Sermon on the First Sunday in Lent: How shall we deal with suffering?
This past week has been hard on many people. A massive storm whacking much of America, including us. As a result, car crashes, power losses, deaths. Storm-stalled shipments of vaccine help COVID continue to rage. Americans are still finding disunity in fights over political positions. Those are the specifics of now. In a few weeks, months, years, details will be different. Hard times are a given in this world.
The First Epistle of Peter addresses the issues of Christians suffering. The rest of the letter, which we do not read, is about “the fiery ordeal”: unspecified trials and tribulations of Christians. Suffering is going to happen, despite, or perhaps because of, living a Christian life. Right before today’s portion, the author warns that, “it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil.”
Then he refers to Christ’s suffering and, in a few sentences, lays out ideas that have figured greatly in Christian theology. Not that they are clear or easy to understand. Because the Bible is not a text book that clearly lays out an argument, emphasizing clearly the most important things to know. Instead, it is a collection of a writings by a wide variety of authors, offering different interpretations and perspectives on human lives in relation to God.
Specifics in these few lines of the epistle include: Christ dying for the sins of everyone, including us; Christ’s proclamation to the already dead; the importance of baptism prefigured by Noah; Christ’s presence in heaven, as lord over heavenly beings, and judge of the living and the dead. These are just rough concepts that the Church would elaborate and elucidate in creeds and doctrines and dogmas.
Still, these concepts are meant for us in the here and now, to comfort and instruct. In the text of the epistle that follows this selection, the author calls on the faithful to “live for the rest of your earthly life no longer by human desires, but by the will of God.” He goes on to emphasize the importance of loving one another, using the famous phrase: “love covers a multitude of sins.”
Such practice of love is the purpose and solution of how Christians should live. Suffering will happen, but it's not the point. Loving is the point. Looking out for one another, helping up the fallen, lifting up those who stumble, rejoicing with the successful, sitting with the tired, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, visiting the prisoner, welcoming the stranger, consoling the grieving. Doing these are as difficult as resisting the passions and carousing and idolatry of the world. Still, the need for them will always be here in the world, too often a place of suffering. But with Christ we have reason for rejoicing.
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2021 February 21
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