The first eternal truth of Bucchism is often translated as "Life is suffering". The idea it's trying to convey is the notion that we're not living life as it was intended to be lived. We're not, by and large, living life as best as we're able to live it. There is something just a little "off" in the way we might be experiencing life. Mayebe we might get the feeling sometimes that things are not quite "right". Maybe this first eternal truth might be better translated as, "Life is broken"... and we suffer as a result.
During my summer clinical chaplaincy experience while a student at Seminary, I worked at a nursing home/assisted living center/retirement community all in one huge campus. Part of my responsibility was to minister to people on two of the six floors of the nursing home portion of the campus. And the nursing home floors were very much like hospital floors, with the nurses stations in the middle of the floors, and rooms down both sides of the hall. And the nurses would often wheel some of the residents out into the area in frront of the nurses station before or after meals to help them out, or watch them better, or whatever.
Well one morning I was walking past the nurses station and I saw three women in wheel chairs in front of the station, and one woman was sobbing quietly. I stopped next to her and dropped down to ask her what was wrong. I figured it might be something physical, and I was about to ask her if I should get a nurse. She told me, "I want to die!" It broke my heart to hear that. She said she was too old, and she was suffering too much, and she was ready to go! It really was an existential thing.
[On Sunday morning I asked people to look around them. And then I added that besides the great suffering in the world, the odds were that someone they looked at is going through some kind of suffering, whether it's physical, emotional, spiritual, or whatever, or a combination of some of these. And if they haven't been through some form of suffering yet, they would.]
In many respects, life really is broken. In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus does not run from suffering. In the chronology of the story, he has just been baptized, and goes off into the desert. Here's where we pick up the story. Before he statrs his public ministry, he goes into the desert-the smae place where John the baptist was supposed to have lived, the same place where the Israelites wandered before they arrived in the Promised Land. He not only pryas and prepars there, but he also suffers hunger and thirst, and loneliness, and temptation.
Then on the cross he says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here he faces the greatest existential suffering, the separation from God-facing utter desolation of existence, alone. And in between these two sufferings, Jesus engages suffering in the world; broken people, broken relationships, broken situations. Jesus did not run from suffering! Did Jesus ask the question, "Where is God in all this suffering?"
In some ways, life can be very broken. Suffering is a part of life.
Boy, Pastor Chad, what a downer!
I don't know why there's suffering in the world! I don't know why some people die in accidents, and some don't. I don't know why some people get cancer (some getting it more than once) and die, and some people avoid it altogether.
The truth is, in many respects, life just isn't fair! I don't know why God just doesn't do away with suffering once and for all! We're faced with the existential question: Why would a loving God, who we assume loves the creation, allow such horrific suffering in the world?
Have you ever asked that question? Great question! I think this is one of those questions that can either make or break your faith. Bart Ehrman, a self-professed agnostic and professor at Duke University, asked this question while still a committed Evangelical. And over time that question chipped away at his faith. He could not reconcile the idea of a loving and all-powerful God not only allowing suffering, but not doing anything about it.
Then there is the story of Pastor Carlton Pearson. From a story in the Houston Press, September 20th, 2007:
"He started rethinking the central belief of his faith: that everyone had to be reborn in Christ in order to go to heaven. One night, he watched the evening news and saw refugees from Rwanda returning to their homes. It was then that he had a conversation with God that changed his life.
"I was sitting there with my plate of food and my fat-faced baby watching the evening news. The Hutus and Tutsis were returning from Rwanda. I'm watching these little kids with their swollen bellies. Their skin is stretched tight against their skeletal remains. Their hair is red from malnutrition. They've got flies in the corners of the eyes and mouths. They reach for their mothers' breast and it looks like a little pencil hanging down. There's no milk."
"I said, 'God, how could you call yourself a loving, sovereign God and just let them suffer like that and suck them into hell?' And that's when I thought I heard a voice say, 'Is that what you think we're doing?' I said, 'That's what I've been taught. You're sucking them into hell.'"
"The voice said, 'What would change that?' and I said, 'Well, they need to get saved. Somebody needs to preach the gospel to them.' And that voice said, 'Can't you see they're already there? That's hell. You created that.'"
It dawned on Pearson that if Jesus had died for mankind's sins, then everyone was saved. Hell was on earth, not in the afterlife. "You look at what Ted Haggard's going through right now. He was off doing drugs with another man. That's hell." This epiphany led him back to Scripture, to 1 Timothy, which says, "We have put our trust in the Living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially those who believe." [Check out the whole story]
This guy found his faith anew... because he looked the suffering of the world square in the face!
I don't know why God doesn't get rid of suffering! But I know this...
I know that God calls us to face the broken parts of life. I know that facing brokenness helps us to make a difference along the way, whether it's for one person, or many. I know there's somethign sacred about reaching out in the midst of suffering. And I know that sometimes facing it... and reaching out, can be redemptive!
And Redemptive Suffering is a whole other topic we can explore sometime!
People in the rooms - in AA or NA or Al Anon or any of those rooms... rooms full of broken people... yet they white-knuckle it together... they talk it out together... they pray together... one self-professed broken person with another self-professed broken person... and in a broken world, with God's help and presence, this can bring in a little light in the dark parts of our world.
I want you to read the story of Hector Black, from NPR's Story Corps:
Editor's Note: This story may be disturbing to some readers.
Morning Edition, February 8, 2008 · Seven years ago, Hector Black's daughter was murdered after she surprised an intruder in her Atlanta home.
"We learned about what had happened in bits and pieces," Black says.
Patricia Ann Nuckles had come home, where her attacker was hiding in a closet, hoping to jump out the back window and escape. But she opened the closet door and fell backwards. The man tied her hands behind her back, Black says.
Nuckles told the man that he needed to get help with his drug habit, her father says. Her captor gave her advice about how to prevent a burglary.
"He asked her for sex and she said, 'You'll have to kill me first.' And so he did," Black says.
"We were all just devastated. Nothing like this had ever happened. I mean, we'd known death, but not like this.
"I'd never been in favor of the death penalty, but I wanted that man to hurt the way he had hurt her. I wanted him to hurt the way I was hurting."
Black says he wanted to know "what kind of a monster would do a thing like this."
He went on to learn that the man, Ivan Simpson, was born in a mental hospital.
"When he was about 11 years old, his mother took him and his brother and sister to a swimming pool and said God was ordering her to destroy them," Black says.
The two boys escaped, but Ivan Simpson "watched while his mother drowned his little sister."
Black and his wife went to the district attorney's office to ask that Simpson's life be spared. "He was quite upset when we told him that we did not want this man killed," Black says.
Black read a statement in court saying, "I don't hate you, Ivan Simpson, but I hate with all my soul what you did to my daughter."
Black looked into Simpson's eyes. "The tears were streaming down his cheeks," Black says. Before he was led away, Simpson apologized twice for "the pain that I've caused," Black says.
Black says he couldn't sleep that night "because I really felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from me ... and that I had forgiven him."
Lot's of suffering there! But his suffering led him ultimately to redemption.
I can't answer the question about suffering! I'm truly not sure how a person of faith is able to. But as a person of faith... I know God can work in us and through us... in the midst of suffering!
I've seen suffering that can break a heart. But I continue to see the Spirit of God rise up within the human soul, and mind and body... time after time!
I believe God lives! And I believe God is the God of life!
Why is there suffering? I don't know.
But in the midst of it... I know together with God ,we can make a difference in a broken world!
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