When Suffering Comes Upon Us Third Sunday in Lent February 24, 2008

(First, read the text for this sermon: Romans 5:1-11)

The season of Lent reminds us of our need to return to the God of grace and compassion. The themes of Lent remind us to return to our baptisms, through which we are included in the church – the community of forgiveness and salvation.

The word for this return is “repentance.”

Because of our sinfulness, we are broken apart from God, and from each other. It is only through the initiative of God that we can be restored. God has taken that initiative, through the death and resurrection of Christ, and through our baptism into that community of grace and forgiveness. Repentance is our response. Repentance means to turn again towards God. It is something we need to do at least every day, so to be restored in forgiveness. Luther teaches that there is daily significance of baptism: that each day the old creature in us must be drowned, so that the new person may rise up, the new person that God created us to be.

All of this is especially difficult when suffering comes upon us.

One theme of Lent is suffering. But let’s think about that. One unhelpful strain among the traditions of Christianity would formed us to think that the Christian life must be a life of suffering. This comes from the Puritan tradition, which has a certain amount of influence on all of us: that the world is evil, and it is sinful to enjoy anything! For instance, have you ever taken a bite of a scrumptious dessert and exclaimed, “This is sinful!” That’s Puritanism! According to that faith tradition, we are to resist the world’s pleasures. We are to suffer.

There’s a wonderful scene about this in the movie, Amistad. The Amistad was a slave ship, and the movie is about the true story of an 1839 mutiny while the ship was traveling towards the Northeast Coast of America. The enslaved Africans on board broke loose from their chains and killed the ship’s crew! But since they couldn’t sail a ship, they were re-captured and imprisoned in Boston until the court could figure out what to do with them. Were they property at this point? Were they free human beings who should be returned to Africa? What makes the movie so powerful is that much of it is told through the perspective of the Africans – and our culture is very strange, when seen through their eyes!

For instance, there is a group of Puritans – fierce abolitionists – who maintain a vigil each day outside the prison, singing hymns. In the scene I love, two of the Africans are gazing out at these strange creatures, and one says to the other, “Why do they look so miserable?”

Well, it’s because they’re suffering! And to someone influenced by this tradition of Christianity, one phrase from this morning’s Romans passage is like giving drugs to an addict: And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings,…

Really? Is Paul teaching that we must be miserable if we are be a follower of Jesus? By implication, is the season of Lent to be a time of entering into Jesus’ sufferings in an intense way – to become really, really miserable?

I think the opposite is true. Suffering comes upon each one of us. When that happens, it is God, through Jesus the Christ, who enters into our suffering.

God is intimately present to us in our humanity. That’s what the Incarnation means for us – that God took on human flesh. And so, it’s not that we don’t boast in our sufferings as if it’s a good thing to suffer! Instead, we are supremely confident in God’s continuing love, even when suffering comes upon us. Rooted in that love, we receive from the Holy Spirit endurance and character and hope in the Easter gospel that carries us through the suffering.

Listen again to what Paul writes to the Jesus people in Rome: Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but 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, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Think of times when suffering has come upon you. When you are suffering, how easy is it to know that peace? That hope? That love of God which has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us?

Often, when suffering comes upon us, it is a special challenge to repent, to turn towards God who restores us in love. Often, when suffering comes upon us, all we can feel is brokenness, despair, distress.

When suffering comes upon us, I really don’t know that it’s possible to repent, to return to the love of God, without the aid of members of the church – the community of compassion that the Holy Spirit calls together. During my weeks in the hospital, for instance, God’s love came to me many times each day – through the touch of particularly caring nurses, through one doctor in particular, through visitors who would hang in there, listening to me without judgment or the need to “fix things,” even when my suffering frightened them. But here’s the kicker. While I was enduring that suffering that had come upon me, I did not see that, in all those instances, God’s love was enfleshed in those people. It took yet another member of the community of compassion called together by the Holy Spirit to point that out to me, weeks later, as I was processing it all!

Perhaps you have had a similar experience, when you have endured a period of suffering that has come upon you. A health crisis. The grief that comes when a spouse dies suddenly. The painful work of caring for an invalid spouse or parent, who is suffering himself. Walking into the room of a parent whose dementia causes her to forget that you visited her last week, and who asks you with anger, “Why haven’t you been visiting me?” A new boss who criticizes you for even the most trivial things.

How easy is it to be sustained by God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, when suffering comes upon you? The first thing we need to repent of is our cultures’ idolatry of self-sufficiency! That’s for sure! [W]e have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; but there are plenty of times when you and I cannot stand on our own, and so we need others in the community of compassion called together in the Holy Spirit. We come again to boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but 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, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

It is not that suffering is good! It is that God restores our brokenness and holds us tightly when suffering comes upon us – as we are open to each other; as we hold each other tightly in prayer and compassion; as we turn again into God’s love; and we regain confidence in the hope and promise that suffering ends in Easter!

This is stuff of great depth and profundity, isn’t it?

Blessings on your continuing journey through Lent.

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia