Together, Wherever We Go

Perhaps like me, you know someone who is an atheist.  Chances are pretty good that you do. I have an acquaintance, the mother of one of Sarah’s classmates, who is lovely and positive and friendly, and only through a few postings on Facebook did I find out that she is an atheist.  She’s not pushy about it, she’s not angry or mean about it, but she does not believe in any God of any kind.

    I only found this out a few weeks ago and since we’ve moved, I’ll never learn the whole story.  But I do know that her father suffers from Huntington’s Chorea, a horrible,debilitating disease that affects the nerves slowly and progressively and fatally.  There is no cure and little relief of symptoms, and death is certain.

    So I wonder if my friend’s atheism is related to her father’s situation, if she cannot reconcile the suffering of this person she loves with a God who purportedly loves us and cares for us.  If that is the case, she is not the first one to struggle with that.  She is not the first one to find it impossible to believe in God.  She is not the first one to experience love that is shadowed by pain.

    So for all of us who struggle to reconcile suffering with a loving God, Paul’s words from Romans 8 might strike a chord.  Let’s remember that when Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote to strangers.  He had not yet been to Rome, and he did not establish the church there.  But he knew about the Big City, the way you or I might know about New York or Los Angeles: big, bustling, too many people in too little space.  Kind people but even more people who were out to get you in some way.  In Paul’s day, people who lived in rural areas were finding they could no longer sustain a living there, and moved to cities to find work.  They moved away from family and away from community.  It could be pretty dreadful.

    And of course, as today, there was suffering in Rome in the first century.  Disease, poverty, an oppressive government – it was all there.  For the Christians to whom Paul wrote, there was the additional threat the faced when confessing Jesus was Lord.  To declare anyone other than Caesar lord was a capital offense.  The Christian life in Rome was not an easy one.

    To these Christians in Rome Paul wrote, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”  That’s not what they taught us to say in pastoral care class when visiting someone who was suffering: oh , it’s bad now but just wait, things will be so much better after you die.  A distant relative of mine wrote a family history entitled “Yonder Will Be Better” about the pioneer family who kept moving westward to that elusive place that awaited them where things will be better.  But they’re not better now.  Yonder might be better, but right here is pretty miserable: that sums up the situation Paul addressed in today’s lesson.

    So Paul is faced with the challenge of teaching these strangers how God fits into suffering.  And he does it in an interesting way.  He reminds them of their identity.  The Christians in Rome are people who suffer. But they are also people who hope.
    As are we, people who suffer and people who hope.  I think about my friend who is an atheist, and I wonder what hope means to her, if she has a sense that yonder will be better, that her father’s suffering is not all there is.  For Christians, we have been given such hope, hope that suffering is not the last word, because the last word belongs to God.  Christ’s own suffering is our sign of this, his suffering and his resurrection, and the resurrection that awaits all of us.

    Here and in other places, Paul teaches that suffering is redemptive.  Again, we have to be careful when saying things like this because the last thing that anyone who is in pain wants to here is that is for a higher purpose.  Perhaps it’s more helpful to put it this way:  suffering is part of the human condition, and hope is part of the Christian condition.

    I have a favorite series of novel by an English author named Susan Howatch.  The novels are about three different Church of England clergymen in the first part of the 20th century, and amid all their dramas is some pretty great theology.  In one of the novels a priest is talking with someone who had been a prisoner of war during World War II.  He says, “Do you remember telling me that when you were a POW you found that human beings could endure almost anything as long as they believed their suffering had meaning?  What they couldn’t endure was the possibility that there was no meaning which would allow the suffering to be redeemed.”  (Howatch, Absolute Truths, p. 595)

    That is Paul’s point:  our suffering will be redeemed.  It is a bit like childbirth.  As a teenager I once asked my mother if it hurt to have a baby.  She replied that she couldn’t remember anymore, now that she met us and knew us and loved us.

    Our suffering will be redeemed:  that is the source of our hope.  Actually, our suffering already has been redeemed.  By faith, we believe that however good or bad this life is, something absolutely wonderful and utterly beyond our imaginations awaits us.  By faith we have hope.

    And faith is a choice.  My friend has chosen not to believe in God.  That is her choice.  I choose to believe in God, and I choose to believe that God is loving, and that God has searched and known my heart, that God will redeem me and those I love and those I hate and the entire creation before God ends the story.  I choose to have faith; I choose to believe.

    And a big reason I choose to have faith and choose to believe is because of the church, and that brings me to the maybe the most important thing that Paul is saying.  In this lesson from Romans, Paul is reminding the Roman Christians of their identity:  they are people who suffer and they are people who hope.  But more important than all of that is this:  they are people who belong.  They belong to God.  The metaphor he uses for this is adoption.

    A pastor I know once commented that God has no grandchildren – I was so stunned when she said this.  God has no grandchildren because we are all children of God, brothers and sisters with God’s son, Jesus, and brothers and sisters to one another.  That’s a pretty amazing metaphor when you think about – God has chosen to call you God’s own son, God’s own daughter.  We’re kin, like it or not.  And our liking it or not doesn’t change the fact that through God, we’re stuck with each other.  We’re family; we are at home with each other.

    Robert Frost once wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  (The Death of the Hired Man)  Maybe that’s the model we should have with each other as sisters and brothers in Christ.  It might even be the beginning definition of what church is:  when someone has to come here, we have to let them in.

    The Neel family has experienced so many kindnesses, large and small, our first week at Westminster.  Flowers and cake and book box carriers and blind-hangers and meal bearers and the name of cell-phone repairs after Sarah dropped my i-phone in the toilet on Monday – we are so grateful for the way that so many of you have taken us in.  Thank  you so much.

    We have come here as parents, and as parents have all those concurrent anxieties for our child: will she make friends?  Will she like school?  Will she get used to our tiny back yard?  Will she learn to ride her bike without training wheels?  Will she drop anything else in the toilet?  But maybe our biggest anxiety and our biggest hope is this:  will she have a sense that she has a place, that she belongs, that she is among family at Westminster?

    We’ve also come here as pastors, and as pastors have more anxieties than you will really want to know about.  We work hard to let go of those anxieties and choose to have faith, to trust that God really is in this mix.  And as pastors, our greatest hope is this:  do you all have a sense that you have a place, that you belong, that you are among family here at Westminster?

    You do belong here, you know, and that’s not something I say but God says.  This is God’s house, and we are all God’s children.  When you have to come here, it is our greatest joy and privilege.  You will always have a place here.  What you do with that place, what you do in this particular expression of God’s house is an interesting choice that awaits you, and us.

    It will be exciting to watch as the months and years unfold how we Westminster sisters and brothers work and play to make this place a home for those who aren’t here yet, should they find something good, maybe even redemptive,  here.  Our having a sense of belonging is wonderful but it becomes even better when we don’t hoard that feeling for ourselves but expand it to others.  I don’t know what that means, how that plays out in Portland.

    What I do know is this: in this amazing city, there are people who are suffering, and some of them are suffering without hope.  In Portland, there are people who hope.  Some still hope in the American dream; some hope in leaders or ideas, some pin their hope on God.  There are people who suffer, there are people who hope; how do we sisters and brothers at Westminster let them know that beyond all of that, they belong?