Whatever the Hardship, Keep Rising Up!
It would an understatement to say the past year has been hard.
Life as we know it got upended on about March 13, 2020. I had been the pastor at Faith for about 9 months when that happened... We had to unplug much of what had always been. Not just things that had been since I’d arrived – we had to unplug all that was “normal” in a nearly 60-year-old community ripe with tradition.
A choir rehearsing in the sanctuary through the week and leading us with hymns on Sunday mornings.
Children gathering on the stair for a children’s message, dropping their offering in the basket, thanking Jesus.
Sunday school classrooms that smell faintly of glue and construction paper, dappled fingerprints on the light switch plates, and halls teeming with love, laughter and wonder.
Youth group hijinks.
Coffee in the fellowship hall.
A potluck here and there.
Cake to celebrate confirmation.
Funerals.
Baptisms.
Meeting shoulder to shoulder to share leadership, to build a budget, to run a stewardship campaign, to hire new staff.
All of it…unplugged for a season.
I don’t know about you, but I have new kinks in my neck and shoulders from bending and scrunching to be fully present in the screen for ZOOM calls. I have learned how to create video on the fly. I believe that I have written more words in the past year than I did in the previous five – which is saying something because that is when I did my doctoral work.
We have figured out how to share worship online. We’ve explored anew what it means to be the body of Christ even when we cannot be fully physical present to one another. The church council has held sessions for learning and visioning. We’ve had town halls to learn and grow and question. The trustees managed major upgrades to our building.
There have been disagreements. There have been miscommunications. There have been mistakes. There has been gossip.
There have been illnesses and there have been deaths. We have wept and mourned.
And we are still here. We are still moving. And most importantly, God has been with us every step of the way.
Along the way, we have experienced some different things. We’ve experienced ways of praying together differently. We’ve experienced how technology binds us together no matter where we are geographically. We’ve learned that sometimes we can survive without something.
We’ve had to look with open eyes at the painful health disparities created by economics and race. We’ve had to recognize that we don’t all think alike. And we’ve had to really work (sometimes with success) at figuring out how, considering that we don’t all think alike, we might love alike.
There are days I feel like a rock in a rock tumbler, having my edges worn off. Maybe you do too?
Have you seen a rock tumbler? My grandfather had one and used to make beautiful jewelry (to be clear, it was beautiful jewelry in the early 1970s), choosing special stones and sometimes cutting them before subjecting them to a long tumbling bath in a small circulating drum that smoothed and polished the stones over time.
There are days I feel like a piece of iron being forged.
Returned to the fire again and again, hammered by what is going on around me and inside of me and among us. Returned to the fire before the hammering starts again.
Did you know that when done properly, when heated to 2000 degrees or so, hammering on iron like that not only changes its shape, but makes it stronger?
But the iron has to be hot enough for that to be true. If it isn’t hot enough, the iron is just banged up and even becomes weaker.
I wonder if the heat of this past year has strengthened us?
Individually and collectively?
I think that it has. At least, I speak for myself and how I see us walking forward as a community of followers of Jesus.
In our congregational book We Make the Road by Walking, this week Brian McLaren wraps up his exploration of the characteristics or fruits of the earliest church as it emerged in the wake of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection.
After looking at fellowship, discipleship, worship, and stewardship, this week he writes about a reality we know well at this point: hardship.
I confess it took me a while to warm up to McLaren’s use of Paul for this chapter. This morning, we heard the story of Saul’s conversion, of his being struck blind on the road to Damascus. The recasting of Saul, the man to sought out Jews for persecution, to Paul, the man who is imprisoned and beaten time and again for his love of Jesus, demonstrates some serious hardship. And some serious transformation.
Part of my struggle with McLaren’s work here is that we have to walk a fine line to be really clear in our understanding that God doesn’t create suffering in our lives in order to strengthen us. It is true and real that life is full of hard things without God making it happen. And God is with us in the hard things. But sometimes, if we take snippets of Paul out of context, it can sound a bit like the suffering was intentional on God’s part.
And we walk a fine line to not glorify the suffering we encounter – I believe that we are not intended for suffering. Suffering is not a badge that we wear. That interpretation of suffering doesn’t fit with the abundance of God’s creation and grace.
In his first-person interpretation of the bigger story of the new church that we’ve explored since Easter, and fueled by Paul’s conversion and his letters to various churches, McLaren notes this:
…the movement…is gaining strength largely because of the hardships we have faced. There have been persecutions from outsiders, betrayals by insiders, and stupid arguments that have wasted time and drained our energy. There have been divisions, moral scandals, financial improprieties, all kinds of crazy teachings that confuse and distract, power struggles, sad things that in many ways show how easy it is to forget what this whole movement is supposed to be about. As we’ve offended each other and forgiven each other, as we’ve experienced rifts and then reconciliations, we’ve learned that God doesn’t give us shortcuts around hardships, but strengthens us through them.
My…my…my…
Doesn’t that sound like real life? And doesn’t that sound like real church? Real community? Maybe real family? Real society?
The scripture that we didn’t read for today is from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth. Let me share one portion of that text, from chapter 6:
6 As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says,
“At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! 3 We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, 4 but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, 7 truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; 8 in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9 as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
What if the salvation of which Paul writes has something to do with how we are changed, shaped, formed, transformed by the hardships we inevitably face? What if eternal life is about ways that we are perpetually reformed? Remade? Remolded?
McLaren puts it this way:
Hardships make us bitter…or better.
Hardships lead us to breakdown…or breakthrough.
Hardships not only teach us to live in dependence upon God, but they also teach us interdependence with one another.
Through hardship we move from “me” to “we.”
Paul and Ananias went from sworn enemies to partners in ministry.
God was right there with them in all of that – from their division to their connection.
Again, because I want to be super-clear, I need you to hear me say that God doesn’t make us suffer. God doesn’t create suffering for us to create growth in us.
And we have work to do in the midst of suffering or in the wake of suffering to accept that we are changed and can be transformed. And to move forward from that place, still with God, with the experience of our suffering woven into the fabric of our being…
Perhaps that work makes us more gentle, more empathetic, more attentive, more grateful, more discerning, more generous.
Hardship is a part of our human journey. What we do with that hardship matters.
What we do with that hardship can bring us closer to God and to one another.
What we do with that hardship can change us. And if it can change us, it can change the world.
And so, I pray, we will not turn our backs on this past year of hard things.
I pray we will not rush to unlearn all that we have learned.
I pray that we will let ourselves become a new thing because we have walked this road together.
May it be so.
Amen.
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