March 27, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

From Burden to Blessing

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 96
Exodus 17:1–7
Romans 5:1–11

“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Romans 5:3–4 (NRSV)

I want. I want. In the heat of Your will
help me to give up wanting!
I am so full of urgency, expectation, image,
I make myself spiritually hungry. You are here,
therefore, there is everything to receive.
With this daily bread I am fed.

Gunilla Norris
"Cooking" in Being Home

You may be familiar with the This I Believe broadcast on National Public Radio. It is a weekly broadcast of personal belief statements written by persons, some prominent and some unknown. Not too long ago, Fourth Church hosted a “This I Believe” Michigan Avenue Forum with radio host Bob Edwards and several essayists reading their “This I Believe” essays here in the sanctuary. Since then I have enjoyed reading a collection of “This I Believe” essays written over the years. In an essay entitled “The 50-Percent Theory of Life,” Missouri resident Steve Porter writes,

I believe in the 50-percent theory. Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse. I believe life is a pendulum swing. . . . Let’s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die. I’ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss, and cherished pets. Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing. Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale. Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person; having a child and doing those dad things, like coaching my son’s baseball team, paddling around the creek in the boat while he’s swimming with the dogs, discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails. . . . But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the good flip-flop acrobatically. This is what convinces me to believe in the 50-percent theory.

Life is complicated, certainly much too complicated to be portrayed as one long and smooth trajectory, going in a single, planned direction. It can seem more like a pendulum or acrobatics, or like a topsy-turvy, winding course. Such metaphors for life convey a recognition of a fundamental fact of our existence: that no matter how much we want to be in charge, things happen to us just as often as, if not more often than, we make things happen.

We are agents, actors in life, and yet we are also acted upon. We are acted upon by other people, by forces of nature, by political powers, and by social norms and conditions, and when we are acted upon in ways that constrain us, coerce us, or harm us, we suffer.

There are so many stories of suffering—stories that are our own and stories that belong to countless others. Taking seriously the reality and inevitability of suffering in life is, I think, a prerequisite for any serious religion. I would posit that no religion can endure without meeting this requirement, and I would be suspicious of any religion that neglects, simplifies, or glosses over the reality of suffering.

Though I do not know enough about the religion of Buddhism, I have always been impressed with its systematic approach to addressing the experience of suffering. As the ancient story goes, the religion of Buddhism began when Siddharta Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, observed and took to heart the suffering of people. He was a prince who, having ventured outside the palace gates, encountered suffering in an old man, then suffering in a man sick with disease, then a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. From thereon out, the prince left his life at the palace in search of a way to help people eliminate suffering in their lives, and the entire system of Buddhism was built upon his teachings that life is suffering; that suffering is caused by attachment; that suffering can cease; and that there is a path to follow.

Not every world religion will build its entire religious system around the experience of suffering as Buddhism does. Every world religion does, however, put forth a thesis on salvation, and that thesis will be put to the test by the believer’s experience of suffering, for it is when we suffer that we come to question the purpose and meaning of life and even come to challenge the religious answers that we have been offered in the past, especially when those answers seem inadequate to account for reality. Religious teachings about salvation, if they are to be meaningful at all, must resonate with the hard and real experience of suffering.

In his letter to the church in Rome, the Apostle Paul puts forth his thesis that God’s salvation is for any and all who trust in God’s faithfulness. Already in earlier chapters Paul presented the thesis and laid out his argument for it. Now, in the verses read this morning, Paul sets out to show that the gospel he preaches does justice to the reality of the believer’s life. Reality for Christ’s followers includes suffering, in this case religious persecution. Paul knows that those in the church at Rome have suffered and that they will suffer more, just as he himself has suffered greatly. In writing to them, he knows that the gospel is good news only if it takes seriously their experience of suffering and helps them to make sense of it. So in verse 1, Paul writes that as people who are justified by their trust in God, they can stand at peace with God. Feeling no need to test God, they can have complete confidence in God. So complete can their confidence in God be that they can even boast in their sufferings. In saying this, Paul knows that he is going to catch the attention of his listeners. It sounds like an oxymoron, but as he often does in his letters, Paul is going to try to make sense of it.

To do so, Paul develops a chain of reasoning. He writes in verses 3 and 4, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Drawing first on a reason already well known to Paul’s audience —probably made popular by Stoic schools of thought in the ancient world—Paul argues that suffering produces endurance. “Endurance” can also be translated as “patience,” “fortitude,” “steadfastness,” or “perseverance”—all virtues highly prized in Greek society. Paul continues his chain of reasoning by saying, “and endurance produces character.” In the original Greek, the term Paul uses for “character” conveys the sense of “being tested.” As one biblical commentator writes, the term brings to mind the metaphor familiar enough in Paul’s day of proving gold by testing it with fire (James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, p. 251). Like gold that is proven genuine when put in the fire, a person’s true character is proven when tested by suffering.

Finally, Paul concludes the chain of reasoning with yet another link. He writes “and character produces hope” (vs. 4). Whereas the virtues of endurance and tested character would have sufficed for popular Greek thought, Paul adds a final reason: that of hope. With confidence in God, a person can look beyond the way things are at any given moment and hope for what is to come. The hope that Paul has in mind is more general than specific in nature. Rather than a hope for some specific thing, the hope Paul speaks of is an existential outlook or attitude; it is a hope for the age to come when God’s purpose for creation, whatever it might look like, will be brought to completion. Such a hope will not, Paul says, disappoint us, because it will not be simply about or for me or you. It is that and much more, for God’s purpose is to save, or put in right relation, the whole of creation. Given this kind of cosmic hope, the Christian can boast even in suffering, trusting all the while that God is working out God’s purpose even in our suffering.

In preparing to preach on this lectionary text, I struggled to understand how even suffering can be a medium through which God is at work. I found especially helpful the writing of Rabbi Shefa Gold. In her book entitled Torah Journeys, Rabbi Gold writes about how she, as a Jew, came to appreciate the experience of suffering. Offering a very personal explanation, she writes, ”I grew up sensing that there was something tragic about being Jewish. I knew,” she writes, “that my inheritance sensitized me to the suffering in the world and that there was something noble about this sensitivity. I knew that Judaism was so deep in my blood that it was useless to deny it or avoid it. So I accepted being Jewish as the work I was being given in this lifetime. Often I felt its weight as a burden that would either break me or teach me about some kind of strength that I could not yet imagine” (p. 2). In her explanation of how she came to appreciate the meaning of suffering, she writes that it is not suffering itself, but the sensitivity to suffering that is noble. It is also not the suffering that she weighs as valuable, but the weight of it that has trained her to be strong.

Paul follows similar logic. It is not the suffering that we come to value, but the endurance we learn, the character we build, and above all, the gift of hope we can exercise. For Paul, it is not the suffering itself that we are ever to boast about; rather, our boast is in the Lord, because God is present and active even in our suffering.

In the story from Exodus that was read today, the Israelites suffered, and in their suffering they could not see that God was present with them. Only Moses maintained his trust in God’s faithfulness to them. Thirsty and afraid for their lives, the Israelites saw their suffering as a sign of God’s absence. So weak was their faith that they tested God, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” While in the wilderness, they longed for Egypt. They longed for their past lives as slaves. Thus they complained against Moses, saying, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

It’s understandable that the Israelites would complain. Thinking about a time when they had food to eat, they longed for the little that they had as slaves. It reminds me of elderly Russians who, in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, called for the return of Communism and even Stalinism. No longer reliably receiving their small pensions from the government, they too longed for the certainty that past conditions provided. In the case of the Russians, those conditions had existed for only 75 years; in the case of the Israelites, the people of Israel had suffered under the oppression of Egypt for 400 years. The time when Moses was born was the time of greatest travail for Israel. Israel had been beaten down, constricted, and forced into the narrowest confines and conditions of human existence. Even so, the Israelites called for a return to Egypt— to the conditions of servitude—when they found themselves in the wilderness.

“Slavery,” Rabbi Gold writes, “is a life of conditioned response.” It is no wonder the Israelites took forty years in the wilderness. For a people so thoroughly conditioned by slavery, liberation could not take place overnight. Liberation would take more than an escape from pharaoh. It would require trust in God’s faithfulness to them. Such faith would be the only necessary condition for such a freedom. About the Exodus story, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “the journey from the confinement of Egypt to the fulfillment of reaching the Promised Land could have been completed in a matter of months. But the evolution of a people from the mindset of slavery to being comfortable with the obligations and uncertainties of freedom would take much longer. . . . They would have to wander in the wilderness for forty years until the generation that had been raised in slavery gave way to a generation born in freedom” (Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, p. 24).

God hears the cry of the Israelites for water in the wilderness, and making water to come out of rock, God provides them with drink. The drink and the food they need, however, are much greater than material water and bread. Their need, God knows, is of spiritual food. They needed to understand that “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” They needed to believe in the promise God spoke to them, and with that food, they would be able to mature in their faith. After much suffering, over forty years of time, the Israelites would come out of the wilderness and reach the Promised Land. With the suffering behind them, they would be able to see that God had sustained them, and more mature in their faith, they would be able to recognize that God’s plan of salvation is at work in all situations, even in their suffering.

This is the kind of salvation Paul desired for the Jews, Gentiles, and for us—a salvation in which we can live in freedom, for which the only necessary condition is a faith that God is and always will be with us, even in our suffering.