Proper 11 (July 17-23)
Texts: Romans 8:12-25;
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
WADING INTO THE DEEP WATER:
THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING
I invite you to wade a bit further into the deep water with me today.
Last week, (1) reflecting on the
Parable of the Sower, we began wading into the deep water of the
mystery of suffering. We
found that Jesus spoke forthrightly about being bad soil. He tells us
directly. But he doesn't say
much about what it means to be good soil. He says only that the good
soil yields a great deal -- a
hundredfold, etc. But we sought to see the various soils in the
characters of the Gospel stories,
and we reached a conclusion that the good soil seems to be the times
and places of suffering in
our lives. When Jesus applauds strong faith, it is invariably to a
person who is suffering and who
reaches out for help in faith -- like the nameless hemorrhaging woman
who simply seeks to
touch Jesus' cloak to be healed. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus begins and
ends his teaching with
people who are suffering. He begins with the Beatitudes, 'Blessed are
the poor in spirit, the
meek, the mourning,' and so forth. And he ends with the Parable of
Sheep and Goats, praising
those who seek to be with and to help the suffering, 'I was hungry and
you gave me to eat, thirsty
and you gave me to drink. Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one
of the least of these who are
members of my family, you did it to me.'
In a sense, Jesus' parables tell us how not to react when
suffering comes into our lives. The rocky
soil of last week's parable are those who initially respond positively
to Jesus but then run away
when the going gets tough, when Jesus himself enters into his Passion
of suffering. Today's
parable shows us the blame game. Something bad gets sown into our lives
and we want to weed
it out. We play the blame game of focusing on the bad elements, the bad
people in our lives,
seeking to rid ourselves of them. But Jesus' parable warns us that that
generally ends up bad. We
end up weeding out some good with the bad. Think of our national
response to 9-11, for
example. It was so easy to blame Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Ten
years later, we finally
caught bin Laden. But we ask ourselves: how many thousands of innocent
people have died in
the meantime? 'Collateral damage,' we call it. Today's parable warns us
about 'collateral
damage.'
But I don't want to talk about the bad responses to suffering this
morning. I want to talk further
about how times of suffering can be the good soil of faith in our
lives. In his book Naked
Spirituality:
A Life with God in 12 Simple Words, Brian McLaren maps out
four seasons in our
spiritual lives and assigns three simple words of prayer to each. The
seasons are Simplicity,
Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony. I'd like to draw a bit this
morning from the Season of
Complexity, which is the first season of strengthening in our faith
lives of prayer. And the simple
word that should come to us when we are faced with a time of suffering
is, "Help!" McLaren
writes,
When we call out for help, we are bound
more powerfully to God through our needs and
weaknesses, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and our anxieties and
problems than we
ever could have been through our joys, successes, and strengths alone.
Because this
practice involves expanding our resource base beyond our own limited
capacities, we can
call it expansion. Because it involves making a plea to God
for help, we can call it
petition as well. Whatever we call it, help
represents a move from self-reliance to God-reliance, and that's a step
in the right direction. (2)
We saw that just a couple weeks ago, didn't we? Our brother Ted Olsen
suffered a stroke, and his
son Peter stood up the following Sunday in church to recognize and give
thanks for the all help
that had already come. Suffering a stroke is definitely a time of
suffering, but can you see how it
can also be an occasion for the good soil of faith? It can bring
families together in love to help
one another, not just blood families but also faith families.
Also, it can bring about our reaching
out to God in faith -- which can end up being the same thing. When we
reach out to God, we
reach out to God's family in faith. We receive help in love. Sixteen of
our young people are on
their way to Red Lake, MN, as we speak, seeking an experience of
helping one another in love,
in being God's family. (3)
The apostle Paul begins this section of Romans in chapter 5 by
celebrating our sufferings,
because they produce in us endurance, which in turn produces character,
which in turn produces
hope, which in turn makes us receptive to the outpouring of God's love
into our hearts (Rom.
5:3-5). This morning, here in chapter 8, he returns to the subject of
suffering in a big way. He
expands the scope to not only the times of suffering in our lives as
individuals but to the
suffering of the whole creation. And Paul even implies that suffering
was built into creation,
"subjected to futility," he says, in the hope that someday it will
reach a glory of harmony that we
can't imagine, yet we hope for in faith. In the meantime, the suffering
brings us together in love,
helping one another, cultivating the good soil of faith.
There are days, of course, when we wish there could be some other
system. (4) We wish there could
be a way of developing patience without delay, courage without danger,
forgiveness without
offense, generosity without need, endurance without fatigue,
persistence without obstacles, virtue
without temptation, and strong love without hard-to-love people. But it
turns out that there is no
other way. The Creator has created the right kind of universe to
produce these beautiful qualities
in us creatures. And among these beautiful qualities is interdependence
-- the ability to reach out
beyond ourselves, to ask for help from others and from God, and to
offer help as we are able. The
whole shebang is rigged for mutuality, for vital connection.
As St. Paul seems to imply, by bringing in the whole creation, we might
think about the theory of
evolution along these lines. If survival were easy, species wouldn't
develop new adaptive
features. If survival were stress-free, there wouldn't be 20,000
species of butterflies, 300 species
of turtles, or 18,937 species of birds (at last count). In fact, there
would be no butterflies, turtles,
or birds at all, because it was stress, struggle, challenge, and change
that prompted the first living
things to diversify, specialize, adapt, and develop into the wonders
that surround us and include
us now. Seen in this light, evolution isn't a grim theory of "survival
of the fittest." Rather, in the
light of love, the planet can be seen as a veritable laboratory for
innovations in beauty and
diversity, fitness and adaptability, complexity and harmony. It renders
the earth a studio for the
creative development of interdependence in ecosystems or societies of
life. Put beauty, diversity,
complexity, and harmonious interdependence together and you have
something very close to the
biblical concepts of "glory" and shalom.
So both science and faith tell us that we find ourselves in a universe
whose preset conditions
challenge us to ongoing growth, development, and connection. The cry
for help, I propose, is
what keeps us in the game. When we cry out for help, we reach out for
resources and capacities
we don't yet have. We dare to desire strength sufficient to meet life's
challenges, instead of
wishing for the challenges to shrink to our current levels of capacity.
By crying help, we choose
expansion rather than contraction, advance rather than retreat, healing
rather than hurting others.
And the rest of creation is counting on us human beings, who are made
in God's image, to lead
the way in a harmonious coming together to help one another. Often,
when I ask young people
what they are studying in college, I hear about new avenues of study
like environmental
engineering. Our young people are studying the ways in which, as St.
Paul says, the children of
God are helping the rest of creation to God's harmonious intentions.
Let's conclude with the model for faith, our Lord himself,
who chose to take on suffering.
Shortly before his arrest, he is at the most stressful moment of his
life, and he knows that one
fork in the road will take him to even greater agony: torture, mockery,
rejection, crucifixion, and
death. So he goes to a garden and cries out in petition: "Father, if
you are willing, remove this
cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).
Simple words, a simple petition, but unfathomably deep: "I don't want
to drink this cup of
poison. I don't want to throw myself into a raging current that will
dash me upon the rocks of
human ignorance, hatred, cruelty, and violence. I don't want my
thirty-three years of life and my
three years of ministry to end like this -- sweat, whips, bruises,
welts, death. But if doing so will
unleash new possibilities for good, possibilities that you, God, desire
to be unleashed in the
world, then I will drink the cup and expand to meet the challenge."
Was Jesus's prayer answered? No and yes. The first half wasn't. God did
not adjust the world to
make Jesus's life more comfortable. But the second half was. God's will
was done, and the
consequences of Jesus's surrender to God's will that night continue to
spread across time and
space like ripples across a pond. Jesus did not receive a reprieve, a
pass, a "get out of suffering
free" card. Nor did he take the path of independence, shutting God out
and choosing his own will
instead. No, in weakness, in vulnerability, from the edge of the abyss,
he reached out to God for
help. And he received the strength to go forward and drink the cup of
suffering. And three days
later he received the new life that begins creation anew, unleashing
the spirit we need to learn to
help one another. Let us eat and drink to that cup of suffering which
brings us the new life of
helping one another in love. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran,
Portage, MI, July 17, 2011
Notes
1. See the sermon from July 10, 2011, "The Good Soil of Suffering."
2. Brian McLaren, Naked
Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words [San
Francisco:
HarperOne, 2011], page 104.
3. Sixteen high school youth and five
adult chaperones were headed to the Indian Reservation in
Red Lake, MN, to a Group
Workcamp.
4. The remainder of this sermon are
mostly words from Brian McLaren's book (Ibid.), pages 107-8, 109-10,
edited slightly to fit my sermon.