Grace In The Midst Of Suffering
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
For several years an earnest and energetic woman has been attempting to make August 8 a national holiday in the United States. She'd like to call it, "National Admit You're Happy Day." She has canvassed the governors of all fifty states, personally requesting their support. At least fifteen governors have responded positively. A good many others have been less happy with the idea -- including George Pataki, the governor of New York, who has said, "The state of New York has no official position on happiness."
Does God have an official position on happiness? What are we supposed to conclude about God the creator as we look around the world -- this world that is so incredibly burdened with sadness, pain, and loss? What are we supposed to conclude about God the protector as we consider the hardships endured by his chosen servants? Paul affirms with brutal honesty, "So death is at work in us ..." (2 Corinthians 4:12). Does commitment to Christ actually diminish our happiness quotient?
John Stott, rector of All Souls Church in London, acknowledges the tension: "The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God's justice and love."
The apparent unevenness and ambiguity of suffering is on display in many of the most familiar stories in scripture. Consider the Bethlehem accounts. We learn that Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents-to-be of John the Baptist, spend almost their entire lives defeated by infertility. Mary and Joseph endure a whispering campaign in their small town: She's pregnant, but they're not married. Joseph, jolted by a dream, uproots his family overnight and is compelled to move them to a distant city in an alien culture.
In the Psalms we find the same mingling of ups and downs. There is immeasurable comfort in Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need." But the psalm right before it, number 22, begins, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Side by side we encounter the heights of personal security and the depths of personal despair. Jesus borrowed from Psalm 23 to declare, "I am the Good Shepherd." Then he willingly went to his death on the cross and screamed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In the Bible, real security is never very far from real suffering.
How are we supposed to make sense of this? One day the evidence for God's presence and power seems to be everywhere. The next day God appears to have vanished from the radar screen. C. S. Lewis in all likelihood delivered the gift of intellectual spiritual certainty to more people over the last century than any one other apologist. Then his wife died. Shattered by grief he wrote, "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.' "
So what is God's official position on happiness? From the perspective of those who follow Jesus, there is no guarantee of happiness in this world. Period. "Happy" comes from the English word "hap," which means "chance." It's related to the word "happening." This makes perfect sense: "Happiness" is a momentary and unpredictable sense of well-being that comes and goes, depending on what is happening to us at a particular moment. People are happy in relationship to their circumstances.
Second Corinthians is one of those books in the Bible that makes it clear that Christians are often in the middle of very difficult circumstances. Chapter 1 opens with Paul's frank admission of a recent brush with death. The outcome appears to have generated a serious bout of spiritual depression. N. T. Wright comments in his book Following Jesus, "Depression is what happens when one particular little clutch of fears gets together in a circle, and it forces us to go round and round the circle, worrying about one thing, which leads us to blame ourselves for the next thing, which leads us to be anxious about the third thing, which takes us conveniently back to the start of the circle, and round we go again. And one of the key features of depression is that we put ourselves on trial, produce lots of evidence for the prosecution and none for the defense, find ourselves guilty, and pronounce sentence. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:9, 'I felt as if I had received the sentence of death.' " There's not much happiness in that picture.
But Paul has something else to say: Happiness is seriously overrated. What happens to us isn't remotely as important as how we respond. Instead of a fixation on the "Why?" of our pain, scripture is considerably more committed to the question, "What now? Where do we go from here?"
Where do we go, indeed? God is good and God is powerful. Yet suffering happens. God frequently chooses not to intervene to take our suffering away. This is where understanding fails us. God is infinite, while we are finite. We are required to endure hardship with far less information than we crave. God promises that in the next world everything crooked will be made straight, and every injustice will be made right. But now, in the midst of pain, it takes courage to live out those familiar words from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and don't rely on what you think you know" (3:5, 6 TEV). When it comes to suffering, only God knows the fullness of what is being accomplished in our lives.
From time to time, however, we are granted clues. Every now and then the doors of understanding are nudged open. So it is with Paul's personal reflections in the first five chapters of this epistle. In our present text he acknowledges the nearness of pain. God's grace, however, will win out -- both present grace and future grace in the midst of suffering.
Present grace includes the blessings that are received by people in the here and now, even when things go wrong. Reminiscing on his own recent trials, Paul says in verse 15, "Everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God." What is startling is the sheer number of parties who are deriving benefit from Paul's hardships: the Corinthian readers, "more and more people," and God Almighty are specifically mentioned. Paul clearly includes himself as on that list in the previous sentence.
In verse 16 the Apostle cites another example of present grace: "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." Hardship takes its toll. But for the Christian, inner reconstruction more than counter-balances outer erosion.
The Bridger Wilderness Area of Wyoming is one of the most rugged and beautiful sections of the Rocky Mountains. Those who manage this area periodically ask hikers and tourists to make comments and recommendations as to how their visit might have been improved. Here are some actual suggestions from visitor comment cards.
1. The trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.
2. Too many bugs and leeches and spiders and spider webs. Please spray the wilderness to rid the area of these pests.
3. Please pave the trails so they can be plowed of snow during the winter.
4. Chairlifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.
5. The coyotes made too much noise last night and kept me awake. Please eradicate these annoying animals.
6. A small deer came into my camp and stole my jar of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed?
7. Escalators would help on steep uphill sections.
8. A McDonald's would be nice at the trailhead.
9. Too many rocks in the mountains.
In the real world, mountains are full of rocks (the Rocky Mountains in particular). Marriages brim with heartaches. Faces degenerate into wrinkles. High school parties hide secret sadness. Offices present close encounters with cutthroat co-workers. And there is no escalator to move us past it all.
So why does God let all this happen? What is the cause of our suffering? Here's an honest answer: The Bible does not tell us. If we choose to spend our time agonizing over the origins and meaning of pain -- why, why, why -- we will inevitably be very frustrated. Here is what the Bible does tell us: God is in charge of the universe. God permits our pain. And God is in that pain with us. We never go into a nightmare or through a nightmare alone.
Even more important, we can know that our pain -- no matter what we are experiencing -- is accomplishing something. On the other side of his depression, Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 9 that it happened "so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." Ultimately every circumstance is an opportunity for us to strengthen our reliance on God -- or rather, to allow God to strengthen a divine grip on us.
All this speaks to the reality of future grace. Paul rejoices in verse 14 of our text, "... we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus...." And in verse 17 we read, "For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure."
It takes courage to adopt a long-term perspective on personal pain. What word of encouragement does the Bible have for parents who keep waiting and waiting for a prodigal child to come home, for a husband and wife who feel chained to a loveless marriage, for the one who can almost wrap the reality of loneliness around herself like a blanket, for anyone whose body is steadily eroding from disease? What God tells us is that for those who entrust themselves to Jesus Christ, the universe is an utterly safe place -- not because bad things never happen (because they most certainly do) -- but because, as Paul writes elsewhere, "Who can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus?" The answer is No One. We can never, ever lose what life is really all about.
So what exactly does God promise? God never promises supernatural deliverance from hardship. From time to time God does indeed provide remarkable rescues. But history, on the whole, informs us that Christians die from accidents and diseases at almost the same rate as non-Christians. Enthusiastic evangelists who say otherwise are dangerously off the mark. They either fail to understand the Bible or reality or both. In fact, some preachers are so eager to get God off the hook when it comes to suffering that they are willing to put us on the hook. Whose fault is it if we aren't healed of cancer or saved from a tornado? Why, it's our fault, of course -- for not earnestly believing in the God who always delivers disciples from hardship.
But in fact there is no biblical guarantee of deliverance. Instead God guarantees the supernatural use of hardship. That's the essential difference in the experience of suffering between those who trust God and those who don't. In chapters like Romans 5 and Hebrews 12 and James 1 we receive the assurance that the pain of those who walk with God is absolutely meaningful. It is not random. It is not unknown to God. It is accomplishing something.
Paul boldly states that our troubles are "achieving" for us an experience of future grace that will one day make them infinitely worth enduring. Before us is the promise of a transformed body: "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (2 Corinthians 5:1).
In the present moment it is impossible to grasp what heaven might be like. Imagine a group of Polynesian islanders sitting in a circle and reading about midwestern strawberries. They can see the big red one in the picture and they can memorize the scientific classification. But that hardly qualifies as "knowing" a great deal about strawberries.
But what if someone from that island were to take a trip and returned with enough fresh strawberries for everybody to have a taste? That is precisely what Jesus accomplished on Easter weekend. None of us can fully know about death until we face it ourselves. We cannot fully experience future grace while living in the present. But God sent the Son to go before us. Jesus died and came back to give us a taste, a real taste, of what's in store for all those who trust him.
Every person who hurts asks two questions: Why is this happening to me? The answer is, we don't know -- but God can be trusted. God provides grace in the present and promises grace for the future. Secondly, why doesn't God do something about my pain? The answer is, God already has -- God sent Jesus, whom we can receive and follow, fully confident that "the one who raised Jesus will also raise us." Until that day, nothing in this world can ever separate us from his love.
Does God have an official position on happiness? What are we supposed to conclude about God the creator as we look around the world -- this world that is so incredibly burdened with sadness, pain, and loss? What are we supposed to conclude about God the protector as we consider the hardships endured by his chosen servants? Paul affirms with brutal honesty, "So death is at work in us ..." (2 Corinthians 4:12). Does commitment to Christ actually diminish our happiness quotient?
John Stott, rector of All Souls Church in London, acknowledges the tension: "The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God's justice and love."
The apparent unevenness and ambiguity of suffering is on display in many of the most familiar stories in scripture. Consider the Bethlehem accounts. We learn that Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents-to-be of John the Baptist, spend almost their entire lives defeated by infertility. Mary and Joseph endure a whispering campaign in their small town: She's pregnant, but they're not married. Joseph, jolted by a dream, uproots his family overnight and is compelled to move them to a distant city in an alien culture.
In the Psalms we find the same mingling of ups and downs. There is immeasurable comfort in Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need." But the psalm right before it, number 22, begins, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Side by side we encounter the heights of personal security and the depths of personal despair. Jesus borrowed from Psalm 23 to declare, "I am the Good Shepherd." Then he willingly went to his death on the cross and screamed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In the Bible, real security is never very far from real suffering.
How are we supposed to make sense of this? One day the evidence for God's presence and power seems to be everywhere. The next day God appears to have vanished from the radar screen. C. S. Lewis in all likelihood delivered the gift of intellectual spiritual certainty to more people over the last century than any one other apologist. Then his wife died. Shattered by grief he wrote, "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.' "
So what is God's official position on happiness? From the perspective of those who follow Jesus, there is no guarantee of happiness in this world. Period. "Happy" comes from the English word "hap," which means "chance." It's related to the word "happening." This makes perfect sense: "Happiness" is a momentary and unpredictable sense of well-being that comes and goes, depending on what is happening to us at a particular moment. People are happy in relationship to their circumstances.
Second Corinthians is one of those books in the Bible that makes it clear that Christians are often in the middle of very difficult circumstances. Chapter 1 opens with Paul's frank admission of a recent brush with death. The outcome appears to have generated a serious bout of spiritual depression. N. T. Wright comments in his book Following Jesus, "Depression is what happens when one particular little clutch of fears gets together in a circle, and it forces us to go round and round the circle, worrying about one thing, which leads us to blame ourselves for the next thing, which leads us to be anxious about the third thing, which takes us conveniently back to the start of the circle, and round we go again. And one of the key features of depression is that we put ourselves on trial, produce lots of evidence for the prosecution and none for the defense, find ourselves guilty, and pronounce sentence. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:9, 'I felt as if I had received the sentence of death.' " There's not much happiness in that picture.
But Paul has something else to say: Happiness is seriously overrated. What happens to us isn't remotely as important as how we respond. Instead of a fixation on the "Why?" of our pain, scripture is considerably more committed to the question, "What now? Where do we go from here?"
Where do we go, indeed? God is good and God is powerful. Yet suffering happens. God frequently chooses not to intervene to take our suffering away. This is where understanding fails us. God is infinite, while we are finite. We are required to endure hardship with far less information than we crave. God promises that in the next world everything crooked will be made straight, and every injustice will be made right. But now, in the midst of pain, it takes courage to live out those familiar words from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and don't rely on what you think you know" (3:5, 6 TEV). When it comes to suffering, only God knows the fullness of what is being accomplished in our lives.
From time to time, however, we are granted clues. Every now and then the doors of understanding are nudged open. So it is with Paul's personal reflections in the first five chapters of this epistle. In our present text he acknowledges the nearness of pain. God's grace, however, will win out -- both present grace and future grace in the midst of suffering.
Present grace includes the blessings that are received by people in the here and now, even when things go wrong. Reminiscing on his own recent trials, Paul says in verse 15, "Everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God." What is startling is the sheer number of parties who are deriving benefit from Paul's hardships: the Corinthian readers, "more and more people," and God Almighty are specifically mentioned. Paul clearly includes himself as on that list in the previous sentence.
In verse 16 the Apostle cites another example of present grace: "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." Hardship takes its toll. But for the Christian, inner reconstruction more than counter-balances outer erosion.
The Bridger Wilderness Area of Wyoming is one of the most rugged and beautiful sections of the Rocky Mountains. Those who manage this area periodically ask hikers and tourists to make comments and recommendations as to how their visit might have been improved. Here are some actual suggestions from visitor comment cards.
1. The trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.
2. Too many bugs and leeches and spiders and spider webs. Please spray the wilderness to rid the area of these pests.
3. Please pave the trails so they can be plowed of snow during the winter.
4. Chairlifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.
5. The coyotes made too much noise last night and kept me awake. Please eradicate these annoying animals.
6. A small deer came into my camp and stole my jar of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed?
7. Escalators would help on steep uphill sections.
8. A McDonald's would be nice at the trailhead.
9. Too many rocks in the mountains.
In the real world, mountains are full of rocks (the Rocky Mountains in particular). Marriages brim with heartaches. Faces degenerate into wrinkles. High school parties hide secret sadness. Offices present close encounters with cutthroat co-workers. And there is no escalator to move us past it all.
So why does God let all this happen? What is the cause of our suffering? Here's an honest answer: The Bible does not tell us. If we choose to spend our time agonizing over the origins and meaning of pain -- why, why, why -- we will inevitably be very frustrated. Here is what the Bible does tell us: God is in charge of the universe. God permits our pain. And God is in that pain with us. We never go into a nightmare or through a nightmare alone.
Even more important, we can know that our pain -- no matter what we are experiencing -- is accomplishing something. On the other side of his depression, Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 9 that it happened "so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." Ultimately every circumstance is an opportunity for us to strengthen our reliance on God -- or rather, to allow God to strengthen a divine grip on us.
All this speaks to the reality of future grace. Paul rejoices in verse 14 of our text, "... we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus...." And in verse 17 we read, "For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure."
It takes courage to adopt a long-term perspective on personal pain. What word of encouragement does the Bible have for parents who keep waiting and waiting for a prodigal child to come home, for a husband and wife who feel chained to a loveless marriage, for the one who can almost wrap the reality of loneliness around herself like a blanket, for anyone whose body is steadily eroding from disease? What God tells us is that for those who entrust themselves to Jesus Christ, the universe is an utterly safe place -- not because bad things never happen (because they most certainly do) -- but because, as Paul writes elsewhere, "Who can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus?" The answer is No One. We can never, ever lose what life is really all about.
So what exactly does God promise? God never promises supernatural deliverance from hardship. From time to time God does indeed provide remarkable rescues. But history, on the whole, informs us that Christians die from accidents and diseases at almost the same rate as non-Christians. Enthusiastic evangelists who say otherwise are dangerously off the mark. They either fail to understand the Bible or reality or both. In fact, some preachers are so eager to get God off the hook when it comes to suffering that they are willing to put us on the hook. Whose fault is it if we aren't healed of cancer or saved from a tornado? Why, it's our fault, of course -- for not earnestly believing in the God who always delivers disciples from hardship.
But in fact there is no biblical guarantee of deliverance. Instead God guarantees the supernatural use of hardship. That's the essential difference in the experience of suffering between those who trust God and those who don't. In chapters like Romans 5 and Hebrews 12 and James 1 we receive the assurance that the pain of those who walk with God is absolutely meaningful. It is not random. It is not unknown to God. It is accomplishing something.
Paul boldly states that our troubles are "achieving" for us an experience of future grace that will one day make them infinitely worth enduring. Before us is the promise of a transformed body: "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (2 Corinthians 5:1).
In the present moment it is impossible to grasp what heaven might be like. Imagine a group of Polynesian islanders sitting in a circle and reading about midwestern strawberries. They can see the big red one in the picture and they can memorize the scientific classification. But that hardly qualifies as "knowing" a great deal about strawberries.
But what if someone from that island were to take a trip and returned with enough fresh strawberries for everybody to have a taste? That is precisely what Jesus accomplished on Easter weekend. None of us can fully know about death until we face it ourselves. We cannot fully experience future grace while living in the present. But God sent the Son to go before us. Jesus died and came back to give us a taste, a real taste, of what's in store for all those who trust him.
Every person who hurts asks two questions: Why is this happening to me? The answer is, we don't know -- but God can be trusted. God provides grace in the present and promises grace for the future. Secondly, why doesn't God do something about my pain? The answer is, God already has -- God sent Jesus, whom we can receive and follow, fully confident that "the one who raised Jesus will also raise us." Until that day, nothing in this world can ever separate us from his love.
