Out of Our Anguish, We Shall See Light Reverend
Thomas Cary Kinder
First Congregational Church
in Thetford, Vermont UCC
October 18, 2009 Twentieth Sunday
after Pentecost
Psalm 91; Isaiah 53:3-12; Mark 10:32-45
We are drawing near the end of Pentecost, the end of
the church year and the end of Christ’s life as we read through the Gospel of
Mark. On the first Sunday of
Advent we will begin the new church year and start in on the gospel of Luke,
but between now and then we have a difficult journey, following Jesus on his
last trip to Jerusalem.
Today’s passage is Jesus’ final attempt before they
arrive on Palm Sunday to warn the disciples of what is coming and to instruct
them how to follow him. It is the
somber message of a suffering servant.
But before we look at it, I want to go back to the verses of Psalm 91
that we read responsively—that bright, confident, reassuring passage that
seems almost irreconcilably different from the tone of Mark’s gospel passage.
Listen to it again, and as
you do, try to wish with all your heart that every word of it could be true for
someone you love who is suffering right now:
Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling place,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent,
for he will command his angels concerning you,
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a
stone.
Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble,
I will rescue them and honor them.
With long life I will satisfy them,
and show them my salvation.
How does that make you
feel?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
it turned out to be true?
But how could it be? We all know faithful Jews or Christians
to whom evil has happened even though they made God their refuge and dwelling
place—the Nazi holocaust, the bloody Protestant reformation, the
assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Archbishop Oscar
Romero, not to mention all the feet we ourselves have dashed against stones
without angels protecting or upholding us. Where has God’s protection been for Eleanor Zue or the
Barker family or the others struggling in our congregation this fall? The Bible itself contradicts the
assertions of this Psalm on almost every page.
So we have a decision to
make about Psalm 91. Either we
decide it is untrue, that it is magical or wishful thinking and ridiculously
naďve, and we take our scissors and cut it out of our personal Bible, or we
find some way that it can be reconciled with all the suffering of faithful
people in the world, and decide that its beautiful promises have a useful place
in our lives.
We need all the comfort we
can get, so let’s look to see if there is a way for it all to be true.
The Gospel shows that the
disciples still did not understand the “suffering servant” concept. They still believed that Jesus was
going to Jerusalem to become king, and they were competing with each other for
the positions of glory—who would get to be Vice President or Secretary of
State.
What is amazing is how
patient Jesus is with them. Jesus
has told the disciples again and again, you will have to lose your life to save
it, the first must be last, you must be like lowly children to enter the realm
of God, you must let go of all your material attachments and follow me. Three times he has told them plainly
what following him meant—three times he has said that he would be
condemned, tortured and killed, and then would rise again.
After all that, Jesus is
still gentle with the disciples’ misunderstanding. He does not scold them for their ambition to greatness, but
tells them they do not know what they are asking. He patiently explains again that to be glorified with Christ
means to do what he does. It means
not lording it over others, but being like a slave of all other people. Jesus says that he came not to be
served but to serve and to give his life, and that is what we need to do if we want
to be great, or to share in his glory.
This is as hard for us to
accept as it was for the disciples.
Yet the prophet Isaiah saw
this same pattern over five centuries before Christ as he looked at how God was
working through the Hebrew people.
They were in exile in Babylon, their homeland devastated, Jerusalem and
the Temple destroyed. As Isaiah
said, they were despised and rejected.
Their nation was like a man of suffering, a man who seemed struck down
by God, a man wounded for others who were healed because he bore their
suffering.
After all this Isaiah says,
“Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,” but “Out of his anguish
he shall see light and he shall find satisfaction. Through his knowledge, the righteous one, my servant, shall
make many righteous….Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great.”
Here is something remarkable
that may be part of the key to reconciling the Gospel and the Psalm. Isaiah says that out of our anguish, we
shall see light. Maybe the Psalm
is not making its promises to lives free of suffering, but to lives full of
suffering.
Early in my ministry I had a
parishioner named Dorothy. She was
ninety-six years old, almost totally blind and deaf, and confined to her bed in
a nursing home in great physical pain.
She used to ask me bitterly, “Why will God not take me home?” She wanted to die to be relieved of her
suffering, and who could blame her?
I used to pray with her that God would let her die.
And yet that was not all
that Dorothy had to say. She was
the one who asked me once—yelling because of her deafness, “Do you know
what the greatest word in the English language is?” And when I yelled back, “No, tell me,” she said,
“Compassion.” She explained that
she made it her practice to find a way to show compassion and kindness to every
person on the nursing home staff who came into her room. She told me how hard they worked, and
how they each had struggles in their lives outside of work, and she talked
about the ways she found to help them, even though she was almost totally
helpless herself.
Out of her anguish, even in
her blindness, Dorothy saw light and found satisfaction. Her suffering had taught her knowledge
and wisdom, and she used it like a servant to help others, including me. She was one of my teachers, and I allot
her a portion with the great.
Dorothy was resentful,
though, about God’s failing to show her the mercy she expected. She had been a faithful pillar of the
church, she had made God her refuge and dwelling place, and yet God was letting
her down by not protecting or rescuing her from her suffering. So we come back to the question, is
Psalm 91 untrue? Or can we
reconcile its promises with the suffering of God’s faithful servants? Is there a way to understand it that
can bring us a peace with our suffering that Dorothy never found?
Looking at the context of a
scripture passage is often essential to understanding it. We tend to read the Psalms as
individual poems or songs, but they have relationships to one another. The 91st Psalm relates
closely to the 90th and 89th. Scholars believe all three come from roughly the same
experience that Isaiah was describing—when Israel was suffering in exile
and their beloved Jerusalem and holy temple had been destroyed.
The 89th Psalm
asks, “How long, O God? Will you
hide yourself forever…? God, where
is your steadfast love of old?” It
says God has spurned and rejected Israel.
The 90th Psalm that we read last week talks about how frail
and short human life is, and asks God to teach wisdom and give satisfaction and
prosperity.
Then today’s Psalm moves
from despair or hopeful prayer to complete affirmation that despite everything,
God is faithful, God does protect and rescue and satisfy. Nothing had changed the fact that their
land had been destroyed and Israelites carried off into exile. So what had changed so that out of
their anguish, they now saw light and found satisfaction? How did it happen?
We have one little clue in
the Psalms themselves. Psalm 90,
the one just before today’s that is closely linked with it, is the only Psalm
in the entire collection that claims to be written by Moses. Moses represents a time when Israel had
no land, it had no temple; it was in exile, wandering in the wilderness for
forty years, weak and lowly.
To go back to Moses was to
strip away the expectations that the people of Israel acquired once they
reached the Promised Land. To go
back to Moses was to enter a time when all they had left was the law that God
had given them and their trust in God.
Looking back at that time from this new period of devastation, they
could see how trust in God had been enough. They could see that to stay faithful to their relationship
to God was to be saved, that dwelling in the Most High was to be protected from
evil and harm—not that evil and harm never happened to them, but that God
led them through harm to healing and greater life. This is the light that Jesus wanted us to see through our
anguish.
But this is a light that we
may not truly see unless we have entered the anguish of losing our life in
order to save it, of choosing to be last in order to be first, of choosing to
be a servant of all. This is the
narrow gate, the eye of the needle that we need to pass through in order to be
able to reconcile the suffering servant with the extravagant promises of Psalm
91. It is not the way out of
suffering and death, but the way through them. When we have let go of everything except God as our refuge
and dwelling place, when we have no expectations left and therefore no
bitterness and resentment, then maybe we will see how it is true that the
angels are guarding us on the way, bearing us up, keeping our feet from dashing
against stones.
And maybe we will see that
we ourselves are those angels.
That as suffering servants, we are the ones who answer prayers on God’s
behalf, we are the ones who are with others in their time of trouble on God’s
behalf, we are the ones giving others refuge and deliverance from evil, each of
us giving it to one another, even when we are confined to a nursing home bed,
blind and deaf and in pain.
And maybe we will see that a
world built on this principle of everyone serving others dwells in the Most
High, and becomes the realm of God on earth, a world where there can be no
poverty, a world at peace.
Maybe then
we will look at Jesus on his cross, giving his life to serve the cause of
establishing God’s realm on earth, and we will feel moved to follow him. We will take his path through anguish
into the light, and we will lead others there as well. We will do so by giving our life in
loving, suffering but triumphant service as he gave his.
Let us pray
in silence…
