As I sat working on this sermon yesterday afternoon, I honestly had no idea what the first words out of my mouth this morning would be. Between active troops on the streets of downtown LA; accusations and counter-accusations between the governor and the mayor on one hand and the federal government on the other; NO KINGS rallies around the country; destructive flooding in Texas taking lives; state lawmakers wounded and killed in Minnesota; new and escalating bombardments between Israel and Iran – not to mention the scheduled military parade in Washington, DC that at that point had yet to take place, I was clueless as to where to start…so I decided to start with the “Thanksgiving for the Nation” that’s found on p. 838 of the Prayer Book.
This thanksgiving is a litany, so I invite you to turn to page 838 and join me in prayer:
Almighty God, giver of all good things: We thank you for the natural majesty and beauty of this land. They restore us, though we often destroy them.
Heal us.
We thank you for the great resources of this nation. They make us rich, though we often exploit them.
Forgive us.
We thank you for the men and women who have made this country strong. They are models for us, though we often fall short of them.
Inspire us.
We thank you for the torch of liberty which has been lit in this land. It has drawn people from every nation, though we have often hidden from its light.
Enlighten us.
We thank you for the faith we have inherited in all its rich variety. It sustains our life, though we have been faithless again and again.
Renew us.
Help us, O Lord, to finish the good work here begun. Strengthen our efforts to blot out ignorance and prejudice, and to abolish poverty and crime. And hasten the day when all our people, with many voices in one united chorus, will glorify your holy Name. Amen.
Here on this Trinity Sunday, Father’s Day, and Flag Day weekend – only two weeks out from the recent Memorial Day weekend when we honored and remembered those who have died in the service of our country even as we grieve for those taken from us in other ways; on this day we hear Paul say to the members of the Christian community in Rome, “[W]e boast in the hope of sharing in the glory of God. And not only that, we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us….”
Or, in the phrasing of the Rev. Eugene Peterson’s “Message” translation, which I admit can sound kind of cringy sometimes, “We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged.”
Sufferings to endurance to perseverance to hope; troubles to patience to virtue to expectancy; different phrasings to be sure, but both of these progressions are too pat, I think; they’re just a little too easy. Paul sounds glib here, and his glibness bothers me, particularly in the face of so much suffering, both around the world and in our own hearts, that is still so raw.
Now, in all fairness to Paul, in this passage he’s focusing on the new relationship with God which is ours through faith in Jesus; he’s not developing a formal treatment or a formal theology of suffering. What he’s listing is a summary; it’s the outline of a process in our newly-redeemed life, with suffering, endurance, character, and hope as the points in the outline.
The problem here is that Paul’s outline is about God’s “already” kingdom, but we’re still living in the “not yet” world. He’s talking about the spiritual reality of the new age while we’re still living under the physical conditions of the old; and in this old, not-yet-new age, where floods and bombs still kill and destroy, and families and lives are still torn apart, we don’t live in outlines or in the points of outlines. Our lives, and our sufferings, happen between the points.
So what can we do to flesh out this process? How do we get from suffering to endurance, much less to perseverance and hope? When we’re hemmed in on every side with troubles and there’s no relief in sight, where does passionate patience come from, and why should patience come to us instead of despair?
In June of 1983, a young man named Eric Wolterstorff, who was the 25 year old son of philosophy professor Nicholas Wolterstorff, died in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. Four years later, Nicholas published a small but very powerful book in honor of Eric called Lament for a Son. In this book he shares the depth of his grief at Eric’s loss, and his struggle to reconcile this loss with his faith.
The dictionary says that to suffer is “to undergo or experience pain, distress, injury, loss, or anything unpleasant,” but I don’t think that definition says enough. Suffering also has a spiritual component, because suffering is dehumanizing. Far more than pain that alerts us to an injury, as severe and unpleasant as that may be, suffering grinds us down on a daily basis; it assaults our soul, and it threatens to rob us of who we are.
Suffering is also imposed upon us, usually without our consent. “What is suffering?” asks Wolterstorff. “When something prized or loved is ripped away or never granted – work, someone loved, recognition of one’s dignity, life without physical pain – that is suffering. Or rather,” he says, “that’s when suffering happens. What it is, I do not know….Suffering is a mystery as deep as any in our existence….Suffering keeps its face hid from each while making itself known to all.” (89)
Another facet of suffering’s mystery and pain, of course, is suffering’s uneven distribution among us. Whether we have consented to it or not, sooner or later we all do experience at least some suffering…but we don’t experience it equally; and this inequality only serves to increase our sense of isolation, our sense of “otherness;” of being unfairly singled out by fate, or by life – or by God – when the suffering is ours.
“I’ve become an alien in the world,” Wolterstorff writes, “shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.” (51)
In Scripture, the situation of Job and the Passion of Jesus are, first, both experiences of extreme physical suffering, as Job’s entire body is covered with sores and Jesus is tortured and crucified. They are also experiences of extreme emotional suffering: Job loses all of his children, all of his wealth, and the respect of his friends. Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, denied by Peter, and mocked and spit upon by the crowds. These are experiences of extreme spiritual suffering as each of these men feels that he has been unfairly abandoned by God.
“I don’t deserve this,” Job cries out to God. “I accuse you of not being just! Show yourself, and come answer me!”
“My God, my God,” cries Jesus on the cross, “why have you forsaken me?”
Towards the end of the Book of Job, God does in fact come to state God’s case, and God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, claiming in essence God’s freedom to be God. “Where were you,” God asks, “when I created the earth?”
Job gets no answers, no explanation for his suffering from God, and what’s important for us to understand here is that in the midst of his suffering, Job has exercised his freedom just as much as God has, because Job has been free to end their relationship; he’s been free to “curse God and die,” as his wife thought he should…but he hasn’t done so. It may have been more his anger against God than anything else that kept him there, but even so, Job has voluntarily stayed in relationship with God. He doesn’t stay because he’s never known trouble, he doesn’t stay because he’s never thought about leaving; Job has stayed in relationship with God because he has chosen to be faithful. He has chosen to be faithful to God, in spite of his suffering.
As the fully human carpenter from Nazareth, Jesus has also been free; free to let the cup of the Passion pass him by. When God didn’t take away the cup in response to Jesus’ prayer in the garden after the Last Supper, Jesus could have chosen to forego it himself. He could have chosen to gather the disciples and get out of Dodge; he could have chosen to confess to Pilate, to try to deal for prison time instead of the cross. But the human Jesus exercises his freedom and chooses to stay, chooses to be faithful and obedient to God in spite of the suffering to come.
And at the same time, in Jesus the Son, the Incarnate Word, God is exercising freedom too. This time the freedom is God’s freedom to have become incarnate in Jesus in the first place; the freedom of God voluntarily choosing to send God’s Spirit upon Mary, who herself has exercised her freedom in saying “yes” to God and agreeing to receive God’s Spirit.
Jesus could have said “no” to the cross; Mary could have said “no” to God; and God could have said “no” to all of us; but God didn’t, because of love; and in God’s love for each of us, God honors our freedom. God wants us to say “yes,” God wants us to love God back voluntarily, independent of the amount of suffering, or the lack of suffering, in our lives – but this kind of love needs an even playing field; and the only way for God to level the field was through the Incarnation.
In “Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World,” Dorothy Sayers writes, “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – [God] had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game [God] is playing with His creation, [God] has kept His own rules and played fair. [God] can exact nothing from man that [God] has not exacted from Himself. [God] has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death….[God] was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.” (in “Where is God…”, Yancy, 181)
God has played fair with us in the Incarnation. In Jesus, God has suffered with us and suffered for us, and this makes all the difference in our own growth from troubles to patience, from suffering to endurance, because what God has done means we’re not alone in our suffering; we’re not alone because God has chosen, and continues to choose, to be compassionate; to suffer with us.
“The definition of compassion itself,” writes one theologian, “suggests the need to begin with the experience of suffering. While the two Latin components of the word ‘com’ and ‘passio’ are taken to mean to suffer with, the Latin ‘patior’ is accurately translated ‘to experience,’ so that compassion means to allow ourselves to experience with someone else what he or she is experiencing by putting ourselves in the place of another. Compassion is not simply an emotional response to the joy or pain of the other; compassion requires the ability to move beyond feeling and thinking to action.” (LP, Suffering, 39)
And as God is compassionate with us, even in our suffering God calls us also to be compassionate: Love one another as I have loved you, Jesus says; love one another with the love that shares each other’s suffering. Love your neighbor as yourself.
“Accepted suffering leads one out of oneself toward the other,” this author continues. “It invokes love and compassion; it implies growth in self. It ultimately brings about real communion….God does not instigate our suffering, nor did God decree the sufferings of Jesus. Rather, God participates in them.” (Ibid.)
Through experiencing and exercising compassion in the community of faith and in the world, we do move through our process, through the points of Paul’s outline and as we do so, we learn that we’re not “passing through” this process as much as we are incorporating it into ourselves; each tear, each cry, each glimpse of the tears of God, each act of compassion received and given, becomes part of who we are, part of who we shall be, part of what we offer for the healing of the world – especially for the healing of today’s world.
Back at Trinity, one of my former parishioners is a gifted seamstress and craftsperson, and she has one of those computerized sewing machines that can do all sorts of embroidery from patterns. At one point she made for the church what she hoped would be a pulpit hanging. The hanging in question was a large embroidered picture of the Risen Jesus in a stained glass window format; but in this picture, produced by the pattern, the Risen Lord was wearing surprisingly contemporary sandals that covered his feet and his hands were unscathed…and I said, “We can’t use that, not like it is.”*
Why couldn’t we use it? Because Jesus was raised with his wounds intact; he was resurrected with holes in his hands and his feet and a gash in his side, and according to John’s Gospel, it was because of his wounds, by means of his wounds, that the disciples recognized him in the first place. Jesus’ wounds became an essential part of who he was and who he is, and he cannot be our Savior without them.
The wounds of Jesus – the wounds of God – these are the basis of our hope in God’s future that Paul talks about, the basis of our confident expectation as to our place in that future. Because of the suffering of God, our “already” future with God is assured; and in this present “not yet” time, although our suffering may pierce our hearts and drive us down, because of the suffering and the compassion of God, because of the companionship of God in our suffering; because of all this, at the end of the day, our suffering will not overcome us. Amen.
*After some cosmetic adjustments, the hanging made its debut on Trinity’s pulpit.