Sermon

2 Corinthians 4:7-12

Down But Never Out

By Dr. Gilbert W. Bowen

The great Albert Schweitzer once commented that the world is mysteriously full of suffering.

What do you think of when you hear the word? What comes to mind? I suspect these days we think first of the horrors of war or the plague of SARS. Or perhaps our minds travel most readily to those we know who are ill or who are suffering the loss of someone dear. And, of course, these are two major struggles we all sooner or later face.

But when you stop and think about it a bit, you can call up an infinite variety of experiences in which pain and discomfort are front and center. I saw tears stream down the face of an unknown woman walking toward the train the other day. Was it loneliness? Was it rejection? I’ll never know.

An exchange student told me once how very painful was the homesickness she experienced in the first months. That’s real suffering. I can sympathize with the little girl visiting a friend for what was her first night away from home. The mother of her friend heard her sobbing quietly after going to bed, and asked, “What is it honey? Are you homesick?” To which the little one responded with perfect logic, “No, I’m here sick.”

There is the pain and panic of the lost job, more than a little of that these days, the anxiety and sleepless nights dealing with that uncertainty.

There is the agony of watching a son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, mess up their life when there is nothing you can do about it.

There is the pain of the discipline required to learn and grow. The second grade class was well underway when one little guy exclaimed to the teacher, “Can we hurry up? This is boring.” Immediately the little girl to the left poked him and said, “Shut up. It’s supposed to be boring.”

There is the fright, the sinking feeling in the heart of the young person who has just learned of a failing grade.

There is the hurt in the heart when the marriage falls apart and the future closes in.

There are the tears and ache of the family fight or the mis-understanding between old friends.

In sum, whether it looks that way or not, on many days for many of us life is hard, full of struggle and trouble. Everybody is struggling with some anxiety or agony, some misery of mind, some disquiet of spirit, some trial of personal discipline, some physical pain, or the suffering in sharing in someone else’s suffering. We may hide it from one another behind manicured lawns and brave smiles, but it is there.

However true this all may be, we live in a culture that tends to deny pain and runs from hurt. We are a people who believe that real life means achieving personal happiness no matter the troubles or problems that may fall on the unlucky other.

I wonder if that may not be part of the problem with formal education in our time. Children today often grow up in a soft, comfortable, undemanding environment where all needs are met and desires encouraged, where television soothes and “rock” excites. Then they encounter this process called formal education which requires the capacity to sit still for hours, control the vagrant urges and impulses, concentrate with strenuous mental effort and discipline. Education is painful.

I half-wonder if the reason marriage has become so fragile may not lie with our low pain tolerance, our inability or unwillingness to live with a certain amount of temporary discomfort. Successful marriage is a painful process, and if we are conditioned to believe that we have a right to an untroubled and comfortable existence, we will not easily tolerate and work through the rough spots when they come, as they do to all marriages.

Do you remember the best-seller of some years ago called Looking Out For Number One? Did you know that after the book was published, the author’s wife divorced him and is now receiving thousands of dollars in alimony. When asked why she did this, she is reported to have said, “I read his book.”

And to raise children well, to hang in there, truly try to guide and care is to suffer. Much easier to tell them to get lost, to let them run. Very painful to discipline them, experience their animosity and rejection.

But finally I suspect that our aversion to pain and trouble may be rooted in a spiritual problem, the sense that pain and suffering are somehow the absence of real life.

I wonder if it is not pretty universal, this equation of suffering with loss of meaning and life, even abandonment or punishment by God. I have walked into many a hospital room where some friend lay broken by disease or accident, to hear him wonder out loud what he might have done to deserve this. We all tend to feel that we have lost out, we all tend to feel that life has turned empty and meaningless, we all tend to feel lonely and abandoned when suffering, reversal, trouble come.

So when an itinerant tradesman turned preacher from a backwater town in Galilee ended up executed for treason, died young, impoverished and childless, it should not surprise us that not a soul saw anything like power or meaning or divinity in his life. Whatever that poor fellow on his cross was going through, it was not life… rather its very antithesis. Everybody knew he must have been abandoned by his God.

But another young preacher named Paul met him on a road to somewhere else one day, met him out beyond that ignominious death, met him alive and loving and powerful, and it turned his whole mental world on its head, led him to believe the incredible, that life and death, pain and purpose, suffering and joy are not so far apart after all, led him to the deep, deep conviction that all life even now is one death and resurrection after another.

So when his sufferings come, as come they do, malaria, blindness, ship-wreck, persecution, weariness, pain, he can accept them as filled with meaning and purpose, he can face them knowing that there is always life beyond, he can embrace them as a sharing, a participation in the death and life of the companion of his soul. “So we are subjected to every kind of hardship but never distressed; we see no way out but we never despair; we are pursued but never cut off; knocked down, but still have life in us; for always as we share the death of Jesus, even so do we share his life.” Paul comes to believe that death and resurrection are not just about the end, they are a part of every day. They are about the way real life is.

Nicolas Berdyaev, the great Russian thinker, puts it this way. “Christianity gives meaning to suffering and makes it endurable. It gives meaning to it through the mystery of the cross. Man’s suffering is twofold. He suffers from the trials that are sent him, from the blows which fate deals him, from death, illness, privations, treachery, solitude, disillusionment and so on, and so on. And he suffers, too, from rebelling against suffering, from refusing to beat it and from cursing it. And this is another and a bitterer kind of suffering. When one accepts suffering and recognizes that it has a meaning, the pain grows less, becomes more endurable, and a light begins to shine through it … to try to avoid suffering and run away from it is self-deception and one of the greatest illusions of life. Suffering tracks our steps, even the happiest of us. There is only one way open to man, the way of light and regeneration – to accept suffering as the cross which everyone must bear following the Crucified.”

None of this is to suggest for a moment that God sends suffering upon us, that he inflicts the loneliness or disease, the reversals and troubles. Neither Jesus nor Paul ever ascribe their burdens to the hand of God. What they do say is that suffering is never a sign of abandonment, even there and especially there in our sufferings, God is at work in our lives, working some good and future.

Embracing the painful disciplines of education and growth leads to the freedom of self-mastery and real contribution to the world. Embracing the responsibilities and restraints of the marital commitment leads to the rewards of true intimacy and the joys of a shared way. Embracing the burdens and anxieties of parenthood leads to the deep satisfactions of a special companionship and future.

One couple described the experience exactly that way.

Their only daughter was seventeen and they were going through a kind of dying. She was about to leave for college. They had all been very close and were feeling the pain of separation. They had visited the campus and had seen the new world she was moving into, and they knew it was not going to be their world. They would no longer be there to protect, counsel and comfort and they were finding it painful to let go.

On their way home after dropping her off at school, they shed a few tears. But as time went on they were able to reach back to this old story and move on through death. They said something like this. “We find that as we were able to relinquish her and let go, we gradually came to know her in a whole new and more mature way, and our relationship is richer now than ever before. The experience was not only a kind of dying, it was also resurrection.”

And embracing the hurts and handicaps that life throws at us and seeking through them to contribute and create leads to special inner peace and sense of accomplishment.

History is replete with stories of artists, composers who wrested great beauty out of pain and misery. Think of Van Gogh, the painter or Handel composing “The Messiah” in the midst of great physical agony. Beethoven was only thirty when his deafness began and it got steadily worse until he could hear nothing. When applause burst out at the first performance of his Ninth Symphony, he did not hear it and had to be turned around to the audience. Beethoven did not hear any of the music he composed during the last eighteen years of his life. At one time, he says, he was at the point of suicide. But instead of suicide came the miracle of resurrection. Life came back to him. Rather than accept his fate stoically, he said, “I will seize fate by the throat. I will live.”

Taking up the shared sufferings and troubles of growing older frees from the need to replay adolescent craziness and leads to the special rewards of a greater equanimity and contentment.

One of my favorite Easter stories is the one Pat Barnes tells about an old flower lady sitting in her usual place inside a small archway. At her feet corsages and boutonnieres were parading on the top of a spread-open newspaper. The flower lady was smiling, her wrinkled old face alive with some inner joy, and on impulse I said to her, ‘My, you look happy this morning.’ ‘Why not?’ she answered. ‘Everything is good.’ She was dressed so shabbily and seemed so very old that I couldn’t help saying, ‘Don’t you have any troubles?’ ‘You can’t reach my age and not have troubles,’ she replied. ‘Only it’s like Jesus and Good Friday. When Jesus was crucified on Good Friday, that was the worst day for the whole world. When I get troubles I remember that, and then I think of what happened only three days later. So when things go wrong, I’ve learned to wait three days … and somehow things always get better.’ And she smiled goodbye.”

Death and resurrection. But it does come down to whether you see and choose life this way, as a sharing in death and resurrection like that of Jesus. It is not automatic or easy. One must embrace the crosses of life as the way to real life. One man writes of a woman he had known for years. “I had the deepest admiration for her. She was one of the most respected persons in that community. Her personal life was impeccable; she was a woman of high principle. She was intelligent, alert, open to new ideas. She was the kind of person you seek out for friendship, knowing that her friendship will enrich your life.

Then it happened – her health failed. For the first time in her life she was not in complete control of things. For the first time in life things had not gone her way. She was now dependent upon others. When I first visited her in the hospital, I was aware of the change that had come over her. It was obvious. But I assumed that it would pass. It was, I hoped, a natural and healthy human anger against the absurdity of pain and sickness. It didn’t pass. Through the days, the weeks, the months and then the years, it got worse. I saw her transformed from a life-affirming, optimistic, generous person to an angry, bitter, defeated soul.”

On the other hand there is a statue down in New Orleans, a figure of a woman seated in a rocking chair, holding a child in her arms. The only carved word on that monument is the single name: Margaret. But to those who lived in New Orleans at that time, the name was all that was necessary. For Margaret was a familiar figure throughout the city, known for one great passion, her love of children. As a young immigrant girl she had come to New Orleans to find a new home and life. In a few years she had achieved her highest dream. She married a fine man and together they had a lovely daughter. Then in a brief span of time she lost them both to illness. After a time of bereavement, she first began to work in orphanages where she could help care for other children. Then, because of her skills in baking, she began to sell her goods, peddling them from a cart through the streets of New Orleans. She prospered in this, and was able to open a bakery which in time became a successful chain of bakeries. Yet Margaret never changed her basic style of life. Most of the proceeds from her business were used to establish and maintain orphanages where children could find refuge. She explained what happened by saying, “I put into my work all the compassion of my old grief.”

Subject to every kind of hardship, we never despair; pursued we are never cut off; knocked down, we still have some life in us. It’s the only way to die and live. The great Albert Schweitzer once said, “The world is mysteriously full of suffering.” But he also said, “The world is mysteriously full of the overcoming of suffering”…overcoming which leads to life.”

Copyright 2003 Gilbert W. Bowen. Used by permission.