Sermon Title: "Boasting in Our Sufferings"
Date: March 27, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Romans 5:1-11

“We…boast in our sufferings,” Paul writes.  We all suffer from time to time—a bad day, a bad week, even a entire year we’re happy to put behind us.  But we also know people who thrive on boasting in their sufferings.  Everything is bad for them—their health, their job, their family, their finances, their future…and on and on.  You dread being around them because you know you are going to be exposed once again to their lethal litany of what ails them and their sad lot in life.

At the same time, we have been exposed to some very real, dramatic and tragic suffering in our world just in the past month.  On February 22, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake toppled Christchurch, New Zealand.  On March 11, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in the Pacific violently shook the northeastern coast of Japan, and then a tsunami of monumental proportions rolled in, sweeping whole villages and thousands of people out to sea.  Within twelve hours, it swept across the ocean at 500 miles an hour until it crashed on the shores of Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and California.  Then we learned of the explosions at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Headlines read, “Anxiety and Need Overwhelm a Nation,” “For Elderly, Echoes of War’s Horrors,” “3rd Blast Strikes Crippled Nuclear Plant,” and “In the Aftermath of Disaster, Survivors Search a Landscape of Loss.”  The cover of this week’s Newsweek magazine declares:  “Apocalypse Now.  Tsunamis.  Earthquakes.  Nuclear Meltdowns.  Revolutions.  Economics on the Brink.  What the #@%! Is Next?”

Then, on March 16, suffering occurred very near to us, just a few miles away at Long Beach Airport.  A small plane crashed, killing five men, several of them well-known and influential in the Long Beach community.  The kind of suffering you don’t want to boast or brag about plunged instantly upon their families as they reeled from the tragic deaths of husbands and fathers, sons and brothers.  A member of this church, Mike Jensen, is the sole survivor, and he is undergoing his own painful suffering in the hospital’s burn unit as he recovers from burns, multiple surgeries and medical procedures.

All of this news—from earthquakes in distant countries to uneasiness about traces of radiation here on the West Coast, from images of miles and miles of deserted Japanese cities plowed down in ruins, to shocking and tragic deaths of people we knew—all cause us to wonder how we can ever move beyond being stalled at “suffering” in Paul’s litany of the end product of suffering:  “…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  (Romans 5:3-5)

Modern psychological sophistication may find the notion that “boasting” or bragging of one’s own suffering as a virtue is a red flag for a masochistic, self-despising faith.  But Paul is not touting suffering as a virtue in and of itself.  Suffering is only worthy of a positive, boastful interpretation when, like our hope, it participates in the glory of God.  As with all the other characteristics Paul mentions in his litany, this kind of suffering points toward the redemptive act of Christ and the presence of grace in our lives.  “Noble suffering” has no place in the Christian list of virtues, only “humble suffering,” experienced in the realization of Christ’s own suffering for the sake of humanity.

Many of us could attest that the suffering we have undergone as individuals—not nearly as severe as death on a cross or recovering from a horrific accident—has been a learning experience for us.  We may come out stronger for it—stronger in our will and determination to lead a life of purpose, stronger in our faith.  We may even be able to help others through what we’ve gone though.  I know many cancer and heart attack survivors give hope and encouragement to others going through the same thing, not by boasting, but by sharing their experience with those frightened by the outcome.

In the middle of today’s passage, Paul takes a turn and reminds us in a key verse of a theme so appropriate to our Lenten journey:  “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (5:6)     It doesn’t say that Christ died for those who endure and develop good character.  That is a response to God’s grace, not the reason for it.  Nor does Paul say that Christ died for the godly.  Christ died for the ungodly, for sinners, which gives us an accurate, if unflattering, truth about ourselves.

Paul further asserts:  “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (5:8)  God seeks to repair humanity’s break with God by reconciling with us through the death of his Son.  Hard as it is to understand twenty centuries later for us who did not stand at the foot of the cross, God was saying this is the most powerful way that I can show my love for you.

In his book Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1991), Princeton Seminary systematic theology professor Daniel Migliore proposes a portrait of God that focuses on God’s journey to the depths of human suffering, pain and alienation in the death of Jesus.

Migliore argues that we as Christians stand in the biblical story and are called to look at God’s relationship to suffering through the lens of Jesus’ life, in which God takes suffering into God’s very being but refuses to let death have the last word.  God brings new life out of the tragic death of Jesus, but not as a lesson about suffering or as some guarantee that suffering can be avoided.  In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God takes on human sin and suffering, ultimately overcoming them with the gift of new life.

Migliore ends his chapter on God and suffering with the insistence that in the face of real, deep experiences of suffering, theories are simply not enough.  Faith involves a relationship with a God who suffers with us and refuses to leave it—or us—unredeemed. 

N. T. Wright, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, notes that the qualities Paul writes of to the Romans—“suffering produces patience, and patience produces a tried and true character, neither of these qualities is much in evidence—or indeed highly prized—in contemporary Western society, which wants everything at once and wants to be free to change character according to the mood of the moment.  As a result, we should not be surprised that we are in many respects a society without hope.”

Wright’s final words reflecting on this text may well be our charge for the week ahead:  “Those who believe in Jesus the Messiah are called to model communities, families and personal lives in which the sequence of faith, peace, suffering, patience, character and hope is lived out, sustained by the Holy Spirit’s work of enabling us to know God’s love and to love God in return.”  (New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X, Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2002, p. 521.)