The One About Paul, Being a Person, and the Ordinariness of Life
Dear West Family
Sometimes I wish that there was a way to escape the humanness of my own humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I like being a person, as we really are incredible creatures, but, part of my human experience (an inordinately large part) involves running into my own limitations, weaknesses, frailties, failures and repetitive cycles of everyday life that are far too dull for anyone to want to see.
Very ordinary things. Very human things.
It doesn’t help that we spend so much time looking at condensed and often exaggerated and misleading narratives of other people’s human experience. The constant peering into the highlight reels of other’s lives through social media and even the way we experience the condensed narratives of film, fiction and celebrity culture gives us deceptively two dimensional characters to look at, characters who look stronger, leaner, more capable, more determined, more action packed, more holy, more virtuous and altogether less human than the long play dramatic character development of our own largely uninteresting lives.
Welcome to Thursday in my head. If you weren’t sad when you got here, well you may be now.
Thanks for nothing, pastor.
But, this is part of why I love the bible and the way that it is recorded for us. The bible refuses to flatten out its’ characters, and it resists and refutes the temptation that we experience to make human lives less human than they actually are. I came across such a vivid example of this again yesterday as I was trying to eke out some devotional time in the book of Acts. Honestly, in my humanity, I wasn’t all that excited or expectant about my daily assigned reading. It was from Acts 13 to 15 and I know those chapters well as they are something of a gospel goldmine for church planters, and I have been training church planters (because those that can’t do … teach) for 15 years. And yet, the Spirit surprised me from the text, as He always does when we give Him space to interrupt our preconceptions, and what stuck out to me from the text (which contains so much gospel goodness) was the humanity of Paul and his experiences. That might sound strange because Paul does remarkably courageous and even supernaturally empowered things in these chapters, and even sets the trajectory of the church in a way that is quite literally civilization changing by extending the message of the gospel to Gentiles and encouraging the rest of the leadership that it is the right thing to do, but … he also experiences some very, very human things.
He experienced what must have been the undeniably tumultuous and wonderful diversity of leadership in Antioch. This group of men was thrust together by common faith but would have literally no other reason for relationship with each other and many reasons for hostility. You have a black African in Simeon, a man from an African colony (probably Libya) in Lucius, a man who is politically very well connected and most likely very deeply compromised with an enemy of the people in Manaen, and you have Paul and Barnabas as well. Now that sounds like a wonderful crew, but can you imagine the complexity? What happens when Manean talks about the legacy of his lifelong friend, Herod, and Lucius has to silently swallow his words because he has seen such atrocities and Paul has to suppress the urge to remind Manaen that God killed his good friend for blasphemy?
That’s awkward, and complex, and human.
He experienced the fickleness of human approval when a crowd tried to deify him when they agreed with him and then tried to stone him to death moments later when they didn’t. People are fickle, and basing your sense of self off of their approval is a very dangerous and very human temptation. I know that many of us live with fear of rejection, but getting stoned (in the biblical and historical sense) is much harder than getting ghosted or even canceled. Paul must have walked away from that instance going … “Oh I have no idea how people feel about me anymore. Thank God that He loves me.” We all need that in our humanity.
Paul experienced the pain of broken relationship with Barnabas and John Mark. Acts 15 tells us that the disagreement between Paul and Baranabas was so strong that they had to go their separate ways. The gist of their disagreement was that Paul felt disappointed in John Mark and didn’t want to trust him with close relationship when he had failed to meet Paul’s expectations of loyalty in the past. Can you feel the humanity of that? The great news is that Paul and Barnabas did reconcile and that Paul even went on to minister with John Mark later in life, but even that is another glimpse into his humanity. He had a wrong estimation of John Mark’s usefulness, which he had to address later (2 Tim 4:11). How many of us have wrongly estimated somebody based on our limited experience of them?
Friends, Paul was a human, filled with the Holy Spirit and able to do some incredible things as a result, but he never escaped his humanity.
You are a human. God knows that (Ps 103.) Don’t try to escape the very human parts of your humanity, but rather ask God to fill you with the Spirit that you can find peace and comfort even in the midst of messy relationships, painful conflicts, fickle senses of self, and the quiet repetition of your ordinary life. You aren’t supposed to escape the very thing that God made you. You don’t get to bypass the life that you have. Live it for His glory, and for a legacy like Paul’s who devoted his ordinary humanity to an extraordinary God.
The music this week is from Marcus Mumford’s remarkable new album. This song, How, recorded with Brandi Carlisle, is my favorite off the record and deals with his process of recovery and forgiveness regarding the abuse he experienced (trigger warning) as a child.
It also has a verse that is a direct reference to Nehemiah, which I love.
I'm afraid it will take a time
I make my case to the Shahanshah as I bring him his cup
And I tell him the best I can what I need
To build the walls of my Jerusalem back up
See you Sunday.
Ross
