Lent Four: Expecting Suffering

When I write a blog series I usually start with a few words that I write down, rearrange, pray and puzzle over for weeks, sometimes months.

 

Sometimes patterns emerge. Sometimes new things jump into focus.

This Lent, I somehow ended up with “e” verbs: embracing, eluding, exploring.

Expecting.

Expecting what?

The last weeks of Lent traditionally focus on the passion of Christ – from the Greek word paschein (πάσχειν), to suffer.

He warned his followers in Luke 9 (the same chapter that speaks of John's beheading): 

The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:22-23 )

Matthew’s version of the story includes a brief interchange with Peter: 

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." (Matthew 16:22-24) 

Jesus’ point seems harsh, but clear: those who follow him should expect to encounter and share in the pain of the world.   Those who object are a stumbling block, trapped in a flawed perspective.

Jesus wanted his friends to be ready, not caught by surprise.

Expecting sorrow. Sacrifice. Suffering.

As a North American Christian, I’ve been taught that things should go my way. I have rights, protections, expectations. Suffering, sacrifice and sorrow have no place in the story my culture has promised.

Yet suffering, sacrifice and sorrow are part of the story we’re all called to, the part of the story we object to and avoid.

This morning’s news is full of stories of suffering: a monster cyclone shattered the impoverished island nation of Vanuatu.

A convent was attacked in eastern India and a 74 year old nun raped by six men. 

Since I sat down to write, this latest story: “Bombs outside two churches in the Pakistani city of Lahore killed 14 people and wounded nearly 80 during Sunday services, and witnesses said quick action by a security guard prevented many more deaths.”  

Whatever sacrifices we make in Lent are small, symbolic, and hardly representative of the real suffering of the world. Whatever suffering I’ve seen or experienced seems very small in comparison to even this morning’s news.

And sacrifice? It seemed almost irreverent this year, to be discussing giving up chocolate or Facebook, while on the other side of the globe followers of Christ are giving their lives, burned and beheaded by extremist enemies of the Christian faith.

The response of those communities is instructive, humbling, and deeply moving: Beshir Kamel, brother to two of the Coptic Orthodox Christians beheaded on a deserted beach in Libya, thanked ISIS for not editing out the last words of those kneeling as they waited for death:  “Ya Rabbi Yasou”: Rabbi (teacher, master, great one, Lord) Jesus. O Lord Jesus. Help. 

Beshir Kamel went on to say: 

“Since the Roman era, Christians have been martyred and have learned to handle everything that comes our way. This only makes us stronger in our faith because the Bible told us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us."   

Reflecting on the deaths of these men, and so many others, Orthodox Christians point to their two-thousand year history of persecution and martyrdom, and remind other outraged Christians that this is part of the story, not cause for calls of revenge or war: 

In the precipice of martyrdom, St Stephen, the Proto-martyr begged God to forgive his killers.  Was there an apostolic uprising following that?

Hieromartyr Eutychius, disciple of St John the Theologian, was beheaded after starvation in prison, an attempt to burn him alive, and cruel beatings with iron rods…which were made to cease by his prayers.  There is no account of retribution. . . .

We stand proudly with the martyrs, whose blood is the foundation of the Church.  And we beg God to grant us equal strength when we have to face what they did. 

In worship in our church this morning, I found myself thinking of the video I chose not to watch: of the men beheaded, and their final words.

I had an overwhelming sense of their presence now with God, their names written on Jesus’ hands, their broken bodies carried in his arms.

I had a sense of God’s love flowing through them – through their wounds, their blood – to their heart-broken families, their shattered church.

I was struck by how reluctant I am to see past my own sanitized, safe little world. I don’t want to see their blood. I don’t want to kneel with them in their pain.

Yet I felt convicted to come home and watch, and pray.

It took a while to find the uncensored five minutes video. And no, I’m not going to link to it.

Icon of the 21 Martyrs of Libya, Tony Rezk

But I did watch it. Kneeling.

The world can be a brutal place.

And humans of all kinds can be agents of great evil.

In my recent reading in Acts, I was struck by the account of Paul heading off to Jerusalem after being warned by Agabus that he’d be bound by the Jewish leaders and handed over to the Romans. He acknowledged the warning and continued on his way, expecting trouble, but not moved by it.

It reminded me of accounts of the marchers in Selma, moving toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge: expecting trouble, but unmoved.

In 1960, Martin Luther King wrote:

I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.

There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly yet proudly say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.   

From what I’ve seen and know of the world, suffering is inevitable. It can sweep through like a cyclone, smashing everything in its way. 

Or it can linger like the drip drip drip of mental anguish: Altzheimer's, psychzophrenia, unrelieved depression.

We can spend our days looking for ways to stay safe, running from choices that would open us to pain, responding with fury when our defenses fail us.

Or we can choose to expect suffering, choose to move forward forewarned and aware, but not gripped by fear or dissuaded from what’s right. 

This is the fifth in a Lenten series.

Other Lenten posts:

2015: 

    Ash Wednesday: Confession Booth

    Lent One: Embracing Hunger: February 24

    Lent Two: Eluding Privilege: March 1

    Lent Three: Exploring Power: March 8

From 2013:

    An  Alternative Narrative: February 10

    Seeking Blessing in a Fracture Land: February 17

    The Poor in Spirit and Those Who Mourn: February 24

    Hungering Far Past "Rightness": March 3

    Guns, God, Mercy: March 10

    Making Peace: What God's Children Do:  March 24

    Where is Newness Needed? March 31

From 2012:
     Looking toward Lent
     Lenten Sorrow : Lament and Nacham
     Lenten Silence: Charash, Be Still
     Lenten Sweetness: Tasting Towb
     Lenten Submission: Rethinking Hupotassō     

     Lenten Song: Remembering Ranan   

Leaning into Lent

As part of my Lenten observation this year, I'm taking a break from writing new blog posts and updating and re-posting earlier material. Today's post was first shared on February 19, 2012.

My childhood church tradition had no interest in Ash Wednesday, or Lent, or any of the seasons of the liturgical calendar. The idea of giving up something as a spiritual practice seemed superstitious: does God care if I eat chocolate or not?

Elijah icon, 

Yet, in a dry, thirsty time of my life, I was deeply fed by my encounter with a deeper liturgical practice, and after thirty years now in the Anglican tradition, I look forward to Lent the way I look forward to an hour of quiet at the end of a long, hard day.

Lent is an ancient practice – an attempt to approximate in some way the forty wilderness years of the Israelite people, the forty days in the desert of the prophet Elijah, and the forty days of fasting and temptation of Jesus at the start of his ministry. 

The examples of Moses, Elijah and of Jesus highlight the tension between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God. 

Moses and his people, newly escaped from slavery in Egypt, wandered in the desert – some wanting to go back to life under Pharoah, Moses insisting that God would provide. 

Elijah, after defying bloody King Ahab, and with Queen Jezebel on his trail, ran for his life to the desert, where he collapsed under a broom tree and begged God to take his life, then spent forty days traveling to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. 

And Jesus himself, after forty days of fasting, was confronted with an offer of “all the kingdoms of this world and their splendor.”

Lent offers us a time to examine our own allegiances as we travel between kingdoms of earth and heaven. Small sacrifices are one way to help us focus, to shake free from what holds us. Some of my friends choose to fast one day a week, or give up Facebook, wine, dessert, coffee.

The point isn’t the small sacrifice. Rather, the sacrifice helps us set the time apart – a small, regular reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for us. 

But it’s also a reminder of our deep complicity in kingdoms we don’t understand, our hunger for the tastes of the old ways, our willingness to find comfort in material things rather than hunger and thirst for a deeper knowledge of God.

In Ephesians 4 Paul urged the church in Ephesus to “put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

That work will never be done, but Lent is a time to pause, and to ask: What should I be putting off? Where have I given control to things, to habits? What have I been feeding myself? Where am I headed? 

detail from Christ in the Wilderness,
Briton Riviere, England, 1898

It’s a time to look more deeply at my own attitudes. I usually give up sugar, which also means I give up coffee. In the withdrawal from both sugar and caffeine, my underlying attitudes surface quickly: Irritation. Impatience. Discouragement. Self-protection.

Lent can sound depressing, but I don’t find that to be the case. As addictions and harmful attitudes surface, I can acknowledge them, address them, and set them aside, ready to put on something new.

It’s a bit like retooling a computer. Over time, unused files, dumb downloaded games, the backload of cached internet files slows the system down. It takes time to erase unused programs, delete files no longer needed, adjust the start menu, optimize disk storage. It takes time, but it feels good to get it done, and the system runs better freed from the weight of digital detritus.

That sounds a bit mechanical – an analogy, but not a good one.

Because Lent, while it’s a time to confront our evasions, our half-believed lies, our self-protective inner story, is even more a time to draw closer to God.

The Israelites, out in the wilderness, experienced God’s presence in manna, in cloud and pillar of fire, in the tent of meeting.

Elijah, on Mount Horeb, experienced God’s presence in a new way, and heard God’s word of encouragement and instruction. 

And we, setting aside distractions, distortions, determined to shed whatever deceives us, prepare to know God better – in the sacrifice of Good Friday, in the joy of Easter, in the countless little ways that God’s grace meets us in moments of hunger, or prayer, or waiting.

There are lots of ways to approach Lent.

Tearfund and the Church of England offer The Carbon Fast:

Consciously adopting carbon-saving behaviours is sacrificial and provides a wonderful way to engage with the Lenten concerns of temptation, denial and salvation. We are called to change the world, but cannot do so without the Spirit.

• We believe God is the Creator of the world and that we are entrusted with its care;
• Lent is a time for sacrifice as we prepare to celebrate life in Christ at Easter;
• Christians love the world and want to influence it for the good.

Christ in the Wilderness, Ivan Kramskoi, 1872, Moscow

Hearts and Minds Books offers an ambitious list of books for Lent, including On The Way to the Cross: 40 Days with the Church Fathers  and A Place at the Table: 40 Days of Solidarity with the Poor by Chris Seay.

Many churches and organizations offer their own Lenten resources: daily readings, weekly videos. Mustard Seed Associates has put together an exhaustive list of ideas, resources, and other Lenten materials. 

My own Lent will be a little different this year. I'll be traveling more than usual, and busy in a strange mix of ways, so plans to give up sugar (my fall-back practice) won't work. 

An article about an eight hour daily fast from Facebook and email has encouraged me to limit computer time (aiming for two hours a day) while another article about fasting not just from, but to, has me thinking about ways to listen better, pay deeper attention, find more in less. 

In all of this, I'll be praying for a life deeper than the surfaces where we so often find ourselves living.

Looking for a way to move beyond the flood of words I often find myself washed along in.

Watching, and waiting, for something new.  

Lord, You searched me and You know,
   It is You Who know when I sit and I rise,
          You fathom my thoughts from afar.
   My path and my lair You winnow,
          and with all my ways are familiar.
   For there is no word on my tongue
          but that You, O Lord, wholly know it.
         .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
Search me, God, and know my heart,
         probe me and know my mind.
And see if a vexing way be in me,
         and lead me on the eternal way.
   (The Book of Psalms, 139, translated by Robert Alter)

What spiritual practices will you be exploring this Lent?

What resources would you recommend to others?

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