The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.
At first, it might seem as if these words from 1 Peter have little to do with us gathered here today. They were written to early Christians who were being persecuted by Rome. They were written to people who were practicing an illegal religion, who faced the threat of beating, imprisonment, torture and death. We face no such threats. We are not persecuted. We enjoy a great many privileges because we are Christians in a predominantly Christian nation. We can rest secure in the fact that whenever religion is invoked in public discourse, it will almost certainly be our religion. But, while we may not be persecuted, we do know something about suffering. Perhaps we don’t know as much as others might, but suffering is a universal fact of life. We all suffer.
And, this community has suffered in the past few months. We have had nine funerals at Good Shepherd already this year. That’s almost more funerals than we had during the entirety of last year. And that count doesn’t include the loved ones that members of this community have lost who were buried elsewhere. Our brothers and sisters in this parish are suffering and mourning. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to take Peter’s advice to rejoice in the midst of suffering.
This past week, I hit a point where I just had to come into the church to pray. Honestly, I thought that perhaps I might be coming in here to yell at God. I need to do that sometimes, and I believe that God is as able to hear my honest anger as my praise. But instead of shouting, as I knelt before the altar, I found myself singing: “Abide with me: fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord with me abide: when other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, O abide with me.”[1] St. Augustine once said, “Singing is praying twice.” That was true for me last Thursday. Somehow those words expressed a pray I could not find the words to pray. And that prayer was an acting out of Peter’s words from our Epistle: “Cast all your anxiety on [God], because he cares for you.”
God cares for you. That’s an echo of Our Lord’s words from the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t it? “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin,yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” That is the important thing for us to remember at times like this: we are precious to God. Our suffering matters to God, no matter how little or much we may seem to suffer from some neutral, objective perspective. It doesn’t matter if our suffering is from grief or from persecution. It is still suffering, and Christ is still suffering with us.
And that, perhaps, is why we should rejoice in suffering. Not because our suffering somehow makes us more pleasing to God, but because our suffering is Christ’s suffering, and Christ’s suffering is our suffering. We never suffer alone. Christ is with us in the midst of grief and pain, and our suffering is with Christ upon the cross. That is why Christ had to go to the hard wood of the cross, not to satisfy a blood-thirsty God, but to destroy the power that suffering and the grave have over us. Christ suffers to set us free from suffering, and Christ still suffers with us.
And we never suffer alone, because we share in the Body of Christ, the Church universal, across all time and space. The sufferings of our sisters and brothers in Christ are our sufferings. And even those of us here this morning who have not lost a loved one recently grieve for and with those who have.
As John Donne so eloquently wrote:
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another…
But we will not suffer forever. One day, with St. Paul, we shall cry: “O Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” We shall see God face to face, and know that life is changed, not ended, at death. Peter promises us at, after a little while, God will restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. Our brothers and sisters in Christ will help us to bear our burdens, day by day, until we arrive one bright morning on that other shore, our earthly pilgrimage ended. Thank God for them. Thank God for the people of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in whom, in our grief, we see God and know the healing touch of God’s hand. Amen.
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