Stewarding Life Part 10: Stewards of SUFFERING

Bible Text: John 16:16-24

When faced with suffering, we often ask: WHY? But Christ's example confronts us with a different question: HOW? How are we to carry our pain? And is it possible that it might be used to bring compassion and healing to ourselves and others?

Quotations:

Nicholas Woltersdorf, Lament for a Son:

• “I could not bring myself to try to figure out what God was up to in Eric’s death. I joined the psalmist in lamenting without explaining. Things have gone awry in God’s world. I do not understand why, nor do I understand why God puts up with it for so long. Rather than Eric’s death evoking in me an interest in theodicy, it had the effect of making God more mysterious. I live with the mystery.”
• “Suffering is the shout of ‘No’ by one’s whole existence to that over which one suffers—the shout of ‘No’ by nerves and gut and gland and heart to pain, to death, to injustice, to depression, to hunger, to humiliation, to bondage, to abandonment. And sometimes, when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which elsewhere seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be. / But what I have learned is something stranger still: Suffering may be among the sufferer’s blessings. I think of a former colleague who, upon recovering from a heart attack, remarked that he would not have missed it for the life of him. / In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness are brewed. But there also character is made. The valley of suffering is the vale of soul-making."
• But now things slip and slide around. How do I tell my blessings? For what do I give thanks and for what do I lament? Am I sometimes to sorrow over my delight and sometimes to delight over my sorrow? And how do I sustain my ‘No’ to my son’s early death while accepting with gratitude the opportunity offered of becoming what otherwise I could never be? How do I receive my suffering as blessing while repulsing the obscene thought that God jiggled the mountain to make me better?"

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis:

• “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.”

Sermon by Frederick Buechner:

• “Keep in touch with it because it is at those moments of pain where you are most open to the pain of other people – most open to your own deep places. Keep in touch with those sad times because it is then that you are most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed in a way by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God’s power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Keeping in touch with your pain, I think, means also to be true to who in your depths you have it in you to be – depths of pain and also in a way depths of joy, because they both come from the same place.”

Film: "Father Stu" (2022):

• “We shouldn’t pray for an easy life, but the strength to endure a difficult one. Because the experience of suffering is the fullest expression of God’s love. It is a chance to be closer to Christ.”