Aug 28 2019 Acts 27: 9-26

Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and thereby avoided this damage and loss;

Paul is on a ship on another journey to proclaim the good news of Jesus. During this adventure, he’s on a ship in stormy seas. At the beginning of his adventure, he tells his fellow travelers that the journey would be treacherous, with loss of property and loss of life. But they listen instead to the captain, and proceed. Sure enough, the weather is awful, and they are tossed all about. They throw over cargo, and eventually their food, trying to not sink.

When they’d reached the place where they’d given up all hope of being saved, Paul stands and tells them that according to an angel who’d visited him in the night, they will all survive, but the ship will not.

Except Paul starts his ‘you’ll all be saved’ speech by saying the equivalent of I told you so. And, initially his prediction was wrong; up until that point, no humans had been lost. And his fellow travelers chose to listen to the captain.

If I’d been on that boat, I probably wouldn’t have believed Paul either. Why would you, when the captain was contradicting him? And Paul’s warning sounded a little like the chicken crying, “the sky is falling”.

Are we to take from this that we should not listen to smart, trained professionals, and rather listen to the person without any standing or any reason to be weighing in on this? I cannot imagine that’s the point. In this case, Paul is acting like a human being, who offers his 2 cents, unbidden, uneducated, and in this case, unheeded.

Paul demonstrates his human being-ness further when he stands amidst the pummeled ship and crew and says, I told you so. Really, Paul? Again, I must admit that I’d be likely to do the same thing – to crow about my right-ness, at all the wrong times.

Unlike Jesus, who we believe to be both fully human and fully divine, Paul is all human all the time. So are all the people he encounters, including his followers, his jailers, the captain of the ship, and those who free him. After reading about fully-divine Jesus, Paul’s story is too mundane, and far too human for my comfort. They say that when you find something unpleasant in another person, it’s often a reflection of something you find unpleasant in yourself. I’d rather Paul be more divine and above petty humanness; I’d rather I be more divine and above petty humanness.

This morning, I’m thinking about how hard it is to be a Jesus-follower, when I’m fully human, full of human pettiness, and a need to be right. And despite his fully-humanness, and his pesky nature, Paul did great things. It’s not that he wasn’t human; Paul was able to persist in his mission despite his flaws and the flaws of everyone around him. It’s much less pleasant to read about Paul, and harder to sort out what he did that was God-inspired versus ego-inspired. But that’s where we are now. Today, I hope to keep my eye on the God-inspired, rather than the ego-inspired.