Expecting the Unexpected 1 Corinthians 10: 12-13; 2 Corinthians 6: 3-10 Sid Batts

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1 Expecting the Unexpected 1 Corinthians 10: 12-13; 2 Corinthians 6: 3-10 Sid Batts First Presbyterian Church Greensboro, North Carolina February 28, 2016 Third Sunday of Lent Recently, a Durham woman wrote this for the New York Times Magazine: On a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor s assistant telling me that I have stage four cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor. I am thirty-five. I did the things you might expect of someone whose world has suddenly become very small. I sank to my knees and cried. I called my husband at our home nearby. I waited until he arrived so we could wrap our arms around each other and say the things that must be said. I have loved you forever. I am so grateful for our life together. Please take care of our son. Then he walked me from my office to the hospital to start what was left of my new life. There is a randomness about life that we never quite get used to. We never are ready for the unexpected. I mean most of us don t expect our world to be interrupted with sadness, problems and setbacks. Rather, we are often surprised, hurt, disappointed or angry when a difficult circumstance comes out of nowhere and stands ready to ruin our happy existence. And yet this is my experience: I have yet to meet anyone, whom I really got to know, who was not facing some difficulty or fighting some personal battle..with life, with family, with work, with whatever. However, this is often unknown to those on the outside. The truth is we live in an imperfect world where love ends, accidents happen, innocent people are cheated and sick people die. This is to say that life is full of problems and that not one of us escapes them. Think about it and the people around us: Our mother has Alzheimer's; An eleven-year-old dies in a boating accident; Our spouse is depressed; Our parents are getting a divorce; We lost a job and we don't know how we can keep the house; We discover our daughter is bulimic; Our wife walks out; Our son is an alcoholic.

2 2 We are not talking about stories we read or things we see on television. We are talking about our life and the lives of those around us. In an old Peanuts strip, Schroeder says to Charlie Brown, Sometimes I feel that life has passed me by. Do you ever feel that way Charlie Brown? Charlie Brown replies, No, I feel life has knocked me down and walked all over me. Yes, we know. Psychiatrist Scott Peck s excellent book, The Road Less Traveled, begins with these sentences: Life is difficult. Life is a series of problems. And did you hear Paul as he shared his troubles with the Corinthian church? He says he has been through afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, and hunger. Paul understood that life is difficult and a series of problems. He also wrote this to the Corinthians: No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. Hear that? Paul is saying that no one of us is immune to life s problems, not even Christians, not even the most faithful and saintly of Christians. And if we theologically wonder how that can be, then we simply remember Jesus and his life... that he too faced suffering and violence. But...there is something very ironic about our problems. We sometimes fear they will unmake us. The truth is, they often make us. Our difficult times make us because they call forth our personal powers and spiritual resources that pleasant, and prosperous situations never demand, so never produce. Paul says it this way to the Romans: We rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. I Some of you may be fans of novelist Reynolds Price who died in He was the author of many books and novels and taught English at Duke University for years. In 1984, and by then the author of eleven books, doctors found a pencil shaped malignant tumor intermeshed with his spinal cord. An operation removed about ten percent of the tumor, and the operation was followed by radiation, therapy and more surgery. His recovery was excruciatingly painful and he became confined to a wheel chair. Price possessed what he called a highly unorthodox Christian faith and tells an incredible story about a vision he had after his surgery. He found himself by the Sea of Galilee. Jesus took him out onto the lake and poured water over his spinal scar. That experience convinced him he would not die and gave him something he could hold on to.

3 3 Price lived for nearly thirty years after that but after his cancer and that encounter with Jesus, his life became very different. He called it a whole new life. And this is what he said about his life after his cancer: I think those last years have been extraordinarily wonderful. I think my life has been better since than before. It s been so rich in such an extremely complicated way; I wouldn't reverse it, even if I could. Our difficulties change and make us. Again, Scott Peck puts it this way: Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. Wilma Rudolph is a name some may recall. She was an African American woman from Clarksville, Tennessee. She was born a premature baby who caught pneumonia, then scarlet fever, and finally polio. The polio left one leg badly crippled with her foot twisted inward. Until the age of eleven, Rudolph hobbled around on metal braces. Then she asked her sister to keep watch while she practiced walking without her braces. She kept it up every day but was afraid to tell her parents, thinking she might be doing something wrong. Eventually, she confided in her doctor who was flabbergasted, but who encouraged her to keep it up. She did. Five years later, this sixteen-year-old won a bronze medal at the Melbourne Olympics in track and field. And four years later in Rome, she became the first woman in history to win three gold medals in track and field. Can there be any doubt that her episode with polio was the key to her success? Our difficulties shape us and make us. II But there is another crucial point in facing life s difficult offerings... and I think it is the most important point of all. Paul says it this way: God is faithful... When you are tested, (God) will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it. This says we are not alone and we are not merely drawing upon our own resources when the walls start pressing in. God is faithful and provides a way to face our difficulties. But our problems can seem over whelming and Paul seems to say, Hold fast! You are not a victim. God is with you! But watch daytime television and we can see that many feel they have little control over their lives or well-being. I want to say, Listen to the gospel. Our God is faithful... and in our freedom, which God so graciously gives to us, is our freedom to receive the strength God offers to face whatever circumstance has come to plague us, whether it be inside us or outside us. This God of ours is faithful. But there is a danger here in understanding what God intends when God offers a way out.

4 4 Do you think that means escape? I don t think so. And, it doesn t mean that God promises to remove the difficulty. It is not a way out in the sense of running away from the problem. Rather, I think the image is more a way through than a way out. The cross is our reminder that God never promised an easy way out of a jam. As we face our difficulties, we see God s way through them. Maybe we think about it this way: tomorrow we go to the doctor because we are not feeling well. We discover our blood pressure is way too high. So we say, Give me the pills, Doc, so we can get this pressure down and start feeling good again. But our doctor says to us, The blood pressure may not be the problem. It may be the symptom of another problem. And then she begins to ask us about our diet or what kind of exercise we do. Next she asks us about our stress, our work, our family...and we begin to get the picture...that our blood pressure is perhaps only symptomatic of a much more involved problem. It could be that our diet is terrible and exercise non-existent. It could be that stress at work comes from an unreasonable boss that our marriage needs counseling and our son/daughter is in trouble. You see, that s the way I think it is with God and us. We bring to God our difficulties and problems and we expect God to treat them, to fix them, to give us an escape from them as if God were the Divine Repair Person. But don t you think God cares and prescribes for our whole person and that often our difficulties, or how we are dealing with them, is symptomatic of something much larger? To borrow an often-used term, maybe God is a holistic physician. Yet, we often want God to fix some particular difficulty and leave the rest of us alone. But what God wants, I suspect, is all of us, and also that part of us that we do not want God to touch. For instance, we may not know how we are going to survive financially and we are in deep trouble. God, if you will just intervene, bail me out of this financial mess, I will be okay. But is it possible that the larger issue for us has something to do with our stewardship, our attitude concerning the place and priority money has in our life that may have caused us to be in this mess? Or maybe we are constantly having trouble in our relationships..with our colleagues, or secretaries, or bosses, or fellow workers and we want God to fix it. But what is it, really, that God wants to touch? Could it be our heart, our attitude, our respect for people? Could it have something to do with our humility or pride or arrogance that is the barrier in our relationships? God wants to treat us as whole human beings. Often that means that the way through our problem is facing, with God's help, another part of us that doesn't seem to have anything to do with our immediate difficulty. This is to say that when we are a person of faith and we are facing difficulties when we come to God asking God to fix the problem we also have to be willing to ask God to fix us.

5 5 Which means we are willing to be shaped by God the Great Sculptor. Healing can be physical. But redemption, meaning, spiritual growth and authenticity is about our whole self. i i Sources Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me, By Kate Bowler, The New York Times, 02/13/2016 Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, Simon and Schuster, 1978 Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life, Simon and Schuster, 1994