Bless to Me: Blessing in Adversity
Romans 5:1-5
August 23, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Photo by Dave Hoefler, Madison, WI
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/pMvKCLqca2c
This week a Baptist pastor wrote about the stress of pandemic for church leaders. He said that he had recently been in a Zoom meeting with 10 pastors from at least three denominations. As they shared their struggles, one pastor disclosed that he had been imagining taking his own life. Before the meeting was over, four of the ten pastors had shared their own thoughts of suicide.[1]
That is a shocking story. It should probably have come with a trigger warning. Preaching about suffering is very tricky. Everyone I know is struggling now. Everyone you know is struggling now, whether you and I are aware of it or not. Whatever else you hear today, please do not hear me saying that people are suffering because they lack faith or because they just need to pray more. Please don’t hear me saying they any of us should just tough it out. I am confident that the pastors in that Zoom call have faith. I am confident that they pray. Forty percent of an admittedly small sample of pastors are suffering enough right now that they have thoughts of suicide. That is not to be taken lightly.
Please hear me clearly. I am not at that level of struggle. A tricky thing about preaching about suffering is that I know my own burden is light. It sometimes feels disingenuous to attempt to speak in a meaningful way about something beyond my experience.
I can only dare to try because of the witness of scripture and the testimony of saints gone ahead of me. One of the gifts of the Bible is access to the lives and experiences of God’s people from across generations and cultures.
The words we read from Romans are those of the apostle Paul. More than once, he was beaten and put in prison because of his public proclamation of faith in Jesus. He was shipwrecked three times and faced many other dangers. Paul earned the right to speak about suffering. He offers the testimony of someone who has been there.
And he writes to people short on hope. Jews and Jewish Christians had been expelled once from Rome. Under the new emperor Nero, they had been allowed to return, but the empire was an increasingly hostile and threatening place. Eventually, it would execute Paul, the very person who was writing to them about suffering and endurance and character and hope.
It is Paul’s testimony, but it is not based solely on his own suffering. His testimony, his hope, is based on his faith in Jesus, Jesus the one who suffered and died to bring about reconciliation with God. Paul says that we have access to grace through Jesus. The hope we have persists through our suffering because its foundation is Jesus’ solidarity, Jesus’ entering into our life in order to share our fear and longing and pain and weakness.
Paul says that this hope does not disappoint. Which means this hope will not let us down. It will be fulfilled. But it also means that living in hope is not something to be ashamed of. We can hold our heads up in the midst of pain; we can trust that tomorrow can be different from today, because the Spirit fills us with strong love.[2]
I want to be careful not to take Paul’s testimony and make it into a formula. If this were a formula, it would be: suffering + endurance + character = hope
If it were a formula, then we would tell everyone who is suffering to endure long enough to get character and then, tada, hope would magically appear. But this is not a formula. This is Paul’s testimony about his experience. Paul has earned the right to speak about suffering. But you and I do not have the right to take these words from Paul and use them to prod others into accepting their own suffering on Paul’s terms or our terms. That is rarely helpful or loving.
What we can do is remember the grace to which we have access because of Jesus. What we can do is to interpret our own adversity in light of Paul’s testimony, to see what grace, what blessing, what hope might emerge if we try to apply his ideas about suffering and endurance and character, not as prescriptions for others, but as spiritual practices for ourselves.
Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Learning to Walk in the Dark is all about embracing the unknown. In it, she tells the story of James Bremner. James grew up in a small Scottish village where there were no wild animals or known criminals. But there were also no streetlights or porchlights. It got really dark. Every night after supper, it was James’ job to take the empty milk bottles down to the bottom of the driveway so that the milkman would get them the next morning. The driveway was about 100 yards long, but from the house it disappeared into complete blackness almost at once. James had to walk out into that darkness. He couldn’t run because he might break the bottles. But as soon as he set the bottles down, he would turn and race back up to safety. The darkness never stopped terrifying him. Every single night it took all the courage he had to do this simple chore. As an adult he said that the bravery that drew out of him stayed with him for the rest of his life. He writes, “Courage, which is no more than the management of fear, must be practiced.”[3]
“Courage is no more than the management of fear.” That makes it sound easy. But have you ever tried practicing being afraid so that you could manage it?
It seems to me that the kind of anxiety we all have right now, the fearfulness which pervades the airways and social media and our relationships and even gets into our dreams and nightmares, gives us the opportunity to practice courage.
I don’t know about you, but if there is a choice between telling myself “I am afraid” and “I am practicing courage”, I’m going to find “practicing courage” the more helpful internal monologue. I will endure longer and better if I understand that I am practicing courage. Perhaps one blessing that may result from the current trouble will be a stronger bravery muscle for next time.
Paul says that endurance (or, as I’m calling it, “practicing courage”) leads to character. That Greek word comes from a tool used for etching, making a mark or stamping an insignia. If we think about people who have endured suffering, we often see it on their faces or hear it in their voices. The marks left on their lives may draw us to them. They often become sources of wisdom, perspective and inspiration.[4]
I think of a man in another church whose only child died as a young adult. She lived and worked in another state. During an ice storm, she was in a car accident. Her parents received a call informing them that she was in the ICU. They drove hundreds of miles and arrived to the news that machines were keeping her alive. They made the heart-wrenching decision to disconnect the machines and release her. That was years before I met them. In my time, what was obvious was the way that experience had shaped their character. More than once, to someone struggling with a hard decision, especially a health care decision, I heard that father gently say “there are things worse than death.” To affirm that death is not the worst thing; to trust that it does not have the last word—that is hope that comes from suffering and endurance.
Practicing courage does not mean a stiff upper lip and silence. Again, please don’t hear me suggesting that we should just tough things out or minimize our own distress. Walter Brueggemann analyzed the testimony found in the Hebrew Bible, particularly of those in exile. He wrote that “Hope emerges among those who publicly articulate and process their grief over suffering.” [5]
“Hope emerges among those who publicly articulate and process their grief.” Brueggemann indicates that the opposite is also true. Hope does not emerge when people keep silent. Naming our distress, offering public lament is a way of enacting hope. We name what is wrong and what we want to be different. If we allow our circumstances to reduce us to silent suffering, if we cannot even articulate our pain, then we will likely give in to despair. That is, ironically, what is hopeful about the story I started with. You and I know about those pastors thinking about suicide because they were able to process their grief over suffering. In a paradoxical way, that is hopeful. Lament is valuable tool that can help us endure with courage.
A final story. George Matheson was a pastor in the Scottish Highlands in the 1800’s. He began to lose his sight as a teenager, but he went to university and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree by sitting near the window for the best light and using thick glasses. He was engaged to be married, but his fiancé ended the engagement when she realized he was going blind. His oldest sister was a strong support for many years, taking dictation, and helping to write sermons. She even helped to run the parish ministry in his first church.
Shortly after he was ordained, he experienced a crisis of faith. He said, “I believed nothing, neither God nor immortality.” He tendered his resignation, but his church would not let him go. They told him to stay and preach as much about Christ as he could believe in. So he stayed. Gradually, he was able to deal with his doubts and fears. He wrote, “I have changed. Without hypocrisy I preach all the old doctrines, but with deeper meaning.” [6] He served that church for 18 years.
When he was 40, the sister, who had been such a support for him for decades, was to be married. Then, he experienced another crisis. He said “I was alone . . . It was the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying overnight in Glasgow. Something happened to me, which was known only to myself and which caused me the most severe mental suffering.”
We don’t know what caused his suffering. Some speculate that it was remembered grief over the broken relationship with his former fiancée. Others suggest that he wondered how he would manage life without his sister. We don’t know the specifics. What we do know is the blessing that resulted. That night he wrote his most famous hymn “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”. It reflects his own experience of the steadfast love of God. And it has blessed generations of Christians in their own times of crisis.
Friends, this is a hard time. We are all struggling, but we do not despair. Let us practice courage and name our pain. Let us lament and paradoxically rejoice in our suffering. May we find the blessing in adversity or in spite of adversity because of the hope we know in Christ and the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] https://baptistnews.com/article/too-many-pastors-are-falling-on-their-own-swords/?fbclid=IwAR31_kzj0Tr3ebCrOA9FTDPFzXLAfvUh0mtfckmZOubF2MuWubdatR_Wz0U#.X0BP_MhKiUn
[2] N. Thomas Wright, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), p. 517.
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning To Walk in the Dark, (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 36-37
[4] Wendy Corbin Reuschling in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp Editors, , (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 79.
[5] Walter Brueggemann, Hope Within History, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987) p. 84
[6] http://www.bullartistry.com.au/pdf_bestill/033BeStill.pdf