Loading...Last week, for Pentecost, Elizabeth took us on a delightful journey outside the Episcopal box of order and structure. It was fun and refreshing. I loved it. I enjoyed the creativity and doing things differently. But there are times when I need order and structure — particularly when I am dealing with a difficult issue or concept.
Math was always my favorite subject in school. I started my professional career as a math teacher. I love the preciseness of math, its order. All you have to do is to follow the steps to get to the right answer.
I love putting things together. You know when you buy something that needs assembling, I’m the one who gets to do the assembling. I love seeing how all of the pieces fit together and evolve into the finished product.
And yes, Elizabeth, my favorite thing to do in English class was diagramming sentences. I don’t think they even do that anymore. But I loved it. I loved seeing how the pieces of the sentence fit together and what purpose they each served.
Liking order and structure may be why, today, I can say I like Paul.
You know it is not always easy to say that you like Paul. Paul gets under our skin at times. He comes across as arrogant and opinionated, and I don’t always agree with his opinion. But in Romans today, he addresses the difficult topic of human suffering. He doesn’t give us an answer as to why bad things happen to good people but does help us see where God is in our suffering. He identifies the steps we take through our suffering and how the pieces all fit together which allow us to come out the other side with hope.
Paul was confronting at least two schools of thought that were different from his Christian worldview. The Romans had multiple gods, each one specializing in a different aspect of life. It helped the Romans make sense of their world when good things happened and when bad things happened. If terrible things like, natural disasters or battle losses occurred, the Romans believed it was evidence that the gods were unhappy. When good things like a battle victory or a good harvest happened, the Romans believed it was evidence of the gods’ happiness or of their approval.
The Romans would make offerings to the gods in thanks, or in an attempt to appease their tempers. But the Romans’ gods were not seen as caring about the morality of the people at all.
Another worldview was the popular teaching of the wisdom tradition, which says that in life, we get exactly what we earn. Bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. Those who followed this belief believed that people who did good things prospered and did not suffer. In the book of Job, we find this type of thinking. Job’s friends insisted that all of his misfortune have to be the result of something he had done wrong.
Many still believe this way today. They believe that those who are “good” and obey all the rules should be blessed. When bad things happen they wonder why. Others believe that God is punishing them when bad things happen. After Katrina, some people claimed that the hurricane was the result of the wrath of God because of the city’s sinful reputation.
But neither of these world views, Roman paganism nor wisdom theology, had an understanding of a loving God, or even a human relationship with God.
In Roman paganism, the gods are unpredictable, fickle, and even childish at times. Humans were the puppets whose strings are pulled by the gods.
In wisdom tradition, God loves conditionally and dispenses justice.
In his letter to the Romans, that we read today, Paul is explaining to the converted Roman Christians that neither of these world views is correct. He is reminding them that God is loving, gracious, and merciful, no matter what is happening to us.
Paul doesn’t try to explain suffering as paganism or wisdom tradition. He doesn’t try to make sense of it, nor does he deny it. Instead, Paul tells us that God is with us throughout all of our suffering. God holds us in God’s arms and hurts with us, and cries with us when we are suffering or grieving. This is the God we know, the God Jesus Christ revealed to us. Paul said that we can “boast of God’s goodness" not only in the good times but also in the bad times. Suffering does not mean that God is absent from us nor does it mean that it is the will of God.
Paul puts order and structure to suffering in order to help us understand where we find God in it. He points out the pieces and how they fit together, and shows us how our suffering can evolve into hope.
The first piece Paul describes is endurance. Paul says in suffering, we discover that we can endure, can carry on, despite our hardships. Our ability to endure does not come without cost nor is it easy. Endurance means taking one more breath when you do not think you will ever breathe again, taking one more step when you think you cannot go any further. Endurance means you are not completely destroyed by what could destroy you completely.
Paul says that this strength of endurance does not come from within us but it is God who is holding us up even when we believe we cannot survive.
Endurance, Paul says, produces character, the second piece. With endurance new character begins to form within us. This character is the belief that we can take one more step, that we can take one more breath. If you start out believing that you cannot move forward or continue to breathe and then you somehow do manage to take one more step and one more breath, again and again and again, you begin to believe that the next breath or the next step is possible. So endurance, which comes from outside of us, from God, helps us form character; that character is within us, becomes us, becomes part of who we are.
And then this character produces hope, the final piece. Hope is what separates the believer from the non-believer. Hope is not just a belief that another step is possible, but that our steps can, in fact, lead to somewhere good, to a new life, a new blessing, a new beginning.
This hope does not undo or repair the tragedy that resulted in our suffering, nor does it explain it. But Christian hope is the knowledge that God will not let us down because God is not fickle nor is God vengeful. But God is with us in our suffering as well as in the hope.
We have lived these three pieces that Paul described here at St James. The tragedies we experienced this Sring shook our world. But we didn’t stop and let the grief consume us. We kept taking one more breath, one more step even though it was a difficult time. We endured.
We now know that it is part of the character of St James Pewee Valley to keep moving forward and not giving up. We have hope that our steps, our endurance and character will lead us to the knowledge of God’s unconditional love for us as a parish and for each of us individually and that we will be a beacon of that hope for others.
Hope will not disappoint us, because our hearts are overflowing with God’s love. The love that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit — the helper that Christ sent to us. It is the Holy Spirit that we read about today in our Gospel reading, who will guide us into truth.
Paul helps us to see that grief and suffering is a part of life. We don’t get through life without it. But we know that God will suffer with us and for us, and that we will know the fullness of God’s love in our hope.
