I Corinthians 2:1-12
A young woman is wracked by an eating
disorder. In her eyes, she’s worthless,
and only if she gets thin enough will she be convinced she’s acceptable. Her bones seem more and more prominent, her
face more and more gaunt. Her parents
are beside themselves with worry. They
could commit her to an inpatient program; they could try to coax her to health
on their own; they could ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening. But deep inside, they scream a silent plea to
a hidden and mysterious God: can’t you please do something?
A recently married couple finds all the
wind going out of their sails. All the
things they used to love doing together they’ve stopped. The excitement they had from being together,
the affection that underlay everything—it’s mostly gone. Their debt mounts, their hopes fade, their
love teeters. And deep inside they
scream a silent plea to a hidden and mysterious God: can’t you please do
something?
A middle-aged man finds his work passing
him by. He can’t keep up with the
changes in technology whirling about him.
The language his co-workers speak seems foreign—too fast, too scatter-shot. He fears he’s on the verge of being laid off,
with no other prospects in sight and only a long slow decline in front of
him. And deep inside he screams a silent
plea to a hidden and mysterious God: can’t you please do something?
What haunts or troubles you today? Maybe nothing. But my guess is that there is something on
your mind as you come to worship this morning—some pain that lingers, some
crisis that festers, some disappointment that leaves a dull ache. Maybe you missed the promotion you were
counting on; a co-worker annoys you to death; dementia is stealing a parent’s
identity; a child of yours is so deep in a hole you can’t see how they’re ever
going to get out.
And when we look at the wider world, other
stresses nudge at us. An Egypt
up-in-arms doesn’t seem too promising.
Will democracy finally prevail?
Will there be an Egyptian backlash at the extended U.S. support
for President Hosni Mubarak? Will oil
prices go through the roof? Will travel
be disrupted and fears escalate?
And sometimes it’s nothing huge; it’s just
the normal wear and tear of daily living—the strains and frictions we all face,
if not daily then at least frequently.
Someone was telling me just this week about the common strains on a
marriage. She said the three things that
lead to the most tension in a relationship are taking a boat out of the water,
wallpapering, and leaving on a vacation.
She said that the husband thinks they’re on vacation when he leaves the
office, while the wife thinks they’re on vacation when they leave the
driveway. And sometimes the difference
in perspective can be particularly irritating.
In all of these, there may be a silent plea to a hidden and mysterious
God: can’t you please do something?
The passage we read earlier from Paul’s
letter to the church in Corinth
is, to be honest, not the most memorable of the words Paul ever wrote. There’s no striking analogy or verbal tour de
force. In some ways he’s simply building
on what we heard last week. But the reinforcement
of that perspective is maybe just what we need this morning. Because the point he’s making upends the
instinctive expectations we have of God.
In Paul’s eyes, God isn’t the great magician in the sky who rights all
our wrongs. For him, instead, God is revealed
most clearly, most forcefully, on the cross.
As we heard last week, and again today, the cross is central for Paul.
And if we had to say in a sentence what
that cross was about, as unfair as it really is to Paul to try to condense his
highly symbolic thought, what we would say is this: the secret and mysterious
God is known most vividly as the one who walks with us in our pain and
struggle. This is where holiness is most
manifest, as God walks with us, and we walk with each other, along the paths of
terror and loneliness and hopelessness.
There’s a hymn in the UCC hymnal, The New Century Hymnal, called “Eternal
Christ, You Rule” (#302). The hymn tune
name—you may know that hymn tunes always have their own names—is Throckmorton. And it’s because the hymn writer, Dan Damon,
once heard a sermon of my mother’s in which she asked the question, “How does
Christ rule?” And her answer was, “By
keeping company with pain.” So the first
line of Damon’s hymn is just that: “Eternal Christ, you rule keeping company
with pain.”
If you’re like me, you’d often prefer a God to reign by solving your
problems or taking away your pain or smiting your enemies. Who here hasn’t—in Christian love, of course—wanted
God to crush their nemeses and give them their comeuppance (or maybe that’s
just me!)!
Much to our occasional frustration,
though, God doesn’t do that. God does
something even better, as it happens, and that is to sit at table with us as we
grieve and spout and weep and beg—to sit at table with us, and share a meal,
and hold us close. The great secret and
hidden wisdom of God is that in the heart of suffering there lies light and
peace. Not solutions, though they may
come. Not miracles, though they may
come. But presence. Light.
Love.
And when we reflect on what that means for
us as Christians, we’re taken to the same place. To be faithful followers of Jesus is to be
present. To be light. To be love.
To keep company with pain. That’s
what any mission worthy of the name is: keeping company with pain.
Sometimes we do this with our money and
our resources. I heard the other day
about a group called, I think, “100 Women, $100.” The basic idea, if I have it right, is that
100 women gather once or twice a year and decide, then and there, what
organization they will give to this time.
The names of various organizations are thrown into a hat, one is picked
out, and each woman sends $100. Voila:
$10,000! Money can sometimes convey our
presence even when our bodies can’t be there.
Sometimes, over long distances, perhaps,
we are present in yet other ways. I was
down at the University of Mt. Union yesterday to watch our son Taylor’s track
team run in a meet there. You may know
that several weeks ago, a trainer with the school’s wrestling team died in an
accident when, in the snow, as they were returning from a meet, a car hit the
team bus. As I was walking down the hall
of the university’s athletic complex, I was suddenly struck by two enormous
poster boards with much hand-writing on them.
When I stopped to take a closer look, what I saw was these words:
“Thoughts and prayers to our friends at Mt. Union. Bluffton
University,” with
literally hundreds of signatures.
Bluffton, as you may remember, lost several members of their baseball
team a few years ago, when the bus that was carrying them to some spring
training games in the south had a terrible accident. The people at Bluffton had a particularly
acute sense of what that loss must have been like in the Mt. Union
community. And they kept company with
that pain.
There are many ways of keeping company
with pain. So often, though, it’s our
physical presence that makes the difference.
The woman with the eating disorder?
Be there. The couple struggling
with their marriage? Be there. The middle-aged man with the world passing
him by? Be there. Because that’s what brings light into the
shadows. That’s what it is to know
nothing except Christ crucified (2:2).
That’s what it takes to make God’s presence known.
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said,
“You are the light of the world” (Mt. 5:14).
We can be that light for each other.
I said to a friend of mine just the other day, picking up unconsciously
on those words, “You shine a light of grace wherever you go, and I am pleased
to be in its beam.” This man never got
me a job. He never took away an
illness. He never got me out of debt. Just his presence makes me feel embraced and
loved. That’s the light of the hidden
and mysterious God, the God of the cross, for whom presence is everything.
Clara
Claiborne Park
taught at the college I attended. She
was an English professor who had an autistic son. In the 1960s, she wrote a book about her
family, called The Siege: A Family’s
Journey into the World of an Autistic Child. She didn’t soft-pedal the difficulties of
their life together. But throughout the
book ran the theme of love. The Siege ends this way: “But we cannot
sift experience and take only the part that does not hurt us. Let me say simply and straight out that
simple knowledge the whole world knows. .
. . I do not want to be sentimental. But
the [worst] sentimentality of all is that . . . which will not recognize the
good it has been given to understand because it is too simple. So, then: this experience we did not choose,
which we would have given anything to avoid, has made us different, has made us
better. Through it we have learned the
lesson that no one studies willingly, the hard, slow lesson of Sophocles and
Shakespeare—that one grows by suffering. . . . If today I were given the
choice, to accept the experience, with everything it entails, or to refuse the
bitter largesse, I would have to stretch out my hands—because out of it has
come, for all of us, an unimagined life.
And I will not change the last word of the story. It is still love” (Williams Alumni Review, January 2011, p. 30).
It is, indeed, still love. It’s the love we see on the cross of
Christ. It’s the love we taste in this
holy meal. It’s the love we receive from
the God who will not let us go. And it’s
the love we have the awesome privilege of sharing with each other.