Life is hard, then you die
     Redeeming your pain

This sermon was presented on May 22nd, 2011: the day after some people had assumed that the rapture was going to happen.  The texts that were read during the service which are referenced here were Psalm 73:21-26 and Romans 8:12-39

Well, I have to say that I’m not sure what to think about the fact that you’re here this morning.  I understood from some billboards around town that yesterday all believers should have been raptured on out of here.   One wonders sometimes just how often the end of the world can come.  If the earth could talk, perhaps it would agree with Mark Twain: “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

But seriously, folks.  Although I realize that primarily the basis of the most recent prediction are the numbers one man found in the bible which he thought added up to yesterday; in part there was, as there often is, the fact that recently we have seen major natural disasters around the globe, including a huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan, tornadoes here in the US, and of course there are various conflicts around the globe etc.  Somehow these sorts of things always result in people looking for the end times to occur.  That always makes me wonder a little, since these are the kinds of things that Jesus specifically excluded as signs of the end. “ Such things must happen”, he said, “ but the end is yet to come” (Matt. 24:6).  Although these events were not signs that the end of the world was imminent, they were signs.  They signify for us in a very stark way that the world we live in is a broken one.  Coincident with all of these events came immense amounts of pain and suffering, and that isn’t how it is supposed to be.  Throughout the world people continue to experience the kind of pain that causes most of them to know intuitively, and those who believe the bible to know because it has been revealed as true, that there is something not right with the way this world works. 

Recently I experienced something more on the personal level that once again reminded me of this.  When my sister’s daughter had her first child, what was immediately obvious was that something was not quite right.  After some tests, it was discovered that she was missing a chromosome.  We were all created to have a full complement of chromosomes, and little Cali’s life as well as those who care for her is going to be a challenging one.  It shouldn’t be that way.  That isn’t the way we wanted it to be.  All of us close to that situation, and I’m sure most people who were victimized by recent earthquakes and tornadoes and wars as well, have experienced the kinds of feelings that the Psalmist did as reflected in the text that we read this morning. 

21When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered,
22I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you. (Ps. 73:21,22)

This passage strikes me as one of the most concise and accurate descriptions of the human response to suffering that I know of.  When we experience the undeserved pain that so often characterizes our existence in this world, our hearts are grieved.  I can tell you that many tears flowed after those tests came back.  It seems as if the world is constantly awash in the tears of suffering that living in this world all too often generates.  And what oftentimes follows is our anger.  I was ticked off.  My sister’s family has been through plenty of pain—they don’t deserve this.  There is no reason to believe, biblically or otherwise, that people who had their families and possessions swept away by a tsumani or a tornado deserved that. 

That was the essence of the Psalmist’s complaint: “here I am entirely righteous and look at these jerks who really deserve some of this pain, and they’re thriving.”  And therein lies the real problem.  The pain would be so much easier to deal with if we just knew why it was occurring.  But, the psalmist declares, we are senseless and ignorant.  We can’t make sense out of why these things happen.  And when we cry out for answers we are left without the information that could at least help us put some meaning to all the suffering.  Let’s face it: human beings have shown themselves capable of dealing with immense amounts of pain and suffering if they understand what the intended result of it will all be.  What ultimate meaning it will have. 

So the grief and the anger continue until, if it gets bad enough, we tend to be reduced to acting like something less than human.  Like brute beasts.   When I considered what that might mean, it occured to me that when an animal is feeling threatened, it basically has two responses: fight or flight.  When faced with our own pain, we get to the same place.  We do battle with it and take a pill to make it go away, or we try to run away from it and take a pill to help us forget it’s there.  Or sometimes both. 

Up to this point, let me try to be clear about something.  The grief, the anger, the tendency to want to take it on and take it out, are all natural responses and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them.  In fact, if you think about one of the times in the life of Jesus Christ himself, you see the same pattern.  When his close friend Lazarus died, Scripture says that the first thing Jesus did when he came upon his burial place was that he wept.  But it also says something else.  The NIV relates that he was “deeply moved in Spirit and troubled.”  I think the New Living Translation gives us a better understanding:  “A deep anger welled up within him and he was deeply troubled.”  (John 11:33) He was ticked off.  He was confronting not only the death of his friend, but his most bitter and ancient enemy: death itself.  The ultimate example of how the world which he created as good and perfect had become broken and full of pain.  And he chose to fight.  He was grieved and he was ticked off and he strode forward and did battle with death itself.  And he overcame.  He knew that the way things should really be was to be in a continuing relationship with his friend, so he took on the pain and raised Lazarus from the dead and in the process accomplished a great display of who he really was.  The pain was real for him, but it was redeemed. 

Jesus was able to get beyond the grief, the anger, and the fight and he redeemed his pain.  He knew exactly where it came from, and why it was there and was able to defeat it completely.  For us, that isn’t always the case.  We are not the creator of the universe and although in many cases we can achieve large and small victories in this world, we remain oftentimes subject to the pain and suffering it visits upon us.  But we cannot allow ourselves to remain stuck with the grief and the anger and the desire to take it on or run away from it.  Somehow we have to get past that or we stay mired at the level of something less than human and never realize the opportunity to embrace the image of God that we were created to be.   Jesus Christ went forward to display that he was, in fact, God.  We cannot be that, but we can move past our pain to display the image of God that we were created to manifest.

The Psalmist managed to do that.  “Yet I am always with you,” he says.  “You hold me by my right hand and guide me with your counsel.”  It is interesting to me to note the direction of movement in this statement.  I am always with you, he says.  So often when we’re in pain, we cry out to God and ask for him to come to us.  I think that the Psalmist realized that God is never far from us, and always available.  The real issue is whether we are going to turn and make the movement toward him, and sometimes it is in the pain and the suffering of our lives that we finally realize that we are not, in fact, the masters of this universe and are willing to allow the one who is to be the Lord of our lives.  So we reach out and take his hand, as the psalmist did.  But God never takes our hand to just sit on the porch swing and listen to the crickets chirp.  He does that in order to guide us  in the direction he wants us to go.  When, in his pain, the psalmist returns to God, he says of him, “you take me by my right hand and guide me with your counsel.”  Sometimes, if there was a point in our lives when we did turn to God, it can be the difficult things that help us get to the point of deliberately following him once again and letting him take us in the right direction. 

Up to now, this is probably familiar stuff for a lot of you.  If you’re like me, you’ve heard plenty of sermons on how God uses difficulties in our lives.  They can make us either “bitter of better.”  “God never wastes a hurt.”  You could probably quote me a few other aphorisms.  And they’re correct.  Paul tells us in Romans 5 that the reason we can even rejoice in suffering is because of the character it produces in us.  Hebrews 5 tells us that even Jesus himself “learned obedience from what he suffered.”  (Heb. 5:8)  Sometimes the pain in our lives can get us unstuck and get us growing again.  On the other hand, if you’re like me, you may have said to yourself once or twice, “OK, if this is what it takes to become a better person, maybe I just want to stay a jerk.”  Sometimes I need more. So did the psalmist.  He says this:  “and afterwards you will take me into glory.” 

For the psalmist, it was all about comparisons.  Compared to what God had in store for him, all of this suffering didn’t amount to much.  The apostle Paul has the exact same attitude as read in our text from Romans 8:  “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us(Rom. 8:18)

So far so good.  We’re familiar with this coping mechanism as well.  Some day it will all be over.  Someday we’ll cross that Jordan river and lay our burdens down.   But there’s something very intriguing to me about what Paul really has to say about this whole glory thing that I want to underscore today, because I think we have largely missed this and to really grasp the full ramifications of it will help us immensely in the process of getting past putting up with our pain and understanding how to really redeem it.  In the previous verse Paul makes this curious statement:  Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. (Rom. 8:17) Apparently there is an actual correlation of some kind between the pain we go through and the ultimate glory that we experience.  He makes this even clearer in his second letter to the Corinthians.  In speaking of some really extreme hardships he has gone through, he says this:  our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all (2 Cor. 4:17)

Wow.  Glory for us is not just a rest and relief from our pain and suffering.  When we go through those things in our lives, they actually enhance what our eternal glorified existence will be like.  The implications of this strike me as truly profound.  Before I make some comments about that, however, I want to make one thing really clear.  This doesn’t mean that we go out looking for pain.  There will be plenty of that just living in a world that Paul says is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth.”  I read this last week that police in Korea had come across the body of a man who had actually managed to crucify himself.  Stab wounds, scourging, the whole nine yards including somehow hanging himself on a cross with the help of a portable drill.  If you’re like me, you’re thinking “OK, that’s gross.”  Like me, you may also be thinking that for his sake as well as the sake of all those who think they can predict the end of the world by adding up biblical numbers, it’s a good thing that being stupid isn’t a sin.  That’s just dorked up.  Even Jesus begged God to take his cup from him. 

But when the pain comes, I think it adds exponentially to our ability to redeem that pain when we understand that it is actually helping us to achieve the full potential of the eternal glory God wants us to have.  Presuming we react to it appropriately.  Presuming we manage, together with the Psalmist, to get past the grief and the anger and don’t get stuck in fight or flight mode.  This is where I think that we really need to understand what Scripture is talking about when we read things like wanting to know the fellowship of sharing in the sufferings of Christ and becoming like him in his death  (Phil. 3:10).  But that doesn’t mean figuring out some way to crucify ourselves. 

So when we suffer, how can we react to that in the ways that Jesus did in order to allow that suffering to do everything God wants to do in our lives through it, not only now but in eternity?  As I have reflected on how these things have worked in my own life, it seems as if the opportunity which pain represents has basically fallen into two main camps. The first is that when the things of this world fall apart or get taken from me, it helps me in the process of “dying” to those things.  As the psalmist said, “Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire besides you.”  We seem to require regular reminders that compared to what we have coming, what this world has to offer doesn’t add up to much. 

In order to fully appropriate this, however, I think we also need to fully understand something about the reality that is yet to come.  In the passage we read from Romans Paul speaks to this a little bit when he refers to a creation that waits in eager expectation to be released from its bondage to decay in the same way that we eagerly await the hope in which we are saved: the redemption of our bodies.  Hey, wait a minute: I thought the hope in which we are saved is the salvation of our souls.  My Sunday school teachers didn’t get the memo here.  The fact is, that all throughout Scripture it is made abundantly clear that our ultimate destiny is to live with renewed, resurrected bodies on a renewed earth.  Certainly for now when we die, we go to live with God, but ultimately he comes down from heaven and now, as John says in Revelation, “the dwelling of God is with men” in a new heavens and a new earth.  This is where our doomsday friends of yesterday also got things horribly wrong.  Just as the rapture did not occur yesterday, the complete annihilation of the earth will not occur on October 11^th.  God is not going to destroy his creation, he is going to renew it.  God created this place as our dwelling and it ever will be. 

The reason this is so important to the process of redeeming our pain is that so much of that pain has to do with having the things of this world taken from us or never being able to fully enjoy them.  We grieve over that, because we have this wrong-headed notion that this life we have will be our only opportunity to do that.  Being able to sacrifice the things of this world without fear of missed opportunity allows us to fully devote ourselves to developing our relationship to God.  And godliness, as Paul points out to Timothy, has benefits both in this life and the life to come.  (1 Tim. 4:8)  I know that as I devote myself to becoming more like Christ in this world and trying to take advantage of every opportunity he gives me for ministry, I won’t be able to experience all this world has to offer.  I won’t see every place or do every cool thing.  But I’m not bothered by that.  There will be plenty of time for all that with a resurrected body that has all the characteristics of Jesus’ own post resurrection body, in a new earth that is no longer broken and decaying. 

Just the simple process of spiritual formation will have benefits for us in the life to come.  Sometimes it is the pain we experience in this world which helps us to let go of the things of this world in order to devote ourselves to that.   That doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy those things as a foretaste of the world yet to come, but at the same time we don’t become devoted to them in ways that take us away from what is really important.  It is during that process that we often come across the other primary opportunity which painful  things often represent for us: the opportunity to serve.  Recently my father mentioned to me that a lady he knows from his church will be receiving a big old crown because she so faithfully cared for her husband who passed away this past week after struggling with many things, including dementia.  He had no idea how well she cared for him, or even who she was.  Out of pure love and a sense of service and devotion she dedicated herself to a literally “thankless” task for years.   When little Cali was diagnosed with a missing chromosome, one of the first thoughts that came to everyone’s mind was that her life was going to represent more work for parents and family than would otherwise be the case in order to care for her.  It always takes sacrifice to serve, but we mustn’t allow ourselves to miss the fact that these are also opportunities. In Philippians Paul says this:

5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,

There’s the connection again: Jesus sacrifices to serve, endures the pain, and receives the glory. 

I confess that there have been times in my life when I have caught myself asking, “How much more can I take?”  But I know that what God was asking was not how much I can take, but how much I can give.  I know that everything I do for myself will drift away behind me as I enter eternity, but every time I serve someone else I have done something that will go with me forever and increase my inheritance as a child of God.

Everyone here has experienced, is experiencing, or will experience significant pain in this world, just because the world itself is hurting and awaiting its own redemption.  When that happens, give yourself permission to mourn.  Give yourself permission to be angry.  But if you never get past that, you’ll stay stuck.  Maybe forever.  Think about the way in which Jesus most often talks about hell: that it is weeping and gnashing of teeth.   Sounds a lot like staying stuck at the “heart was grieved and spirit embittered” stage of reacting to pain.   Just as getting past our pain to embrace the image of God helps to craft our heaven, maybe staying stuck with the grief and anger begins the process of creating our own hell here on earth: something that we will take with us into eternity.  But if we move past that,  if we take the opportunity to reach out to God and allow him to take our hand and lead us in his ways;  and if we allow those seasons of life to clarify our values, re-commit us to spiritual growth, and make us better servants, then we allow them to play the role that God desires to help craft the most glorious eternity that he desires for us to have.

In all this talk of eternity, I concede that much of what awaits us will have to stay in the “we’ll see when we get there” category.  But I know at least one thing that will be there waiting In the new heavens and new earth.  A little girl is going to find her missing chromosome.  And although today she is beautiful, and precious; on that day she will be complete.  And her great-uncle is going to be there to hang out.

For now I am reminded that a broken world is not worthy of my worship.  So I choose to let God be my Lord.  And to devote myself to the spiritual growth and servant-hood that will maximize the glorious life in eternity that God is even now building for me.