Experience Wanted

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

What is your experience of Christ? This is all Paul has of Jesus. He wasn't a disciple, he didn't follow Jesus, all he has is what he has is an experience and he has written about here. A writer tried to clean it all up and give us the details in Acts, but this one here is Paul's own hand about the experience.

Experience is all we have of Jesus. What has been your experience of Jesus? Who do you know the Christ to be? These are important questions to answer in our faith life and walk. In a class in seminary we were asked to reflect on what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus and write about it. I had to think about it for days and still didn't have anything written for class the day before. Finally I sat with the question and an image came to mind, this is a process we learned in seminary of theological reflection. You write out an issue in your own words with no judgment, just the bare bones, and then you sit with it until an image comes to mind. Then you relate it to a biblical story or some part of your own faith tradition. So I sat with why couldn't I think of anything, what was blocking my way forward?

When it came to me it came in scripture: I know what it is to loose my life and gain it all. I know what it is to be lost and found (Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Luke 9:24). Loosing your life to gain all is a hard thing to describe, it is like Paul here trying to put words on his own experience. There is nothing which is concrete. It is described in imagery, in talk which is mysterious and not boastful. 

Having an experience with Christ is a humbling thing. It is not something we can say we have been given this in order to be over others, but it gives us the place where we were most vulnerable, most exposed, and most weak. See, Paul makes this reference to having an affliction which he could not get rid of. Now some scholars have made speculation about what this might have been, but since we aren't given it here I don't think this is the point. Sometimes this is given so we might fill in our own blank. What is our point of weakness? What would we like removed from the way we act or do and begin to start being stronger? 

It is only at our weakest though where we become truly in touch with Jesus. More and more weakness and vulnerability are becoming looked at as if they are wrong. This is wrong. Our weaknesses make us more whole. Paul shares this praying three times and we are to think of the story of Jesus in the garden, asking God to take this cup from him three times, and we all know how this story ends. Not in strength, but in not saying anything in defense, in pouring himself out in order for all of us to be made whole. The good news is not in any strength we can form, but in becoming weak.

The whole Christian walk, to me and for me, is a series of surrenders to not my will, but God's and guess what, it is the hardest lesson I learn. There was a series of books written by Jan Karon about a priest named Fr. Tim. In it he always tells people, and himself, to pray the prayer which never fails and you know what this is? "Thy will be done" this little section from the Lord's prayer acknowledges we are not in control, it is not for us to manipulate and scheme and change, but to surrender. Thy will be done with us, in us, and for us. It is the hardest lesson of this walk with Jesus.

So, today we come away with these few and important things. What is our own experience of Jesus? How do we pray the prayer which never fails? And how are we strongest in our own weakness? God give us the grace to be honest and to allow us to pray, not mine but your will be done. Amen.