Pain and Gain-Sermon on May 30, 2010

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.

On that day you will ask nothing of me. Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.

Sermon: Pain and Gain

by The Reverend Doreen Oughton

The gospel reading this morning comes from what has been referred to as Jesus’ farewell discourse. The discourse is four chapters long, four chapters of Jesus’ words of caution, comfort, advice and instruction to the disciples and prayer on their behalf. It takes place on his last night with them, after Judas has left to carry out his betrayal, and before they head out to the garden. He has told them several times already about the Advocate that will come to them when he leaves. There is more that they need to know, he says, but he can see that they cannot bear it right now. The teaching that the Advocate will give them will be his teaching, just like having him there. But he acknowledges that there will still be a sense of loss for them. He knows that they will mourn and weep, that they will suffer in his death. But he promises that the suffering won’t be the last thing, that it won’t take root and take them over. He promises that the suffering will lead to joy. It’s not just that the pain will end, and then there will be room for joy. The pain actually leads to joy, the suffering will be transformed into joy. The suffering, the source of pain, is the raw material that is fashioned into joy.

And in our responsive reading, we heard from Paul who tells the church in Rome that once one’s life is in the hands of Christ, one will have peace and hope. This peace and hope does not spare one from suffering. Indeed, Paul seems to say that suffering is part of the peace and hope of Christ. Suffering is something one can boast in and understand as part of putting one’s life in Christ’s hands. Paul says that suffering builds endurance, endurance builds character, and character builds hope.

So, is suffering a good thing? Is it always a good thing? Is it something we ought to seek out? Christian saints and mystics through the ages have sought physical suffering to demonstrate their love for God and their wish to identify with Christ. They have denied themselves basic necessities such as food and sleep far beyond a cleansing fast. They have worn hairshirts – very itchy or even sharp, piercing garments – and practiced other forms of self-mortification. I have always been puzzled by such things. Could this be what God wants for us or from us? Is this the kind of suffering Paul says we should boast in? What connection would this have to the pain that will be transformed into joy that Jesus speaks of?

And then there are the Christian martyrs, people who were put to death, as I understand it, for proclaiming their faith. Again, another puzzler for me. It’s so far removed for me, to imagine someone being hunted down, asked if they believe in Christ as their Savior, then killed for saying yes. I even watched a Veggie Tales episode that dramatized such an event, with a quick rescue at the end so there was no killing. But the show encouraged this sort of bravery and faithful dedication. I have to admit that I was not moved to awe, but only shock. I can’t imagine teaching my children to stand there and say yes to something that would get them killed. I keep thinking, “lie, lie, lie.” Who would be hurt by this denial?! God will understand! I mean really, does God really need someone’s testimony to a person or group who is so hostile about it? What about Jesus’ advice not to cast pearls before swine, to shake the dust off your feet when you meet people who don’t want to hear about the good news?

Now I can’t speak for anyone else. Perhaps some are called to such expressions of faith as bodily self-mortification, or even called to face death in their unwillingness to deny their beliefs. But personally, I don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s what Jesus had in mind, nor Paul. Our bible study groups have been looking at the gospel of Mark, and it is loaded with instances of Jesus telling people to keep quiet about who he is. He doesn’t even want to proclaim his divinity. He doesn’t actually deny it, but evades the question with authorities, redirects their questions about it, and rebukes people who would run around proclaiming him as the Messiah. Yet he wasn’t trying to avoid suffering. Jesus faced his suffering with minimal resistance. I’m sure he knew what he could say that would pacify the Jewish leaders who wanted him executed, and it wouldn’t just be the denial of his divinity. They used the charge of blasphemy against him to have grounds for execution, but that wasn’t what really got to them. What really got them going was his persistent challenge to their power and authority.

All three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have Jesus issuing an invitation to people to take up their crosses and follow him. He invites us to go with him into suffering. So again I ask, is suffering good, something to be sought out? Or if we are in a situation which causes us suffering, perhaps an abusive relationship, a job that we abhor, a painful physical condition, are we to endure it and assume it will bring us closer to God? I have heard of people in very difficult marriages who seek spiritual counsel and are told, well, accept it with as much grace as you can, this is just your cross to bear. They have been advised of the importance of self-sacrifice. To me, this is not loving, Christ-inspired advice, and I think a misuse of the notion of sacred suffering. I can’t think of a religious framework where it would be appropriate to tell someone else they need to endure suffering. In fact, I think a huge part of the call of Christians is to help alleviate suffering for others.

My thought is that suffering is less endorsed or encouraged by God or Jesus than it is just acknowledged as a reality of our condition. We live in this world, and so we will suffer. There is no avoiding it. Christianity goes straight to the heart of this truth. We will suffer. We don’t need to seek it out. We will lose people dear to us as the disciples lost Jesus. We will experience some physical pain or impairment or limitation. We will have our feelings hurt in large and small ways, and we will have our hearts broken. We don’t need hairshirts or pebbles in our shoes to remind us that life hurts, that Jesus suffered in his life, and that we must suffer in ours. The transformation from pain into joy happens in the way we deal with this truth.

Twentieth century theologian John Yoder says that the only suffering connected with Christ’s cross is the suffering caused by actively chosen faithfulness, and not the suffering we endure because of difficult personal circumstances, family, financial, frustration of personal fulfillment, etc. But I am not sure it is so easy to separate the two, or that even if we can, that personal suffering can’t also be transformed and bring us closer to God. Paul talked about how suffering produces endurance which produces character which produces hope. And that kind of movement can happen, I believe, most definitely through difficult personal circumstances.

I hope this isn’t too much of an over share, but when I was much younger I was in a relationship that turned physically abusive. I minimized it for awhile, I blamed myself, I felt ashamed, I hid it from others. Even before the physical abuse began, my partner had been quite verbally abusive, calling me names, putting me down. That was harder to hide since it was done in front of other people. I did feel embarrassed, but I also had the feeling that I was being martyred in some way, that I was suffering for a larger cause, that the suffering I endured was admirable to others. Surely at least I would look like a saint next to him. I was able to get some wonderful counseling about this and got out of the marriage. I was able to find other ways to feel good about myself. I was not connected to church at that time, but if I did think about what God might think about my leaving the marriage, I figured it was alright. I imagined it was hard for God to see me suffering so needlessly. It didn’t help anyone for me to go through that, and it certainly wasn’t good for my partner to carry on unimpeded.

As much of a positive thing it was for me to leave that situation, I don’t think it was transformed into joy the way Jesus talked about for many, many years. And the way that happened was by suffering over it again. At the time I was going through it, I was pretty numb. I operated on automatic pilot to a certain degree, one step in front of the other, finding a new home, getting my stuff out, etc., and then I ran headlong into a new life. Eventually I started a new career, going to school for counseling, and it was through that work that this suffering was transformed. It was just a pamphlet on domestic violence that set off the transformation. As I read through the signs of abuse, I remembered. More than remembered, I felt like I was there again in my head. It really got right to my core that that had happened to me, and that deep acknowledgment hurt, it hurt a lot. But working it through, doing my weeping and mourning, opened me up in a whole new way. My compassion grew tremendously, my heart seemed bigger, and I rejoiced that I had made in through in a way I never had rejoiced at the time it happened. My suffering was transformed into joy. This was not, in the words of Yoder, the suffering of actively chosen faithfulness, but my own personal suffering that was transformed. Then again, it was a very spiritual experience and grew out of my call to help other people. So maybe it was my unchurched, not-yet Christian embodiment of faithfulness to a call.

What does it mean to suffer for one’s faith? To me, it is not about creating random physical discomfort for oneself, it is not about being willing to declare your belief in Christ even in the face of persecution, but is about being willing to act on your faith in the face of persecution. I believe declarations of belief matter much less to Jesus than following him in challenging the powers and authorities that oppress people. I believe that our willingness to see as Jesus would see, to hear what Jesus would hear, to act as Jesus would act towards people will bring us more persecution and suffering than saying we are believers. And the persecution won’t only come from outside of ourselves, but will be an inside job as well. We will be constantly tempted to back away from that stance, to ridicule it, to say it is the viewpoint of a sucker, a fool.

There is a deep and rich theology of the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross that posits that it helps us to see the way the world scapegoats people, see the way we unite around common enemies. The cross points to the reality that these common enemies are victims of our need to scapegoat. If you are interested in learning more about this idea, please let me know, but for purposes of this sermon, I just want to say that part of Christ-inspired suffering is the ability to recognize the scapegoat, even when they look like enemies. On this Sunday closest to Memorial Day, we can recall the period of time during and after the Vietnam War when soldiers were scapegoated. People who made a meaningful sacrifice based on love of their country were ridiculed and criticized and painted as the enemy. They were scapegoated.

I believe that suffering for Christ means letting our compassion grow boundlessly. It means speaking truth to power, and speaking truth in love. It means seeing our enemies through the lens of love. It means remembering that God loves the people of Iraq and Korea and Afghanistan as much as he loves the people of America. It means remembering that God loves the people who are in America illegally as much as he loves the people who were born and raised here. It means remembering that God loves the BP Petroleum executives and workers. So if we are disturbed about any of these situations, Christ calls us to speak up, but to do it with love in our hearts.

Suffering for our faith means being willing to challenge our own notions about who is the enemy. It means that even if we truly believe that someone is against us, we are to be for them, we are to love them. I’m not saying it means to do what someone else wants you to do, or to enable people to do things that are destructive, but it does mean that you must see them with the compassion of Christ, the one who died a painful and humiliating death for all of us, for those who judged and condemned him, for those who betrayed him, for those who abandoned him, for those who mocked him and beat him. He prayed for God’s forgiveness for those people. His plan all along was that the Advocate would transform the suffering of his apostles to joy, and to transform the suffering of everyone, every player in his story and every one of us, into joy. May it be so.