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A Dose of Reality                             Romans 5: 1 – 5                           June 3, 2007

The cover article in this week’s Philadelphia Inquirer Weekend section is entitled “Go for the Burn; the joy of breaking a sweat on and around the city’s river drives.”

Here’s a confession:  the headline did not make me want to jump in the car and drive across the bridge so I too could feel that burn.

Frankly, I have never been able to understand why some people actually enjoy it when their muscles begin to burn.  For me, muscle pain – or any other pain, for that matter – is not something I have ever associated with joy. 

“No pain, no gain,” may be the slogan of bodybuilders and other competitive athletes around the world, and I certainly can relate to the gain part of that slogan.  But my goal is always to achieve that gain with as little pain as possible

Nonetheless, I’d like to talk about pain and suffering this morning.  As depressing as that sounds.

I know it’s Trinity Sunday.  But rather than serve up yet another explanation of the three-in-one nature of God, I thought, instead, that on this Trinity Sunday I’d try to come to grips with the passage we read a few minutes ago, from Paul’s letter to the Romans – a text that has always made me uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable, in great measure, because it is a text about pain and suffering.

Author and preacher Mary Ann McKibben Dana writes: Whenever I was having a really hard day, my mother would listen patiently to my tale of woe, sigh, and say, “well, what a wonderful opportunity to grow.” 

“Boy, I hated that!” she continues,  “I did not want to hear that, even if part of me knew it was true.  Opportunity to grow?  No thank you, I’ll stay immature and stunted if it means I won’t have to go through this.”

“Great,” she concludes.  “Life stinks, but at least I’ll grow.”

In our text for this morning, Paul sounds a lot like Dana’s mother.  “Rejoice in your suffering,” he tells his readers, “it builds character.” Now, there is a harsh dose of reality if I ever heard one. 

In point of fact, we don’t know much about what the church in Rome was going through at the time of Paul’s letter.  And even more to the point, Paul was probably not all that familiar with their specific circumstances.  Paul did not found the Roman church.  He most likely never met the people he was writing to. 

Chances are pretty good, however, that this church was afflicted with the typical hardship that was part of being a church in the First Century, and that Paul was aware of that when he wrote to them.  Persecution, death, divisions, temptations – all of these things were par for the course if you wanted to be a Christian at that point in history.

None the less, there is no way to know for sure what was going through Paul’s mind as he wrote the words of our text. “We celebrate our sufferings,” he writes, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” 

Was he trying to console the Roman Christians? Or chide them? Or was he trying to help them?

Actually, I’m not sure it ever helps very much to tell people that the suffering they are going through is somehow good for them.  While I will grant that it may help some people, it doesn’t help me much to know that someday I’ll look back and conclude that my current discomfort taught me something.

That is the primary reason I have always had trouble with this passage.  Rather than a dose of reality, it seems unrealistic and unattainable to me.

We do know this: Paul certainly knew about suffering. During his ministry he was imprisoned, flogged, beaten with rods, stoned and shipwrecked. Many times he labored without food, sleep or adequate clothing.  Yet, he still managed to rise above all of this trouble and become unquestionably the greatest evangelist of all time.  The Church as we know it today would simply not exist, if it had not been for Paul and his preaching.

And his response to all the suffering he endured is methodical:  suffering, Paul says, produces patience, patience produces a tried and tested character, and all of this produces hope.

Well, thank you very much, Paul, but I still don’t feel particularly comforted, to tell you the truth.

On a pretty regular basis, I talk to people who are suffering enormous pain.  Sometimes it is physical pain, sometimes it is emotional pain and sometimes it is simply a result of one setback after another.  Many of you undoubtedly have personal examples that I’m sure come immediately to mind the moment the word suffering is mentioned.

I have never been comfortable being one of those clergy-types who respond to the suffering they see with aphorisms like “perhaps it is God’s plan,” or “God is testing you.”  I’ve never found these sentiments to be helpful to me, and I can’t think of any reason to expect them to be helpful for anyone else.

Now, I don’t mean to question the faith of any of my fellow clergypersons, nor do I wish for a moment to shatter the beliefs of folks who find some comfort in the notion that suffering is somehow God’s will for us. I know that some of you can cite examples of significant gains that you have experienced after enduring pain and suffering.

But I just don’t buy the notion that God wakes up in the morning and decides to inflict pain.  Particularly not on God’s own followers.

And more importantly, as Christians, I think I think we have to recognize that we don’t have any pat answers to the questions that are inevitably raised when we witness suffering.  To piously quote Paul and tell people that suffering produces patience which produces character which produces hope, just doesn’t cut it for people who never make it past the suffering part.

Suffering may have made Paul strong, but that is small consolation for those of us who, when pain afflicts us, simply feel weaker and weaker.

Look, I admit it.  As I alluded to earlier, I hate pain.

Stuart Vail, the editor of The Scream Online magazine, agrees with me, and chalks it up to being a man.  He points out that we men are particularly inclined toward wimpishness when it comes to tolerating agony. “Imagine a man going through childbirth,” he writes. “If it were our role to give birth, we would become extinct after the last of our generation.”

But whether you are like me and hate pain or are one of those people who tolerate it well, the problem arises, I think, when we begin to search for some meaning to explain it away.

Mary Ann Dana, the author I quoted earlier, nails it, I think, when she writes:  “When we insist that suffering have some meaning, that it produce something or mean something, we no longer need God. We’ve got the answers.  And then we bog ourselves down with all the baggage that gets in the way of God doing God’s work!”

So, what, then, do we do with this troublesome text?  First, we put it in context, which, as usual, is helpful. 

The primary focus of this passage from Romans 5, you see, is actually not pain and suffering.  The primary focus is justification. 

“Therefore,” Paul begins, “since we have been justified through faith, we have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.   Let us rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”

Now, there’s a statement I can wrap my arms around.  There’s an article of our faith that provides me with some comfort, even when pain is a part of daily life.  It’s a reminder that Christ suffered and died so that peace with God is a reality I can depend on. 

Even if I don’t have a particularly strong character; even if my endurance in the face of pain and suffering is lacking; even if at times I have trouble finding hope, Christ died for people who, like me, try to rise above our pain but often fail miserably in the process.

Just the thought of that remarkable reality makes me want to join with Paul and rejoice.  It helps me remember that pain is now and peace is forever.

The peace that Paul refers to in this passage is not just the absence of conflict.  It is the peace that arises when we know, right down to our fingertips, that we are in touch with the awesome God whose power to comfort us is greater than all the pain and suffering in the world.

This justification in which we rejoice is a free gift.  We need not do anything to earn it.  It is already ours. 

Think of it this way:  Our employers may ask us to justify our existence.  Our customers and patients may ask us to justify our existence.  Heaven knows, as a consultant I knew only too well that my clients were always asking me to justify my existence.  The rejoicing happens when we realize that we have no need to justify our existence as children of God. 

I think that is what we can take from this perplexing Pauline passage.  While we may still experience pain and suffering, the peace that comes with knowing that we are fully justified in the eyes of God allows us to rejoice, in the midst of the pain.

Our God is not the inflictor of pain.  And our God does not stand there and tell us to suffer in silence because the pain is good for us.  Our God assures us that we are justified and, through the power of the Holy Spirit who– on this Trinity Sunday and every other day – reminds us we are surrounded by God’s love.

And that, my friends, is most certainly reason for rejoicing.

                                                                                AMEN