Sermon: The High Calling to Suffer

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The High Calling to Suffer

By Charles Rush

March 4, 2001

hatma Gandhi studied law at Oxford University and planned to have a simple, respectable career when he returned to South Africa. His long passage home was without event until he crossed the boarded a train in his native home. The trains were segregated and Gandhi naturally sat in the “Whites Only” section. He had, after all, been in a pretty much “Whites Only” world for the last decade during his years as a student in England. He had, after all, been educated to become a proper gentleman as well as a scholar. (He was buttoned up that day in a bow tie, looking as crisp as Cary Hardy or Squire Knox). More than that, as he would later recount, he had read the New Testament in a religion course at college and was impressed with the teaching of Jesus in general, particularly the idea that we are all children of God.

The conductor on the train that day was tired and curt. Maybe he was just having a bad day. But history changed because of him. As he was collecting tickets, he asked Mr. Gandhi to move cars to the car for “Coloreds”. Gandhi protested. The conductor cut him off, telling him he was not White. Gandhi refused to leave. The conductor grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him off the train in front of the other passengers who looked on in embarrassment. The conductor had ripped his crisp new suit and soiled the pants when he hit the ground. Gandhi was humiliated. He took some time on the platform to collect himself and recovery his dignity, such as it was.

Humiliation morphed into anger that morphed into indignation. Upon return to his home town, he was forced to register for a pass, since all Colored and Indians were required to have a pass in order to travel across county lines. Whites, of course, could travel freely. It was then that Gandhi realized that he had met the demonic. It was not a scary ghost but a faceless bureaucracy whose name was legion.

Gandhi then followed in the way of Jesus. He knew that if he was a child of God, he could not participate in an unjust system of apartheid. His conscience would not allow him to do it. On the other hand, he would not attack such a system with revolutionary violence because to do so was to perpetuate the cycle of unjust violence, even as one protested against it. Instead he chose to resist the system through non-violent protest that would highlight its moral corruption.

In a public place, he gathered a small contingent of followers. They lit a fire in an ordinary garbage barrel. One at a time, they walked up and dropped their passes in the fire to burn. As soon as the police saw what they were doing, they tried to stop them. But the protesters simply continued to walk around the officers, up to the barrels and drop in their passes. Eventually, the officers clubbed the protesters to get them to stop. But they stood back up slowly, continued to walk towards the barrels, and drop in their passes.

Surely, this violence against innocent men standing up for their personal dignity must have burdened the conscience of all but the most hardened officers. The officers were stopping anarchy, true. But, in order to do it, they had to strike down unarmed men who were merely standing for the same political and spiritual rights that the officers presumed themselves to have by virtue of their birth.

Gandhi would eventually return to the spiritual roots of Hinduism because he thought this was appropriate for the recovery of identity for Indians in their struggle to gain independence from British Imperial rule. But he would later say that his original idea for non-violent resistance came from his reading of the New Testament. It is a reminder that maybe, just maybe, religion courses in college have their place. More seriously, it is an important reminder that there is a spiritual power in simply reading the Gospels, encountering Jesus for the first time.

Paul says in Philippians “I press on toward the goal for the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (v.14). And he is clear about what that entails. He says “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (v. 10). Paul is realistic here in a way that it is important for us to remember at some point during the year. And this is really the point of Lent that we begin with this Sunday and continue through Easter in mid-April.

There are two levels to the Christian life. The introductory level is that of grace. It is the recognition that God loves us, that each of us is a child of God, and that the intention of God for our lives is to fulfill our higher being of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love. It is a very important insight. We cannot achieve our fullest potential unless we are confident we are loved and accepted. Only then can we become spiritually and emotionally expansive people.

But there is a second part of the Christian life. It is a deeper, more mature level. It is what we gradually grow into if we take Jesus seriously and commit ourselves to trying to follow in his way- to becoming disciples.

And the point it this. If you follow in the way of Jesus, if you allow the Spirit of God to fill you with love and goodness, you will beckon forth evil eventually and its name is legion. The how of the encounter is not important, nor is the causation. But, when that encounter takes place, you will suffer in proportion to your ability to be filled with powerless love. There is a very real sense in which we are called to share the sufferings of Jesus if we take Christian discipleship to it mature fulfillment. It is not to be avoided. It is inevitable.

We live in an era of tremendous prosperity. It is an age of instant gratification. It is a time of technological control. This is so pronounced in our culture that our children could get the idea that in the near future, we should be able to do away with accidents and tragedies altogether. We should be able to minimize pain to the point that it is veritably non-existent. The era of suffering is nearly over.

It is because of this that the question of innocent suffering is the theological sine qua non of our time. It is the one question that my confirmation students can be counted on to ask every year, ‘why did God create a world in which there is suffering at all, let alone innocent suffering?' We are simply uncomfortable with suffering because we have been so successful at limiting it. It is not inconceivable today to have people at mid-life who have never experienced serious tragedy, death or loss yet in their life. Often when it comes, it is something of a shock. That is why, it is not unsurprising to have tragedy or suffering of any kind turn into a serious crisis, including a crisis of faith.

By contrast, I was reading the diary of a woman who lived during the Civil War. She lost her brother in battle. She lost three of her seven children to diseases in childhood. The entire county where she lived had seen a major battle, the fields all torn apart, most anything worth having appropriated by one of the armies in the battle. She describes all these things in her diary in the most matter of fact way. The thing that struck me was the fact that she never questioned the reality of suffering. In no way did she think she was singled out for punishment or that she had been given a lot that was intolerable for any human to bear. It never occurred to her to blame God or question God's goodness in the midst of all this calamity. That is because, until very recently, suffering was such an integral and regular part of human existence that it never occurred to anyone to question it in the way that we do today.

We can reasonably assume that the reality of suffering was so taken for granted 3000 years ago that it was not a significant challenge to faith. Today, the question of theodicy is the most often asked question by young people and God is on trial. Why doesn't God control the world like we do with our technological control?

It is a different question than the one that St. Paul addresses himself but it is important to remember that Christians have never taught that the spiritual life brings with it exemption from suffering. Never! Quite the opposite. In Jesus, we learned that pure goodness exposes and highlights that which is unjust. People possessed with demons seek him out in the gospel of John. Scribes and Pharisees try to trick him up in Matthew and end up looking like hypocrites in the process. In all four gospels, Jesus overturns tables in the Temple Mount, a prophetic gesture that exposed their corruption. Herod singled him out for death in Matthew. And in all the gospels, his trial is depicted as rouge justice. He is beaten, torture, and he dies.

I wish I could stand before you and tell you that the higher calling of God in Christ will give them happiness, wealth, success, power, and a big pile of folding money. I wish I could tell them that this special spiritual elixir would fill them with incredible ecstasy and that they were garaunteed a direct merger with the divine. But I cannot tell you this because after we follow Jesus, we will still endure tragedy and hardship, lonliness, anxiety, ill health, and spiritual fatigue. It is important to remember that St. Paul was writing to the Philippians from jail, a jail that he would never leave. He was executed, in no small part for his faith. He had moral and spiritual integrity, yes, but it cost him his life.

This was the higher calling that motivated St. Paul. It was not morbid. The positive side of suffering is spiritual integrity. It is a unity of purpose that comes from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our lives. In the last speech of his life, Martin Luther King was in Memphis to participate in a strike by the garbage workers. By that point in the Civil Rights movement, his life had been threatened many times. He had come to grips with the likelihood of his death.

That night he had the haunting words of faith and resolve in the face of the threat of evil and arbitrary injustice. He said, “I'm here to tell you tonight that I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you but I'm here to tell you that we will get to the promised land. Like any man, I'd like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not worried about that now. I just want to do God's will. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

It is not a morbid thought. It is the positive conviction of faith that stands for something in the midst of compromise and corruption and that ain't all bad. But let's be clear about it. It comes at a considerable cost and it is an elevated spiritual plane that is not easy to achieve. You do not have to seek this out, it will come to you in the fullness of time. Suffering accompanies integrity like taxes follow wealth. Do not be afraid of it. Do not resent it. It is a higher calling and there is a faith and grace that God fills you with to get you through it with dignity and honor. It is not the kind of thing that any of us would wish upon anyone else or even ourselves, but it is a blessing to receive nevertheless and that is the truth. Brothers and sisters, press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. And may peace be with you.

Amen.