Suffer

Scripture: The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Life is suffering. Such is the human condition.

This is not the same as saying that life is pain. Pain and suffering are separate beasts. When you break your arm, when you unexpectedly lose a loved one, that’s pain. It burns hot and bright at the surface like a roaring flame. Suffering is different from that. It doesn’t roar on top but smolders underneath. Suffering is the slow burn, the lingering burn, that works its way down into your soul. Suffering is spiritual, and to one extent or another it affects us all.

Now granted, you and I are in many ways quite pampered. Generally speaking, we have food, we have freedoms, we have medicines the likes of which most human beings can only dream. With our great excesses one might think that we have left suffering behind us. But the truth is rather the opposite, I think. Americans have been raised with the infinite false promises of advertising, brought up to expect that someday we’ll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. Instead, when we turn out to be, well, normal—or at least normalish—we feel like we’ve failed. We feel like real life has somehow trapped us, robbed us of our rightful glory.

So Americans grow old lamenting what might have been, what should have been, if only we had dreamed bigger, mated bigger, lived bigger. Then we’d be rich and famous! Then we’d have fulfilled our potential! Then we’d be happy!—right? Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that the rich and famous tend to be miserable human beings. But it does get us to the crux of the matter, I think. Our suffering stems from our insatiable desire, the desire to have what we cannot have, to live as we cannot live. This is what makes suffering a uniquely human affliction, because we alone amongst the beasts of the earth understand the disconnect between the way things are and the way things ought to be.

So if this indeed is the human condition—that we all suffer, and our suffering stems from our desire—what should we do? How shall we deal with it? Many would say that we must simply let it go, to cease to desire. Such was the teaching of the Buddha. He had seen it all. He had been rich and poor, worldly and ascetic, a lone wolf and a family man, and none of it had satisfied. None of it had sated his deepest desire, and so he continued to suffer. Thus he resolved to stop desiring in order to stop suffering. He taught nonattachment to the world, to the self, to anything. In Buddhism one cannot even desire not to desire. Very Zen.

As Christians, however, we believe that desire was given to us for a purpose. The problem is not that we want, but that we want the wrong things. We desire that which cannot satisfy. We desire wealth and fame and riches and pleasure. We desire that our will be done—that we be, in effect, our own gods. That’s what leads to suffering. We have a natural desire to seek out God, to seek out Goodness and Truth and Beauty in a broken world. And when we try to satisfy that desire with false goods, false gods, it’s like responding to hunger by eating stones. The problem is not the hunger. What we need is true bread.

St. Augustine wrote that we are all born with a God-sized hole in our hearts, and no matter what we try to stuff in there, no matter what we use to fill up that deep lack within us, nothing will do other than God. Nothing will satisfy other than God. We do not suffer because we desire too much. We suffer because we desire too little. We aim for glory that is much too small. Riches, fame, what are such trifles? We were born for infinitely more. The spiritual suffering that we experience in life is at root the deep longing for our true inheritance, which is nothing less than eternal union with the Triune God. Our suffering, brothers and sisters, is unrequited love.

We have a foretaste of this eternal destiny here and now in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God made flesh, God come down to earth, God come to dwell with us and forgive us our iniquities and take our sufferings upon Himself. So often we want to know where God is when we suffer, and His answer is right here! He meets us in the smallest and simplest and humblest of things: in a promise spoken over water; in a congregation of sanctified sinners; in the poor and hungry in the world around us; in the life of hearth and home; and here upon this altar, beneath the appearance of bread and wine. Jesus promises to meet us in all these things. And God does not break promises.

It is true that insofar as God is God, He does not and cannot suffer. God is perfect and complete in and of Himself. He lacks for nothing, needs nothing, desires nothing. He creates and redeems and sanctifies the world purely out of grace, out of love overflowing in superabundance from the eternal dance of the Trinity. Yet insofar as God is Man in Jesus Christ, He absolutely knows what it is to suffer. He knows what it is to lose loved ones, to bleed unjustly, to be rejected by those you love most, and to agonize more than anyone else over the break between the way things are and the way they were meant to be.

And He deals with this suffering not by detaching Himself from us—for truly we are both the objects of His desire and the source of all His suffering—but by pouring out wisdom and healing and life for us, pouring out His own Body and Blood and Spirit upon the Cross, pouring out everything He has and everything He is that we might live in Him.

He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. He poured Himself out to death. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

That’s how much your God loves you: all the way to hell and back.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.