Easter 7A
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church
Lakeland, FL
May 21, 2023
Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14,5:6-11
John 17:1-11, 20-23
Grace to you and peace from God and from our Risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I barely know how to begin today. So, let me say this. Our focus today is on suffering. Hear these words from I Peter: do not be caught off guard by the fiery trial that you now face as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be glad that you share in the sufferings of the Chosen One.
Suffering. This is common to humankind. We all have suffered, are suffering or will suffer. There is no shortage of writings or poems or novels or diatribes or tomes on the matter of human suffering. I have little to offer to them today.
The sufferings we have all experienced in our lives range from the mundane to the catastrophic. From pleasures denied, like a toddler tantrum, to matters of life and death as we walk down the hospital corridor after a loved one has died. And so, we may sigh and hold on to the words from First Peter – don’t be surprised. It happens. Well, indeed it does.
Suffering happens. Sometimes because of what we have done. I have suffered when I have not done the things that I ought to have done. A test not prepared for. A task not completed in a timely fashion. I have suffered when I was careless – only a year ago, my ankle broke as I dashed around the stairs on the ship to capture the perfect photo of the sunset. I have suffered when others intended and brought ill to me. When unexplainable things happened. And it was awful. And so it has been for you too. My purpose today is not to address those times, not to vainly attempt to explain them nor to trivialize them. Not to try to answer the question of why bad things happen to good people – or perhaps why good things happen to bad people. No. Today, we turn to something bigger.
Peter was writing to Christians who lived in the decades immediately after Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension. Christians who were a minority people. Christians who were trying to figure this all out while gathering together in worship and prayer. Christians who were subjected to suffering, suffering at the hands of the State, suffering in the taunts and insults flung at them. Suffering that brought devastation, social isolation. Suffering that cut them off from family and friends. Suffering because they were known to be followers of Jesus. The one who taught and loved and touched and healed. The one who suffered and died and was buried. The one who rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven.
In public media I hear complaints about how Christians are being persecuted today – persecuted because clerks at retail stores say, “Happy Holidays,” instead of Merry Christmas. Persecuted because the Ten Commandments are not posted on classroom walls. Persecuted because frankly, they don’t get their way. They don’t get their way in a country of religious tolerance.
This is not the suffering that Peter was writing about, nor is it even suffering.
There is a suffering that comes through the hands of the powers that be. A suffering that comes through the hands of those who are so sure that they are right. A suffering with slippery fingerprints all over it. A suffering that is thinly veiled, oh ever so thin, in righteousness. Self-righteousness.
There is suffering. Suffering that we are beckoned into. Suffering that we each encounter at times throughout our lives.
There is suffering into which we enter on tiptoes in quiet silence. It happened just down our street. It happened to those we could barely imagine. You may have heard the story as it has unfolded in recent months. The mother and father who learned that they were carrying a pregnancy that would result in death. A mother and father who sought medical care. And were denied. A mother and father who were subjected to suffering beyond our human understanding because of those who were just so very sure that they were right.
There was that day that I walked into the chapel at the funeral home when Baby Milo would be remembered, his parents and brother would be consoled, his grandparents and aunts and uncles and greats beyond measure would gather and grieve. Grieve with these parents whose suffering was imposed upon them. By the powers that be. Those who had no understanding nor care for the suffering that their certainty would impose. Yet, they were clear that they were right. And that would be the end of it.
Milo’s parents suffered.
Do not be surprised, wrote Peter. Do not be surprised at what is happening around you. When St. Paul wrote to the Romans, who also were suffering, he told them to find joy in their suffering knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope – a hope that does not disappoint, a hope that is a gift of the Holy Spirit that has been poured into our hearts, a hope that sustains us.
I think about the suffering of the disciples, those of Jesus closest friends – the trauma they endured after they with Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time. The arrest, the passion, the crucifixion, the burial, the confusion and dismay. And then the resurrection! And there was great joy as Jesus was with them for forty days, forty days that culminated in the ascension – when they thought that once again they were alone. In that last night that they shared a meal before Jesus was betrayed, he prayed for them in what is called his high priestly prayer. He prayed that they may all be one as he and the Father are one, that they may be one with him and the Father, that the world may come to know Jesus through their witness. But Jesus prayed not only for them, but also for us as those who believe because of the word of the disciples. Two thousand years ago, our Savior prayed for us who are sitting here today and for all those around the world and across time.
For millennia people have grappled with suffering. Why it happens to the good and why it doesn’t happen to the evil. We have tried to make sense of it, to fit it into the box of our human understanding and it defies all our efforts. So then, what do we do with it? Father Richard Rohr, a contemplative theologian and priest who is suffering with lymphatic cancer, wrote this: “Humans often end up doing evil by thinking we can and must eliminate all evil, instead of holding it, suffering it ourselves, and learning from it, as Jesus does on the cross. This ironically gives us the active compassion we need to work for social change.”
Yes, compassion and empathy that causes us not to turn away from suffering, but actually to turn toward it, to see it for what it is, to care, deeply care for those who are suffering, to work for the changes that will ease suffering.
And at the heart of all of this is prayer. After the ascension of Jesus, his followers once again were alone in a world that had killed their leader, threatened them, continued to occupy their land. And what did they do? They returned to Jerusalem, they spent much time together in the temple, they ate together with glad and generous hearts and they devoted themselves to prayer in the same way that Jesus prayed. They prayed with and for one another. And they were given power to change the world.
Amen.
