Sermon For March 19, 2000
Second Sunday after Lent
CHRISTIAN LETTERS: The Example of Abraham ~ Romans 4:13-25
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Power and Suffering ~ Mark 8:31-38
My purpose, this morning, is to convince you that God does not cause suffering. God does not cause suffering to punish us. God does not cause suffering in order to build our character. God does not cause suffering in order to teach us a lesson. More than that my purpose is to convince you that there is no great overarching redeeming value in suffering that turns suffering into a good thing. When people suffer, when children suffer, it is a bad thing. It is not something that I believe that God intended for us.
When I thought about this subject the first words that came to mind were the words of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, “He sees you when you’re sleeping, knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” Being good for goodness sake for me points to the purpose of us living lives of discipleship, living lives of sharing God’s love. I wanted to look into the background of the term “good for goodness sake.” I spent time on the Internet searching and didn’t have a whole lot of luck. If you have some good ideas about how to find the meaning of a phrase, let me know, because I obviously wasn’t at the correct site. But I also had a resource on my shelf, Hear America Talking, a book that considers all different colloquialisms, slang and phrases that have been part of our language. I didn’t find “for goodness sake” exactly, but I found a category of things that had to do with swear words. It had all kinds of variations, ways in which we have taken more acceptable words and put them in the place of swear words. So Charlie Brown’s “Good Grief” was along the lines of “for goodness sake.” You can imagine a parent saying, “For goodness sake, will you sit still and be quiet?!” All of the different terms, “fish hooks and pollywogs” and whatever else you have that are stand-ins for swear words, fit into the same kind of category. Even things that you would think have a religious meaning, in the context of being used as a curse word, take on a darker side. I we call on God to damn someone, we are calling a curse down upon that person. Most swear words that we use are used in three different ways. One is an exclamation point, we say, “Oh, Darn!” Or if we are calling down a curse on someone we say, “Well, darn you!” And if we are using it as an intensive modifier we say, “It is too darn cold out today.”
The phrase, “for goodness sake” is another variation of “for Pete’s sake.” They also had “for cat’s sake,” which I had never heard of before. It is a euphemism, it is a curse word that is used for impact, to do something for goodness sake. If you will notice in the worship bulletin I put down an apostrophe after goodness, which is not the way it is usually spelled, but the intent is that you are doing good for the sake of goodness. So it is not an exclamation or a curse or an intensive modifier, but it is an explanation about why you would chose to do something good for good’s sake. That is in opposition to doing good so that you won’t be punished. Doing good, so that nothing bad will happen to you. I’m going to make sure that I’m good so I stay out of trouble. You were doing good for the sake of good. That might remind you of the phrase -- to do something for the sake of Christ. But you know in our ability to turn words, we have turned that also into a curse. We say, “Will you stop doing that for Christ’s sake!” So now it is no longer a definition of why we would do something good, but instead it is a curse word that we use as part of our vocabulary. One other thing, we think that “Darn” was an immediate replacement for “Damn”, but instead the book said that it comes from “tarnal”, which comes from “eternal”. So if you start with “eternal”, which was basically a stand-in for “damn”, but it wasn’t from “damn” to “darn”, it was “eternal”, “tarnal”, “darn”. Doesn’t make a whole lot of difference today, but I thought it was interesting (chuckles from congregation). There was another thing that didn’t make a whole lot of difference, but I was going to tell you about it anyway (more chuckles from congregation). I was sort of obsessed with this Santa Claus business, and maybe that’s why “be good for goodness sake” came to mind. A couple of months ago we had a memorial service. There were elementary kids here and after the service they were upstairs in the classroom which has the cupboard where I keep my robe and some of the other costumes that I use. In that closet I also have a couple of Santa Claus suits that I picked up. I’ve never worn them, but one of these years you will be treated to a conversation between Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas, something to mark your calendar and look forward to (more chuckles). I knew that when I opened the cupboard door they might see the Santa suit so I decided to tease them. I said, “Make sure you don’t look in this cupboard.” When I opened it up they all said, “OOOH!” Then I said, further teasing them (and I already knew that they were not big Santa believers), “Well, you know when Santa comes through the Northwest, it rains a lot. Santa left a couple of suits here so that if he gets wet he can change clothes.” Then one of the girls said, “And I see he left a change of beard, too.” (Laughter)
In the scripture passage today, Jesus is talking about what is going to happen to him. He describes some pretty harsh scenarios. He said, “We are going to Jerusalem. I’m going to be arrested and put to death.” Peter jumps up and says, “I don’t want to hear any of this kind of talk at all! Let’s not talk about this crucifixion stuff. Let’s go and do some good things!” Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! I don’t need any further temptations to stray from the path, because it is already hard enough for me as it is. This is the path that I am walking and this is where it is going to lead. If you want to be my followers, you will walk the same path with me. You will pick up your cross and follow me. If you want to be my follower, you have to deny yourself. If you try to guarantee your life, if you try to secure your future, you are going to lose it all. You will have nothing. But if you give up your life for my sake, then you will find life in completeness.”
This is a tough thing for us to think about. You will notice that the commercial sector has never been able to make a lot of money out of Lent or even Easter, maybe a little bit of money for Easter eggs and squishy chicks. If you want to take the big holidays, you will find that after Christmas it is Halloween hands down. Easter just doesn’t have a lot of appeal. Death and rising again. Sacrifice. Following in a path of discipleship. There is not too much sales value there. Jesus said, “You have to follow me. You have to pick up your cross.” As we play that out through Christian history we find a developing idea that is labeled with the big seminary word of “atonement”. We have people developing a theology that says, “In order for all of us sinful humans to be saved, to be redeemed, someone had to pay the price.” There was only one that was good enough to pay the price, and that is the one that was sent by God specifically for that purpose. So Jesus came to die, to pay the price for your sins, so that you don’t have to pay the price, because you couldn’t afford it. If you will accept Jesus’ love, salvation is yours for all time. Now, you can sell that one. You sit down with someone and you tell him or her, “You are a bad person.” All of us are filled up with enough guilt, as it is, that we are pretty open to someone telling us that we are bad and worthless people. You would just say, “Well I kind of suspected that all along, actually.” If you were told that the guaranteed way to survive the pain of this life, the guaranteed way to have victory over death, is to accept Jesus’ love and the price that he paid, then you would say, “Sign me up right now! I will be there. Jesus is my savior!”
Atonement is carried through in lots of the hymns that we love. In the anthem today, “Just as I am, without one plea, but that your blood was shed for me.” Some great songs, the gospel and bluegrass, it is hard to know where those lines are, “Washed in the blood of the lamb, are you washed in the blood, are you washed in the blood of the lamb.” I love to sing those songs. They have a power that just carries you away. But I don’t care for the theology at all. I’m not the only one. Christians have been struggling with this whole issue all the way through the history of the Christian church. When the church was just beginning, shortly after Pentecost, it was centered in Jerusalem and then began to spread out into the Greek world. The Greek world and the Roman world were already dealing with the concept of dualism. There is a physical world and there is a spiritual world. The spiritual world got the “white hat.” The physical world got the “black hat.” So everything that was physical was bad and the goal of life was to be redeemed to the spiritual world. You had people that were eager to get on with that, because the real good time was after death, when you were no longer sinful and physical, but were spiritual, living in the love of God. That comes into direct conflict with the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis says that God created the world and the world was good. God created the heavens and the earth. God created the sun and the moon. It was good. God created the plants. Good. Animals. Good. Humans. Good. But we know that the world is not exactly as we would like it to be, so we developed this way of explaining things, “Well, God created it good, but we stepped away from God.” “It was Eve’s fault”, or “It was Adam’s fault for listening to Eve”, or “It was Adam and Eve’s fault put together that are to blame.” So evil came into the world. Suffering came into the world. We demonstrate that dualism even in the things that we do as part of the Christian church. The Roman Catholic Church has a crucifix. There is a corpse, a body on the cross. That focus says that Jesus died for our sins. Jesus’ death was necessary in order to redeem our lives as humans. The focus of a crucifix is on sacrifice. We have an empty cross. An empty cross says that the most important thing is God’s victory over death, so we celebrate the resurrection. Even as Protestants we still have some confusing ideas. We will call this an altar. Now it may be a picky thing, but I correct people constantly. An altar is an “altar” of sacrifice. If you read in the Old Testament whenever the people of Israel wanted to please God they would bring an animal and burn it on the altar as an offering to God. A payment for sins. To speak of Jesus as a lamb is to talk about exactly that same thing. Jesus is our sacrifice. The righteous sacrifice, so that God might forgive our sins.
The reformed tradition calls this a communion table, with space behind it so that people can gather around it. The focus then of our faith is not Jesus sacrificing body and blood in the bread and the cup, but instead a family meal, a meal among friends in which there is a commitment to a greater purpose. Sharing the love of God. If you page through our hymnbook, even this newly enlightened hymnbook that we have, you’ll find those images about God as creator of a good world and humans being redeemed from sin woven through it. Those ideas have been at odds throughout the history of the Christian church.
This morning in the videotape that we watched in Adult Sunday School Class, the topic was, “Does God want us to suffer?” There was disagreement among the four people that were gathered for that conversation. Some of the questions that were raised were, “Do we deserve suffering?” “Are there things that we can do in our live that inevitably cause us to suffer?” “Does God send suffering to us as a punishment, as a building of character?” The flip side of that is maybe a little easier to get at for you. If somebody lives a comfortable life; they have a nice house; money in the bank; vacations to the Caribbean every year; nice sailboat, does that mean that they are a good person? Is that a person that has been blessed by God for their righteousness, so they have this abundance of blessings? If you have read the Book of Psalms lately you know that the Psalmists certainly didn’t think that was a sign of God’s blessing. They cried out to God and said, “Why do bad people prosper, while I suffer as I try to be faithful to your purposes?” “Why is it that people can ignore others, be hateful, spiteful, power-hungry, and the money just pours down from the sky onto them?” Well, if we are rational about things we will say that the presence of money or the absence of money does not have a whole lot to say about whether a person is good or bad. It is no indicator about whether a person is loved by God or is not loved by God. There are lots of things that happen in the world. Some of them happen through our internationality. Some of them happen because of circumstances that we have little or no control over. Those who are rich and those who are poor live out that same life with those happenstances and that extensionality. The Bible says that God makes the rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. The world treats us all equally.
There are other ways to explain this business of suffering. One of the speakers on the videotape said that he liked the example of a parent trying to raise a child. There are times where that parent will allow a child to suffer because that has to happen in order for that child to grow and learn about the world. So you let your child climb a tree knowing that the child might fall and break an arm. But if you always tried to protect your child from climbing trees then the child will never be an adventurer, never be willing to take a chance, never willing to risk something. You will let you child enter into a friendship or a love relationship, knowing that this might not be the best thing for your child. Knowing that it is the only way that they will learn. If you tell them, “That girl is no good for you!” or, “That guy is going to take advantage of you!” they are not going to listen. In fact it might make the experience all that much more dangerous.
It seems like a good metaphor for how God works with us, why suffering takes place in the world. But there are flaws in it. If you use the word “allow”, God “allows” us to suffer, then that means that God could chose to intervene and stop the suffering if God chose to do so. If that is the case, one of the speakers pointed out, then we are getting awful near to the situation that William R. James described when he called God a white racist. If God “allows” some people to suffer, we can look through the world and see who does the bulk of the suffering. The bulk of the suffering is not carried out by white affluent northwesterners. If we look at our statistics about standard of living, about the use of the world’s resources, about income, education level, we are at the top. The top 10%, the top 5%. Pretty sobering, but we are at the top of the world. If we look at what the lives are like for the majority of people in the world, they experience a kind of suffering that we can’t begin to imagine. Suffering from natural disasters. Suffering from war. Suffering from bigotry, from hatred, from ethnic cleansing. Suffering of all kinds. If God “allows” us all to suffer, God doesn’t have to allow us to suffer very badly at all, and God allows some people to suffer an awful lot. That is frankly not a God that I care to believe in, not a God that I care to follow. There is no way of explaining it all to say that God is doing it for our own good, that there is some greater purpose in mind. There is not great purpose in mind that could be served by a child dying of hunger. There is no great purpose to be served by somebody’s house burning to the ground with the whole family inside. Or a hurricane wiping out an entire community. That is not to say that we can’t learn something from it. That is a whole different issue. How we approach the things that happen in our lives, how we approach the tragedies, does say something about who we are as Christian people. It does build our character. In the next section of scripture, go home and take your worship bulletin with you, if you look at Paul’s reading for Romans and read the very next passage, Paul says that suffering leads to endurance, endurance will help to build your character. If you are able to survive suffering, you will be better for it. That does not say anything about why the suffering happens to begin with. I believe that God is a loving God and that God does not cause these things to happen to us for good reasons. Instead God promises to be with us so that we can survive and in surviving we become stronger people. When Jesus says to take up your cross, I don’t think that he is talking about the little burdens of life. That is the way we tend to use that phrase. If we have a skin disease we say, “That is my cross to bear.” Or if we have an unruly child we say, “I guess that is my cross to bear.” If we have some kind of disability that makes life more difficult for us we say, “Well, that is my cross to bear.” I don’t think that is what Jesus is talking about at all. Jesus’ cross was not something that was dropped down on him or handed to him. Jesus’ cross was something that was a consequence of his actions. Jesus chose to challenge the authorities. Jesus chose to stand out and to speak out for the people who were outcasts. Jesus chose to say, “It is not the law that matters, it is God’s love that matters.” The consequences of his choices were his arrest and his crucifixion. That does not mean that Jesus came to die to pay the price for our sins. I don’t believe that Jesus chose to die to save us. I believe that Jesus chose to live his life faithfully in order to save us, in order to tell us about God’s love, in order to help us live a life of faith. He did not choose to die, he chose to live. When he calls on us to take up our crosses and to walk with him, he is not calling on us to chose to suffer to build our character, he is not calling on us to chose to die a martyr’s death. He is calling on us to choose to live our life faithfully for God’s love. I pray that God’s spirit might strengthen you for that walk this Lenten season. Thanks be to God. Amen.