Suffering joyfully?

 

Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

When was the last time you prayed, as our collect for today does, “to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed?”  I feel a little uncomfortable with this prayer.  It is not a way of praying that I would commend to someone in the midst of great trauma or loss.  It leaves something to be desired as a pastoral response to other people’s suffering.  So, what do we do with this prayer?

 

I am reluctant to tell other people how they should respond to their suffering.  At the same time, there is a sense in which religion is precisely about what we do with our suffering.  If our faith cannot help us meet the challenge of suffering, then what good is it?  I am reluctant, but I can tell you what I do with this prayer.  Take what is helpful and leave the rest.

 

There is a big difference between suffering that I can or cannot accept – suffering that presents itself to us as a choice – and suffering that is imposed upon us, that simply crushes our will.  We might call this the difference between voluntary and involuntary suffering.  It is not always so easy to distinguish between the two, but I believe it is a distinction that makes a difference.

 

Any choice to serve a good that is larger than myself involves a kind of voluntary suffering:  the sacrifices one makes to raise children, or create art, or secure human dignity and freedom.  Jesus’ suffering, it seems to me, is voluntary in this sense:  the result of his absolute commitment to stand in solidarity with all who suffer and to embrace them in the healing power of love – no matter what. 

 

Suffering undertaken voluntarily is always done in the hope of a better future:  confident of the glory that shall be revealed.  We may not experience that future.  Like Moses, we may not get to the Promised Land, but we will suffer so that others can get there.  It seems to me that such suffering is an unavoidable aspect of the evolution of human consciousness, and the realization of love in the concrete circumstances of life. 

 

If you’ve ever participated in a movement for justice or shared in the life of a congregation to which you are committed, you have probably experienced the paradoxical joy that comes with voluntary suffering:  the sense of meaning, of community, of discovering one’s rightful place in the world; dare I say, discovering God’s will for you.   Such joy is not about pain or pleasure.  It is about purpose. 

 

And it is about love.  The love of God and God’s love for us, can be stronger than every form of affliction.  This is the mystical core of our capacity to accept suffering joyfully.  In her profound and lyrical book, simply titled, Suffering, Dorothee Soelle beautifully expresses this understanding of “accepting” suffering. 

 

She writes, 

 

It is paradoxical but true that unconditional love for reality does not in the least defuse passionate desires to change reality.  To love God unconditionally does not mean to deny our concrete desires and accept everything as it is.  To put it in mystical terminology, unconditional love can allow itself the most absurd desires – it can pray for them and work for them, precisely because it does not make the existence of God depend upon the fulfillment of these desires.

 

Mystical love . . . transcends every God who is less than love.[1]

 

We can pray with the psalmist, “O Lord make haste to help me,” even as we willingly accept the suffering occasioned by the resistance we face in our determination to persist in the work of love.  All of our scripture readings today are addressed to communities facing persecution and suffering, precisely because of the resistance to the work love they were facing.  It isn’t so much that they chose suffering, but that they were willing to suffer for choosing love.

 

In each case, they were encouraged to persevere because (a) all suffering is temporary and (b) God will vindicate the work of sacrificial love.  Such voluntary suffering is a participation in the “glory” of God:  it is a sharing in the reputation or identity of God.  The image of God is revealed within us through the tempering fire of sacrificial love.   We cannot love what we do not accept.  And we cannot change what we do not love.  That seems to be the order of the divine economy:  we do not need to change in order to be loved, but having been loved we will be changed.   Thus, Jesus washed the feet even of Judas, the one who betrayed him, and accepted Judas’ betrayal as a step toward sharing God’s glory.

 

Now, there is also involuntary suffering.  Suffering we do not and should not choose.  When it comes to involuntary suffering, love demands that we seek to ameliorate the causes of that suffering and repair the damage that has been done.  It is for this purpose that we accept voluntary suffering.  This is the clear teaching of holy scripture from Moses to Jesus.   

 

And, yet, I have witnessed a capacity for acceptance of even involuntary suffering when circumstances cannot be changed.  “Acceptance” in this sense does not mean that such suffering should be desired or that it is somehow justified – a punishment for sin or a necessary lesson.  It is the very opposite of thinking that suffering is sent by God for our own good.  “Acceptance” in this sense is the freedom to integrate suffering into our experience without being defined by it, without it reducing our world to a single point of pain, confident of God’s vindication.  Love is stronger than every form of affliction. 

 

Moses did not enter the Promised Land.  Not everyone experiences liberation from suffering in this lifetime.  We know this.  Even so, I take comfort from the image of Moses and Elijah with Jesus on the holy mountain where Jesus was transfigured.  The horizon of love’s healing power extends far beyond the compass of our lifetime.  This is not a reason for quietism or withdrawal from the work of love; rather, it is a source of strength, as the glory that will be revealed is even now reaching out to embrace us from beyond the horizon.  It is in the light of the Resurrection that the darkness of Holy Week casts its shadow.  Amen.

 

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[1] Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 94.

Saying Their Names: A Palm Sunday Sermon

As we begin our observance of Holy Week, let us pause with Jesus as he stands weeping just outside of Jerusalem.  I have diverted from the lectionary, which would have us read Luke’s Passion narrative today, so that we could take this moment with Jesus in his grief.  You see, Holy Week isn’t only about Jesus’ passion.  It is about the suffering of all the victims of injustice for whom Jesus weeps.   Let us pause and take all the time we need to acknowledge our collective failure to recognize the things that make for peace; our failure to recognize God’s presence with us.   We must mourn for Jesus this week, but not for him alone.

 

Palm Sunday is often described as the celebration of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, hailed as the long awaited king of Israel.  But Jesus didn’t see it that way.  He rode into the city with tears streaming down his cheeks.  “In the world of feeling, tears are the criterion of truth.”[1]  Only Luke’s Gospel has the courage to show us the truth of Palm Sunday and it is a bitter truth; there is no way to sugar-coat it.  Jesus’ tears break through every attempt to deny, minimize, or avoid the suffering of God’s people.[2] 

 

Jesus refuses to act as if everything is just fine.  Neither is he naïve about the prospects for change around the edges of the system.   He knows that things are about to fall apart.  Indeed, they need to fall apart, so that something genuinely new and live-giving can break through our indifference, conformity, and complicity with the way things are.  We cannot solve the problems we have created from within the level of consciousness that created them.   We must undergo metanoia, the transfiguration of our consciousness and awakening of our conscience generated by the breaking-open of our hearts. 

 

This is why lament is one of the central tools in the prophet’s toolkit.  Grief acknowledges the reality that things are not as they should be.  This isn’t easy.  Amma Syncletica said “We must kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work.”  Acknowledging reality is hard work.  We can become so inured to the suffering within us and around us that it requires effort to break through our numbness. 

 

Jesus was anything but numb.  He wept over Jerusalem, acknowledging that the failure to pursue peace would have devastating consequences for his people.  He wept over the broken bodies, broken lives, and broken hearts that he encountered wherever he travelled; the crowds of suffering people clamoring for food, for healing, for justice, for life.  He knew their stories.  He knew their names.  His love for them drove him to Jerusalem to plead their cause and share their plight. 

 

Prophets, like Jesus, name names and grieve the losses that others refuse to acknowledge.  This is the root of the veneration of the martyrs.  “Saying their names” is an ancient prophetic practice that roots our energy for healing and reconciliation in compassion.  The Black Lives Matter movement has powerfully reminded us of this truth: prophetic criticism is energized, not merely by anger, but overwhelmingly by love:  Love for Trayvon Martin, for Ahmaud Arbery, for George Floyd, for Breonna Taylor, for Tamir Rice, for Addie Mae Collins, for Cynthia Wesley, for Carole Robinson, for Carol Denise McNair, for Martin Luther King Jr., for Medgar Evers, for Emmett Till and a litany of other victims of racist violence in the United States.  So many names.  So many tears.  So much love. 

 

We cannot change what we do not grieve.

 

Grief is a form of criticism.  Tears are the criterion of truth.  In the prayers of the people, we have been naming names:  of loved ones suffering and grieving, of neighbors who have no home to retreat to at night, of refugees fleeing terror and hunger.  All is not well.  The system isn’t working.  All this is obvious to the awakened heart.

 

“Weep.  Truly, there is no other way but this” said Abba Poemen, echoing the example of Jesus on the threshold of Holy Week.  Why is grief so important to our collective spiritual evolution?  Because, as Margarete Mitscherlich-Neilson observes,

 

the defense against shame, guilt, and mourning leads to emotional emptiness in the individual and, in consequence, to psychological and political immobility, to a lack of ideas and imagination in society.[3]

 

Tears cleanse the lens of perception so that we can acknowledge reality and begin to imagine new possibilities.  Things don’t have to be this way.  Jesus weeps as he rides into Jerusalem.  Then he goes to the Temple and drives out those who were using it as a pretext to exploit the poor, quoting the prophets before him, “It is written: ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”  The people are spellbound by Jesus’ teaching and his action, because he imagines and enacts a future different from the way things are. 

 

Walter Brueggemann, reflecting on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, argues that

 

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings . . . Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again:  (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness.  His weeping permits the kingdom to come.[4]

 

During Holy Week, we pause to weep with Jesus.  We rekindle the divine fire of love within ourselves through tears and hard work.  On Holy Saturday, we will symbolize the renewal of our imagination, the love that inspires new possibilities for life together, as we kindle the new fire and carry the Light of Christ back into the world.  But for now, let us pray for the gift of tears and for the courage to remember the names of those for whom, for too long, we have failed to weep.  Only then, will we be able to perceive the new thing that God is doing, the things that make for peace.  Amen.

 

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[1] E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 55.

[2] Luke 19:41-48.

[3] Margaret Mitscherlich-Neilson, “The Inability to Mourn – Today” trans. Beverly R. Placzek, in The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 407.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 56, 58.