Apostles was in the process of folding. That it didn't has little to do with me, and much more to do with the God-given stubbornness of our bishop and our senior warden. It was at that point that I promised myself I was going to spend the whole of 2005 studying this book because there is much in it that addresses the stresses, strains, anxieties, and delights of 21st Century ministry.

Like our society, the image of Christian leadership has been Disnified -- and the result is an understanding of what it means to lead the People of God that is more like a Donald Duck cartoon than the reality of trying to keep ourselves afloat and providing leadership in a culture that is increasingly biased against our message and lifestyle. A further complication for those of us who are Episcopalians is that we are now part of a denomination that has decided to pursue the culture and address revelation in its own bizarre way. It is no wonder that so many of us who are leaders are wounded and in great discomfort.

I think that Second Corinthians is the balm that we need. It is strong chemotherapy, if you want to stick with a medical metaphor, but I think it helps us see this battle with principalities and powers in the right perspective, and I believe that it is the purgative that our souls need if we are to be faithful to this task.

Here is how we will study the text:

Each week I will put up a passage and my observations about the passage. Then I invite you to come to the blog at any time and add your own observations, insights, etc. I have invited Mike Thompson, Vice-Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, to join us on this journey as a New Testament scholar and pastor who has written a little commentary on this book (Transforming Grace - Michael B. Thompson. Oxford: Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998).

The translation of the Greek text that I am using is the English Standard Version, but if you wish to comment on the Greek text feel free to do so.

What I hope is that by the end of the year we will have cut our minds with one another and the Apostle Paul, and that we will have a body of materials that in some form or other will be helpful to other pastors struggling with the onward march of postmodernity and our advance into a post-Christendom world.