WHERE DOES SUFFERING LEAD? Barbara Dua Beavers

Psalm 35:2-5 Broad Street Presbyterian Chruch
Matthew 17:14-23 Columbus, ohio

February 20, 1983

People around the country are flocking to a movie which portrays the
deep agony of the human condition. At the end of the movie the narrator
describes this vision of humanity as the “butchered, betrayed, martyred
children of the earth." Sophie's Choice is a confrontation with tragedy
and death. Sophie lives with the horrors of Auschwitz and her own guilt.
Her Tover, Nathan, lives with the terror of madnass. Together they try to
survive in lives so full of scars that escape through fantasy is the only
way to live with truth. The depth of their scars and the despair of their
fantasies make this movie a powerful experience of the pathos of life.
Living with suffering is synonymous with life. The scripture passages
read this morning both express human conditions of which suffering is
central. The personal anguish of the Psalmist crying "Fear and trembling
came upon me and horror averwhelms me," and the desparation of the father
bringing his epileptic son to Jesus for healing are life situations we can
understand. Yet we do not really understand. We ask questions that can be
neither answered nor dismissed. Why must we suffer? Does pain have meaning?
Should one learn from suffering? Should one wish for herself or himself a
life free from pain?

One scene in Sophie's Choice shawed the narrator, a young aspiring
author, asking Sophie about her past and anxious to understand her. He says
of her suffered life, “I want to know the truth." To which Sophie replies,
"The truth does nat make it easier to understand."

Truth does not make it easier to understand the Passion Story of Jesus
Christ. Yet the church tries to face the realities of pain and death during
these pre-Reserrection days. Lent has traditionally been a period for peni-
tence and confession in preparation for Easter. Madeleine L'Engle, in her
book The Irrational Season has suggested that Lent is not the season to give
up candy, chocolate, and soda pop. She points out that in a world where many
live on the edge of starvation, 40 days of self-denial by overweight Americans
should instead be 365 days of changed eating habits. She urges us to use
Lent as a time for thinking about what we ordinarily avoid considering. I
think she may mean seeina the crucifixion through the eyes of human suffering.

Most recently the question of suffering has been put in the form of a
best selling book titled Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. After his
three year old son was diagnosed as having a rare heart disease Rabbi Harold
Kushner felt compelled te confront the age-old question.

Rabbi Kushner catalogues the many partial explanations that people have
used then faced with suffering. They range from understanding suffering as
a punishment for wrongdoing, to viewing the world as a tapestry which only
God fully understands. In a lighthearted way, the goodness of God js chal-
lenged through the question: "Good God, how much reverence can you have for
a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include tooth decay in his divine
system of creation?"

~Qa

Ernest Campbell comments: “From the beginning the church has been
made up of the non-descript. Even the Apostle Paul was forced to recognize
that ‘not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called’: Ordinary
people showing extraordinary commitment are the Strength of our congrega-
tions. (Campbell's Notebook, Volume III, No. 1)

One of the perplexities of the Biblical story has to do with the
qualifications of the people God always seems to have work for him. If
not dull, in contemporary terms, they are quintessentially human. They
are ordinary people. Thy mystery of election is how theology would de-
scribe it. How in the world did God end up choosing Israel of all nations?
Why not a strong, well organized culture? Why not Egypt, Rome. or Greece?
or, as Old Testament scholars love to put it: “How odd of God to choose

e Jews,‘

When you begin to ask the question from inside the Bible the incongru-
ities multiply. Frederick Buechner calls the characters in the Bible
"...this rag-bag of people..." Think of their almost embarrassing humanity
and the fact that among al] the things we believe about them the clearest
and simplest is that in spite of the flaws God chose them for a particular
purpose.

After all, Adam disobeys at the first opportunity, blames Eve and
Eve blames the snake. Cain kills Abel; Lot's daughters give him too
much wine and sleep with him; Noah gets publically drunk; Abraham gives
his wife to Abimelich to save his own skin. Jacob deceives his elderly
father and defrauds his brother; Moses is a murderer who can't speak
very well in public; and their kings, later, are known more for their
mediocrity and opportunism than for anything else except David. And
David lusts, covets, schemes, commits adultery, then lies and murders
to cover his tracks. David, someone said, could not have passed a simple
test in morality.

Obviously there is something going on here which is different from
the way we might evaluate, choose, and employ people to work for us.
Obviousty, being a celebrity doesn't count for much, nor does having
all the personal characteristics to match the position description, nor
dees moral punity seem te put God off when he's making choices. St.
Paul, it has heen pointed out many times, would never make the first
cut with a reasonable pulpit committee.

And then, behind these observations, there is a deeper assertion
the Bible makes on several occasions. It is that God not only chooses
ordinary human beings who are sometimes quite dull, are always terribly
Flawed, he also chooses some people who either do not care about him,
oppose him, or deny that he exists. That is an idea which sounds accep~
table enough until one begins to think about it a bit.

It is ordinarily associated with Isaiah, the prophet whose call
to his vocation and his resounding "Here am I, send me." we read this
morning. Isaiah heard the call of God and responded, strongly and immedia-
tely. His qualifications are not an issue. But later, this same Isaiah
is found making a staggering assertion. It is in the tenth chapter...

"Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury;
against a Godless nation I send him..."

= Qe

Apathy is a word that literally means non-suffering, freedom from suf-
fering, a creature's inability to suffer. The facts of the story indicate
the disciples were apathetic in the face of tragedy, we can identify. Our
modern society is so dominated by the goal of avoiding suffering that it
becomes a goal to avoid human relationships. I just mention the number of
peapla who come to our churches in need and tell of the endless run-arounds
they have had going from one welfare office to another.

The reality of their poverty has been Tost in the bureaucracy, When
one is unemployed, at the end of the economic rope, going from one agency
to another means walking - walking from West Broad to East Broad to North
High. Apathy! The prophet, Isaiah, put it this way, "The poor and needy
seek water and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst."

i had an interesting conversation recently on this subject. I was on
a flight from New York to Columbus. When I was seated on the plane I was
delighted to find an empty seat beside me. I had brought some work to do
and was anxious to have the seat to spread out my legal pad and books. I
was preparing for a class I was teaching on "Suffering". My solitude was
broken when the man on the aisle seat said something like, “You certainly
are working hard on that." I must confess I wasn't anxious to socialize.
The gentleman had other ideas. What was I teaching? Suffering -- how
interesting He had a lot to say on the subject. More than I cared to listen
to, quite frankly. He also had some ideas to which I couldn't subscribe.
He said, "I believe only the weak suffer." Only the weak I thought, but isn't
that all of us? He was adamant about that. He was a self-made man, on his
way to Columbus to oversee two of his plants here. He never Tet things get
him down. At this point my new friend was into his sacond scotch-on-the-rocks
on our before-noon flight. Possibly one way to avoid suffering. (ne way
to remain apathetic. Freedom from suffering is nothing other than a blind-
ness that does not perceive suffering. :

I recall Dorothy Soelle -- ask not from where does suffering come, but
ask where does it lead. Jesus told the disciples, “If you have faith as a
grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to
there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." He says
"raspond, do something, be compassionate enough to move mountains."

With polls dewn and demonstrations driving their point home it is hard
to imagine that our nation can avoid the present sufferings of the poor in
our country, tinamelesrent remains over 10%. When the hurt is so acute, we
often laugh in place of crying. Such is the nature of the joke, “What's
the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic?" “Cleveland has a better
orchestra." As in most other big cities, young peopte, especially minori-
ties are suffering disporportionately. Unemployment for minority young 7$
now almost 53%,

why is it so difficult to see the suffering and to work to alleviate
epilepsies that drive nations into the fire and drown individuals in for-
gottenness?

~h~

And then, you begin to see the mystery in it all, and the fact that
we are not talking about great skill and accomplishment. We are simply
affirming that from outside, on occasion, comes the impetus, the
inducement, the call and that ali any of us can do is say yes to it whether
we answer the call in ministry or as laity.

Artists - musicians - writers know about it. Human creativity is
perhaps best described as an artist becoming a vehicle of the art which
transcends his or her own being. Roman Catholic author Graham Greene
has a fine sense of it. In his novel, The Power and the Glory, an
alcoholic failure of a priest is the medium through which God's grace
takes shape and becomes active. And Madeleine L'Engle writes:

“Look at them! ordinary human beings, full of flaws, sins,
humanness, but found by God...God always calls unqualified
people. In cold reality no one is qualified..."

And then she tries for an answer to the puzzle in a way I found intriguing:

“If God had chosen great kings, successful and wealthy merchants,
wise men with their knowledge of the stars, it would be easy
to think that these people, of their own virtue and
understanding, accomplished on their own the blessing which
God asked them to complete." (The Irrational Season, p. 100)

Does it mean that only the mediocre get in the kingdom? Or that
if you are not poor, nondescript, and without influence God isn't
interested in you? Of course not. It means that what God chooses you
for is probably not what you would choose you for. It means that discovery
all of usS more-or-less make, namely, that God has chosen us and called
us and it has had nothing to do with any deserving on our part. It means
that he sometimes chooses the small to carry the heaviest burden. It
means that God chooses the successful banker sometimes to be gentle and
compassionate, and the nurse te be tough. It means that in his infinite
wisdom God chooses us to do what he knows we can do best and what, now
and then, we can see we needed to do for our own wholeness and integrity.

That's the adventure of it, of course. It ts why ordinary people
become extraordinary saints in the Bible. It is the invitation and
challenge of discipleship in every age. Your life has a purpose. You
may not always see it clearly. But the testimony of God's people is
there is purpose for each of us, a reason to be, tasks which God needs
us to do. God has chosen you. In Jesus Christ he has called you. The
adventure begins when you say "yes". AMEN.

We can’t do anything?

The question is not can we avoid suffering, but where does sufering lead?
Our suffering Ted Jesus Christ to love us enough to die for us, For the young
author in Sophie's Choice, whose first desire was to pack and leave, suffering
led to great love and devotion to his two friends. He endured rage, mocking,
rejection, and much pain. His love was tangible and concrete. It was love
which enabled him to remain and at the end of the movie to express with hope
that this was “not judgment day, but the morning, excellent and fair." His
suffering led him into the brightness of a new day.

Jesus tells'us through his dying love that nothing wili be impossible
to us. Qur faith in him enables us to move mountains.

Lent is a good time to think the unthinkable and to listen ta that which
is easier not to hear. Lent means not avoiding, but facing the world as it
is, as Jesus faced Jerusalem. Lent means being led by cur own suffering and
the suffering of others into a new life of Tove. We know life well enough
to know that living involves pain. Some say it doesn't have to, that suffering
can be avoided. We know better. We also know Jesus Christ, who suffers with
us and leads us from death to living with passion for others.

In the name of our bod, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. AMEN.