Trials for Glory
By Rev Charles Rush
July 22, 2001
1 Peter 1: 3-9
ere is a Broom Hilda Cartoon in which her troll-like, naïve, innocent little friend Irwin puts on a long-tailed formal tuxedo jacket, picks up a conductor's baton and walks into the woods alone.
Irwin steps up on a fallen tree
trunk and begins to wave his arms as if to conduct. There are no musicians,
only rocks, trees and flowers. Soon, musical notes pour from the rocks, trees
and flowers and fill the air. Finally, Irwin turns and says confidently to the reader,
“it's all in there; you just have to work at getting it out.”
We like the idea of getting all we
can out of ourselves, our team, our loved ones, but we are not too hot on it
when it involves serious pain. Truth be told, we Americans have never been very
big on deprivation. In the twenties, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his diary about
walking past a big, liberal Methodist Church in Detroit. The Church sign
announced, “Good Friday Service at Noon: Snappy Music.” He took that sign as an
illustration of all that was wrong with the sentimental liberal Church of the
twenties that simply had no place for sin or suffering in their piety.
The Gospel message actually deals
profoundly with suffering, though it reverses our expectations on the subject.
I Peter gives expression to that reversal. It is precisely out of the joy of
the resurrection that those early Christians found the courage to face radical
evil, to endure all manner of unjust torture, and to stand for the convictions
of their soul come what may.
We come to religion with a different
common sense logic most of the time. We often tried to bind the Almighty making
a pledge that we agree to give God something of large value or personal
sacrifice, if only God will grant us this one thing that we really want. This
is the guilt approach to spirituality.
How foolish we often make ourselves in the process. Think of
the tragic figure of Jephthah in the book of Judges (Judges 11:30 ff.). He has
a pretty typical battle-field faith. He is facing a considerable opposition
with a large, hostile contingent of Ammonites. So he prays to God, “If you will
deliver the Ammonites into my hand, then the first creature that comes of the
door of my house to greet me… I will offer as a whole offering” (11:31). The
logic of the deal is, ‘God, you make a sacrifice for me, I'll make a sacrifice
to you. I need this one.' It is the prayer of desperation when you don't have
any other resources to make something happen and you are afraid. It is
understandable and it is foolish. In Jephthah's case, it was tragic and
pernicious. It turns out that he does win the battle and returns to his home.
Once he gets there, the first thing to come out of his door is his daughter.
Having bound God in this onerous way, he now has to bind his daughter, lest his
own personal integrity be compromised. Like so many A-type male ego's, Jephthah
is unable to stop mid-way in this bind and ask himself, “is this really what
God wants? Is it possible that perhaps I am wrong?” Never asking that question
and hearing no direct prohibition from the Almighty, Jephthah sacrifices his
own daughter. How tragic. Phyllis Trible points out that in this tragic and
foolish story, God never says a word, the implication being that God has
nothing to do with this.
Scholars are not quite sure why that story is in the Bible
but some have suggested that it might be there because of the ancient Phonecian
practice of sacrificing their children to the god Molech. Phonecians are the
people that settled ancient Carthage and they had a colony in the Promised
Land. The Jews called them Canaanites. And they were all around. Every time
some disaster happened, every time there was a famine in the land, every time
there was an outbreak of disease that killed a number of people, the priests of
Molech assured their people that it was a sign of divine wrath and that the
gods needed to be appeased. A sacrifice had to be made. The bigger the offense
to the gods, the bigger the natural calamity, the more costly the sacrifice.
The biggest sacrifice that one could make was a small child. We have unearthed
some of these cemeteries which contain urns with the remains of young children
by the score. It was a very sad period for religion and culture. When I first
saw these urns, I was horrified by the priests that could allow something like
this to go on.
Over the years, I have come to see them in the larger
context, which doesn't make it any less horrible. But I've come to appreciate
the emotional and spiritual desperation that people sometimes come to that leads
them to reach for such an extreme response. One of the more difficult things
that I have to do occasionally is tell someone that a loved one has died. I
remember one night going to the hospital emergency room after a car accident.
The crash involved a young man in his twenties, full of promise, joy and love.
The physicians had a hard time making contact with his young wife. By the time
she got to the hospital, I was already there. That was not a good sign. She was
very upset and scared. She demanded to know how her husband was doing. When the
physician came out and told her that her young husband had died and she was
hysterical. She was pounding the Doctor on the chest saying over and over, “I
will do anything if you bring him back, anything, anything…”
That is where this theology of binding the Almighty is born.
It was born out of desperation, walking in a boundary situation full of fear
and anxiety, with nothing to lose. We are willing to gamble in a big way with
the Almighty because it can't get any worse than right now.
In a desperate situation, the guilt
approach with God seems sensible. We are tempted to think in the real Lenten
times of our lives, that if we just suffer enough, if we go through enough
personal turmoil, then God will be forced to have mercy on us and grant us at
least the one wish of our hearts.
I knew a Jewish family that had a
very sick child and the treatments for this child were long, involved and there
was no guarantee of success. The chances were good that the child would die
young. This family wasn't particularly religious, rarely went to synagogue,
never said Sabbath prayers in their home. And they decided to keep kosher home
all of a sudden and follow the Orthodox approach to religion, hoping, I am sure
though I never asked, that it would make a difference in the courts of the
Almighty, hoping that their prayers for their child would be answered.
The
popularity of this approach continues despite the lottery-like results. Every
high school student makes a prayer like this just before the exam. “Oh God, if
you help me to remember the stuff I didn't study, I promise not to get drunk to
night… maybe just one beer.” Every young man, at one time or another prays, “Oh
God if Jennifer O'Neil goes out with me, I'll go to church for a month… or
three out of four times in the month”. We bargain for pregnancy. We bargain for
our I.P.O.'s but we know it is so silly, we can't even tell our spouse about
it. Deep in our hearts, we Christians know that this approach is foolish and
silly, but we do it anyway, largely because of the lottery like results…
Meaning that there is always someone who knows someone who actually cashed in
on this approach, so it should not be dismissed out of hand.
And just like the lottery, this
approach to God is often accompanied with a lot of exuberance and anger when it
doesn't work. When we don't get what we want, we assume that God let us down.
We think God doesn't exist. It is irrational and no one will ever admit this to
the Minister openly because it is silly. But this is our emotional theology. We
get pissed off and God and decide there is no point to religion anyway and we
leave organized religion behind. Who needs God anyway?
No, the Gospel reverses this
misguided approach. The teaching of Jesus is very nearly the opposite of
bargaining with God, or trying to guilt God into helping us out. The logic of
the gospel is like unto the man who finds a buried treasure on an empty parcel
of land. It is a surprising, transforming divine initiative that just happens
to us without us having deserved it at all. It leads us to dance up and down. It is party time. It leads us to sell
everything we have (sometimes) and buy this one piece of land to get the
treasure.
The birth of the Christ Child comes to us like that. The
mystery of the resurrection comes to us like that. We are not entirely sure of
what it actually means but it is more positive and powerful than anything we
had reason to expect. There is an energy that is available that a group of
people can channel that is quite amazing. There is a love and community
possible that is simply profound and able to open before us the higher reasons
for which we were born and give us a meaning and purpose to our living that
even possessions, power and prestige cannot match.
It is a great moment. For me, it happened with the birth of
my children. I really didn't know what to expect and I didn't have mental
thoughts about it. I was 22, a fraternity man just out of college. It was just
a mystery moment. In a way that is hard to explain, I was suddenly aware of the
precious wonder of the world. I was blessed by God in such a way that at the
time I thought to myself, if rest of existence is just misery, it will have
been worth it to have this moment. Life is blessed. And I cannot say how my
attitudes and my actions were changed but they were.
And I have to come back to that moment from time to time.
Every time I have to go to the police station to get a teenager, I have to
remember that original blessing. Every time I write a tuition check. Every time
I visit the Principal and I am thinking to myself ‘what was I thinking about
when I decided to have these children', I have to come back to that moment. It
was a blessing.
No, for the Christians, it was
remembering that they were blessed by God. They were blessed by the Christ. And
because of that great blessing, we also have a new way of looking at our
suffering, loss and deprivation. Having known this grace, love, and community,
the earliest Christians found that they were undeterred by physical illness.
They found that they were able to tap into a longsuffering in the face of
unjust imprisonment and torture that they didn't think was possible. They were
unafraid of death. It opened in them a reservoir of courage and boldness that
had a mighty impact on people around them.
We know that because the earliest
Christians were a religious threat to the Roman Empire and they were severely
persecuted, many being fed to the Lions in the Collesium. The Gladiatorial
contests had begun to degrade into utter spectacle by the time that Christians
were actually persecuted. The thrill of the kill had a pressure for more sordid
sadism than two soldiers in battle could provide, not to mention the fact that
the culture of the late Empire was daily giving new definition to the meaning
of decadence. After staging historic battles that were set up to ensure a
bloodbath with armies of gladiators completely outmatched and overwhelmed, the
crowd increasing wanted to see grown men cower in fear and dread before they
were torn apart by wild beasts that had not been fed for several days.
It is a fate that collapses the
courage of the bravest of people. But Christians went through it, empowered
with a profound spiritual hope in the presence of God and hope in the redemption
of all things in the after life. The legends about their resolve in the face of
terror report supernatural miracles such as the wild beasts becoming suddenly
pacific and Roman magistrates converting to the faith on the spot. While that
surely did not happen, there was, no doubt, occasionally a profound witness
that left a lasting impression on the crowd. They witnessed a noble defiance of
terror and death, a spiritual calm that no ordinary person could muster. One
can only hope that it ruined the whole ‘entertainment value' of the contests,
as surely such a witness can.
Fortunately, we precious few of us
ever have to endure arbitrary violence for the privilege of confessing Jesus
Christ as Lord, though it is important to remember that there are people in the
Sudan (and other countries as well) who daily live in this reality.
But there is another level of
application to this teaching that is important as a corollary. We regularly
have to endure all manner of natural suffering, whether that be from illnesses
for which there is no treatment at present, accidents, natural disasters, birth
defects, etc. They are a challenge in their own right sometimes a profound one.
And all of us have to prepare for the fact of our own dying, one way or
another.
The scripture is very realistic that
trials of suffering are very real, not something to be avoided, but a challenge
to be spiritually integrated in our lives. As our scripture says this morning,
there is a spiritual sense in which, because of our hope in the resurrection of
Christ, we are empowered to incorporate these sufferings (great and small) in
such a way as to refine our character. They too can become the occasion for the
indwelling of the Spirit. Suffering can be redeemed. The affirmation of the Christian
in the Easter season is that through Christ, God has conquered death and Hell,
and these other sufferings also. There is a spiritual power we can tap which
courses through the ‘beloved community' in support and loving empathy that
transforms us all. It literally casts out fear. This we know to be true.
We do not have to go out of our way to find suffering. It
will seek us out in due season. But when it does, do not despair, for even this
can refine you. Stay open to the Spirit and be a channel of blessing. You are
building a cathedral of your soul, not a hut.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said. “Nothing that is worth doing can
be achieved in a life time. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which
is true of beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of
history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, howe4ver virtuous,
can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. Faith, hope, and
love, these three abide.
Amen.
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