Sermon Text

Before I really get into this sermon, I want to say just a quick word about Father’s Day.

As you might expect, Father’s Day had its start as an outgrowth of Mother’s Day. A few years after Mother’s Day began really gathering momentum, in 1909, Sonora Louise Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington, heard a Mother’s Day sermon, and it gave her the idea for a day to honor fathers, and in particular, her own father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and her five siblings by himself, after their mother had died in childbirth.

With support from the Spokane Ministerial Association and the YMCA, her efforts paid off and, on June 9, 1910, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane. The rose was selected as the official flower of the day. It wasn’t until 1972, however, that Richard Nixon signed a Presidential Proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day.

Today, of course, is another big day for greeting card companies. Shirts, ties, electric razors, and I-pods top the list of gifts. Perhaps most telling, though, is the fact that, like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is one of the biggest days of the year for long-distance calls, but more collect calls are recorded on Father’s Day than on any other day in the year!

Now let us listen for God’s Word to us today as we find it in the writings of the Apostle Paul, in Romans 5:1-5.

The words sound too easy, almost glib. “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, …”

But what does suffering really mean? Certainly, pain and suffering are a part of any human life. Pain and suffering is one of the body’s ways of telling us that something is not right and needs to be dealt with. Pain and suffering can lead to growth and maturing, but there’s no guarantee of that. Pain and suffering can also lead us to despair, anger, cynicism, hopelessness, and worse.

The Book of Job is an extended poetic effort to explore the meaning of pain and suffering. The Psalms express human emotion and question over pain and suffering. Jesus and his disciples discuss the possible origin of pain and suffering. And we’ve already heard Paul’s words on the subject, and considered that they might be a little too glib to fit our experience.

But maybe depending on our own experience is part of the problem. Most people today tend to give a lot of weight to personal experience, to my story, my feelings. I expect my story to help me make sense of the world. The problem is that my suffering is never identical to the suffering of others, now matter how close the commonalities. In addition, the truth is that my story, as interesting and relevant as it may be to me, is simply not complex enough to explain everything. What I need is a story that enables me to be both honest and hopeful and to stare suffering in the face without being annihilated by it. The Christian claim is that the story of Jesus Christ – because it is, in the best senses of the word, true – is the one story that enables us to look at our lives and at the world in a truthful way.

In Jesus, Christians believe, God confronted the powers of evil, darkness, suffering, and death and demonstrated God’s ultimate rule over them all. Being a Christian means to be part of a people who make the story of Jesus normative for the interpretation of our own lives.
Now, there is a very real danger in our not being theologically clear about pain and suffering. The old cliché, “God never puts more on us than we can bear” assumes, first of all, that God is the Author of pain and suffering. That’s certainly a well-trodden path, but one that is fraught with pitfalls. And as I mentioned earlier, we all know people whose great suffering has crushed instead of strengthened them. One person’s struggle with cancer causes her to feel self-pity, resentment, bitterness, and cynicism. Another person’s cancer mobilizes her to form the first cancer support group in her community, to seek out other victims and encourage them not to lose hope.

So, where does hope come from? Our Scripture lesson from Romans says that Christian hope stands even in the midst of suffering, in fact can even grow through suffering. But what strange kind of hope is that?

One thing it is not is “optimism.” The dictionary defines “optimism” in this way: “a doctrine that this world is the best possible world; an inclination to put the best or most favorable construction upon actions or happenings or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” Optimism ignores one whole side of life -- a side we might like to be able to ignore, but which we ignore to our own peril: life’s tragedies, failures, and frustrations. Christian hope, on the other hand, is painfully realistic about both the ups and the downs of life.

It is precious small comfort to say that suffering cannot be avoided in this life, but can only be endured and learned from, but that seems to be the case. Nevertheless, there are things we can affirm, on the basis of our faith.

First of all, God is not the Author of pain and suffering – God is not our enemy – God is for us. As Paul writes in another place in Romans, “Nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This relationship does not provide an escape from the tragedies of life, although sometimes we wish it would, but it does assure us that God is with us, loving and supporting.

The second affirmation we can make grows out of the first. While God does not save us from suffering, God does give us strength and courage to live in a world that still contains suffering. Look at Jesus. He enjoyed pain no more than do we. He wept, he recoiled, he asked to be delivered from it. But the cross is the sign of what God does with suffering. God answers the problem of human suffering and pain by identification, by participation, by being there.

But the Christian claim is not just that God in Christ bears suffering. Somehow, through what God accomplishes in Jesus Christ, suffering is overcome! Christ’s suffering is transformed into a sign of victory!

However, that’s a hard word to hear when you’re in the midst of suffering. It’s hard to see how what you are going through is going to issue, by God’s grace, in your improved character and renewed hope. In fact, that’s not the word we should be bringing to someone who is in the midst of suffering. The word we should be bringing is the embodied word, as Jesus was the embodied Word, by being there.

Christian hope is the sense that God loves us, and works grace in all of life’s circumstances, leading us toward the destination God has chosen, even if it is not the specific place we had in mind. Christians are people who hope, even though they have not escaped from the difficulties of life in this world. To put this grace into more everyday terms, while God accepts us “as we are,” for Jesus’ sake – in our sin, selfishness, helplessness, and perversity – God does not intend to leave us as we are, precisely because God loves us. God’s love frees to live life to the fullest, becoming more and more like the One who loved the unlovely and who gave himself for a world that rejected him.

The Christian faith offers us a way to be both honest and hopeful because it is a story of a God who doesn’t let us go, a God who loves and stands with us. We as Christians then, are those people who live this story, seek to embody it in our lives, witness to it, work in the light of it, in all the ways we can, as best as we can.