The Gift of Pain<title> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../../sermon.css"> <style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #FF0000} </style> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify; } </style> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../2002/sermon.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" vlink="#0000FF"> <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4 > <tr VALIGN=BASELINE BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <td COLSPAN="2" BGCOLOR="#000080"> <b> <font color="#FFFFFF"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">  The Gift of Pain </span> </font> </b> <font color="#FFFFFF"><br>A Sermon based on </font> <a target="_blank" href="http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&version=NIV&passage=Matthew+1:1-3"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Matthew 8:1-3</span></font></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN="2" width="640">  <p>About 20 years ago, I was standing on a street corner in a little place called Sunray, Texas, where I was serving as a pastor at that time. Sunray was a little panhandle farming community of about 1,900 people. Not much exciting ever happened in Sunray. It was a pretty calm, laid-back place. I happened to be standing on this particular street corner when a pickup truck came by with fire coming out from underneath it. The driver had his window down, and some man standing on the street yelled at him, "Your truck is on fire!" The man believed him and stopped his truck and got out of it, just before it exploded into flames. It was really kind of an exciting day for us, because we got to see the volunteer fire department in action! There just were not many things like that that ever happened in Sunray. It's a good thing the man stopped. The vehicle he believed to be taking him to the place he had wanted to go was about to take him to his death instead.</p> <p>Jesus warned us in much the same way about some of the ways we think. We get in this particular vehicle of thought or living or whatever. We're comfortable with it because it's the vehicle of thought and living that others have affirmed to us as a good way to think, live. Perhaps generations of people have encouraged us that this is a certain way to think and live about all kinds of things. About money, about life, about health, about education, about careers. Then, all of a sudden, we're reading the Gospel one day and Jesus calls out to us and says, in essence, "If you keep thinking that way, if you keep traveling that road, you may be disappointed in where it leads you."</p> <p>Whatever peace the gospel of Jesus brings to us, it also calls out to us to rethink every way we live. Oftentimes, I am discovering that the gospel raises as many questions for me as it answers, if not more. Even in these few short verses we find words oddly relevant to us, despite the fact that we know very little about leprosy. There's a question that I believe the scripture poses to us, even though Jesus doesn't leave it in the form of a question.</p> <p>There's a suffering leper and a Jesus who heals him, upon the man's request. Now, we've been in Sunday school all of our lives. We know that leprosy was a terrible disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are still some one to two million people worldwide infected with what is now known as Hanson's Disease.</p> <p>Aside from the fact that it has some ugly scarring effects on the body, one of the primary manifestations of leprosy is that it kills the nerve endings, especially in people's extremities. Because people afflicted with leprosy can't feel simple things, like bumping into something or rubbing a blister on their foot, they would continue to re-injure themselves, until they had horribly disfigured their own bodies.</p> <p>This disease, in Jesus' time, also caused people to be cut off from society, from their religious communities. So, the request for Jesus to heal the leper was not a simple thing. For some reason, though he does not always choose to do so, Jesus answered the man's request immediately and healed him. Three short verses including a leper, Jesus and the leper's healing. It doesn't seem like much is there. Is there something else we might be overlooking?</p> <p>The truth is, in our culture, this particular passage of scripture ought to get our attention, because we prize pain avoidance and pain riddance so highly. Watch the commercials on TV today and count the number of them that offer you some kind of pain relief before this day is out. A pill, some kind of treatment, whether it's true or not, that will magically cure whatever ails you. We have come to prize pain relief so highly and to prize pleasure and comfort that we are actually prone to curse God as though he has cursed us when things are painful. We've come to believe that we are entitled to painlessness.</p> <p>That's actually a very ancient way of thinking. Job was encouraged by his wife, after suffering as much loss as he did, to simply curse God and suffer the immediate consequences of the death that would bring. Job must have been tempted to think that death would be better than suffering as much as he was. Jesus himself was tempted to fall through those cracks of thinking. "˜My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me . . ." (Matthew 26:39).</p> <p>We tend to get into that vehicle of thinking ourselves that, if something is painful, there must be something wrong. If we are suffering, we must have done something wrong. If there is any pain in our life whatsoever, God must have cursed us and the only thing we can do is pray for relief, even the relief of death itself.</p> <p>In fact, that way of thinking has now begun to sweep through the pews of churches. I'm not saying it's a totally recent phenomenon; it just seems to have gotten more attention of late, because of television. The most recent cover of Time magazine, for example, carries the cover article title, "Does God want you to be rich?" Preachers of the gospel in America have taken the American way of life which so highly prizes pain relief, that they have now begun to examine the scriptures in light of their way of thinking and their sense of entitlement to wealth and pleasure instead of letting the Bible examine their lives. They have preached it to us back through the Bible, quoting scriptures out of context, as though the gospel of Jesus, who suffered for us, is about a God making us materially wealthy instead of acknowledging our moral poverty before God and trusting him absolutely for his invaluable grace.</p> <p>Indeed, one of the primary proponents of this prosperity gospel, a woman well-known on the television circuit, asks this question: "Who would want to get in on something where you're miserable, poor, broke and ugly and you just have to muddle through until you get to heaven" (Joyce Meyer, televangelist, as quoted in Time, September 18, 2006)? Answering that question for herself, she seems to more than imply that God intends for all of us to be healthy and wealthy, whether or not we're wise.</p> <p>Is that what God really intends for us? Not to be ugly, or broke, or to have to muddle through life? Unlike some, I'm not going to answer that question for you. That's a question you and I each have to answer for ourselves. When it comes to misery and brokenness and ugliness and muddling, that's a question we'll all have to answer for ourselves before the God who, in Christ, and I quote from Philippians, "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant . . . he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6-8, NIV)? Our model for thinking, even about material accumulation, especially about material accumulation, is Christ. God, the very Word of God coming to live among us and give us a hopeful word, not about a pain-free existence and material wealth, but instead, a kind of impoverishment that might enable us to know what it means to have a meaningful existence.</p> <p>In that light, the scripture gives us more to think about. Leprosy destroys nerve endings, the human body's God-given pathway for communicating the sensation of pain to the brain. When nerve endings are no longer functioning, people continue to re-injure themselves in horribly disfiguring ways. When Jesus healed the leper, what he actually did was give him back the gift of pain!</p> <p>We curse the pain. We even curse the God we believe gave us the pain and who owes us a less painful experience. But, where would we be without pain? We'd burn our hands on hot stoves. We would not know when we're having heart attacks, because there would be no chest pains. We would not have headaches to tell us our doctor needs to examine us and find some horrible disease that needs to be treated. If all pain were taken away from us, would we really be richer for it? Is it not true that what truly enriches our lives is not the absence of pain, but the presence of it?</p> <p>If it were not for our pain, would be ever cry out to God, even if just to curse him for making us so miserable? Is it possible that we are never closer to God than when we are crying out to him, even if we are crying out in anger (thanks to Michelle Collins for this thought)? Job, sitting in the pile of ashes that had once been his life, seemed to come to some perspective that, in fact, this pain that he was experiencing and these horrific losses might have actually been the gift of God to him. Job said, sitting in the ashes, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand. My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you." What would you know of God today if it had not been for the things you've suffered?</p> <p>When I think about my life, as I did in preparation for this message, it occurred to me that everything of any significance that I have in my life, I have because someone, somewhere, suffered for me. Unknown heroes by the thousands died on battlefields so that we could worship freely this morning. My mother, through the pains of childbirth, brought me into this world. Even though I was much smaller when she did so, she carried me for nine months of pregnancy, the last three of which she suffered in the heat of Houston's humidity in the summer of 1954, before air conditioning was so prevalent. My Jesus, who in his birth into the ugliness and muddling we call human existence, came as the presence of God into my life, and in his horrible death, made my life possible.</p> <p>So, what do we do in the presence of suffering? Well, certainly, I believe as we have prayed this morning in the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, even as Jesus did in healing the leper, we ought to seek to alleviate the pain and suffering of others. More often, that will not be our choice. If the only way we can believe in God is if the suffering of all humanity is relieved upon request, our faith will not survive long. As painful as it is to realize, prayer is not about getting God to behave the way we believe ought.</p> <p>I was speaking to Julie Pennington-Russell a few days ago. She is the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, a church very similar to ours in many ways. She was talking about how exhausted she is when she goes home anymore. She tells her husband, Tim, "I don't understand it. I really haven't been doing anything all that physically demanding." Then, it occurred to her how exhausting it can be to just be what she called, "a peaceful presence in a sea of anxiety."</p> <p>Isn't that what parents are for children? Oftentimes we don't have the answers to their questions or immediate solutions to their dilemmas, but are not parents sometimes just a peaceful presence in the sea of their children's anxiety?</p> <p>Chris Ivey was telling me that, a few weeks ago when school started, the principal of their school put all the teachers on a school bus and made them ride the bus route their students ride every day. She wanted the teachers to see the homes their children came from and returned to every day. There were one-room hovels and multi-story mansions on the route. The principal told the teachers that she wanted them to know the world from which their children came before they entered the school world so that they would not just be educators by transferring information but that they could also be a peaceful presence in the seas of their students' anxiety.</p> <p>We should pray for people's suffering, and where possible, we should seek to alleviate it. But the truth is, when you read the gospels, we read about a Jesus who saw far more hurting people than he ever healed. Oddly enough, in every situation where he did heal people, he gave them back the gift of pain!</p> <p>More often than not, the suffering Christ became a peaceful presence in a sea of sinful anxiety. Either way, whether he healed people or simply became a peaceful presence to them, their suffering brought people closer to Jesus who was calling out to them to think again about how they were living. Certainly, Jesus drew them closer than they ever would have been without their suffering.</p> <p>A few weeks ago, in the middle of all this sneezing and hacking and coughing, I finally went to see an allergy doctor. I had never been to this particular doctor before. It turns out that she was never a member of Cliff Temple, which I thought was remarkable. However, she is a member of the Highland Park United Methodist Church, and she knew about Cliff Temple. She loves to sing in their choir. So, we got to talking about my allergies and her love of music.</p> <p>Somewhere in the middle of all this conversation, she gave me some medicine that comes in little foil packets. It's a powder that you have to mix. I won't describe what you do with it next, because we have to go eat lunch. But, she made the comment that this little packet of powder is even safe to carry on a plane these days. I simply made the comment that I supposed the terrorists will eventually find a way of putting something lethal in a little packet of powder and bringing down another airplane. I said, "Evil always finds a way, doesn't it?" And this Methodist choir member not only treated my allergies, but in response to what I said, treated my anxiety about terrorism that I didn't even know I had until I said that. I said that terrorists will find a way. She said, in her gospel faith, "Yes, but we also know that good will also find a way to ultimately triumph over evil."</p> <p>When we only interpret life through the eyes of our immediate pain, when we don't see the bigger picture of God's purpose of drawing us to him through his own pain and ours as well, we misinterpret the pain as the curse of God instead of the gift of God. The best things I have in my life have come to me through some form of suffering, my own or the suffering of others for me.</p> <p>Are you hurting this morning? Physically? Emotionally? Financially? Relationally? Do you know why Jesus wants you to give him your heart? He wants you to give him your heart so that he can then be the peaceful presence of God in the sea of your anxiety.</p> <p>One of my favorite old gospel hymns contains these words: "When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, abide with me. In life, in death, in misery, in joy, in suffering, in sadness, in victory and defeat, O Lord, abide with me" (Abide With Me, Henry Lyle, 1847).</p> <p>Whatever is hurting today, is there any possible way that pain is really the voice of God calling out to you? Is there any chance?</p> <hr WIDTH="100%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Glen Schmucker, Pastor </td> <td> <div align=right>  September 17, 2006 </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN=2> Copyright © 2006, Glen Schmucker </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>