Sermon: Overcoming Hardship

[ previous | index | next ]

Overcoming Hardship

By Charles Rush

March 14, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 7.6Mb) ]

share with you an odd passage of scripture, particularly for those of you that are facing difficult circumstances and dealing with failure… “And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man, and begged Jesus to touch him. And Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had spit upon his eyes and laid his hands upon him, Jesus asked the blind man, ‘do you see anything?' And the blind man looked up and said, ‘I see men; but they look like trees walking.' Then again Jesus laid his hands upon the man's eyes; and he looked intently and was restored and saw everything clearly' (Mk. 8:22-26).

I believe this is the only story of Jesus having a re-do and perhaps it is a word of grace especially for those among us that are thinking they are the only ones they know dealing quietly with some failure, some frustration that has not yet been surmounted. This, too, is part of the growth. As one of my New Testament scholar friends has observed about this text, ‘Even Jesus occasionally needed a mulligan on a miracle'. We'll come back to that.

At last winter is over, but one warm memory we all have is the Olympic Games in Vancouver. How about that last run in the half-pike snow board by gold medalist Shaun White? Wow. He'd already secured gold but he held nothing back, saying later, ‘You know, this is what I came here to do, so that is what I did.' And he added that incredible double McTwist 1260 never done before, stuck it on a dime. Boom, oh what a beauty it was. Oh man, is it cool, when it all comes together in perfection like that.

Perhaps you saw the interview when they showed him practicing over and over flying into a foam pit. He'd hit it again, and again, and again, and again. And then they cut to him and he said, ‘But you know, there comes that day when you don't have the pit anymore. You just have to do it…. And that… is completely different.”

You remember that moment doing something really important for the first time when there was a lot on the line? You remember that first really big interview? You answer every potential question in front of the mirror. You practice your confident handshake. You're getting ready…

Or, even worse, when you were younger still, and you practiced all of your lines to ask out the young beauty at school. You dream about the moment, you envision the moment, you are good to go- you will be casual not too aggressive, interested but not begging, humored but not fawning, you are ready, bring it on… And then she walks by with her Algebra book but there is… nothing, you can't hardly speak, you just dissolve… And there she goes, perfection that might have been.

This is where our life is really lived, whether we are in the Olympics or not. We are training for the thing that really matters to us and then there is ‘just doing it' and making it go. And even with these really successful stories, this is where people actually live. Get behind the glamour, behind the supposed genius, behind the prodigy and the natural athletic ability, and this is our real life whether we have worldly success or not. In the most important ways, our biggest challenge is ourselves. Can we show up and just do it?

One of my fraternity brothers sent me an article about one of our freshman suitemates who is now CEO of a very successful company. The article was all about how he took risks… ‘bold', they called him, ‘innovative' they called him, and the adjective you get when you luck upon fortune, ‘He's a visionary'. Remembering the antics of freshman year, my fraternity brother wrote at the bottom, “he was always a wild man. I'm glad he figured out how to tame it enough to make some serious money.” That wildness could have de-railed and left him destitute but he found a way to corral himself and won.

The mother of the great Tennis player, Bjorn Borg, was interviewed about what he was like as a kid. She said he drove her nuts hitting tennis balls against the garage door, day after day after day. We know that at the upper end of the competitive world, incredible success is regularly a controlled obsession. In spite of it, what we admire about people at the top of their field is the way that focus has brought their skills to peak. It is a discipline, a practice, a way of being. It is impressive.

We don't talk so much about the idle time that we waste along the way to finding that focus. We don't talk so much about the failures we actually went through that forced us to find that focus, almost by accident sometimes. We don't talk about it… but it is all part of the process. And the process is our lives themselves.

What is behind all of successes and failures is our character. When we look at our lives ourselves, this is the actual test right here. This is how it actually is about ‘us'. We are not asked to be Shaun White or Bjorn Borg or anyone else. Our actual test is to become ourselves, who we are meant to become. And if we win this actual test of our life, what we get is the ability to be really real.

And the funny thing is that when we find what is really real in ourselves, we find God at the same time. Profound character has a powerful, transcendent, charisma to it. That is the story of the life of Mohandas Gandhi, an ordinary lawyer from South Africa, educated in England, who met a series of obstacles in Apartheid just after he graduated from law school that personally hurt his career and his person. It caused a raging internal struggle with his self-esteem. How could he be self-respecting in a world that wouldn't respect him? He experienced a lot of rejection as a young man. He experienced a lot of limitations on what he could do. He couldn't make any money or the career that he dreamed about as a kid. It caused him anger, it caused him self-doubt.

And over many years, many trials and errors, he began a spiritual exploration for authenticity in order to deal with these rejections. “Who am I if my society tells me I can't be a professional?” “How will I keep my dignity and self-respect if I can't develop my identity through my job success?” “How do I handle not making much money without becoming just bitter and enraged?”

In the process of dealing with these very real challenges, he says, he was forced to remember who he was- an Indian, living under colonial rule (first in South Africa and then in India after he moved to his native country). In his case, as he began to recover who he was as an Indian, he became much simpler as a person. He started to leave behind his identity as a Colonial subject-seeing himself as the British saw him- and he started recovering some of the old practices of India. He allowed those to shape him and mold him and as he did he changed himself.

The circumstances of his life almost forced him to have to live from his ‘inside out', knowing who he was in here, not as his Colonial society would define him, simply as a colonial subject. As he grew in living from the inside out, he tapped into a spiritual power. It took many years unto decades but this was the long process we didn't see it in public. We never can. After many years, this spiritual power that he tapped into by living from the inside out became predominant in his life. People that met him wrote about it widely because he had something about him that the rest of us don't really have by comparison. When he was older and many people had recognized the same charisma that he exuded, they started to call him ‘Mahatma'- the Soul Force. His deep personal integrity from living inside out and that integrity were infectious. In his presence, you would feel it.

Gandhi fell into the transcendent power of intrinsic living. He turned inward spiritually and began living out of his core identity. He was actualizing who he was supposed to be. And when he did it, the spiritual power was palpable but so was his humility. This power was not aggrandizing, it was just authentic. And when people met him, they would regularly remark that this must have been what it was like to be in the presence of Jesus.

Jesus had that quality of being ‘in the world' but not defined ‘by the world'. He lived from the inside out.

Immanuel Kant had that insight about our character. You may recall from college that Kant said that we should “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. If it is wrong to tell a lie, it is wrong to tell a lie at any time. From college, most of us remember Immanuel Kant from the lecture on consistency in moral thought.

But, there is another dimension to his insight that has to do with character. It is that the fullest moral acts don't need to be induced with reward or proscribed by punishment because they are intrinsically worth doing. They have a self-authenticating quality to them. On the moral level, they are lived from the ‘inside out'.

All of our lives we are on a quest to discover who we are and what we are to be about, a kind of peeling back the onion that has deeper challenges for us to grow in authenticity… Or we can choose not to grown in authenticity, always an option, and one we regularly take because it is not so difficult.

But the challenge to become authentic keeps coming back and back and back. We ignore it, we choose not to pursue it now, but the challenges of our life keep posing the question of authenticity for us whether we want to face it right now or not. As we go through life, we can choose to live many other ways, but somewhere in the middle of life, you start to see that the direction up the path of the mountain before us leads inexorably towards intrinsic living. This is the challenge that life presents to us.

Jesus teaches us three things that are very helpful for this quest towards intrinsic living, and these teachings are somewhat profound in the midst of setback and difficulty we are painfully growing through.

The first happened right at the beginning of his teaching. He went to see John the Baptist and John baptized him. As Jesus comes out of the water, God blesses him and Jesus hears the voice of God, so to speak, saying “You are my beloved child; in you I am well pleased.” That blessing from God isn't just for Jesus. That is for you too. “You are God's beloved child and God beams you well-being”. It isn't just that we are created in the image of God; it isn't just that we have the higher spiritual faculties that are god-like; it isn't just that you have freedom to choose and the responsibility of making wise choices. God wants you to realize fullness. God wants your best you. God loves you.

The second happens at the very end of his life. It is the veritable last thing that Jesus says to the disciples in John, He breathed on them and said “receive the Holy Spirit”. What you have seen in me, you can also do. That power that God gave Jesus, God gives to you. The way that Jesus interiorized the blessing of God; the way that he lived love; the way that he found authentic voice to his life and was able to stay on his game even in the midst of Roman oppression, even torture and death. All that he did, you can do. Through hardship as well as prosperity, it is intrinsic authenticity that transforms the situation from the inside out.

And the third part of the teaching from Jesus, the gospel of John, sums up at the Last Supper, kind of the meaning of it all of his teaching about the spiritual life. Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”

We can become the strength of God's courage for each other. We can be the compassion of Christ with each other. We can stand one another up. For most of us the most profound healing that we will know in this life is the healing a spouse or a good friend facilitates so that we can get beyond something from our families or something in ourselves that is destructive.

We can support one another in ways small and profound. For almost everyone I've ever talked to about it, reports what a privilege it is to actually be able to walk with a loved one or friend as they die. They are powerfully intrinsic times that just make you grateful to be here and be part of it all.

And that is the point. “You are beloved.” “Receive the Spirit of Love”. “Love one another”. It is the richer, fuller way of being in the world. It not only gives us greater joy in the midst of good seasons, it is what we appreciate in the midst of our seasons of set-backs and suffering. It is intrinsically worthwhile.

The parable from Wall Street in the 90's told of a young MBA who takes an exotic vacation on a remote island off Belize. The guy he rents his place from is poor, has only one boat and fishes just enough for his extended family. This largish extended family spends most of the day lazing about in the sun and water, enjoying one another's company.

One day the young MBA decides to inspire the idle owner and tells him that his island is worth enough that a bank would lend him money for a new boat.

“And then?” said the poor man.

“Well, you could catch more fish and afford a fleet of boats”

“And then?” said the poor man.

“Well, you could lure American investors and develop international contracts”

“And then?” said the poor man.

“Well, you could do an IPO, and make a fortune.”

“And then?” said the poor man.

“Well, you could buy your own island and relax and do nothing all day.”

We liked that joke ten years ago because you didn't have to be a spiritual genius to figure out that our boat was moving steadily away from the dock of intrinsically fulfilling lives.

And even those of us who make a fortune and can buy that island… The truth is we don't get to laze in the sun all that long. There is our real life that beckons us back to the ordinary woes of the world, the challenges that are happening in our extended family that we have to deal with, and children that never stay fixed either, and parents that get ill. We have the wider political events impinge on practically everything in our era.

We have studies now that show that we have more contentment, more genuine fulfillment, when we are privileged to be loved by others and able to love, when we receive the blessing that we are beloved by God and bless others with acceptance and encouragement.

So, nurture those relationships for through them we have the real meaning and purpose for our living that we can face the season of loss and death in our life.

I've been reading several books recently on the literature from the Psychology department from the University of Pennsylvania, where they have been doing research for the past decade on how you live a happier life. It is one of those studies where the tests of science confirm the anecdotal insights from spirituality over and over again.

They have had thousands of people participate in hundreds of different experiments designed to test various aspects of happiness. But one of them, by far, has been the most popular. And it has to do with relationships.

The researchers found that, no big surprise here, a key to genuine fulfillment is cultivating gratitude in our lives. But you don't do this in an abstract way. It turns out the way you actually do it is by thinking of someone in your life that has made a positive difference in your life, someone that you've never actually thanked. And the experiment was this, you write a one page thank you note, you call this person up and make a time with them and you don't tell them exactly why. When you get there, you chit chat for a bit, then you sit down face to face, you look them in the eye and without any interruption, you read this ‘thank you' to them, and allow them to react, hopefully having some time for them to reminisce about specific things from the past that you share together.[i]

All those cynical, Ivy League intellectuals at Penn were astonished at how powerful the experiment was. The director started an evening for people that were part of the experiment that simply had you and the person you thank both come to an evening with the whole class, and the students would read their papers to the people they were grateful for in front of everyone else. You know what? Everyone wanted to do it and they had trouble limiting the number of people that wanted to participate.

And you know what happens when you express that kind of gratitude? You find yourself becoming more aware of the things that you have to be grateful for. You find yourself getting in touch with the things that are really important to you -- scratch that -- you get in touch with the people that are really important to you. You access the love dimension and in so doing you engage your positive strength. It isn't a cure all. It isn't a panacea. But you access your positive strength and it is considerable.

In the midst of setback and difficulty, it can be profound. The face of the Christ, for most of us, has a very human face of someone we know that has made us feel beloved. The strength of God, for most of us, has a very human face of someone whose courage of character has inspired us beyond what we expected to do. The hope of Christ, for most of us, has a very human face of someone who has seen us through our worst and is still pulling for us even if they are dead and gone.

And when you think about it, in the face of medical threats that are terminal, what is it that we want to do, surround ourselves with the people that have meant a great deal to us, to thank them for who they have been and what they have meant to us, and draw strength from their very presence. They are integral for how you became who you became in fact.

It turns out, that in the really critical times of your life, in the really difficult times of your life, the support from loving friends is all the net you are going to get. But the wonderful, breathtaking thing we learn when we get to these times, that support from loving friends, is what we really need. Through your seasons of trial, even in the midst of your seasons of triumph, may you stumble on the blessed awareness that you are beloved. Amen.

[i] See Martin Seligman's book “Happiness”( Free Press: Toronto, 2002), p. 74.