Sermon: "Finding Purpose in Suffering"

3rd in the "Heroes" series.
Delivered September 2, 2007 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3

Series Theme: Every culture has its heroes. Heroes help a culture express their hopes, dreams, and fears; what is best about humanity and what is worst. We'll look at 3 of our modern superheroes to help us see what they reveal about our culture, about ourselves, and about our faith.

Movie reference: Batman Begins.

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Well as John said Andy is feeling really badly that he could not complete this series and as you can see we had to scramble for a sub and even though I am not using his text per se that is printed in the order of service, I am using his title and I am staying in 2nd Corinthians to keep the flow or the focus of what his title is in mind. He was intending to use Batman as an illustration, because Batman was a super hero who was born, in a sense, out of suffering. Bruce Wayne if you know the story was a little kid whose parents were robbed and murdered right before his eyes and it was that incident, that tragic event that steeled him to be all he could be in fighting crime and became the Caped Crusader. I am quoting Andy verbatim. He sent me his manuscript just to kind of get an idea where he was going and as I said in the other two services, I don't know if Andy will ever be quoted verbatim in a sermon again, so this is a great day, okay? Here is it: "Batman invites us to believe that even in the worst of circumstances and darkest places, good can come from evil: that justice will prevail over corruption, that we can find purpose for our suffering." And that is really what the title of the message is: "Finding Purpose for Suffering" and yet when we hear that a very normal reaction is is there really a purpose in suffering? Can we make heads or tails of some of the crazy things that happen in our world?

I know many of you have traveled up and down 95, Interstate 95, and I still have an article from years ago that a truck was coming in one direction and the rear axle of the truck came off while it was driving and rolled all around the southbound lanes, hit a pole, bounced over in to the northbound lane right on the roof of a car and the person in the passenger seat was killed, while the other two people in the car were not. The driver of the truck was not hurt. And you know we think about those kind of tragic events and we think just a couple of seconds sooner or a couple of seconds later or somebody would have just tightened something, you know I can't make any sense of this at all. Many of you know what I am talking about. Many of you probably now, in the present tense, are going through things that are hard to understand and are hard to endure. You know well the loss and pain that comes with difficulty and suffering.

Many of you know and some of you may not know that one of the darkest moments in the life of this church, of this congregation was in the early 80s when a beloved staff member, the choir director Lois and her husband Ed, two children, grandson, son-in-law, two friends; one of whom was Susan Goshorn daughter of Gary and Mary Margaret Goshorn who have been long-time members, were all killed in a small plane crash in Southern Virginia on their way down to school down there and you know it just rocked the church. We couldn't understand what the purpose was in all of that. And you think, who suffers more? The dying or the people who survive? I mean no matter what set of eyes you look in to, how can you say that God has a purpose for inflicting you with such difficulty and pain and suffering? We all as Christians, no matter who we are, we find it difficult to understand suffering. As Christians we are like 'okay we believe that God has ordered the world and everything in it and so how does this square?' And yet the witness of scripture and the witness of the lives who penned the scriptures, many of whom suffered terribly teaches that the distresses of life are indeed used by God to shape us, to shape us in to conformity with the Lord Jesus Christ, to shape us in a way that reaches others with his love.

Now we are going to look at 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 1 in just a moment, but I want to start in 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 11, because I want you to see that the person who was writing this was no stranger to suffering. Before we look at both passages, I would like to just offer a prayer. Lord, we offer this prayer for illumination, because we know that we are blind unless your spirit helps us to understand and so take these words and help them connect with our hearts so that it will make a difference and so that we will be transformed more like you. We ask it in your name. Amen.

Okay, 2nd Corinthians 11, Paul is trying to defend his work, and I am not going to read every word here, but I just want to give you a flavor of the kind of suffering and, in fact, when he was called to be a Christian, you may remember in the Book of Acts that Jesus was talking to Ananias who was to give a message to Paul and Jesus said, "I will show you how many things he is going to have to suffer for my sake." And listen to what some of these things were in 2nd Corinthians 11 as he defends his apostleship. He says in Verse 23,

"I have worked much harder. I have been in prison more frequently. I have been flogged more severely. I have been exposed to death again and again."

I mean you could stop right there.

"Five times I received from the Jews the 40 lashes minus one."

Can you imagine getting a lash across your back just once? Five times, 39 lashes.

"Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day on the open sea, I was constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, bandits, own countrymen, Gentiles in the city, in the country, at sea, from false brothers, labored and toiled, often gone without sleep, known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food. I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches."

So when he opens this letter we can understand from this context that when he talks about; hey maybe there is a design for suffering and listen to this, he is not just talking in theory. So let's go back to 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 1, Verse 3 and just read the first four verses from 3 to 7 and this is how he starts, this is what he says:

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort."

So Paul is trying to get across the us that God really is at work in our suffering, and without question, the idea of appreciating what suffering teaches can sound on the surface nonsensical or paradoxical. And there are many people, some that you probably know who are not the least bit interested in trying to discover the lessons that suffering teaches, because they have gone through so much.

Consider a counseling exchange between Dr. Larry Crabb and a distressed Christian businessman. A well-dressed Christian businessman comes in to his office. Dr. Crabb says, "How can I help you?" The man says, "I want to feel better quickly, that's how you can help me." Dr. Crabb says, "Well let me see. You come here not so much to find out what is troubling you and why, you just want to feel better quickly? Okay, here is my advice: go buy a case of hard liquor, find some willing females and take a three-week tour of the Caribbean. That should do it." The man says, "Are you a Christian?" Dr. Crabb says, "Well why do you ask?" The man says, "Because that doesn't sound like Christian counsel to me." Now Crabb didn't say this in response, but in effect this is what he said. "Well your goal of feeling better quickly doesn't necessarily sound like a Christian goal to me, because following Jesus, even though it means walking in joy of the resurrection also at times means taking up a cross and the taking up of that cross and following him is intended to conform us to his likeness."

Have you ever wondered why Jesus mentioned so many times the fact that he would suffer? I mean if you go through the Gospel of Mark, you can see all the time, like it seems in every other chapter he is talking about the Son of Man is going to be delivered over in to the hands. And, what it always says is that the disciples never understood it. So if they never understood it, why would he keep saying it? It's almost like he was reaffirming for himself his call. His call was not to feel better quickly. His call was to embrace the will of God and the suffering that it entailed, not for the suffering per se, but because he knew that healing would abound for many through his suffering.

Isaiah 53: 10 and 11 talk about this and at the end it says, "After the suffering of his soul, he will be satisfied; my righteous servant will justify many and he will bear their iniquities." When suffering comes to us whether it stems from our own sinful choices or just because we live in a fallen world, whenever it comes and however it comes and why ever it comes, even if we don't understand, for walking with Jesus, the seeds of salvation exist in that experience. While we don't and while we recoil from it when it happens, the seeds of salvation exist in that experience. Listen the testimony of Charles Colson from his book, Loving God. He said,

"The real legacy of my life was my biggest failure: that I was an ex convict. My greatest humiliation, being sent to prison was the beginning of God's greatest use of my life."

He had tremendous power; tremendous status you know from being a part of the White House staff of Richard Nixon. He goes on:

"He chose the one experience in which I could not glory for his glory."

Now you may be going through an experience and you look at it and you say, "It's all over." I am sure that is the way he felt when he was sent to prison. But no matter what you are going through now, the same possibilities, the same seeds of salvation exist for each of us.

With this as the backdrop let's look at Paul's response to affliction and to troubles. He talks about in this passage to praise God who comforts us in all of our troubles. The word troubles, the word afflictions in another translation, means the distress that is brought about by outward circumstances. Here are some synonyms; pressure, oppression, tribulation, harassment, hemmed in, vexed, persecuted. Anything from illness to unkind people, anything that closes us in and even in this context his language is so strong. We did not read Verses 8 and 9 of 2nd Corinthians 1. Listen to this.

"We don't want you to be uninformed brothers about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death, but this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead."

And he goes on to talk about that God delivered us in the past. He will deliver us in the present and he will deliver us in the future.

And so look at 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 1, Verse 3; he says three basic things in the space of just two verses that indicate that he believes that there is design or a purpose in suffering. This is his first reaction. "Praise be to God. Praise be to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ", as he is talking about being in the context of suffering. The first thing he recognizes is that God is to be praised because, not for the suffering, but because he is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who is our Lord Jesus Christ? The God who Christians believe entered into the suffering of humanity, experiencing every testing that humans experience without sin. He was the only person who could choose his own birth and he chose, (not just choose when he would be born, but where he would be born and in what kind of family he would be born) and he chose to be born as a humble carpenter's son and according to Isaiah he was not much to look at and he experienced it all; all of it; sorrow, loss, loneliness, pain, separation, betrayal, abuse, rejection, even death on a cross. Listen to what author Dorothy Sayers says:

"For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is, limited in suffering and subject to sorrows and death, he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from humans that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it all worthwhile."

So Paul blesses God because God is with us in our suffering. The second thing he says is that he blesses God because he is the father of compassion; the God of all comfort. He is probably thinking of an Old Testament Psalm that God has pity on his children, as a father has pity on his own children so God has pity and compassion on those who fear him. He is moved by empathy and pity to help us. Exodus 3:7, before the deliverance of the Jews of the Israelites, he says to Moses,

"I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers and I am concerned about their suffering."

I know it's weird to talk about the DNA of God, but the DNA of God is that he hears the cry of the suffering. He hears the cry of the wounded and those who feel outcast, as though no one cares. If no one else cares, he hears the voice of that person whether it's Hagar in the wilderness, or any of us in our times of greatest distress. But God to Moses doesn't just wave a magic wand over Egypt and everything is better. There are still struggles and suffering, but he uses an instrument, he uses a tool of Moses who himself had to go through a great deal of suffering. And I say that because God is not only interested in delivering us out of our troubles, he is interested in using those sufferings to develop us within the troubles, and I say this because often the question is if God loved me, why didn't he just keep the affliction away to begin with?

Leslie Weatherhead, an English author and preacher struggle with this specific question; why doesn't God just remove all this pain from my life and to help them understand he used a human analogy. I am reading from "Where is God When it Hurts" by Philip Yancey.

"Think of a physically strong man whose wife often complains because of mysterious ailments. After listening to her, the man gives in and begins helping her walk. After more complaints he picks her up and carries her wherever she goes. Soon she is an invalid. She can't take a step. She is totally dependent on him. In this case it would have been far better for the woman if the man had stood back and watched her stumble, however painfully to learn to walk on her own. In the same way, God lets us acquire powerful new strength and not just give easy answers. What is God up to in this world? Why does he bother putting up with this world at all?" He goes on to say, "So that he might be in the business of soul making."

Our daughter Mandy when she was two-years-old, our youngest was running in the hallway in the home that we lived in and rounded a corner, tripped in such a way and fell so that her upper lip hit an open door edge of the bedroom and gashed open her front lip. It didn't even bleed. It was just open requiring a number of stitches. We called Dr. Goshorn, who was our pediatrician, we said, "Dr. Gary, we got problems." He said, "Rush her to the emergency room. I will have a plastic surgeon come and we will take care of it." And within an hour it was going on, but just before she went in, 2 1/2 years old or something like that, because she was so little, because they had to anesthetize her lip, they put her in one of these things to hold her, like a little restriction or a restraint and I mean here we are parents looking at our little girl with a split lip in this restraint crying "Mommy, Daddy" and we hear her crying as she is carted away in to the surgery suite. We wanted to like; can we spare her from this? If we had rescued her in the short run it would have left such a nasty scar in the long run. Today she would be saying, "Why didn't you do something about this? Out of your great need to comfort me, why didn't you do something? Why didn't you just let them do that?" That is what she would be saying to us today, but she wasn't then. So Paul blesses God who is the father of compassion and comfort for both deliverance and development, and healing in ways that we don't understand in the present moment.

And then thirdly he says,

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who comforts us in all of affliction so that we may be the means of God's comfort to others."

Anybody who has ever been caught and stuck in an addiction and gone to the very bottom, but by God's grace gone through the 12 steps knows what this means: that in our affliction God brought comfort and we can then be the means of comforting other people. The word comfort here is where the translation for the Holy Spirit comes from; paraclete, one called along side to help, one who appears on another's behalf. Paul knew God's comfort and he knew what it meant for others to come alongside of him. That is one of the designs and one of the purposes for suffering; that as we learn from it, God will use it so that through us we might comfort others.

I think one of the most powerful examples that I have ever read about in this regard is the story of Pastor Christian Reger, again as told in the Yancey book, "Where is God When it Hurts." Pastor Christian Reger was sent to Dachau Prison Camp and stayed there for four years. His crime was that he was a member of the confessing church with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Niemoller and a few others who stood against Hitler. And after all of that was said and done he went back to Dachau and became a chaplain in that city and he would often tell stories of the horrors and how God helped him. But when he was in there, within the first two weeks of being in there and he was betrayed by the way by his own church organist, that is the person who told the authorities of the fact that he was in a secret confessing church movement. And when he was in that prison camp for two weeks he had abandoned all hope or all belief in a loving God. But then something happened within another couple of weeks to challenge his doubts. A person could receive one letter a month from a family member and of course those letters were screened and censored and he received a letter one month to the day of his entrance in to that camp and in the course of this short letter, his wife put a scripture reference that didn't get screened out for some reason. It was Acts 4:26 to 29. Now because he had smuggled a Bible in, he was able to look it up. It was a verse where the apostles in the early chapter of the churches history were speaking to God, and they cried out to the Lord and they said,

"The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one." And it lists all of the authorities of that day; "...who conspired against your holy servant Jesus. They did what your power and will decided beforehand should happen. Now Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness."

So he looked at this and he took some comfort, but he was to go in to an interrogation room and he was very scared because he knew that they would ask him to give up other people and if he didn't give up other people, they would torture him: electric shock and all kinds of stuff. He was very worried. But as he is going in to the interrogation room a fellow pastor comes out of the interrogation room and slips a matchbox in to his shirt pocket. He goes in. The interrogation by God's grace was not as he feared and he was able to leave without too much discomfort. He goes back to his bunk. He was sweating profusely even though it was very cold. He was lying there thinking and he felt the matchbox and he took it out of his pocket and he said, "Oh good. Matches will help keep us warm." But there were no matches in it. He opened up the box and in it was a little slip of paper with the reference Acts 4:26 to 29 on it. This all happened within the space of a day. This is what he said:

"God did not rescue me and make my suffering easier. That day he simply proved to me that he was still alive and he still knew that I was here. I simply know that God met me."

And because of that he went though that horrible suffering and still for the rest of his days became a person who comforted others in any of their suffering.

Is there a design; is there a purpose in suffering? Well if we understand what Paul is saying here that it is designed to bring us to God, that it helps us to grow in God and become more like Christ and it helps others grow through our growth and grace through it, then I guess you could say there is a purpose. The God who took his nail-scarred hands in to heaven as a reminder that he suffers with us still, that in his humanity he is one with us and we are one with him, as well as in his divinity.

And this table that we are about to gather around again, reminds us of the truth that Jesus, in fact, has seen our need and has redeemed it far beyond any temporal means. I don't know what you are going through today or what you will go through tomorrow, but recognize that God will never leave you or forsake you and will use whatever you are going through to his glory and greater purposes for you and for those whom God brings across your path. Let's pray:

Lord, we thank you that you love us even when we don't understand what is going on around us, when we don't understand our losses, our difficulties, or the pain that they bring, whether its physical or mental or emotional or relational and yet we know that you are for us and that nothing can separate us from your love, not life, not death, angels or principality, things present or things to come, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Lord, for this and for many other things we give you thanks, as we gather around this table in Jesus name. Amen.

© 2007, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org