SERMON

 

March 31 and April 1

March 31-April 1

Tasha Brubaker

There is a scene from a great book called A Wind in the Door by the theologically brilliant episcopal writer Madeline L’Engle I’d like to share.  It is a children’s book, but one that has just as much to say to adults once they fire up their imaginations. 

         There is a crisis.  Meg is being asked to undergo an ordeal to help save the life of her brother Charles Wallace with the assistance of a cherubim named Proginoskes.  She is scared and she knows she will go through pain and suffering, perhaps even die in her efforts to save him.  And, after facing her fear in this scene, she does.  She suffers and very nearly dies.

           “Megling, I’ve never been to your planet before.  This is your home.  Charles Wallace is your brother.  You are the one who knows Mr. Jenkins.  You must tell me what we are to do now.”

          Meg stamped, loudly and angrily, against the hard, cold surface of the rock.  “This is too much responsibility!  I’m still only a child!  I didn’t ask for any of this!”

          “Are you refusing to take the test?”  Proginoskes pulled away from her.

          “But I didn’t ask for it!  I didn’t ask for Blajeny, or you, or any of it!”

          “Didn’t you?  I though you were worried about Charles Wallace.”

          “I am!  I’m worried about everything!”

          “Meg.”  Proginoskes was somber and stern.  “Are you going to enter into the ordeal?  I must know.  Now.”

          Meg stamped again.  “Of course I’m going to.  You know I have to.  Charles Wallace is in danger.  I’ll do anything to help him...”

               I read this passage, something unfamiliar or perhaps long forgotten, as a way to get our ears opened for hearing anew the story of the arrest, trial and execution of Jesus the Christ—the passion.  There is a particular aspect of suffering that is front and center in the Christian faith and that L’Engle’s story also points to.

 It is this:  The discipline of Christian suffering is to decide, when given the choice, to enter into suffering with or on behalf of someone else.  The discipline of Christian suffering is to decide, when given the choice, to enter into suffering with or on behalf of someone else.  That is a pretty complex statement.  We won’t, couldn’t possibly, fully answer it today.  There is much on this topic we won’t touch such as why there are natural disasters or why do we get ill, and so on.  What I would like to do is briefly offer up snapshots of how this statement is shown in both the reading of Isaiah, the song of the suffering servant, and the passion narrative.

 Snapshot 1:  On some level we are made to enter into suffering on behalf of others.  Think of every mother who has given birth to a baby.  Parents will take on danger and harm to self unthinkingly to protect their child.  This is done both knowingly and but also very much instinctually—we are driven to protect our young by biology and emotion.  Meg is somewhere different. She has to make an intentional and deliberate choice.

Snapshot 2:  Suffering in the Gospel takes this and goes further.  It is to know that suffering may flow from the path we are on and yet we continue anyhow because it is the path of compassion, truth, mercy and freedom.  We have a choice.  We can continue or we can turn away.  Jesus had the choice.  “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”  In his anguish he prayed and sweat came like great drops of blood.  This is a person in distress.  We need to let go of the image that Jesus welcomed it calmly, placidly, assured that it would all be well on the other side, and that in three days he would be eating with his friends again.  He agonized.  He is asking for some other alternative than this horrible end.   All that stands before him is death.  He could have fled.  He could have hidden.  He could have succumbed to the temptation that had been offered several times before—to be made king and all that would have meant at that time. 

Snapshot 3:  He chose, deliberately and intentionally, to stay true to the Gospel and to follow it even though suffering was the consequence.  He chose to continue on a path that would mean suffering on behalf of those he came to serve and heal.  He showed mercy, he challenged interpretations of the law and scripture that were used to abuse and hold people down in the name of God, he taught forgiveness and love, even of enemies. Staying true to his path meant a road that never inflicted suffering on others, but always offered life.  What good news that was for those he touched!  And he threatened the powers that be.  His whole life and teaching cut through the ways we dominate each other-- latent or overt--to control each other and feel secure.  He never turned away, even when saying one word of renunciation would have saved his neck.  ‘If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I question you, you will not answer.’ And again, “You say that I am.”  He made the choice to the end to live the Gospel.    He like Meg would do anything for them with love.  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

Snapshot 4:  Part of the good news of his death is that it exposes a fundamental and foundational lie in our world—the need for violence and death.  Both are part and parcel of a world that thrives on domination and that world fights back hard when resisted.  Jesus sees it clearly for what it was and still is:  “But this is your hour and the power of darkness!” That power will distort and misrepresent the voice and message of the one speaking out.  That power will offer resistance to that voice and use the vehicles of justice, legality and power to put it down.  Listen to this process in the scripture.  Then the assembly rose as a body. ‘We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.’  He was despised and rejected by others, he was despised and we held him of no account.  By a perversion of justice he was taken away, stricken for the transgression of my people, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Snapshot 5:  Another face of this good news is that his death revealed the mechanism we have created to find the one to blame—the scapegoat.  The devout Christian and remarkable thinking René Girard sees this as one of the glories of the gospel, the unmasking of this mechanism so it can be seen.  This one or this group is the cause of our problems.  Banish or kill them, justify this as the requirement of God and thereby through this act be put right with God and each other—order restored.  In the version of John we hear it quite clearly:  It is better that one man die for the people. But it is here too. Why, what evil has he done?  I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death.  Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?  ...but this man has done nothing wrong.  Certainly this man was innocent.  But to many he was guilty of the most deadly of crimes: challenging the bases upon which they had constructed the order of society.

Other orthodox theologians from the earliest church to Archbishop Williams have seen the cross as bearing this message.  Jesus’ death exposed the world to itself and offered the deeper truth.  It is not God that requires the violence; it is us. “Lord, should we strike with the sword?  No more of this!”  And more horribly the chant:  “Crucify!  Crucify him!”  To modern day versions such as a bumper sticker I saw not long ago:  Kill them all.  Let Allah sort them out.  Much of the Bible is the story of these two opposing views in conflict with each.  That struggle continues to this day for we still believe that our violence is redemptive and that God picks sides in it.  The cross in truth redeems us from our violence.  The tension of these two kingdoms colliding is real.  We still live out lives under the thrall of violence and domination yet we know that the victims we all create is an act of injustice.  The glory of the Gospel is that we were able to see this very process—the truly innocent one condemned to die and surely that is the punishment that made us whole—for God himself took it on in Jesus Christ—graphically and uniquely--and transformed it.  He took our sin and became the scapegoat and shattered its hold on us forever if we but believe it.  

Snapshot 6:  In this reality of suffering there is no shortcut.  It is only through this suffering that another way can be seen.  It was true of the cross.  It was true of India’s struggle for freedom and it was true of Archbishop Romero’s witness in El Salvador and in every other instance of suffering for the sake of the Gospel.  The suffering is part of the very revelation of a new way.  The suffering and those who suffer give birth to it and without their witness it could not happen.  Perhaps this is a way to understand that most difficult of lines: Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.  Not that God is perverse or demanded this death for his honor or justice, but that there was no other path by which we could come to see. 

As followers of Jesus we will be faced with the same type of choice.  Do we, when faced with the choice, decide to enter into a course that will include suffering on behalf of others knowing that it will cost us much?  For each of us that will look different, but the call remains the same.  Do we challenge societal norms and behaviors that fly in the face of the Gospel’s call to liberate, love and let go of self with determined and brave compassion, peace and mercy? Do we sit with others in their pain and suffering?  Do we not blame or turn a blind eye, but suffer in communion with others through our very presence?  Whether micro or macro, whether personal or communal, the reality of suffering and the call to suffer for the sake of the Gospel remains.  And here is the deep truth, that path will end not with death and emptiness, but new life.

It is devastatingly hard.  It flies in the face of so much of what we have been told.  And when we suffer in this way, or any way, it is almost impossible at times to see where God is in it.  Can we trust in God and sit at the cross when we can not see the resurrection light and hold onto something deep in our soul that the pain and suffering is not the end of the story and not the victor?  For it isn’t.  God is there, beside us, with us, even dying with us.  It is a hard path at times, but it is also a path of joy and hope and one that keeps fixed on the love of God lived out no matter how impossible the odds.  And that is something worth living and dying for.