From Facts that Undergird Life by Paul Scherer (New York: Harper & Brothers: 1938).

STRENGTH MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS
by Paul Scherer

My strength is made perfect in weakness.— 2 Corinthians 11:9

THAT'S the answer Paul got when he prayed about his thorn. It's enough for you to have my grace; my power makes itself fully felt when there is no other support.

Now a proper sermon should take that up and proceed along it for twenty minutes or so, as though it were an old acquaintance known to everybody; at the end one would withdraw into some conclusion, and likely enough run the risk of leaving the text itself like a perfect stranger on your doorstep, well analyzed, but never quite introduced! I want to say something here, if I can, that will serve no other purpose than to introduce the text.

Let me begin back yonder somewhere, with this: that the world is too strong for us. There's one of the secrets of life, like my text, that we're bound to wind up with. We learn it sooner or later by being battered about and growing old and dying. Why not get a running jump on living and start with it? The world is too strong for us!

I cannot see that anything is more manifest. One might almost be bold enough to say that there would never have been any religion at all if men and women, alone and unaided, had ever been able to cope successfully, in any real and vital fashion, with the victories and defeats and difficulties of this queer place where they have been set down to live their lives! The savage knew very well that he couldn't cope with them. And I dare submit to you today, in this year of our Lord 1938, that we aren't a great deal better off! The only mastery we have won is a sort of fictitious mastery that looks all right, but when things come to the pinch it doesn't honestly work; not if we are frank about it. We can protect ourselves from storms, more or less, and immunize ourselves against a few diseases. We can get from place to place with amazing rapidity, and see and talk around the world. We can explode molecules and theories with equal facility. But about all that any of it amounts to is that we are free to live bored and restless lives for a longer time, with greater efficiency, and over a wider area than ever before!

How the sect that calls itself Humanist has been able to build a religion out of its confidence in humanity, and in what humanity can do to make the world a better place, is more than I have ever been able to figure out. There simply is no mastery worth talking about in any of the realms that count! We have beautiful symbols, yes; towering notions of the higher life: and from generation to generation we continue to make a mess of them. There is the lady who carries a torch on that island in the harbor of New York and calls herself Liberty. She's lovely, as an ideal; but she presides today over as driven a people as any, driven by fear, by poverty, by wealth, by pleasure, the only redeeming feature of it all being that we can vote for the particular kind of vexation of spirit we like best, if we are willing to take the trouble! And there is that other lady called Justice, who is blindfolded and carries a sword and a pair of scales. Recently we blasphemed her fair name in the sovereign state of New Jersey by staging one of the coarsest shows of which a civilized country was ever guilty, and letting it pass for the Hauptmann trial. The verdict that was rendered was not properly subject to your scrutiny or to mine; but the commercialized horror of the crowds and the newspapers and the motion pictures and the radio were. But the great American public, far from raising a very hurricane of protest against all such wanton cheapness, shrugged its shoulders and went on grumbling about the much more important real estate situation! If we want to worry, why not worry about the right things?

These are only a few of the reasons I have—I could recite a score! —for submitting to you that humanity is still in a world that's too strong for it. Its attempts to get the upper hand have never yielded any very impressive results. Some hundred years back Horace Mann prophesied in Boston, with his accustomed eloquence, that crime would be wiped out, slowly but surely, with the increase in size and number of tax-supported schools; and slowly but surely his prophecy has been stultified by the facts. You should see how healthy the growth of prisons has been since we took over with more enthusiasm our responsibilities in the field of learning!

With still less likelihood of any success, we have of late begun again steadily to push forward our experiments in the way of peace by this fool's logic of preparedness, which consists in getting ready for war. Battleships shall be the pledge of our national security. We shall build them bigger, forever bigger, and sail the seven seas, until we bring home that dove with the olive-branch in her mouth!

No; some of us have conceived such a lack of confidence in humanity and in what it can do that we are willing at last to establish our religion) not on the faith that we have in the unfettered spirit of man, but precisely on the faith that we haven't: which indeed is what Jesus of Nazareth quite obviously did. "Without me," these were his words, "ye can do nothing!" And all the common sense of history is on his side! The world is too strong for us. It would be a great saving of time if we could start out with that, instead of winding up with it. We'd get a tremendous jump that way on this business of living!

But let's go on. Next, if we want to be consecutive in our thinking, and make a bit of progress toward this text, we ought to dismiss our futile attempts at power and look for a moment at the power of God. Wherever you come on it you will find it making itself felt through what passes with us for weakness! His ideas of strength seem to be altogether different from ours!

Here for instance is the world of Nature. What impresses us with the might that's there is the occasional outburst, the earthquake, the storm, that plays havoc with our little selves. Whittier writes of it in Snow-Bound:

The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.

If I may put it to you like this, what impresses God about it, I think, so that he might well smile in the sense of his own eternal adequacy, is the power within his world which is not of the earthquake or of the wind or of the fire, but of a likeness to some still, small voice,—holding silently the stars in their orbits for a child to lie awake and gurgle at; pressing up in blades of grass for cattle to tramp down, ripping it off in great mouthfulls and crunching it all night long in the meadow.

Power! We paint you a picture of the Pennsylvania's Red Arrow Express, or whatever it is, crossing the bridge near Harrisburg, with the wheels spinning, and the steam spitting from the cylinders, and the smoke billowing out from the funnel in black clouds. That's Power, say we! And God's symbols look so helpless: a midnight sky; the green carpet of the spring! Whose symbols are better?

I remember reading an account of how Mr. Einstein was talking one day about atomic energy. He said there was enough in a lump of coal the size of a pea to take the Mauretania across the Atlantic and back. A handful of snow would heat a large apartment house for a year. The pasteboard in a small railroad ticket would run a heavy passenger train several times around the globe. A teaspoonful of water would raise a load of a million tons to the top of a mountain six miles high. No doubt we should laugh out loud if some artist were to put these things on canvas and label them Power; but science wouldn't laugh! The only God she can guess at works that way!

Or take it of human life. That's more to the point. Here are Hitler and Mussolini, shall we say, both of them symbols of the world's growing hunger for a leadership that does things. We in America have our own heroes whose virtues we annually extol. It's quite right. And yet, somehow, I carry around a different notion of the way in which God commonly gets things done! He and James Abbott McNeill Whistler once painted the portrait of a mother, you remember it, sitting there in a long chair with her hands folded and her face and body resting toward the right. You never saw a figure of lonelier helplessness, crying out to every fibre of manhood in you for protection! And one says it in the same breath, you never saw a figure with a more appalling measure of all there is in human life that's strong: a patience, and a love, and a hope, that won't ever let go! We call it weakness, and for power prefer perhaps Peale's romantic portrait of Washington: God calls it strength, and keeps on sending people like many a man's mother into this work-a-day world of ours to hold it together!

All through the Book there he gets things done by an odd galaxy of men and women that never could have gone very far by themselves: an Abraham coming out of the East with wondering eyes; a Moses stammering his way through a wilderness; an Elijah pitted against a queen and a thousand priests; an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, standing solidly, if alone, in a nation's face; and at the end, a young Jew on a Roman cross! Was there ever such a token of utter weakness and abysmal rout given humanity as those two beams of wood with their quivering freight of a manhood not yet in its prime? It's the weakness that's the theme of the Book; yes, and of this whole symphony, in minor key, called human life—swelling to its climax on Calvary, there to be transmuted into the only pledge you and I have to cherish of God's resistless power to cleanse and hold and recreate the very stuff a soul is made or! Writes Browning, as he comes once more upon that eternal paradox of Majesty with nails in its hands and feet:

I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage—a rage to suffer for mankind,
And re-commence at sorrow.

Ah well, you say, what has it all to do with us? Just this: Christ, with the world still on his heart, isn't asking of us strength. That's something to get hold of in these days of ours when so clearly the world is too strong for us! Since the time when Israel sent out her spies from the wilderness, the call never has been for giants who could spread themselves around through the Promised Land with their thumbs in their armholes! But for a people yonder on the borders of Canaan, bewildered, in their own sight as grasshoppers, if only they will lift up the hands of faith without fear and go in to possess it!

Shall we set it down in plain words? What you and I can do will never amount to much; and nobody can say it with too great an emphasis: the best we have to offer is tainted with the poor self that offers it! But what God can do with the kind of love that refuses to have its feelings hurt; the patience that declines to quit; the hope that begs to be excused, please, from giving up: this is quite beyond your figuring! He can write a Bible with them, and redeem a world!

That's why there's no escape for any of us. It isn't quietism I'm suggesting. There's no getting away and hiding behind our inabilities; no hour in the day, no day in the week, when with a sigh of near-pious regret we may lay aside the dreams we have been cherishing because they are too hard now. For then and just there you meet this text striding down the middle of the road. "My strength is made perfect in weakness." There are no buts, and no ifs, and no althoughs. When the last stanchion has fallen down, and the stays have been chopped out from under you, when your confidence has been completely shattered, and you've conceived a thoroughgoing distrust of everything you've been counting on; when there's nothing left to get you through: then God's ready to start! It's there and just then you'll begin to feel the lift of everlasting arms!

Strong, upstanding, confident people may wriggle and squirm all they like; but there it is. Paul squirmed, too. Something he called a thorn stood there in the very sinews of his apostleship, humiliating him, insinuating its ugly self against all his plans, canceling his hopes one by one, or so it seemed to him, and it wouldn't budge. He tried to wriggle out into some measure of self-reliance three times by way of his prayer. He wanted a little bit of human wholeness under his feet to be a man on! "In God's name," he cried, "let me be free to run, free from this hounding infirmity that holds its nose at my heels!" And all he got on his lonely island of discontent was the hint and murmur of the sea, God's greatness around his incompleteness, round his restlessness God's rest! "It is enough that you have my grace." The word kept whispering itself down through the silence out of heaven; and it didn't seem right! He had preached to others about the weakness that was stronger than strength, and the foolish things that had been chosen to confound the wise; but it wasn't so easy to get hold of, now that his old winged sermon had come home to roost! It was like falling through endless space, getting such an answer as that, there in his closet, behind the closed door! Until the day he struck bottom! You've come up with it now; you've come up with the text! He knelt there, dazed suddenly at the distance he had fallen from his own esteem. But when he struggled up from his knees, it was GOD he had under his feet to be a man on!

"My strength is made perfect in weakness."

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