Jesus
spent much of his ministry in Galilee, the sun-drenched fields and rolling
hills by the beautiful inland Sea of Galilee. He talked about the love of
God, about the Kingdom of God, the rule of God… he gave life to so many
people. But when we arrive at the 51st verse of the 9th
chapter of Luke, the scene changes, changes radically, it’s just like
turning a corner. It’s one of the key verses in the Gospel. “When the
time had come for him to be received up, he set his face stead-fastly to
go to Jerusalem.” And we
find that Jesus is now moving toward Jerusalem, the Lenten journey if you
will, and Jerusalem means suffering, rejection, resentment, separation
from friends, misunderstanding, and ultimately death. And what I want to
do this morning is just to present to you an image to carry around with
you this week in your imagination, a pictorial image of Jesus literally
leaning into his pain. He knows that if he goes to Jerusalem, there will
be suffering and pain. I don’t believe he knew the details, but he
certainly knew what the situation was, and he was literally leaning into
pain.
Now
one of the reasons I want us to think about this is that many of us have
been brought up with, and many of us are living with, a pain avoidance
style of life. The basic principle on which we operate is “avoid pain at
all costs.” We fear pain; we run away from pain, we try to escape pain.
The moment the first pain comes, we leap for the aspirin bottle.
Television, of course, has schooled us to do this. When we go to the
dentist, we want the Novocain even before we know whether it’s going to
hurt or not. And this is literally the life style that we’ve developed:
avoid the pain.
Now
sometimes that’s good counsel, obviously. I was so amused by a newspaper
clipping. I suppose I was amused because when I was a little boy in
elementary school, I was getting a drink at the drinking fountain and the
boy in back of me pushed my face down into the fountain and I hit my mouth
on the drinking spout. I started to bleed and had to go to the nurse’s
office with blood dripping down my shirt and tears in my eyes and a loose
tooth in my mouth. I can still remember that. And that’s why I was so
taken by this account in the paper of a class of ten-year-olds who had
been asked to write a little essay on “The Care of the Teeth,”
They’d had a hygiene lecture. And one little boy said, “Number one,
see your dentist often; two, brush your teeth after every meal; and three,
watch out for shovers at the drinking fountain.” That’s good advice in many cases. Just watch out for those
shovers who are going to inflict pain on you. But the trouble is some of
us spend so much time watching out for shovers at the drinking fountain,
that we are never able to drink deeply of the waters of life. It has
become a whole style for us. Avoid pain at all costs.
I
am not suggesting that we go out and look for pain, which is a form of
illness in itself. What I’m suggesting is that in the full rich human
life, some pain is absolutely unavoidable…some of it because of
circumstances beyond our control, and some of it because, as in the case
of Jesus, when you stand up for what is right and for what you believe in,
you will often suffer for it.
The
good news in all of this, the beautiful good news, is that while God loves
us in an infinite number of ways, God never loves us more clearly, more
fully, more beautifully, than in our times of suffering and pain. It’s
part of the Gospel, part of the Good News. And I really don’t understand
it. I don’t know if it’s like a father or mother who loves their
children all the more when they’re hurting, or whether it’s simply
that we are sensitized, that we are more open to God’s love that is
always there after all, I really don’t know.
I
just want to ponder this for a moment or two this morning with you and let
you think about it, but I have to be very careful. We have had so much
misfortune over this past year here at the church…the deaths of some
very close friends, and now, of course, the war in Iraq - talk about
leaning into pain! I don’t want to just get up here and spiel off a lot
of pat clichés, because it is no fun to hurt, and some people here are
really hurting. So I’m not giving you ultimate answers; I’m just
giving you an image of Jesus moving toward his pain, leaning into it; and
if you read the section of the Gospel you will find there’s a special
vitality about him, a special sense of God’s love, and I’m convinced
that’s the way it is, even though we may not feel it at the moment.
Even
something as common as the flu. I don’t know anything that makes you
more depressed than the flu. I remember once getting the flu and there’s
some period in your illness when you’re sure the doctor has made a wrong
diagnosis, and you’re actually dying, and nobody appreciates the fact
that your dying. I heard a story of a man who died and went to heaven, and
St. Peter asked him how he got there, he said, “flu” (flew). And St.
Peter said, “What a way to go!”
You
know, the strange thing is that while we’re struggling to overcome it
(we get the rest, we get the medication, we do whatever is necessary to
overcome it), we don’t overlook the possibility of something beautiful
and good happening in every occasion of illness: discovering how much
other people love you, for instance; or being more sensitized just to what
it’s like to be well…we take that so much for granted. So many people,
who have been very, very ill and who have survived, tell me how different
everything was when they recovered and were out again--the smell of bacon
frying in the morning, the cry of a little child, a tree, a flower, just
things we take so much for granted. We become so much more sensitized to
them. And that’s part of what happens. Don’t miss that in your
illness, by spending all the time trying to avoid the pain. Kind of lean
into it and see what happens to you.
Or
the pain of relationships is where it is for many of us--the things that
happen to us in relationships. I was on a weeklong workshop last summer.
At the end, one of the women in the group was crying deeply. And she told
her story that all of her life, every close relationship she’d ever had
had ended in separation of some kind or other: death, estrangements, and
here she’d had a wonderful week of sharing life, but now it was coming
to an end, and she felt this thing just pouring in on her again. She felt
the loneliness and the desolation and the despair. She really had built a
life style that protected her from getting close to anyone, because she
was afraid to hurt through the separation.
Then
there’s the problem of honesty that we have with each other. We have
this kind of unwritten rule that you don’t want to hurt anyone’s
feelings, and so very often we don’t speak the truth. It’s not so much
that we lie directly, but we just sort of cage it around indirectly and it
never comes out straight; it always comes out crooked. And yet some of us
have also discovered that while there may be pain in the moment of
honesty, God can do something with that pain. God can move into the
situation then, and healing can come. And it can happen if we’re willing
to be honest, but even God can’t do much with the dishonesty.
There’s
also the pain that’s involved in witnessing for truth and justice.
Martin Luther King could have avoided so much pain and suffering. He could
have. But he believed in what he was doing and he believed it was the will
of God, so he leaned into the pain, not enjoying the hurting…he didn’t
enjoy hurting anymore than any of us…but he leaned into that pain and
look what God was able to do.
And
then of course there is the war. I don’t know about you, but as I lean
into the human pain of this war, I personally struggle, and it is painful.
I am saddened that war was the answer to what I know was a difficult
situation. I felt, and still do, that there were, and hopefully still are,
more peaceful solutions to this conflict, which are closer to the teaching
of Jesus. Yet, I also want with all my heart to pray for and to support
our brave, and I’m sure also very frightened, young men and women in
Iraq. We have a nephew in the marines in Iraq, which makes it very
personal. I want to stand behind America, a country, which has given me so
much and which I still believe can be a beacon of freedom and hope and
tolerance in this chaotic world. I wish for the people of Iraq that they
be rid of a dangerous and despotic leader who has caused them so much
pain. And I also want the people of Iraq to understand that this is not a
war against them. No, I don’t have answers, I struggle with my
ambiguity, as perhaps many of you do, and I weep with those who are
weeping. It is a very painful time for all of us.
Yet
in the midst of this I want also to affirm that God still loves us and is
with us in our pain, and that, in the end, remains a mighty God who is in
control. I want to say that war will never stop the spring from coming or
little children from laughing and playing; that war will never stop us
from acts of kindness; and that in this church we will not give into fear
or revenge, but will continue to be hopeful and courageous and faithful,
and be open to dialogue, even if it’s painful.
And
so today I want to keep that image of Jesus as he moves toward Jerusalem,
leaning into his own pain. The important thing for us this morning is just
to see how this fits in with all the rest of it and what’s happening
here. We spend so much of our energy trying to avoid this and hide from it
and run away from it, that we miss the glory of things God gives us in and
through the experience of suffering through pain.
Please
understand me…I’m not saying we go out and look for pain. What we
ordinarily do is struggle to overcome it. But one of the options, while
we’re struggling to overcome it, is to lean into it a while, feel
what’s there, and be alive to it, and be sensitive to what God is doing
in and through the pain.
My
last word, it’s a very difficult thing for me, because as a parent,
I’ve had this thing about protecting my children and my family, to
whatever degree I can, from pain. We all want to do that. We want to
protect them, to save them, to shield them, from suffering. We don’t
want them to go through it. But in many cases that is not the most loving
thing that we can do for our children, for our family. The ability to be
realistic about suffering and pain and to deal with it in a positive way
is one of the great things that can happen to us, and if we shield them,
we’re depriving them of this. Perhaps you remember the image of
Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress, who went through terrible
suffering and made it to the gates of the celestial city. When he got
there, the one thing on his mind was to send a carriage back for
Christiana and their children so that they could come directly to the city
and not have to go through all of that pain. And it could not be. Each one
of us, every one of us, individually, each one of our children, has to
walk the road to Jerusalem with Jesus and discover the incredible love of
God who give us such fullness of life when we lean into our pain.