October 14, 2007 Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Access Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 116; II Kings 5:1-15; Luke17:11-19
With all the suffering in the world, with all the poverty, oppression and
war, with all the ravages of human greed, lust and pride, it has struck various
thinkers over the years that there must be some miraculous mechanism of grace
holding the world together. One of the theories is that there are half a dozen
people scattered around the globe who are so pure of heart, so profoundly good, so
immersed in God, that the force of their souls is enough to keep the world from
total chaos. Some of these people may be monks or hermits we never hear of, and
some may be the carpenter or preschool teacher living unrecognized next door.
Then there are the great souls, the prophets and miracle-workers like
Elisha—the great spiritual sages we all know. At Grace Paley’s service here 2
weeks ago someone said that she was a great soul. Another was Mother Teresa of
Calcutta. Until recently most people thought of Mother Teresa as the saintly
worker of mercy for the poorest of the poor, a woman radiating steadfast faith and
love of God. If we thought about her in relation to today’s scripture passages, she
would have been the Elisha or Jesus figure, healing the lepers, restoring their
health and dignity.
But lately another side of Mother Teresa has become widely known, one
that puts her more in the character of the leper than the healer. Recently Time
Magazine excerpted a new book chronicling her 45 year long feeling of God’s
absence from her life, a terrible devastation interrupted only briefly by moments of
God’s presence and grace.
The extent of her suffering was extreme, but the fact that she had this
experience does not surprise anyone who has studied the lives of the saints, or
anyone who has been dedicated to their own spiritual journey. What Mother
Teresa experienced is commonly known as the “dark night of the soul,” a phrase
that comes from the 16th Century Spanish mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross.
Some naïve commentators are saying that Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul
is a sign of weak faith and hypocrisy, but in fact, it is considered to be one of the
marks of God’s action within those advancing in their spiritual life.
This does not mean that God wants us to suffer or can save us only through
affliction, necessarily, but suffering a dark night of the soul can serve God and
promote our spiritual well-being by changing our relationship to the world around
us, stripping away what is false in us and increasing our dependence on God.
Suffering a dark night of the soul can teach us humility and surrender. Mother
Teresa said, “This is the surrender: to accept to be cut to pieces and yet every
piece belongs to God. You are free then.”
Another of the great souls of our time is a Chinese pastor named Lin
Xiangao who was imprisoned in a communist labor camp for twenty-one years
where he worked in the coal mines. He emerged from prison to find that his wife
had died just the year before. Despite all he had suffered, he went right back to his
ministry, risking spending the rest of his life in prison. He resumed hosting an
illegal church in his home. That church became the spiritual home to thousands.
Lin Xiangao said, “A Christian who has not suffered is child without training.
Such Christians cannot receive or understand the fullness of God’s Blessing. They
know the Lord only as an acquaintance rather than as an intimate heavenly
Father.”
Suffering can be the gate that leads to our transformation, but only if we
have the grace to receive it as such—both God-given grace and grace of our own
choosing. If we do not choose the grace of the truth, admitting our suffering and
its impact on our lives, and if we do not choose the grace of faith, recognizing
God’s higher power as capable of leading us to healing and peace, and if we do
not choose the grace of humble surrender, calling to God to save us over and over,
even for decades if need be, then we cut ourselves off from the full grace that God
could give us. The great souls become great by choosing the human grace that
leads to God’s grace through faith and surrender. They have what pastor Lin
Xiangao called, “A mind to suffer.”
The place to find the greatest collection of wisdom about suffering in the
Bible is the Book of Psalms. Psalm 32 says, “While I kept silence, my body
wasted away.” Psalm 116 says, “I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on
the name of the Lord; O Lord, I pray, save my life!…When I was brought low, he
saved me….I kept my faith, even when I said ‘ I am greatly afflicted.’” The
wisdom here says to admit our suffering, to turn to God in humility, and remain
faithful even as we lament our affliction. This combination of truth, faith and
humble surrender is exactly what Mother Teresa did.
It is also what millions of others are doing today because this same wisdom
is encoded in the spiritual path of the Twelve Step movement. Listen to the first
three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. You could replace the word alcohol with
any form of addiction or any form of suffering that fits. The characters in today’s
scripture could replace alcohol with leprosy for instance. (Note: Although AA
considers alcoholism an illness, it is certainly different from other illnesses, so the
12 Steps may not appear to be useful in the curing of leprosy. But in the healing
of a human soul damaged by disease, and in the management of life during intense
suffering, the 12 Steps could be very useful. And who knows where opening to
God’s grace in this way may lead—perhaps even to a cure, as in the cases in
today’s scripture passages.) Here are the first three steps:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol---that our lives had become
unmanageable.
2. [We] came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us
to sanity.
The rest of the Twelve Steps are designed to help us face the exact nature of our
suffering and our true humility, and to open us to transformation through our
surrender and connection to God, and finally to bear witness to what God has done
in our lives.
Think about what is causing you suffering these days. Maybe you have an
addiction or obsession or suffer from compulsivity or a rut you cannot get out of.
Maybe you have an illness or a grief or an injustice that makes your life
unmanageable at times. We can find help in the same three steps of facing the
truth of our condition, asserting our faith in the ability of God’s grace to save us,
and then turning to God in humility and surrender.
But to do this, we need to have “a mind to suffer.” We need to have a
willingness to feel the pain of what is wrong and to pass through the dark of night
of the soul, if it is our lot. We need to have the inner grace to admit the truth of
our lives without seeking to deny or avoid it, if we want to gain what this spiritual
wisdom has to offer. We need to have the humility to surrender to a higher,
helping, healing power.
This is not easy. It goes against what we have been taught. It goes against
the values of our society. We are taught not to ask for help, to be independent, to
be proud of our ability to cope with hardship or pain. We are taught to medicate
suffering with drugs or with distracting pleasures or comforts. (In many cases this
is important—some suffering is too painful to bear without drugs, distractions or
denial. But some degree of suffering needs to be felt to guide us in the way of
truth. Our society tends not to recognize the value of suffering, and so promotes
avoidance without feeling and understanding.) As children we learn to protect our
vulnerability by saying, “I don’t care.” It is not safe to show weakness or admit
problems. If we do, at the very least society would have us rely on self-help to get
straightened out, or find some way to boost our self-esteem in the process.
We can see this mentality at work in the story about Naaman in Second
Kings. He was a great man, and so he went to the King of Israel to arrange his
healing. He had leprosy, but he also had his pride. So when the prophet Elisha
would not come out to meet him, his pride was affronted. It offended Naaman to
be told to go bathe in the River Jordan. He wanted some kind of healing that
could uphold his high standing—if not some showy magic, than at least a mighty
task so he could earn his redemption. He storms off, refusing to be healed if it
could not be on his terms, until one of his servants who understood the necessity
and power of humility educated him. When Naaman humbles himself and
surrenders and trusts Elisha and follows his will—turns his life and his will over to
Elisha’s higher power—then he is purified and healed and he recognizes the
presence of God. That is how Naaman’s suffering became the path to
transformation.
Our suffering can become the gateway to our transformation, too, but the
story does not always go as Naaman’s did, or as it did for the ten lepers Jesus
healed. Sometimes, like Mother Teresa, our suffering continues, or it ends briefly
and then resumes. If like the Psalmist we keep our faith even when we say, “I am
greatly afflicted,” if we keep calling out to God, “Save my life!” then the longer
our suffering, the deeper our transformation. To us it may feel like nothing but the
painful darkness of suffering, like the absence of God as it did for Mother Teresa,
but others will look at us and see endurance and courage, love and light, and they
will find inspiration and hope for their own struggle.
God may not give us healing, but we may find the faith that God is walking
with us through our suffering. As one person has put it from the midst of a long,
painful illness, “It makes the crucifixion so real and so important to me—that
being close to God doesn’t take away the suffering, it enables you to go through
suffering with love and clear eyes. But pain is pain, and even Jesus wanted the
cup to pass.”
Suffering with that honesty and integrity and faith is transformative and
redemptive. It changes us, it changes our relationship to God and the world and it
gives meaning to our suffering and to our lives. Even if like Mother Teresa our
suffering goes on for the rest of our days, in a real sense we can say with the
Psalm, “I called…‘Save my life!’ When I was brought low, God saved
me…Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with me.
For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from
stumbling. I walk before the Lord in the Land of the living.”
God is walking with us through our suffering. Call out and ask, and God
will ‘take your hand, lead you on, let you stand…through the storm, through the
night, leading on to the light.’
Let us pray in silence, “Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me home…”
Sermon 10/14/2007