Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Sometimes There's Just No Escaping It "
Date: April 2, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  John 12:20-33

In our church newsletter this week, I shared my quandary in studying the scripture texts for each Sunday.  What is new in there that I haven’t preached on before?  When I did my sermon homework last Monday, one verse kept coming back to me.  It is the one I printed below the sermon title in the worship bulletin.

Jesus says, “Now my soul is troubled.  And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”  (John 12:27)

Other clergy preaching on this same lesson from John today may focus on the verses saying there were some Greeks present, indicative that when John wrote near the end of the first century, Christianity was stretching well beyond its area of origin.  Still others might preach on the fact that all Jesus does is not for his own glory, but to show the glory of God the Father.  These are all worthy sermon themes, some of which I’ve used in the past.

But last Monday I kept getting drawn back to Jesus’ answer to himself about his troubled soul.  Was the solution to pray to God to save him from the coming hour of trial and suffering and death?  In Matthew, Mark and Luke, while in the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells his disciples that his soul is “sorrowful.”  He departs to a place alone to pray:  “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42)  His prayer may sound like he’s trying to escape what lays ahead, but upon closer reflection, it is offered with the same sense of acceptance we hear in John today.  “Not my will but yours be done” is not too different from saying, “…it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”  Jesus accepts what is coming for he truly believes that is why God sent him into the world; that is his role and mission in life. 

There is a difference, however, in how the synoptic/first three Gospels interpret Jesus’ understanding of his death and John’s interpretation.  The Christ of John endures no great agony, has no ambiguity about his own commitment to his mission.  The Christ of John’s Gospel walks confidently, regally to his time of “glory.”  Now will the reign of God begin in its fullness.  Jesus’ death and resurrection will be his great exaltation.

Sometimes there’s just no escaping it.  His disciples didn’t understand it.  A few weeks ago, we heard Peter tell Jesus to stop the talk about death; it was demoralizing to the troops.  Even after his resurrection, at first they weren’t sure what to make of it.

When the news from the doctor is bad, when your kids get in trouble, when your spouse tells you he or she no longer wishes to be married to you, when there’s an unexpected death in your family, when your company downsizes and you’re out of a job, when the bottom falls out of the market and your income is slashed . . . sometimes there’s just no escaping it.  You have no choice but to deal with it, no matter how surprised, ill-prepared, or unaccepting you are.

Sometimes, in those confined places in life, when we are trapped, nowhere to escape, we are pushed close to God and to what really matters in life.  For instance, it is fascinating to consider how much important biblical material was written by people in jail—by Paul in prison, by John in exile on the Island of Patmos.  There is also the powerful letter that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote while he was in prison in the Birmingham jail.  Each of these men used their faith to help them survive the ordeal, and their writings continue to this day to offer faith and hope to others.

Eugene Peterson says that we also have times of “forced imprisonment.”  We go through some great loss—unemployment, divorce, or bereavement.  It is like exile, as if we are being forced to move out of our accustomed home into an unaccustomed new place.  Not that these circumstances produce new life and good by themselves, but it is amazing how they can be the condition necessary for new life.

Whenever I am going through a difficult time, a challenging time, an uncomfortable time, I have learned—and it comes with age—to say to myself, “I don’t like this, but I will get through it.  What can I learn from it?”  Those experiences from which there is no escape teach us things about ourselves that we can use in the future, and they just may teach us something that we can use to benefit someone else going through their own dark valley.

Susan Stracke writes in an issue of the Upper Room about a lesson learned from broken sand dollar:  “One evening, when my children were playing in our living room, my youngest son hid behind a chair.  When he was coming out from hiding, he accidentally bumped a nearby glass table.  The table wobbled and picture frames toppled forward upon a large, delicate sand dollar I had bought while vacationing at the ocean one summer.

“Hearing the crash, I rushed to the table and saw the shattered sand dollar.  Minutes before, the sand dollar had been beautiful and whole.  It now lay in three jagged pieces.

“My son and I carefully gathered the pieces of the sand dollar and carried them to the kitchen.  As we glued the parts together, we noticed the intricate structure within.  Had it not been broken, we would never have known of the beauty hidden inside.

“I think we are a little like that sand dollar” she concludes.  “When our spirits are broken, God puts us back together again.  During the healing process, God helps us discover inner resources we would never have known existed within us had we not experienced being broken.”  (Upper Room, November 13, 1995, p. 16.)

It is strange.  On Sunday morning at worship, or in our own individual prayers, we often pray for good health, for prosperity, for safety and good things—almost that we be saved from ever being hurt or suffering.  And yet, according to the scriptures, it is during the times of adversity, of tragedy, of hunger and need, of darkness and storm, that people are met most by God.  Perhaps we ought to be praying, not that we will be relieved of all of our hunger, but that in our hunger, we shall find true nourishment.  We ought to pray that in the storm we might find true shelter, that in the night we might find the warmth and the light of true home in God.

When the sun goes down, and the sky becomes dark as midnight, we are surprised to see the light of stars overhead.  When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we lift up our eyes, we are comforted, and we go on, but in a different way than we have previously walked.

There in the darkness, in the despair, we are able to see the peculiar glory of the Christian faith.  We look up and see God who stoops to us in our need, the Lord who reigns from the cross.

Jesus suffered.  So must we.  Sometimes there’s just no escaping it.  Being the Son of God did not mean that Jesus was immune from suffering.  Rather, it meant that there was a way to suffer that transformed our understanding of suffering forever.