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   

Lenten Sorrow : Lament and Nacham

Grief, Tile Painting, Arthur Rothenberg,
1959, used with permission from the
estate of Arthur S. Rothenberg

Lent starts with the ashes of Ash Wednesday –a symbol of grief and lament. In our modern liturgical traditions, we dot the ashes on the forehead and wash them off at the end of the day. In ancient Hebrew tradition, the practice of lament went far deeper and lasted longer: mourners sat in ashes, or poured them on their heads, ripped clothes, wore sackcloth. This practice of shiva, of extended grief, was expected in most cases to last a week, sometimes longer.

We hurry through lament, often to our loss: Suck it up, walk it off, let it go, move on.

We hurry toward “closure” without doing the hard work of grieving.

In his article ‘The Hidden Hope in Lament’, Dan Allender writes, "Christians seldom sing in the minor key. We fear the somber; we seem to hold sorrow in low esteem. We seem predisposed to fear lament as a quick slide into doubt and despair; failing to see that doubt and despair are the dark soil that is necessary to grow confidence and joy."

As a young teen, learning to play the guitar, I was drawn to songs in minor keys. I was given my first guitar just months after I left the home I’d lived in most of my life. I was sharing a narrow attic room with my grandmother in a small house with people I didn’t know, struggling to find my way in a large new school where I didn’t feel welcome, not sure how long I’d be there, or what would come next. I remember an elder in our church, a family friend, stopping me in the middle of a song I was practicing: “Christians don’t sing in minor key.” I’ve remembered his words – although I’ve never agreed.

A third of the Psalms are written in minor key – songs of grief, of anger, of confusion:

Scream III,
Eduardo Guyasamin,
1983, Ecuador

I am worn out from groaning,

all night long I flood my bed with weeping

and drench my couch with tears.

My eyes grow weak with sorrow. (Psalm 6)

I am poured out like water, 

and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax; 

it has melted away within me.

My strength is dried up like a potsherd,

my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

you lay me in the dust of death. 
(Psalm 22)

Will the Lord reject forever?

Will he never show his favor again?

Has his unfailing love vanished forever?

Has his promise failed for all time? (Psalm 77)

I am like a desert owl, 
like an owl among the ruins.

I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof. (Psalm 102)

Some of the lament psalms are very personal. Others are corporate – an acknowledgement that things aren’t right, not just for the individual writing the psalm, but for his people, sometimes for the earth itself. 

Do you rulers indeed speak justly? Do you judge uprightly among men?

No, in your heart you devise injustice,

and your hands mete out violence on the earth.  (Psalm 58)

How long will the wicked, O Lord, how long will the wicked be jubilant?

They pour out arrogant words; all the evildoers are full of boasting.

They crush your people, O Lord; they oppress your inheritance.

They slay the widow and the alien; they murder the fatherless.

They say, The Lord does not see; the God of Jacob pays no heed.  (Psalm 94)

The prophetic books continue and expand the theme of corporate lament, describing a world where justice is forgotten, where the earth is degraded, where the poor are misused, where parents no longer care for their children, where political and religious leaders abuse power for their own ends and disregard those entrusted to their care. 

Wail, O pine tree, for the cedar has fallen; the stately trees are ruined!
Wail, oaks of Bashan; the dense forest has been cut down!
Listen to the wail of the shepherds: their rich pastures are destroyed!
Listen to the roar of the lions; the lush thicket of the Jordan is ruined! (Zechariah 11) 

Wailing Wall Jerusalem, Flickr Creative Commons, 1988

There’s an ancient Hebrew word נָחַם, nacham, in some places translated “grieve.” It’s one of those words that opens out in multiple directions – grieve, be sorry, regret, think again, repent, console, be comforted, have compassion. 

We would like the comfort without the grief, the consolation without the repentance. 

But is it possible they’re facets of the same unwanted treasure?

In The Prophetic Imagination, a book I find myself returning to again and again, Walter Brueggemann talks about lament as the first step in envisioning a new reality, a kingdom distinct from the current “empire” marked by oppression, exploitation and denial: 

“[R]eal criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism” (p. 11). 

Grief is the first step in admitting that things are not right. “Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge” (p.12).

Both Allender and Brueggemann talk about numbness: when we refuse to grieve, when we avoid acknowledgement of pain and the brokenness around us, we shut ourselves off from the possibility of real emotional, real spiritual health, real wholeness in our communities.

I go back to that word, “nacham”. I wrote several months ago about the ways that we meet God in our places of pain, experience his comfort, and become agents of that comfort. It’s also in our places of pain that we begin to see the world as God sees it: to see how far we are from the beauty, fellowship, health and freedom he calls us toward. As we grieve, we turn, repent our part in all that’s wrong, come alongside the broken, begin to participate in God’s own grief, and in doing so, find his mysterious comfort.

So I grieve:

Young lives lost – to hunger, war, selfishness, corruption.
The breakdown in community around me – marriages unraveling, alienation of parents and children, loss of trust between citizens and leaders.
Our reckless waste of resources - forests gone, water ruined, mountains destroyed, whole stretches of ocean full of floating plastic.

Prophetic Skies, Kay Jackson
Washington DC

I  grieve a national conversation in which people claiming to follow Christ insist God is more concerned about not raising taxes on the rich than about making sure the poor are fed.

I grieve the ways we shout past each other, rather than learning to listen.

I grieve schools without libraries; refrigerators without food; kids without listening, caring adults.

I grieve slave labor, baby girls tossed on trash heaps.

I grieve money spent on more and more weapons, while more and more children go hungry. 

And as I grieve, I acknowledge my complicity:

Remaining silent when I know I should speak.
Seeking my own comfort when I could offer help or hospitality.
Thinking more about good features and low prices than ethical sourcing and fair treatment of workers.
Wasting time, energy, resources.
Looking for an easy path, instead of doing the hard work of listening, grieving, caring.

And as I grieve, I turn, wonder how to do things differently, wonder how to be different. And move deeper into God's mysterious, consoling, transforming presence.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

Nacham, O nacham. 

Grieve, 

      be sorry,

            repent, 

                 think again,

                      have compassion,

                           be comforted
                                be changed.