Sermon - Can We Love Without the Pain?

Preached on March 8, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC

Psalm 22:23-31 Mark 8:31-38

Dedicated to all who have loved and lost; and always to the glory of God.

C.S. Lewis, who wrote the chronicles of Narnia and many books of theology and of other stories, was married late in life to Joy Gresham. The movie Shadowlands tells the unlikely story of their relationship before she died of cancer. Although Lewis finds great happiness, great joy, in their marriage, it also brings him great pain to see her suffer. At one point he wishes that he could take away her pain by suffering it himself, as I’m sure so many of you have wished on behalf of a spouse, parent, friend, or child. Finally, there is the pain of grief. The experience of pain causes him, and us, to wrestle with questions: Why must there be pain in the world? Why would God allow it? But most perplexing is this: why would you or I, who usually seek to avoid pain and minimize suffering, ever make a choice that will bring us more pain? That’s the question I hear in the argument between Jesus and Peter in the gospel reading. Why would we ever choose something that brings us into pain? C.S. Lewis put it this way, after the death of his wife:

“Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.”

The reality that Jesus helps us to face is this: When we love, we open ourselves to pain. When we seek good for others, we become vulnerable to suffering. But as Lewis said: that’s the deal. The only way to keep ourselves from being hurt is to turn inward, to become protectionist in a self-centered isolation. Don’t love anyone, because you will lose them, or they will let you down. Don’t offer assistance, because you might be giving away something that you will one day need. Better to guard yourself, keep what’s yours and keep your tender heart out of sight. We might think that we are saving our lives, Jesus says, only to find that we have lost them.

I think of Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol. He kept his life safe. He didn’t care for anyone, and that way he didn’t mind if no one cared for him. He looked out for his own interests. But when the spirit of Christmas Past comes to visit, we discover that he once loved others, as a child and as a young man. But his love had brought him pain, and his response was to close the walls around his money and around his heart. He thought that he was saving himself from pain, saving his life, but any child who hears that story knows that he had lost his life, and only found it in the end.

The argument between Jesus and Peter begins when Jesus starts to tell his disciples that what he is doing will lead to his suffering and death. Peter rebukes Jesus – which is a stronger word than perhaps it sounds – and then Jesus rebukes Peter, calling him Satan, which is the word for one who is arguing against God.

To hear this the way the disciples heard it, we need to remember everything that they have seen, back to the beginning of Mark’s gospel. At the beginning of his ministry, after he was baptized and spent his forty days in the wilderness, Jesus came back to town and began to proclaim his message: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And what did the kingdom of God look like? Well, if you were following Jesus around the Sea of Galilee back them, it quickly becomes clear that the kingdom of God is where everything broken is made whole. In the kingdom of God, people find that their illness is met with healing, their hunger is met with food, their isolation is met with community, and their sin is met with forgiveness.

The gospel of Mark tells in quick succession how Jesus healed leprosy, fever, internal bleeding, blindness, deafness, a withered hand, the guy they kept chained up in the cemetery because he had a legion of demons inside of him, and even a girl who had died. Along the way, he shared meals with people whose sins made them outcasts and fed large and hungry crowds with a few loaves and fish, making it clear that no one is to be kept away from the table. This is what the kingdom of God looks like. The kingdom of God restores us to health, restores us to community, and restores us to God. You might say that the kingdom of God is where we get to be our true selves, perhaps for the first time.

The way of Jesus is to make the kingdom of God a present reality, where the love of God meets the broken world and makes it whole. But now there is a hard reality to face. Until the time when God remakes heaven and earth, there are forces that work against the kingdom of God, both outside us and within us. There are kingdoms built on power, and the injustice that inevitably follow self-interest. There is suffering, and there is death. Jesus knows that to meet the world with love is also to meet the pain of the world. We can’t love without the pain. That’s the deal.

That is why the ministry of Jesus leads to the cross, and why our season of Lent leads to Good Friday, that dark day when it seemed as if the kingdom of God has been snuffed out. Only it hadn’t. Easter tells us that the kingdom of God will ultimately prevail, that finally, all that is broken will be restored. The one who gave his life in love is risen.

And now we can hear the most important part of what Jesus says to his disciples. After he has predicted his own suffering, after Peter has rebuked him, Jesus tells the disciples that all those who want to follow him must deny themselves and take up the cross. He has already sent he diciples out in pairs to do the work of the kingdom. They had been out in the towns proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near, healing the sick and welcoming the sinners. Now Jesus tells them that this way of the kingdom of God, this way of love, will bring pain with it.

Jesus sends us in the same way to heal, to feed, to forgive and welcome. We work in medicine; we support missionaries; we give food; we prepare meals; we welcome each other from far and wide to this place of worship, fellowship, and growing faith. But the more we give ourselves to the way of Jesus, the more we open ourselves to the pain of this world.

Be careful not to hear Jesus the wrong way. When he says that we must deny ourselves, and lose our lives, it isn’t a call for us to allow ourselves to be walked all over or used up and burnt out. Too often this teaching has been abused. In the name of Christ, people have said that other races should resign themselves to hardship, that the poor should resign themselves to danger and oppression, that good Christians should put up with domestic violence, all in the name of love, all with the promise that they would be rewarded later. That is not what Jesus said. Remember that his entire ministry has been to restore what is broken, so giving our lives does not mean giving up our lives, allowing them to be degraded.

What Jesus calls us to give is our full, strong, and vibrant lives. We give our best lives, and to do so we must overcome that which harms us and breaks us in the name of the love of God. Sometimes people misuse this teaching, saying “that’s just my cross to bear” about the wrong things. We need to be careful that naming something as your cross to bear is not simply an excuse because we don’t want the trouble of confronting an unhealthy relationship, or doing the hard work to make ourselves healthy and strong.

The cross we bear has to with where we decide to direct our strength. Do we seek to protect our own interests, or are we moved to love those besides ourselves, to love those outside our families, our tribe, our nation? We know that loving them will involve suffering. When we seek to restore health, we will have to know the faces of illness and injury. When we seek to restore peace, we will have to face the violence of war and conflict, and our own participation in the root conflicts. When we seek to restore justice, we may find ourselves in holy confrontation with injustice. In some cases, our care for others will cause us to sacrifice something we had held dear. Sometimes, we will suffer simply because we lose the ones we have come to love. But let none of these stop us. The pain is a part of the joy of living in the kingdom of God, of being restored to wholeness by God, and of offering that same love to this wonderful world.