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March 11, 2007
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10: 1-13
Title: "Beyond Strength"

Unfortunately, I think we have to conclude that Paul is serious. No false confidence allowed here! Straighten up! No idolatry, no immorality, no putting Christ to the test, and most importantly no whining. Read your Bibles, draw some honest parallels, and consider yourselves warned.

That’s not fun, but it’s still fairly straightforward. It’s not until verse thirteen that things take a bit of a turn. What do we make of this: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

This is one of those texts that we’ve all heard many times, but today this is my first question: How do we feel about this text? Is it comforting and uplifting, or is it challenging, or is it frustrating? What does it mean, this assurance that we have the strength to handle anything that happens to us?

Do you feel like you have had adequate strength to overcome everything that has happened to you thus far? ‘Adequate’—that’s a loaded word. But what does survival mean. This verse puts us at risk of playing a massive game of Chicken with our inner resources—We will not be tested beyond what we’re able to endure, therefore everything that happens to us can be endured, therefore everything is fine, always.

That seems harsh. After all, we can suffer terribly in this life. Suffering is universal, but it comes in different aspects for all of us. Whether it be through poverty and hunger, loss and loneliness, betrayal and emotional starvation, illness physical or mental, we can spend so many of our days dwelling in darkness, and most of us do.

How can we accept this verse at face value when we have eyes in our hands and stories in our pasts? Are we still within our capabilities to endure when we have been broken by grief, when we have doubted everything we ever thought was true, when we have lost sight entirely of the people we used to be? Are we still enduring even after we have screamed with the pain of our own destruction?

If we have the capacity to endure, shouldn’t our endurance look a little better than this? How do we reconcile the damage we take to Paul’s assurance that nothing will ever be too much for us to handle? It’s too easy to feel lost inside this verse—or worse, shut out from a truth that somehow doesn’t seem to apply to us. Can we hold our experiences and Paul’s ideas together in our minds and manage to arrive at some kind of truth? How can we still see our strength when we are sure our strength has failed?

Last summer I participated in the AMERC immersion program—for two weeks, a group of seminary students bounced from one small Appalachian town to another, studying the art of the region as well as the harsher realities of life in the mountains. As the trip drew to a close, we all had to come up with a project—some artistic expression of what we had learned. One young Methodist from Drew decided to write a poem. It was divided into three parts—Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection. All went well enough through the writing of the first two sections, but then there were complications. He didn’t know how to make the transition from Destruction to Resurrection. How can the one possibly lead to the other? He was pulling his hair out, and the entire project was in jeopardy.

At our innermost cores, and in our hard places where we have seen and done too much, resurrection remains a mystery to us. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve heard the Easter Story—some part of us will always fail to understand how great suffering can disappear, how life comes from death, how the true end of the story comes after the end.

And it’s an achingly simple, deceptively simple answer. One night in Charleston, as Gene spoke once again of how he didn’t understand how he could make his poem switch directions, of how he truly couldn’t see beyond the border of destruction, I caught a glimpse of something new and true and I almost couldn’t believe it. ‘Gene,’ I exclaimed—‘this is resurrection—the realization that the destruction did not destroy.’ And there it was.

Even when we lose everything else, God is with us and God is in us, and the God in us cannot be destroyed. Even when we are broken down into nothing but that single glowing ember, that is more than enough to kindle a new life, a new kind of joy, a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of faith and hope and love. Yes, new means different. But new also means whole, and untainted, and from the same source as what we had before, so never inferior.

This is why we need Lent. Not just so we can hear the same story one more time, even though we do need to hear it, every single day of our lives. Mainly we need Lent because Lent forces us to break ourselves down. We dismantle all of our hasty faith, all our shallow assurances, all of our complacent hope, and see plainly the anguish of life. And then we look beyond that, and we remember that even when we lave lost everything, our destruction has not destroyed everything that we had. There is always the seed of a new life inside us.

Our strength is the God-In-Us. It cannot be conquered, it cannot be lost, it cannot be damaged beyond repair, and we cannot find ourselves in a place so desperate that is cannot be of help to us. We have our own strength that comes from our individual personalities, and maybe if that strength were good enough Suffering wouldn’t cause us pain, but that’s not how it goes. Paul is uncompromising, but Paul is also a realist. There is no If for him when it comes to our trials; there is only When. We will suffer, and it will hurt, and it may even destroy us for a time. But the destruction will never go all the way to the core. God is our strength, God cannot be defeated. We cannot be tested beyond our strength, because our strength is already beyond us.

Let us pray.

God who defends us, give us peace in our suffering and trust that you will make something new our of the pieces of all our old lives. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Amanda Hatafield, Student Associate

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