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“The Advantages of Disadvantages”
1 John & Luke 19:1-11
Preached on June 5, 2005
by
Rev. David G. Carpenter
At The Presbyterian Church in Morristown |
Pain and suffering—they are the common denominator of our
human existence. However you cut it, pain is a part of our life
and to try to avoid it, as ridiculous as this may sound, is to
somehow detour the very essence of life itself. As I was wading
through all of these books on pain and misery I couldn’t
help but ask myself, “Why would someone in their right mind
want to preach about suffering seven weeks in a row?” It’s
a little morbid, don’t you think? And, yet, as I look out
into your faces and I think back over just this past year, as
I get to know your stories and compare them with my own, I am
reminded of just how universal a phenomenon the storms of life
are. Pain is inevitable. The choice for every single one of us
is not if we will accept pain but how we will accept it. And so,
here I am, preaching on the topic for the seventh week in a row
because, somehow, it is ultimately an important issue, a pivotal
issue in our lives that we must learn to come to terms with and
be honest about if we are ever to find any real joy in life .
As a society in general, we are not very good at
accepting pain. I don’t think it is any big secret at
this point that Yvette and I love to travel. Every
time we step foot in a new country there are two
things that we carry with us that are even more
important than our Immodium tablets—our cameras
and our journals. Each time we are immersed in a
new culture, we break open a fresh, wide open
page in one of our journals, and we begin to write.
We write about everything: our observations, the
smells, sights, sounds, differences and similarities.
Over the years we have filled up books with our
musings and our sketches, and when the traveling
is done, we always end up back here, where we
spend many blissful hours reading through them
over and over again. We begin to pick up the
patterns that emerge across the pages, fascinating
lessons about ourselves and the world and lessons
about how others live that frame and inform who we
are and the ways that we live back here. Do you
want to know one of the most profound and
disturbing observations I have made over the
years? Without fail, from Los Angeles to Bombay,
London to Mozambique, Paris to the Katmandu,
those who have life the easiest, almost always,
seem to be living with the least joy. I see it over
and over again. It is as predictable and reliable as
the sun. It is like an upside down bell curve. The
places where people have the least, where people
seem to have the toughest lives, you pick up an
unmistakable contentment, a deliciousness to being
alive that, frankly, we can only dream of here.
I think Clyde Reid stumbled onto something
significant when he said, “One of the most common
obstacles to us celebrating life fully is our
avoidance of pain. We will do anything to escape
it. Our culture reinforces our avoidance by assuring
us that we can live a painless life. Advertisements
constantly encourage us to believe that life can be
pain-free. But to live without pain (says Reid) is a
myth. To live without pain is to live half-alive; this is
an unmistakable, clear, unalterable fact. Many of
us do not realize that pain and joy run together.
When we cut ourselves off from pain, we have
unwittingly cut ourselves off from joy as well.
” You and I, we live in a culture that idolizes comfort to
the point of our own peril. We’ve become so insulated. A
person can go a whole lifetime in our society without ever getting
really cold or really hot, really tired or really thirsty. There
is so much padding around us that we can make it all the way from
cradle to grave without ever experiencing real, raw, delicious,
painful life. We have become master insulators and epic illusion
builders. But of all the illusions that we have created for ourselves,
the grandest would have to be this illusion that if we just work
hard enough, if we pray hard enough and are good enough, we will
eventually be able to build a life around us that is safe—safe
from any pain or suffering, safe from any kind of limitations
or difficulties.
This is a dangerous illusion that has worked its way into the
very fabric of our psyches. It has even taken hold in many of
our churches. This Prosperity Gospel could have only been born
in the country that brought us Disney World. An entire theology
is crafted meticulously to reinforce this illusion that life is
meant to be a perpetually painfree, happy place; a theology that
touts the ideal spiritual life as one where problems are instantaneously
solved, cures are for the asking and miracles never cease; where
to be saved means to live a charmed life of prosperity, health
and wealth. Sure, the Bible says that the righteous will flourish
like a palm tree, but what the purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel
forget to tell you is that palm trees don’t grow in beautiful
forests. They grow in harsh, unforgiving deserts in the midst
of challenge and adversity.
It’s not that the Prosperity Gospel surprises me. It is so
easy to fall into the temptation of wanting to construct a God
around our favorite illusions. This is exactly what happened to
John the Baptist in our scripture lesson this morning. Barbara
Brown Taylor says that verse three of the 11th chapter of Matthew
may be one of the most haunting passages in all of scripture:
“Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”
Of all the people in the world to be asking that question, John
had devoted his entire life to preparing for the Messiah’s
arrival. When Jesus arrived at the banks of the Jordan River,
it was the crowning moment of John’s entire life. John knew
exactly who was standing in front of him. The moment he saw Jesus
wading in the river towards him, he cried out, “Woah, wait
a minute! Hang on! I can’t baptize you! You want me to baptize
you? No! I am the one who needs to be baptized by you!” He
knew who Jesus was. He was there when the heavens parted and when
God’s spirit descended like a dove. He listened as God voice
boomed from above, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am
well pleased.”
So what happened? “Are you the one or should we
wait for another?” Well, things hadn’t turned out
exactly the way that John had expected them to.
By the time today’s story takes center stage,
everything had turned south. John is languishing
away in prison, and in fact, he is just days away
from having his, well, his head handed to him on a
silver platter. Had you forgotten where that
expression comes from? You see, John had a few
illusions of his own as to exactly who and what God
was supposed to be, illusions as to the role that
God was supposed to play in his life. Like us, John
was expecting a Messiah who was going to fix
things once and for all; a God who would crash
onto the scene with his guns-a-blazing; a military
liberator who would free the Jews from the yoke of
Roman rule, punish the wicked, end the suffering
and set things right. But it seemed like nothing
went the way it was supposed to after the baptism,
and John, well, he was disappointed. He was
disillusioned. Jesus had utterly failed to meet his
expectations, and so, John sends out a telegram
from prison that betrays every ounce of his
frustration with Jesus. “Are you the one who was to
come, or should we just wait for another?”
It’s a question we all ask when we have been
disillusioned by God, isn’t it? We ask for relief from
something we are going through but it never seems
to come; when we beg God for an answer but it
feels like the heavens are silent; when we pray to
God to heal somebody we love, but there we are
with our minds spinning, trying to focus on the 23rd
Psalm as we sit at their funeral—complete and total
disillusionment.
You know, disillusionment… it’s not necessarily a
bad thing. Think about it. Disillusionment is literally
the loss of an illusion whether it is an illusion about
God, about life, about the world or about ourselves.
Disillusionment may be painful, but it’s not bad. It
is simply the uncomfortable process of being
stripped of the lies that we have mistaken for the
truth; and you know, it really is better than the
alternative.
You see, every time we step through and then
beyond another one of our disillusionments, we find
a truth waiting for us on the other side, like this truth
that pain and suffering is somehow an important,
integral part of life, that our cup of joy really can
only be as deep as our cup of sorrow. Sure, we
can try to deny it; we can build grand, complex
illusions to try to resist it; or else we can face it and
accept it, embrace it and use it.
In the 1952 Olympics, a young Hungarian boy
looked down the barrel of his pistol and split the
bull’s eye again and again to win the gold medal.
With perfect right hand and eye coordination, he
became the best marksman in the entire world.
Just six months later, in a terrible tragedy, the
young man lost his right arm. His dreams were
shattered. His pain was real. But three and a half
years later, he was back in the Melbourne Olympics
splitting the bull’s eye again, winning his second
Gold medal, this time with his left hand. What
illusions are you living under that need to be
exposed and destroyed? Pain and suffering may
be inevitable in this world, but misery is not. God
does not always take away the pain, but if we let
him, he will transform it.
There is a subtle but powerful difference between
being cured and being healed, isn’t there? And
once we understand the difference, pain will never
be able to affect us in quite the same way again.
AMEN |
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