Sermon for September 18, 2011: A Hard Life

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

The text for this morning’s message comes from the Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, Chapter 1.  Allow me to read some key portions for you, where Paul is speaking about his suffering in bondage to the authorities:

 Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain…  Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again… For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.

Dear Friends in Christ,

            There is a story of a boy who had a bad day.  First off, he went to sleep with gum in his mouth, which then got in his hair.  Then this boy tripped on his skateboard getting out of bed, soaked his sweater in the sink getting ready, and his brothers both found prizes in their cereal boxes but he found none.  To make it worse, on his school carpool, he got the hump in backseat, squeezed between warm bodies with no window to enjoy the ride, then his teacher judged his ability to engage in art and criticized it in front of the whole class.

He couldn’t do anything right, whether singing or counting.  This boy’s best friend decided to up and leave him for another best friend and stated so publicly.  His mother forgot to pack him a desert when everyone else had one.  He got drilled at the dentist, dropped in the elevator, muddied in the dirt.  Dear friends, this is the story of a boy who had nothing go right, nothing at all, and for whom the day got worse and worse.  This is the story of “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”

            Doesn’t that sound a little like us?  Many of us, very many of us, have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, don’t we?  We suffer the small things.  We wake up late, we brew too weak of coffee, all the eggs are rotten because they’ve been in the fridge for two months, we get in a fight with our spouse or our parents before we leave for work or school, our car won’t start, our air conditioning won’t work, there’s a traffic jam on the highway, the elevator is out of order and you work on the fifteenth floor, the copier, the fax machine, the internet are all out, you forgot a meeting that started half an hour earlier. AND THIS IS ALL BEFORE 9 AM!!  The day, we think, can’t get much worse, but oh so very often, the day does exactly that.  We have terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad days.

            Others of us also have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days in other ways.  We suffer the very large and looming things.  Some of us, we feel it in our bodies.  We are not as strong as we once were.  Our knees, our backs, our eyes, our ears, they give out on us.  They give way and we fall to the ground.  We hurt and writhe in pain.  Some of us, our insides seem to work against us.  Our blood is our enemy, it betrays us.  We have cancer, blood attacking blood, cell attacking cell.  Some of us, we wake up and realize that our spouse of more than 40 years has died in bed with us or we wake up from amazingly happy dreams and realize that our spouse of whom we had be dreaming has been gone for 10 years already and we despair for what used to be.  Some of us, we wake up and immediately feel the pain of arthritis, of osteoporosis, of not knowing where we are, of not knowing who we are, of wondering if anyone cares for us.  Some of us, we dread the idea of going to school because we know we will be called ugly, or fat, or stupid, or dumb, or any other awful name, or we know that we’ll be bullied or ignored or beaten up.  And, especially in these situations, if we show weakness and just break down and cry, which is all we want to do, it makes everything worse, so we just keep it to ourselves, we don’t tell anyone, not even someone who can help.  We suffer alone.  Our days begin in pain.  Our days begin in anguish.  Our days begin in sorrow.

Why is that we suffer?  What purpose does it serve?  Our suffering isn’t something that we can just compartmentalize and leave behind whenever we want to.  It’s not like a dog that you lock away in a cage before you go outside the house on your errands.  No, our suffering is always with us, it’s always following us.  Our suffering is often like the dark cloud that hangs over our heads, following us around, raining on no one but us.

            And why?  Why is life so hard?  Why are we in so much anguish?  It is so easy, isn’t it, to cry out, “WHY ME???” towards God?  It’s so easy to blame God or ask why He has forsaken us.  It’s so easy to ask God why He’s doing what He’s doing.

            I’m tempted to believe that’s just what we should do.  Say to ourselves, “Well, God, you sent this suffering to me.  Here it is.  Fine.  Whatever.”  And if that’s true, then sermon over.  I’m done preaching for today because there’s nothing more that I could preach to you.

But it’s not true.  That’s not enough just to leave it there.  Our suffering isn’t something to which we can just say, “Fine.  Whatever.”  Our suffering has a purpose.

We have a hard life, dear friends.  THAT is true.  Whether you suffered in some way this morning, yesterday, any time prior, I don’t know.  Emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual suffering.  It is all difficult.  If you can’t think of how you suffer, just stick your finger on your neck or wrist and see if you have a pulse.  Whether you can think of how you suffer or not, I promise you, the day is coming that you will.

I know, I know.  This doesn’t sound happy.  It’s not supposed to be.  Our lives are full of suffering.  But, whose fault is it?  Is it really God’s?  I mean, He is in control of everything.  Does He desire that we suffer?  No!  Of course not!  God does not desire that we suffer.  Then why does He continue to allow it? 

Dear friends, we suffer because we are sinful, prideful, spiteful human beings.  There is suffering in this world because we invited it in in our first parents, Adam and Eve.  And this was a bad move.  Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden and brought sin into every single thing on earth and in all creation.  God promised them immediately that because of their sin, Eve was going to have a ton of pain in childbirth and that Adam was going to have to work extra hard to even get the ground to THINK of producing anything.  Thanks a lot, right?  If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t suffer.  Thanks a lot, Adam and Eve. 

Not to let you off the hook, however.  You not only were conceived in sin, you continue to sin daily, even this minute.  You are sinful, there’s not getting rid of it.  Suffering will follow after you because of it.  Suffering and sin are like magnets, always being attracted to each other.  And it would be so nice if we could just repent, or lean on our baptism, or receive the Lord’s Supper, and suffering would just go away.  It seems much easier to deal with sin when there’s no suffering.  It would be great if somehow we could get rid of our sin from ourselves and all of the sudden, suffering would POOF disappear.

But that’s not how it works.  We confess each Sunday, and really we should confess each day, each hour, each minute, that we are sinful and unclean.  We ARE sinful and unclean.  Our flesh, our bones, our muscles, our thoughts, our words, our deeds, our souls, our lives, our everything, are sinful and unclean.  We look at ourselves, judging ourselves by the words of the Law found in the Scriptures and we find ourselves wanting.  The Law condemns us.  We have not held it perfectly, we couldn’t even if we tried, and because of that, there are consequences.  We are sinful, we should expect damnation; we shouldn’t be surprised by suffering in our lives now.

And then we find Paul in the text.  Paul is suffering and has been suffering for a long time.  We often, we who know his story, think of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” which none of us really know what he means by that.  Paul has something that kept plaguing him and he kept praying for it to be taken away, but it never was.  Moreover, Paul tells us in Philippians that now he is in chains, in bondage, he has been mistreated.  If anyone had terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, it was Paul.  Beaten, whipped, chained, tortured, spit on, arrested, beheaded, stoned, shipwrecked.   Paul had some very, VERY bad days.  He had a hard life.  No wonder he says that between living and dying, he would choose death in Christ, for to die with Christ is much better!

Of anyone who should not have suffered, we would be tempted to point to Paul, an Apostle for Jesus Christ, a man who desired nothing but to live for his savior.  However, Paul is no different than us.  He is a sinner; he called himself the “Chief of Sinners,” a title that we can and should also claim. So it not Paul we should look to as the ultimate example of suffering.  Paul is sinful just as we are.  Rather, we should look to Jesus Christ, the only perfect man who has ever lived, and yet God, our Good God, allowed His Son, His perfect Son to suffer.  Why?  Why would Jesus suffer?  Why would God allow the only good man to suffer?  OUR suffering makes sense, but not Jesus’ suffering.  Jesus’ suffering was unbidden, unwarranted.  Jesus’ suffering, however, was also the most important suffering that ever happened.

            It is SO easy for us to get caught up in our own suffering.  No one knows our pain.  No one understands us.  No one understands what we’re going through.  No one can feel what I feel.  But that’s not what Paul tells us and that’s not what we see in Jesus.  Paul takes that idea, that idea that no one understands our suffering, and flips it right on its head.  Paul tells us that the suffering we face, the suffering we go through, we are not doing it on our own.

            We hear that we suffer, not for own sake, but for Jesus’ sake.  What does this mean?  Our suffering, which is the fruit of our sinful lives, our suffering that can be the pain we bring on ourselves because of our sinfulness or the pain that others bring upon us, our suffering that may not even be a result an actual sin but a consequence of living in a sinful world, our suffering points us and others to Jesus.  What?  What did Vicar say?  Our suffering points us and others to Jesus.  This doesn’t mean that we try to be pious and cause our own suffering.  Rather, it means that despite our suffering, we know that we are forgiven and that ultimately all will be made new.  It means that when we suffer, we say, “Christ has already redeemed this!  Christ knows what is happening to me even as I go through it because He died for this 2000 years ago.”

            Jesus Christ loved you so much that He went to the Cross in your place to die for you.  He suffered and was buried for you!  He took your place, He paid your debt, He bought you back from Sin and Satan Himself and said, “Here!  Take me!  I love them, I’m buying them back, take MY life as the ransom for them!”

            Jesus Christ took on the sin of the world, becoming sin itself.  That means He took the sin that dwells in you, that possesses your life, that consumes your soul, and like a vacuum that reaches across space and time, sucked it from you, collected it in Himself, and crucified it.  The sinful things you think, He took them.  The sinful things you say, He took them.  The sinful things you do, He took them.  Everything that is sinful has been taken from you. Everything you go through, for sure, has been taken to the Cross and has been crucified in the body of Jesus and washed in the blood of Jesus.  We call this process ‘The Glorious Exchange.’

We exchange everything we are for everything He is.  We cover Him with our sinfulness, He covers us with His righteousness.  We cover Him with our guilt, He covers us with His innocence.  We cover Him with our sin, He covers us in His blood through baptism.  We cover Him with our brokenness, He covers us with His perfect and whole body.  Christ has given you everything righteous, everything that is from Himself, everything that serves to save you and bring you closer to Him, and in return He has taken everything from you that is sinful and nasty and decrepit and causes suffering.

            “Now, that’s all very well and good, Vicar,” you say, “But why then do I still suffer?”  My friends, Jesus has redeemed you and will make you whole, but your wholeness will be finished on the last day, the day when Jesus comes back to make all things new.  Take joy in knowing that the suffering you face, it was crucified for you, 2000 years ago. 

You do not go through your suffering alone.  Jesus, 2000 years ago, took your suffering from you and went through it on the agony of the Cross.  Jesus, 2000 years ago, took your suffering and redeemed it.  He took your suffering and made it His joy.  That is why Paul says that to live is Christ because it literally is.  Christ takes joy not in the fact that you suffer, but that your suffering was crucified with Him and He has paid the debt for it!

To live is to suffer and Christ was made to suffer for you!  To live is to sin and suffer and repent and be forgiven and to take on the very body and blood of Christ!  Christ Himself takes the suffering that we live through, and He is right there with us.  Christ has gone through it all.  There is no need to be alone.  And should we die, should we die before the day Jesus returns, to die is Christ(!), in that we die the death that Jesus died, a death that has been paid for and therefore we have a guarantee to be raised from the dead and welcomed into eternal life with Jesus Christ, the one who paid our debt. 

            Dear Friends, we have a hard life.  It is very true.  We should expect it.  It’s natural.  But, our hard life does not transform into something horrible.  Our hard life transforms in the power of Jesus Christ.  Is your body giving way?  Rest on Jesus’ body: “This is my body, my perfect and unspoiled body, broken for you.”  His body is now your body.  Is your blood betraying you?  Rest in Jesus’ blood: “This is my blood, my holy and innocent blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.”  Are you grieving?  Jesus grieves with you: “Jesus wept!”  Are you sorrowful?  Jesus holds you in His arms.  Believe this passage from Isaiah 53 about your Lord and Savior Jesus:

He was despised and rejected by men;
   a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
   he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

But do not end here.  Do not believe that all is lost.  Do not believe that Jesus’ death at our hands ends His story.

  Surely he has borne our griefs
   and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
    smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions;
   he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
    and with his stripes we are healed. WE ARE HEALED, BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

Jesus’ suffering is for us, with us, in our place.  Everything we have, He has already taken on.  Your wounds, they are healed.  Your hard life, He has paid for.  Your suffering, He has redeemed and sanctified.  Jesus has already died to make you whole.  He has already died to suffer for your sins.  He has already died so that He can walk beside you, calling you His friend, and making it so that your hard life becomes HIS JOY and your comfort, because it has all been paid for. 

We will struggle in this life, but take comfort, for Jesus stands beside you, having already suffered the pain of a hard life in your place.  Rejoice, as does, Paul, for Christ has already counted your suffering as His own and paid your price.

Now may the peace that passes all understanding and suffering, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord.  Amen.