John 12:20-33
Suffering
03-25-12
We will rely solely upon
ourselves until there is no other option but to trust in God. I wonder if that is the purpose of
suffering.
I have showed you the first of
many videos about Ed Dobson because I realized as I prepared this sermon that I
have no clue what it is to suffer. I
have lived a privileged life. There are
others out there that have done nothing but suffer in life. The last ten years of Ed’s life is a prime
example and the suffering he continues to do with ALS. Suffering is part of life and we will all
have moments in our lives. Yet how do we
approach it? How do we understand
it? How do we proclaim it?
We are one week away from Holy
Week. Next week is Palm Sunday and we
will wave palms and celebrate Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Then a week from Thursday, we will gather
here and celebrate the night in which Jesus at with his disciples and gave them
the sacrament of the Eucharist. We will
feast at the Lord’s supper as we prepare to then remember his death on the
cross on Good Friday. It is a hard week
and I invite you to join in all services.
Without it you will miss out on the true nature and spiritual depth of
that week.
Now, in this last week of
preparation, we hear Jesus say a familiar phrase, “I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and
dies, it can only be a single seed. But
if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
This verse may or may not be familiar to you but it is to me because it
is how I open up each committal service I do.
As a family gathers around the grave of a loved one I read this part of
John’s gospel. It reminds us of our
purpose here on earth and our purpose in life.
It reminds us that suffering is not to be shunned nor should it be
glorified but it DOES have purpose.
There is an interesting part in
this scripture. We hear the voice of God
in the Gospel of John. In John’s gospel
there is no baptism story. There is no
heavens tearing open and no Holy Spirit descending and resting on Jesus. There is no voice who says, “This is my son
with whom I am well pleased.” Yet here
Jesus in a moment of reflection about the suffering he is about to partake in
says, “Now I am deeply troubled. What should I say? Father, save me from this time? No, for this
is the reason I have come to this time.
Father, glorify your name!” Then
his father answers in a booming voice like thunder and says, “I have glorified
it and I will glorify it again.”
God is going to be glorified
because of his son’s suffering? Because
like a wheat grain falling to the earth he must die? It is hard to wrap our heads around such an
idea but the good news is we get to understand why.
In the last couple of verses
Jesus tells us the voice from heaven was not to benefit him, which seems to be
the case in the baptism stories of the other gospels. The voice was to benefit us because, “Now is the time for judgment of this
world. Now the world’s ruler will be
thrown out.” One of the commentaries
I read this week said that the word used in our English translation for World
doesn’t necessarily mean earth. Rather
it may be translated better to mean “the System.” Judgment is coming up on the System that holds
the world in its place. The System that
keeps the world focused and rotating on itself.
The ruler of this System is sin and it is about to be put in its place
by the suffering of God’s only Son.
Let me give you a couple of
illustrations to explain. A video that
went viral this past month is the Kony 2012 video. The people behind this want to shed a light
on the suffering of the children of Uganda.
One way to end the suffering, according to this video, is to capture the
war lord Joseph Kony who is kidnapping children and turning them into child
soldiers. The video has had over 85
million views on YouTube. But what it is
doing is shedding light on a problem in this world that the world may have
never heard of before now.
Another way of thinking about it
is to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s peaceful marches. In his acts of non-violence and standing up
to the racist systems of the south, he shed a light on an issue that the world
may have not known anything about or thought was important. Those who lived in the north may have heard
that racism was bad in the south but really not thought much about it. Then there were videos on the news of fire
hoses and dogs being turned on peaceful marchers and then people started to
stand up and rethink some things. Those
people who decided that suffering ridicule, water hoses, and guard dogs was
worth it because the purpose was greater than them. It pointed out a larger problem
that society was blinded to. There have
been others like Gandhi’s hunger strike shined a light on Britain’s rule in
India. The sit in at the Woolworth’s
dinner in Greensboro brought national attention to our racist ways.
Yet none of them compare to the
suffering that our savior will go through next week. What System did his suffering point to? What happens at Christ’s crucifixion is that
a mirror is held up to the System of this world and we see how ugly it truly
is. How can an innocent man die in such
a way? The only way to truly understand
this suffering is to understand it through the eyes of salvation. Christ’s death on the cross points to God’s
salvific act and in it his love for us.
We cannot understand our own suffering without an understanding of
Christ’s found in our salvation.
When we suffer, like Ed does,
who does it point to? Do we point to
ourselves and ask for pity and for grief.
Or do we look at our suffering as a way to point out what God can do
through us and how his love is still being extended to us in our daily lives?
In a copy of Our Daily Bread there is a story about a
person who visited an orange grove where an irrigation pump had broken down.
The season was unusually dry and some of the trees were beginning to die for
lack of water. The man giving the tour then took Bailey to his own orchard
where irrigation was used sparingly. "These trees could go without rain
for another 2 weeks," he said. "You see, when they were young, I
frequently kept water from them. This hardship caused them to send their roots
deeper into the soil in search of moisture. Now mine are the deepest-rooted
trees in the area. While others are being scorched by the sun, these are
finding moisture at a greater depth."
Ed Dobson is turning his
suffering into a Yogi Bearer moment. He says
“it ain’t over until its over.” He has
switched his priorities, changed his perspective because of the light that our
Lord’s crucifixion has on his situation.
When he looked at his suffering through the eyes of our salvation, he
decided to never give up. We will rely
solely upon ourselves until there is no other option but to trust in God. I wonder if that is the purpose of
suffering.
And all God’s Children
said…Amen.
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