I think our scripture readings today convey an understanding of pain and suffering that is very, very different than the understanding typically held by most people in our society. Remember, these words from John, chapter 17, part of what is known as Jesus’ high priestly prayer, these are Jesus’ very last words before he is betrayed, arrested and then goes to the cross to die. And yet, the word Jesus keeps using to describe what is happening is the word “glorify.” He actually repeats the word five times in this little section of the prayer. What could it mean that the cross is to be revealed as a place and a time of glory? And in our Epistle reading today, Peter is talking about the suffering of Christians - a fiery ordeal, he says - but, again, the language is glory and joy - rejoicing even in the midst of pain and suffering. Most people in our society do not connect the words suffering and joy - ever. Indeed, the common perspective is that pain and suffering are to be avoided at all times, kept away at all costs, because they are the opposite of the happiness we desire. Human frailty, brokenness, illness, mortality - we try, as best we can, to keep them out of sight and out of mind because they are seen as obstructions on our path to the good life, the positive experience, and the happiness we seek.
But the perspective offered by Jesus stands in sharp contrast to this worldly perspective. In both his life and his teaching, Jesus seeks to help us understand and discover that true joy is sometimes hidden in the midst of sorrow, and that new life almost always finds its beginning in an ending of some sort, in the midst of loss and grief. He says, “unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit....Unless we lose our life, we cannot truly find it. Unless we go through the experience of letting go of our life, we will never truly possess it. It is a very different perspective.
Jesus viewed the reality of his own impending suffering and death from such a radically different perspective, in part, because, as it says a little earlier in John’s gospel, “Jesus knew that he had come from God and was going back to God.” This radical faith, in both his divine origin and destiny, was the context for Jesus’ experience of life on earth. And, I believe it is important for us, as followers of Jesus, to learn to see our own life from the very same perspective. It is important for us, as Christians, as we journey through life with all of its many ups and downs, to remember that, by faith, the same thing is true about us. That we too have come from God and, ultimately, we are going back to God. I love the way Richard Rohr put it. He said, here is the truth about you and me: we have come from God, we are ultimately going back to God, and everything in between is a school. We have come from God, we are going back to God, and everything in between is a school. Jesus wants us to understand that one of the major components of the “curriculum” of this “school” we are all in is the reality of human frailty, brokenness and mortality, which includes the inevitable experience of pain and suffering.
I remember leading a retreat some years ago for the ordained Deacons of our diocese, and we were talking about this issue, the reality of pain and suffering as an inevitable part of what it means to be human. And, despite the fact that every single person at that retreat was wearing a cross of some kind around their neck, despite the fact that the central mystery of our faith, the central pattern into which we are all baptized, is this pattern of death and resurrection, we all admitted - this group of ordained clergy - we admitted that we all try to avoid pain at all costs. We try to avoid it any way we can. We run away from it with our compulsive busyness. We try to cover up the pain in our lives - numbing ourselves in various ways with television, our various addictions and compulsive habits. But most of us also had to admit that, if we reflect back honestly on our own life, we had to admit that pain is one of the only things that really forces us to grow - emotionally and spiritually. For the most part, the private ego simply does not let go until it has to. For the most part, the truth is that we will not give up the illusion of control, we will not give up our need to be at the center of life, our need to be right, our need to fix everything and everyone, until we have to. I mean, do you? I don’t, for the most part. But this is some of what the reality of pain and suffering does for us. It is the one thing that forces us to grow spiritually.1
Of course, we don’t have to look all that far to find the reality of pain and suffering in ourselves or in our world. I remember Mary Cosby telling about when she asked a great and very experienced preacher what one piece of wisdom he would offer to a new preacher just beginning the ministry. The older preacher said, “Every time you get into that pulpit and look out onto the congregation, remember - that every person you see is sitting beside their own pool of tears.” I think that is indeed a good and true piece of advice. Because, I think deep down we all know that the pain and grief in our own lives, just in a group of people like this, the pain and grief just in this room is immense.
When we were young, we imagined that our lives would be one triumph after another, an upward movement of ever-increasing success and happiness; but our lives have turned out not to go exactly as we had hoped; there are compromises, circumstances, accidents, illnesses, tragedies, failures, and in many ways we are living quite different lives than we had originally dreamed and hoped for - and we grieve. Occasionally, God seems to bring into our lives some wonderful person, whom we come to love deeply, then that person is somehow taken away from us - and the pain of that loss can leave us with hearts that are broken - and we grieve. Or someone to whom we open ourselves completely in a relationship of trust and love turns around and betrays that trust, betrays that love, and hurts us so deeply that it may be hard to fully trust again - and we grieve. Maybe someone we care about is in trouble, a friend, a child or a parent, and we desperately want to help, but we are unable to do anything to really help them, and we feel so utterly powerless - and we grieve. And, as Gordon Cosby says, year after year, we pray that God’s kingdom will come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we’ve prayed that prayer maybe a million times, yet we look around and sometimes that kingdom seems farther away now than when we first started praying that prayer - and we grieve. I have my list - you have yours. (Gordon Cosby, paraphrase).
Pain is simply a reality of human life. Which is why, says Rohr, all great and authentic spirituality involves the issue of what do we do with our pain. And, if you do not have an active, authentic spiritual path and practice, for the most part, you simply will not know what to do with the inevitable pain of life. And, he says, the reality is, if we do not transform our pain, we will always transmit it - always - to the people around us, to the people under us, to our children, from one generation to the next, or to some scapegoat out there we try to blame for our pain. If we do not have a way to transform our pain, we will always somehow transmit it. That is why true spirituality is always about the process of transformation.
But, if people do not have an authentic spiritual path and practice, if they have no God to give it to, if they have no instruments for transforming their pain, the only option is to transmit it - usually by blaming someone else for it. I think it is a universal human defense - projecting it onto someone else, scapegoating and blaming some other person or group. You know - it’s the Republicans. It’s the Liberals. It’s the homosexuals. No, it’s the fundamentalists. I know, it’s my wife’s fault - my husband’s fault - my boss’s fault - my priest’s fault - my parents' fault - it’s got to be somebody. But, as Rohr puts it: “at the level of soul, the truth is that no one else is your problem.” If you want to grow spiritually, into the fulness of life God intends for you, you come to the realization that no one else is your problem. You are your problem. If you are not happy, I’m sorry, it is not your wife’s fault. Darn it! I was trying to run that one for the first ten years of my marriage.
The truth is, if you are not happy, generally it is because you have not come to know the Holy One, you haven’t surrendered to the sacred mystery. Because, as John Powell says, happiness is an inside job. If you’re not happy with the gift of the life you have been given, generally it is because you haven’t fully learned the sacred mystery at the very heart of our faith - what Jesus and what all great spirituality is talking about - that pain and joy, death and life, are two sides of one great truth - and you can’t have one without the other. The psychologist Carl Jung put it this way, he said: There is a legitimate pain associated with being human; and either you find a way to accept and bear that legitimate pain, or, ironically, you bring upon yourself and others ten times more suffering in your efforts to avoid that legitimate pain of life.
And, you know what, that is pretty close to the doctrine of the Cross. But if someone doesn’t tell us about the legitimate pain of human life, we will spend most of our energy and effort, we will spend our whole lives trying to avoid it, trying to escape or flee from it - thinking it is a curse, thinking it is death. Without realizing that life and death and new life - resurrection - are all part of the same sacred process. We call it the Paschal Mystery. And this is much of what the Christian spiritual path is all about: learning to let God transform our pain, rather than transmit it. This is the Way of the Cross. The Way of Jesus. The Way that ultimately, eternally, finally and forever leads to resurrection, joy, glory and light, even as it passes through the human realities of pain, suffering, darkness and death. This is the way of the cross that leads to glory.
Since Easter Sunday, and throughout the season of Easter, the theme I have been working with is “practicing resurrection.” As Christians, we are called not just to believe in Christ’s resurrection, we are called in our baptism to “live in the power of his resurrection,” we are called to practice resurrection. So, today I want to give you another practice. The practice is this: to allow God to transform our pain, rather than transmit it. And we do that by fully accepting it - fully accepting that “legitimate pain associated with being human,” and allowing God to transform that pain by placing it upon the Cross of Christ.
In his book LIFE OF THE BELOVED, Henri Nouwen describes the basic pattern for authentic Christian living as reflected in the actions of the Eucharist - like the bread of Christ’s body we too are taken, blessed, broken and given. We are taken or chosen by God. We are blessed with all the gifts God has bestowed upon us. We are indeed broken in various ways by life. But we are broken in order that we may be given, given in compassion and love, given as bread for others and bread for the world. And when Nouwen speaks of our “brokenness,” this is precisely what he means, this “legitimate pain” that is always and inevitably a part of human life. And the practice Nouwen recommends is to “put our brokenness under the blessing.” Instead of experiencing the pain of human life “under the curse,” as he puts it - avoiding, fleeing, denying the legitimate pain of life as if it were somehow confirmation of our own inadequacy or of God’s disapproval, instead we are called to the practice of “putting our brokenness under the blessing” - which means to experience it in the context of God’s love, our true identity as the Beloved of God, our divine origin, created in the very image of God, and our divine destiny, the promise of life eternal in Christ.
Again, you have come from God, you are ultimately going back to God, and everything in between is a school. We might as well take the curriculum. As someone put it, “we are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.” And if indeed we are spiritual beings on a human journey, and Jesus has joined us on this human journey to transform our pain and brokenness into blessing and new life, then our Christian faith provides us with a very real and dramatic shift of perspective. A shift of perspective that doesn’t make our pain go away, but significantly lightens that pain by putting it in a much larger context, in the context of God’s love, compassion and grace, in the context of our divine origin and our eternal destiny as God’s beloved children forever. It is a shift of perspective which allows us to see our human “brokenness” not under the curse but under the blessing - to see our human experience, even with its inevitable pain and suffering, not “from below” but to see it “from above.” From the perspective of faith. From the perspective of resurrection.
To see “from above.” Some of you will remember “the weaver’s prayer.” The weaver’s prayer goes like this: “Dear Lord, my life looks like a mess of tangled threads and knots. But that’s because I only see the underside.” You get it? From a purely human and worldly perspective, seeing “from below,” we only see the underside of what is being woven, that “mess of tangled threads and knots.” But what if our life also has a topside that is being fashioned simultaneously? What if our life seen from above, also has a topside being fashioned simultaneously by God, the divine weaver?
We are all very familiar with this horizontal axis of life - this flat, one-dimensional realm of linear time, so often fraught with fear, pain, stress and anxiety, because this is how human life looks “from below.” At a certain moment we are born into this world, we live our lives, whatever time we are given, and at a certain moment we die. At which point, a tombstone will be engraved with a date of birth, a date of death, and a hyphen in between. That hyphen may be long, it may be short, but it is basically a flat, one-dimensional line with a beginning and an end. That hypen represents our experience of life from a purely human perspective, seen “from below.” But according to Jesus and his gospel, there is also a vertical axis. A spiritual dimension of life where there are “many mansions,” many realms from which the energies of God and the qualities of divine life may flow into and transform our human experience in this linear realm of time. This is human life as seen “from above.” The horizontal axis is intersected by a vertical axis. And, as you can see, it is this point of intersection which forms the shape of the cross. It is precisely at this point of intersection -of time and eternity, human life and divine life, the material realm and the spiritual realm - it is precisely at this point of intersection that Jesus calls those who would follow him to live their lives each and every day. And when we are living at this intersection, in the pattern of the Cross, we are practicing resurrection.
For the cross is the symbol of suffering and joy, of death and new life, of temporal defeat and God’s eternal victory, . It is on the cross that the legitimate pain of human life is once and for all time transformed. We don’t ask for suffering. We don’t want it. But it comes. Yet in that darkness of human suffering, the glory of Christ shines light. The glory of Christ crucified and risen shines light. And in that light, by that light “from above,” human pain, suffering, even death itself are transformed, not only in time, but in eternity, from the place where it appears God is least visible to the place where God’s love, light and glory can be most profoundly present to us.
So, again, I invite you to practice resurrection, for life will indeed bring to all of us “hours” of darkness, pain and suffering. For Jesus, it says his “hour” had come. When my hour comes, when your hour comes, I hope, I pray and I trust in Christ that it will indeed be the glory of God revealed.
1. Adapted from a talk by Richard Rohr, who inspired several sections of this sermon.