Scripture Reading
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.
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves; keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.
Sermon
This is an odd passage, isn’t it, for the next to last Sunday in the Easter season? Since Easter Sunday, we have been immersing ourselves in the stories of Jesus’ appearances to his friends and followers. We’ve been listening to Jesus’ words of encouragement to those he loves. We’ve even, thanks to Rev. Michelle’s sermon last Sunday, immersed ourselves in a story that would have been well-known to Jesus and his disciples—a story of civil disobedience in the name of God’s love and precious lives.
Today feels different. Today, we are reading from the first letter of Peter to congregations in trouble. In strife. In the midst of conflict—and it sounds like conflict or oppression from outside the community. It’s so bad, the letter uses the words “fiery ordeal.” People are suffering.
There are three distinct phases to the Jesus story as we read it in the New Testaments. All the gospels tell us about the first two: the first phase, the ministry of Jesus, in his teaching, and healing, and feeding and welcoming This first phase also extends to his suffering and death.
The second phase is the one we’ve been celebrating these past six weeks: the season of resurrection. We read the stories of the empty tomb, we read about Jesus appearing to his friends and followers.
But this past Thursday the church all over the world marked the celebration of the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. This is the moment when the community moves into the third phase: that time when Jesus is no longer present in what we might call the “resurrection body,” but when the church is still learning that the presence of Jesus is something one can learn to see. Scholar Marianne Sawicki describes it this way:
For forty years the churches experimented, and learned what it took to bring people into the possibility of recognizing Jesus in real time.[i]
What we’re seeing in today’s passage is how communities following the Way of Jesus learned to see and experience him in the midst of pain and turmoil. A passage like this can also teach us how to recognize the presence of Jesus, in our day and time. Here are the three basic strategies the first letter of Peter offers us for times such as these.
First: Remember that Christ suffered. The early friends and followers had to reckon with the fact of how horribly painful and shameful Jesus’ death was. But as the gospel of John insists, Jesus’ suffering shows the glory of God in that God’s love for us is so fierce and unabashed. In my Daily Prayer book one of the thanksgivings for Friday morning reads, We give thanks for the presence of Christ in our weakness and suffering.
I don’t want to skim over this. I don’t want to slap this on those of you who are going through difficult times like a flimsy Band-Aid. Suffering is real, and it’s awful—whether physical, mental, or emotional. But then we remember that God did not use the Divine Get Out of Jail free card. Rather, God embraced suffering to be in complete solidarity with humankind. One of the problems with weakness and suffering is that they can obscure our experience of God’s presence with us. They can make it hard to notice. Honestly, every single time I read that prayer in my prayerbook, it comes as a surprise. I think back to my most recent experience of suffering—and these are often things that are so minor, it’s almost embarrassing to use that word, “suffering.” But if a three-day stomach bug makes it hard for you to remember that God is with you. that’s a time of suffering. So often we don’t notice God’s presence with us during those times until after it’s all over. This is why it is good to remind ourselves. Jesus knew suffering, which bestows an eternal blessing on the suffering of humanity. God loves us that much. So, First: remember that Christ suffered.
Second: Cast all your anxieties upon God. Once we have reminded ourselves that our God has not remained remote, up in some beautiful heaven, but has been and remains in our midst, it makes sense to yield up everything else that is troubling us into God’s hands. Why? The writer of the letter says, “because God cares for you.” God cares for us. This isn’t some abstraction. This is the promise of our baptism, the promise, honestly, of simply being made in God’s image and likeness, as scripture reminds us. God hears our prayers as the requests of beloved children.
Once we have let go of our need to control outcomes and let things rest in the very capable hands of God, we may find something unexpected. Joy. Joy returns. And it seems counter-intuitive, but we can experience joy even in the midst of any seemingly God-forsaken dumpster-fire of a situation. But that adjective, “God-forsaken” is a lie. Nothing is ever God-forsaken. No one is ever God-forsaken. And the human capacity for joy is always there, it just hides from us sometimes. When things are going horribly, we can lose our sense that we can even feel joy at all. And it seems wrong to us, sometimes, to notice that spark… it can even get us twisted up inside, wondering whether there’s something wrong with us, to feel joy in that moment. But that’s God for you. Caring for us.
I will never forget the February weekend in 2004 when my children were going to their dad’s apartment for the first time since we had separated. I was still mad, and hurt, and floundering, and not in the least reconciled to the new situation. And I was extra mad that I would spend the weekend alone in what suddenly felt like a very big house. But I’d adopted “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all; other ground is sinking sand” as my new personal anthem. And I’d set some tasks for myself. I spent Saturday cleaning out of the attic. In the late afternoon I showered and dressed and drove to meet a friend in Ithaca for dinner. On Sunday afternoon, after church, I found myself reading. Then I cooked dinner while listening to music. And in the moments before the children arrived back home, I had a startling realization that I had survived this thing I’d dreaded. Two things had happened. First, the narrative I was telling myself that my life was ruined was, shall we say, challenged. And second, I’d had some little flashes of joy—something I’d convinced myself I would never experience again. The Second thing: Cast all your anxieties upon God.
And that brings us to the third thing. A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a church outside Syracuse as part of a delegation from the Susquehanna Valley Presbytery. We had gathered for a “Presbyteries-in-Conversation” event. We have been meeting with the good folks of two other presbyteries to talk about our common mission to support congregations, and how we might do that better together.
We aren’t entirely sure of the path. Will we share staff? Will the boundaries of our presbyteries change? Will we rename ourselves? One thing we are sure of: These things take time. Time and openness. Frankness. Willingness to share our faith and our doubts and our trust that God is leading us. These things take prayer. These things take time, which means we will be waiting.
One person said, “God is always asking us to do something that we humans are notoriously bad at. God asks us to wait. To wait and pray, and then to wait some more.”
This is the Third thing: Wait. I will raise my hand and say I am terrible at waiting. Awful. I hate it. But if we wait, this is what will happen: The God of all grace, who has called us to participate in eternal glory in Christ, will restore, support, strengthen, and establish us.
I am terrible at waiting. But sometimes waiting is what you’ve got. When you’ve remembered that Christ is present with you in times of weakness and suffering; when you’ve yielded your fears, anxieties, and sorrows into God’s strong and capable hands, then it is time to wait to see what God has in store for you next. It’s in this waiting time that we often notice that joy has returned. It is in this waiting time that God does God’s best work, restoring us. Making us whole again. Strengthening us. Shoring us up. Settling us. And before we know it—before we have had time to notice what God is doing, we find ourselves, again, joyfully steadfast. We stop worrying about waiting. We get on with the business of living faithfully, and we start to notice—we start to see—God has been at work in us all along. Jesus has shown up in this friend, or that good news, or this other opportunity. The Spirit is guiding us, and we’re open to it.
This last Sunday before Pentecost reminds us that, even after the joy of the resurrection, Jesus friends followers had difficulties, went through trial by fire, wondered, at times, where God was in all this.
But, like the early church, we can practice resurrection by remembering the amazing love of God, the One came among us and knows suffering too. We can practice resurrection by casting all our burdens upon the Lord. And we can practice resurrection by waiting for God to reveal what is next for us. And along the way there will be joy.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, 1994), 51.