Sermon Title: "Thanks in the Midst of Suffering"
Date: May 4, 2008
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

Sermon request:  "Why do good people--and their families--have to suffer through grave diagnoses?  How does faith in God help?"

The person asking this question wrote that he knew I had addressed it before.  And it is a commonly asked question.  I have had a church member leave the church because someone good died whom she thought shouldn’t have.  We prayed to God, but what difference did it make?  What good does it do to offer our prayers written down on these blue cards, the details of which I expanded upon in this week’s Carillon?

Rabbi Harold Kushner addressed the topic in his landmark book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  I was surprised to note the 1981 publication date in my well-worn book; twenty-seven years later we are still asking the age-old question, one that goes back to the plight of Job in the Old Testament.

The reason it keeps getting asked is because bad things continue to happen to good people, and whatever answer we might have been satisfied with ten or six or three years ago is not satisfactory when it happens all over again.

Instead of reading from Rabbi Kushner’s book, which is definitely worth reading, I want to quote a dialogue that jumped out at me from another, more recent book.  For my birthday last month, the younger of my two sisters gave me a copy of Three Weeks with My Brother, by Nicholas Sparks and Micah Sparks.  While this bestselling story of their three week trip around the world is the framework around which the book unfolds, it is interspersed with the story of the Sparks family over the years:  how their parents met and married, the birth of their three children, and all the family joys and tragedies over the ensuing years.

While on their trip, Nicholas Sparks more than once probed his brother about why Micah no longer participated in the church.  Micah replied:  “I think God exists, but I’m not so sure he takes an active role in the world.  I think he put everything in motion and since then he’s just sitting back watching how it’s going to turn out. . . . It’s not what they tell you in church, obviously.  In church, you’re supposed to pray and be thankful, but…I’ve come to the conclusion that prayer doesn’t work. … And for a long time there, it wasn’t easy to be thankful for much.  We went through one big challenge after the next.  They just didn’t let up.  And everyone kept telling me to be strong, that it would work out in the end.

“And after a while, it just kind of hit me.  What do I really believe?  I followed the commandments, I believed in Jesus, I went to church, and I prayed all the time.  And when I really needed God’s help, it was like the only answer I got was, Who cares?  I didn’t want God to give me strength to endure whatever was happening, I wanted God to put an end to what was happening.  And he didn’t.  So I quit.”

A long silence ensued.  Nicholas knew to wait.  Finally Micah asked him if he ever felt that way.

“Yeah.  All the time,” Nicholas replied.  But then he explained why it didn’t hit him like it hit his brother Micah:  “I guess I didn’t think any of the bad stuff was really God’s fault in the first place.  Things just happened.  And if God didn’t cause them, I guess I didn’t expect him to change it,” Nicholas concluded.  (pp. 267-268)

At another point, after Micah confessed that he hadn’t prayed in three years, he declared curtly, “I don’t pray because it doesn’t work.  Prayer doesn’t fix anything.  Bad things happen anyway.”

Nicholas asked, “Don’t you think it helps you handle those bad times though?”  Micah didn’t answer, signaling he didn’t want to talk about it.  (p. 100)

I could hardly put this book, Three Weeks with My Brother, down, and I recommend it for two reasons:  1)  While not written as a religious book, Nicolas is a person of faith, and there are several good interplays between the brothers as Micah struggles with faith and Nicholas struggles to understand him.  You will discover how his own faith has helped him to deal with several daunting crises over the decades.  2)  If you are a Nicholas Sparks fan, you will discover the inspiration behind many of his novels was dramatic incidents from his own family’s life.

Today’s epistle lesson from Peter was written at a time of deep struggle and suffering among the fledgling Christians of the first century.  The emperor Nero, upon causing the great fire in Rome in 64 AD, found a scapegoat among the followers of Christ.  Blaming them for the crime, he undertook a vengeful persecution.  Those who confessed belief in Christ were made subject of sport, being covered with animal skins and attacked by dogs, nailed to crosses, set on fire, even burned at night for the illumination of Nero’s garden parties.

Yet, in the face of this, Peter speaks with hope.  The use of the term “fiery ordeal” is a way of casting the people’s suffering in terms of the purification of gold and silver.  Faith is refined when put to such tests.  Moreover, to suffer for the name of Christ is to be united with him in his suffering.  Those who suffer such persecutions are blessed, says Peter, because the glory and the Spirit of God rest upon them.

As today’s lection skips ahead from chapter 4 to 5, Peter gives some straightforward, profound instructions:  humble yourselves to face whatever fate comes your way, for God will finally exalt you; in the meantime, cast all your anxieties on God and trust in his care; be disciplined and alert to the evils afoot in the world; and remain steadfast in faith, knowing that believers everywhere are facing the same persecutions.

The crowning word of hope in light of such bleak circumstances is Peter’s promise that after the suffering has ended, God will restore his people.  While suffering people would take some immediate comfort in the idea that they would be strengthened and restored to health if they survived the persecution, Peter has his eye on a more far-reaching promise.  God has called the faithful to an “eternal glory in Christ” (5:10).  His concluding doxology underscores the infinite nature of his point:  “to him be the glory forever and ever.” (5:11)

Many of you have joined me in enjoying the tales of Father Tim, an Episcopal priest of a certain age in author Jan Karon’s Mitford series.  A woman of deep Christian faith, I have been amazed at her ability to get into the head of a clergyperson as Father Tim deals with all the life experiences of his own parishioners and himself as realistically as clergy of any religion or denomination.  Over the course of eight novels, we experience Father Tim dealing with his own diabetes, marrying for the first time in his sixties, adopting a teen boy and reuniting his siblings, the deaths of dear church members, and his own retirement. 

In her novel, In This Mountain, author Jan Karon has Father Tim deliver a sermon during a time when he is suffering from an affliction.  Through the struggle of writing the sermon, Father Tim learns to deal with his pain.  In part, his sermon reads: 

“I wrestled with this morning’s message as Jacob wrestled with the angel . . . What I’d hoped to say was something we all need to know and ponder in our lives, but the message would not come together . . . And the reason it would not was simple.  I was writing the wrong sermon.  Then, at the final hour, when hope was dim and my heart was bruised with the sense of failure, God blessed me with a completely different message . . . Last night in my study God gave me four words that Saint Paul wrote in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica.  Four words that can help us enter into obedience, trust, and closer communion with God himself . . . Here are the four words. I pray you will inscribe them on your heart.  ‘In everything, give thanks.’ (5:15 KJV) . . . In everything give thanks.  That’s all.  That’s this morning’s message . . .

“Though we don’t do it often enough,” he goes on, “it’s easy to have a grateful heart for food and shelter, love and hope, health and peace.  But what about the hard stuff, the stuff that darkens your world and wounds you to the quick?  Just what is this everything business?  It’s the hook.  It’s the key.  Everything is the word on which this whole powerful command stands and has its being . . . In . . . loss of all kinds.  In illness.  In depression.  In grief.  In failure.  And, of course, in health and peace, success and happiness.  In everything . . .

“Some of us have been in trying circumstances these last months.  Unsettling.  Unremitting.  Even, we sometimes think, unbearable.  Dear God, we pray, stop this!  Fix that!  Bless us - and step on it . . .

“I want to tell you that I started thanking Him last night - this morning at two o’clock to be precise - for something that grieves me deeply.  And I’m committed to continue thanking Him in this hard thing, no matter how desperate it might become, and I’m going to begin looking for the good in it . . . Our obedience will say, Father, I don’t know why You’re causing, or allowing this hard thing to happen, but I’m going to give thanks in it because You ask me to.  I’m going to trust You to have a purpose for it that I can’t know and may never know.  Bottom line, You’re God - and that’s good enough for me,” Father Tim concludes. (pp. 310-313)

From time immemorial, humanity has suffered.  The Bible is filled with stories of persons—from Job to Stephen—who, in spite of their faith, had great calamities, even death, fall upon them.  Millions of Jews during World War II were exterminated because of the faith into which they were born.  Suffering happens in spite of our best efforts to bring peace to our troubled world, or healing to those who are sick with grave illnesses. 

Jesus never promised that faith in him would lead to a trouble-free life or one without one iota of suffering.  But what Peter and Nicholas Sparks and Jan Karon through Father Tim all profess is true:  Cast all your anxieties upon God, because God cares for you.  “And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.” (1 Peter 5:7, 10)  In this life, and the next.

 

Resources:

Harold S. Kusher.  When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  New York:  Schocken Books, 1981.

Nicholas Sparks and Micah Sparks.  Three Weeks with My Brother.  New York:  Grand Central Publishing, 2004.

Jan Karon.  In This Mountain.  New York:  Viking, 2002.