Sermon: Trials for Glory

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Trials for Glory

By Charles Rush

August 2, 2009^[i]

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 battlefield 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 Phoenician practice of sacrificing their children to the god Moloch. Phoenicians 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 Moloch 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 Coliseum. 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, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. Faith, hope, and love, these three abide. Amen.

^[i] A version of this sermon was preached by Rev Rush on July 22, 2001