A Sermon Based Upon 1 Peter 4: 12-14; 5:
6-11
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1st, 2014
A popular Lutheran pastor in Seattle, Ed
Markquart, once asked his congregation, “Who
wants to live in Pasco?”* His
congregation perked up their ears, for they all knew Pasco as a barren, dry,
dusty nowhere place on the other side of the mountains. Pasco, is a place where few would ever want to
go, especially if they lived in lush green of Seattle. Again, who would want to live in Pasco? Would you?
(http://www.sermonsfromseattle.com/series_a_suffering_who_wants_to_live_in_pasco.htm ).
I recall wanting to go to serve and work
in Eastern Europe. Not many other people
wanted to go there. My parents didn’t
know why I wanted to leave home. My
pastor friends and church couldn’t understand why I wanted to leave my work as
a pastor. My German mission colleagues
in western Germany also wanted to know why I wanted to live in eastern Germany;
a place neither Americans nor Germany missionaries wanted to live either. And when I saw the conditions of eastern
Germany for the first time, which was right after the fall of the Berlin wall,
the only way I can describe it is like leaving a color TV and going back to
‘black and white.” In fact, it was even worse
than that, the Black and White was ‘snowy’ or had lost its focus and it was
almost like looking into a black hole.
Why would anyone want to go and live there? Why would I.
I’m not sure I knew either. Why
would anyone want to live in Pasco?
What you need to know is that the word “Pasco” not only refers to a place in
eastern Washington State, but it also refers to the Greek word in our Bible text
for ‘suffering’. Peter says that God’s people should want to
go there; to Pasco, because they should ‘rejoice’
to be able to participate, or to ‘share
in Christ’s sufferings.’ But who
would really want to do this? Moving to a
place like Pasco sounds like moving to some ‘god-forsaken’ place where life is
not as good as we have it. It sounds a
little like a life lived on pins and needles rather than pillows and
cushions? Who would want to live in
“Pasco”?
SUFFERING
IS A RESULT OF BEING HUMAN
We might think that life looks a lot
like “Pasco” at times. Terrible things
can happen in this world. People
suffer. Life can be full of it and no
matter how hard we try to deny it, alleviate it, or eradicate it, we are never
rid of pain and suffering. We will never
take suffering completely out of the human picture because capacity to suffer
is part of what makes us human, which is, as the psalmist put it, a life that
is “a little lower than the angels.”
When I was a pastor in Shelby, one of my
deacons and our music leader’s wife came down with cancer. It came fast and hard. No treatment helped. They had two very young sons who loved and
needed their mother. It was a very
difficult time for everyone. The whole
church mourned with them as she suffered treatments, chemotherapy, long
hospital stays, and terrible pain. WE
prayed, we cried, we worried and we tried to keep faith and to encourage her
and her husband, but finally she died.
I have never seen such love and such hurt. He was by her side every day, all the time,
all the way to the end. It took him
years to get his bearings and to regain his joy for life, and to remarry. I can say that one of those sons is now
working with Navigators and we are so proud of him. That was a terrible thing to go through,
losing your mother when you are small.
As terrible as it sounds this is NOT what it means to live in “Pasco”---that
is to share in the sufferings of Jesus.
I’ve seen other people go through some
terrible things both physically and emotionally, that people should not have to
deal with. A young man in my church
named Justin was in an automobile back in the 1990’s, but he and his mother did
not seem to get hurt. But while they
were doing xrays they noticed something that showed up on Justin’s brain Xray. It was not a normal scan and it did not look
like cancer. Justin was just starting
his teenage years. When they did further
tests, they notice that Justin had something very rare called Arterial Venus Malfunction. What that meant was that the arteries in
Justin brain had a birth defect and by the time he reach 20 years of age,
Justin’s likelihood to die would increase about 20% per year. Justin loved basketball. When I would visit him he had every ACC
basketball team on his wall. He had met
and was known personally by most of the ACC basketball coaches, and he wanted
Dean Smith’s job.
When Justin went to Gardner-Webb as a
student, he knew his time was short. But
you never heard Justin complain. I asked
him, Justin, how do you keep such a positive attitude, even when you know your
time is very short. He said Pastor
Joey, when know your days are short, every day I have to have “LIFE” for
breakfast. Sure enough, before Justin
could graduate Gardner-Webb, his time came.
He had to have a shunt put into his brain, but it was only delaying the
inevitable. Full of life and full of the
Spirit of God, Justin Austin gave up his life at 23 years of age. He had “LIFE” for breakfast every day to the
very end. It was so sad, so tragic, and
he suffered at the end, but even this was not “Pasco”.
Suffering comes to us in life, and sometimes,
in not most of the time, there is no rhyme or reason. This does not mean that God cannot bring good
out of pain and suffering. He can. As the apostle Paul wrote in Romans
8.28: “We know that all things work together for good for those
who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (Rom 8:28 NRS). We must not misunderstand Paul to be saying that all things happen for a
reason, or that everything in life is going exactly according to God’s plan,
but Paul implies that “God is at work in
all things, even bringing about good for those who love God…. With
God’s help, we can find hope, even the worst situations and God’s love can enable us to redeem our suffering and our
pain. But this does not mean that
everything in life happens because God plans it. Perhaps
God did design ‘pain’ into our human situation,
and human vulnerability is what it means to be human (lower than angels)
but it does not mean that God wants us to hurt. Any Doctor will tell that pain in the body
tells us that something is wrong and calls forth its own healing properties. Again,
physical pain can have purpose, but this does not mean God makes us hurt. However, Scripture does suggest that God works
our his purposes through our pain, and through our struggles in life. If we bring our ‘brokenness’ or ‘weakness’ to
God there can be even greater healing and strength. This will not always make the pain go away, but
we can always find God’s healing through the pain. It is a good thing that we can find healing
and hope, even in our worst moments of pain, but still, even this kind of
suffering is not what it means to live in “Pasco”.
SUFFERING
IS AS A RESULT OF SIN
There is, of course, another kind of
pain and suffering we know in this life.
Some suffering comes because this is how life is, but a lot more
suffering comes because people do stupid things.
There is an interesting website
entitled, 10 Really Smart People Who Did Really Dumb Things. At the head of that list are people like General
David Petraeus who had an affair with Paul Broadwell, President Bill Clinton who had inappropriate relationship
with intern Monica Lewisky. Not yet on that list, but should be is Oscar
Pistorius currently on trail for killing his girl friend, Reeva Steenkamp. You could fill up a whole set of Encylopedias
with the “Dumb things” people do. The
point is, we can’t really blame our own bad choices on how things are in life,
nor should we say that everything is God’s fault. So
much of the outrageous suffering we encounter in life comes because of the
choices people make.
When I was driving home from High
School, I turned left to go into my driveway and another student, who was
racing down the road, passed a school bus and four cars and hit me in the
driver’s side of the car. When I was
lying in the hospital for over two months with a body cast on, I had plenty of time to wonder ‘why me’? Then it finally came to me that I was lying
in the hospital for two reasons: I was lying
there because teenagers shouldn’t be driving cars under the age of 18, even
though the law allows it, and secondly, I was lying there because the other
fellow made a stupid decision to illegally pass other cars and drove right into
the side of my door with his Plymouth Fury.
The pain I felt had nothing to do with the immediate or specific plan of
God, and it was not any part of God’s great purpose, nor did it happen because
this is simply how life is. No, this
happens because people are free, and free people can do some really stupid
things. The only good thing, I also came to realize is that even when people
are really stupid, God still loves us, and if we are willing to seek him, God
can redeem us even from the worst situations.
We can all understand this can’t we? That a lot of unnecessary suffering and pain
goes on in life, not because this is how life is, but because in our desire to
have things, make things, do things, and create things, we often hurt ourselves
in the process. Take the terrible
Nuclear Accident in Japan, where some of that land will never be inhabitable in
several life times. Or just think about
an area in the Heartland of Iowa, where farmers were using pesticides to help
their crops grow, all the while the increase of cancer could be observed with
the increasing level of pesticides. Were
farmers in Iowa willing to give up the advantages of using pesticides, even though
it was killing some of their own family members? No, they didn’t. They learned the truth, but they did not
desire to follow or live the truth they knew, and suffering continued.
It’s amazing how many things happen to
us in life, even when we know what we are doing is risky, but we do it
anyway. In too many moments of pain and
suffering, it is possible to turn back the clock and do things differently once
the damage has already been done. The
Bible tells us in the story of Adam and Eve that this kind reckless, senseless and
even rebellious human behavior has been going on, ever since Adam and Eve ate
the first bite of forbidden fruit. While
some suffering comes because we are human, much the pain we encounter in life because
of human will and wrong choices. Unfortunately,
we often know what it would take to alleviate much of the suffering and hurt in
life, but even though our spirits are willing to do better, our flesh is often
still too weak to do it.
SUFFERING
CAN BE A WAY OF SHARING CHRIST
We suffer because we are human. We suffer because we are sinners. But to participate in suffering in this way
is still not what it means to live in the place called “Pasco”. Again, “pasco” is the root form of the Greek
word ‘suffering’ used in today’s Bible text (4.13). It is more than mere pain, because Peter defines
it more like a ‘fiery trial’ (v. 12, KJV) or “ordeal” (NRSV). It is the kind
of pain and suffering we bring upon ourselves when we ‘partake’ (KJV) or “share”
(NRSV) in “sufferings” of “Christ”.
Interestingly, many do not understand
the Christian life as a way of suffering, cross bearing, or as an important
part of our own witness to Jesus Christ, even though this is the primary
understanding that comes from the New Testament. The word ‘witness’ comes directly from the
Greek word, martyr; that is, someone
who makes a witness for Jesus often makes a ‘sacrifice’ and sometimes pays the ‘ultimate
sacrifice’.
When Americans joined in the D-Day
landing in Europe, they were witnesses
to the democratic way of life. When Astronauts
get into a spaceship to explore space, as some have died trying to go into
space, they have been witnesses to the value of having scientific knowledge. When missionaries have taken their own
families into difficult places, they too have been witnesses to the love of
Jesus Christ sometimes at very high costs.
To pay the price is what it means to witness and this is what it means
to live in ‘pasco’. When Christians shape their life around
worship and make sacrifices to order their lives around God’s will, not their
own, they also share in Christ’s
suffering as ‘witnesses’ to God’s love, so that we bring a strange, unexpected
kind of ‘joy’ into our lives (1 Pet.
4.12-13) that also ‘glorifies God’ with
our lives (1 Peter. 4.16).
Back in 1990, then president of Columbia
International Seminary, Dr. Robertson McQuilkin, stepped down from the head of
that school to care for his wife, ailing from Alzheimers disease. Dr. McQuilkin had built that seminary into a
fully accredited, missionary training school.
The Board of Directors went to Dr. McQuilkin and offered to pay for his wife to
have 24/7 care; the best that money could buy.
They reminded him that the missionaries sent from that school were
making an eternal impact. But Dr. McQuilkin reminded them that when he
made his wedding vow to love his wife, until ‘death parted them’ that was one
of the first and foremost promises he had ever made, so he resigned to care for
his wife Muriel, no matter the cost it. His resignation speech was heard around the
world and is world famous. Dr. McQuilkin loved his wife as Christ loved
the church, and he was willing to give his life for her, and Christ gave his
life for the church. This is how Dr.
Robertson McQuilkin choose to live in Pasco---to participate in the sufferings
of Christ (http://www.ciu.edu/robertson-mcquilkin).
Not long after I became pastor in
Greensboro, a Deacon in the church came and asked me come and speak at the
Bible Study he conducted every month on Tuesday evening. I told him I would, but then asked about how
many students he expected to have at his home.
He said, “The Bible study is not at my home, but it is not far away”. He would drive me there. Realizing it was going to be a surprise, I
then asked him, how many he might have at the study, but he said that he never
knew exactly.” He went on to tell me
that he would pick me up around 6 and that we would start the Bible study
around 7 pm. As we drove to the study
that evening we ended up going to the local prison. Once a month, every month, this deacon would
go to the local prison and share in Bible study with many of the
prisoners. He did not have to do
this. No one told him he had to do this
to be a deacon. It was the joy of his
life, to share hope with these men who often appeared to be beyond hope. He would often arrange meals for them, bring
in guest speakers, and give out Bible’s and literature at his own expense. This was his ‘pasco’, and this deacon rejoiced in ‘sharing in Christ’s sufferings’ with these who needed a witness of
God’s love.
What does it mean to share in Christ’s sufferings
for us today? It can mean many things. Sometimes it will mean being in a Bible study
that no one else understands or wants to join.
Sometimes it will means doing something you don’t have to do, but you
know you must do, if you want to be who you say you are. People will not always understand why you do
what you do. Some will talk about
you. Others will call you crazy or fanatical. When
the first Christians left Judaism to follow Jesus, their own families often disowned
them. When Hitler started to kill Jews, many who
tried to oppose him, paid for it with their own lives. People who do what is right or stand up for same
kind of love Jesus had, have always been subject to persecution, ridicule, and
have been willing to suffer for their faith.
Sharing in the sufferings of Jesus can
be much less dramatic. Back in March, a young Colorado girl shaved her
head to show her support for friend and classmate who had stage 4 cancer. Because it went against school rules to have
a shaved head, the school suspended her.
But that 11 year old, Katyln Renfro, showed more compassion than all the
adults on that school board when she took it upon herself to share in the
suffering of her friend. When we decide
to do things that number us with Jesus, we bear a cross to do some hard things
that brings hope and help to others. To embrace
any kind of suffering or pain that invites God’s goodness into this world is
what it means to follow Jesus. How
will you ‘share in the sufferings of Christ?”
How will you take the pain and passion of Jesus into yourself which will
not only cost you, but it will also pay you with the deepest joy and
fulfillment of what it means to be real human being. Are you willing to live in ‘Pasco?’ You are going to suffer, so why not suffer and
do some good? Amen.
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