April 5, 2009 Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday,
Sixth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Mark 11:1-11; 14:1 - 15:47
A middle-aged theater professor lost his wife in a tragic accident not
long ago. He says, “Everyone has something they struggle with. It’s an
aspect of theater that I try and help [people] discover, that the more we share
our stories, [the more] we understand how universal our suffering is in a way,
and that no one’s really alone.”
A college sophomore made wise beyond her years by her struggles,
says, “You aren’t alone in suffering. You are more a part of humanity, I
think, the human condition, when you are suffering than when you aren’t.”
A recent college graduate says, “Going through everything I have, I
have realized that there are people that love me and that will take care of me
when I need it and that I will return the favor, and that kind of takes care of
any stuff that, you know, has happened, is happening, will happen.”
A teacher and mother suffering from cancer says, “Tearing and
rebuilding stronger is what makes muscles develop. We’re no different. We
need to be torn up a little in order to grow back stronger and that’s what I
think of going through breast cancer and having this genetic mutation, or
when I was twelve and my father was put out of his church, or losing a dear
friend when he was only twenty-one and killed in a plane crash… or, the list
goes on…Not a punishment, but a way to grow stronger.”
And finally, a minister who watched a loved one suffer from being
attacked, says, “It isn’t about fighting back that makes fears diminish. It’s
love. Love is what…casts out fear. So it isn’t appropriate for us to be
responding…making decisions based on fear, but rather making decisions
based instead on how we can be loving of one another so that fear does not
take hold, so that fear can’t multiply and grow into something so destructive,
demonic.”
These are all voices of neighbors here in the Upper Valley. They are
part of a new exhibit at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College that
opened on Friday as part of a campus-wide exploration of conflict and
reconciliation. The artist Félix de la Concha was commissioned to interview
fifty-one selected members of the college and community, recording the
interviews on videotape at the same time as painting their portraits. I
encourage you to go down and listen to some of the interviews and look in
the eyes of these people in their portraits, all of whom have experienced
suffering and conflict and sought to reconcile somehow.
Many of the people are not Christian, but together they illustrate
something that is quintessentially Christ-like, and that is the way of suffering
love. Everyone who loves learns sooner or later that love inevitably
involves us in suffering. Love leads us to feel compassion, which means
literally to suffer with others, to share in their suffering. Love opens us,
makes us vulnerable, and we can get hurt. Love makes us long to hold onto
what we love, and then what we love gets taken away from us by change, by
violence, by death. But what the people in this exhibit have learned and
what the life and death of Christ have shown us is that suffering love—love
that suffers and continues to love—is the way that brings reconciliation and
healing. It brings social and personal transformation. The way of suffering
love leads through loss and the valley of the shadow of death to resurrection
joy.
We can see this at work in the characters in the Passion story. Jesus
had healed Mary Magdelene and transformed her life through his love. She
became one of his leading disciples. Imagine how her heart tore apart to see
his anguish, his humiliation, his torture on the cross. Imagine how she
suffered. And yet she did not turn away. She did not seek escape. She
endured the suffering that her love demanded of her and kept loving, and as a
result, she was the one who was at the tomb on Easter morning to find him
risen.
Think about Peter. Peter boasted that he would never desert Jesus,
and then, when opportunity to suffer came, he found that he loved his own
life more than he loved Jesus. He denied Jesus three times. But Peter
suffered terribly from his failure, and from that suffering he did not flee. He
was humbled, ashamed, but after the crucifixion he continued to love and
follow Christ. He endured the suffering his love brought, and as a result he
was the one the Holy Spirit moved at Pentecost to stand up and inspire the
first church with his preaching.
Consider Judas. It is easy to assume that the great crime and ruin of
Judas was his betrayal of Jesus, but I think it was his betrayal of suffering
love. Christ’s love and forgiveness are infinite—great enough to include
even his betrayer. Judas could have chosen Peter’s response and returned to
the way of love, but Judas could not endure the suffering of his remorse. He
despaired of love. He fled from it. He felt he was unworthy of it, perhaps, or
he feared the pain of feeling himself loved by the one he had killed. He cut
himself off, and so the infinite power of love to transform even the worst of
lives could not help him in the end.
I suspect that all Christians have Mary, Peter and Judas living within
their hearts, and maybe we have Judas most of all. We betray Christ in ways
large and small, we compromise his ideals, we hand him over for the price of
our comfort or security or our own sense of control. Knowing our betrayals,
we consider ourselves unworthy of his unconditional love and forgiveness.
Yet Jesus showed us again and again how complete his love was. He loved
those who had done wrong. He loved those his society treated as outcasts.
He loved and forgave even those who crucified him. He chose to love and
suffer and keep loving rather than act out of his pain or fear or desire for a
long and comfortable life—feelings that were heartbreakingly real for him in
the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jesus refused the temptation to go the way of power or pride. He came
out of the wilderness identifying with the poor and sick and oppressed, the
weakest and most vulnerable, the worst of sinners. He poured his love out to
them and taught us to do the same. His compassionate, suffering love led
him to confront the powerful establishment that inflicted suffering on
others—to confront it with only the weapons of love, including nonviolent
direct action, and including the cross.
The wisest saints have recognized that what looked to some like
foolishness and weakness was in fact the greatest wisdom and power in the
universe. No weapon of mass destruction can match the power of humble,
self-sacrificing, unconditionally forgiving and serving love. Weapons can
destroy, but suffering love has the power to create. It creates friends where
there have been enemies, it restores broken community, it brings things back
to life that could have remained dead. Gandhi saw this and harnessed its
power in his nonviolent movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. and many
others have done the same.
Suffering love has changed the course of empires. It can change the
course of your life, too. Recently I was talking to a man who has many fears
right now. He has a child who has a chronic, serious illness. The child is fine
at the moment, but relapse can happen at any time. The man has a job that he
could lose if the economy does not improve. And he has enough fear left
over to worry that the legislature will not over-ride Gov. Douglas’s veto of
the marriage equality bill, and that President Obama’s vision for change will
become another shattered hope. I asked him what he thought would happen
to him if the worst that he could imagine came to pass. He thought for a
minute or two and I could see in his face the suffering he anticipated, but
then he looked up at me and said something that is echoed over and over in
the exhibit at the Hood Museum. He said that he had faith in love. He had
faith that loving community would see him through. He had faith that his
love would give his suffering meaning, that loving through his suffering
would enable him to grow stronger and wiser and able to transform his life
however he had to in order to dwell in grace and peace.
Holy Week gives us the opportunity every year to learn again the
power of the way of suffering love. We can use Holy Week the way a
satellite uses the sun’s gravitational force. Once a year we orbit back here,
and if we allow it to take hold of us, the force of it can launch us back out
renewed for another year’s challenges. The more we enter into this week, the
more power we will gain from it. I hope you will let what you have heard
today stay in your consciousness, and I encourage you to come and deepen it
on Thursday and Friday evenings. I hope that you will entrust yourself to the
way of suffering love that leads through this week, going forward with the
faith that it will help transform your life and enable you to emerge into a new
Easter dawn.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 04/05/2009