Many of you know that my son Calvin was named after the great Reformer and founder of Presbyterian theology, John Calvin, but you might not know that he was also named after the other great Calvin in my life, the one from Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip about an imaginative young boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and the adventures they have and the trouble they get into, all while Calvin s parents desperately try to keep him out of trouble and under control. When I was younger, I loved reading about all the shenanigans Calvin got up to, but now that I m a dad - now that I am Calvin s dad - I have to admit that I have a lot more sympathy for what Calvin s dad and mom went through trying to raise a very, very challenging little boy. One of the recurring jokes in the comic strip is that Calvin s dad always wants him to do difficult, challenging, uncomfortable things, like shovelling snow or going camping in the rain, because it builds character, and Calvin s dad loves building character, and the last thing Calvin wants to do is build character. In this comic, Calvin does a pretty good impression of his dad, saying why don t you do something you hate? Being miserable builds character. And it s a funny joke, but it kind of hits close to home, because that idea - that being miserable, going through suffering and pain and challenges, that these experiences are actually good things, that they build our character and make us stronger and wiser and better human beings somehow, that idea is one that we hear in the church all the time. We see it in our hymns - today we sang Take up your cross, the Saviour said, if my disciple you would be; deny yourself, the world forsake, and humbly follow after me. To be a Christian, we need to take up the cross, carry this symbol of suffering and pain and death, deny ourselves and forsake the world. We can see this in our scripture readings this morning - in our beatitude for the day, Jesus says that God blesses those who are persecuted for doing right, God blesses You when people mock you and persecute you and lie about you and say all sorts of evil things against you because you are my followers. In our reading from Corinthians, Paul tells the church that through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies. All through the Bible, all through the church, you will find this idea that being miserable builds character, that suffering makes us stronger, that we need to take up our cross and accept that persecution and pain and suffering are part of being a Christian. And that s a difficult thing to understand, and over the history of the church we have taken this idea of taking up our cross and we have misinterpreted and misapplied this idea to cause some problems for ourselves. For one thing, we have decided that if
suffering is such a good thing, then suffering must be something God wants us to do, something that God causes us to go through. When somebody close to us dies in tragic circumstances, we say things like it must have been God s will or we say that God is testing us to see if we have enough faith to rely on him more, and that is just plain wrong. God does not inflict pain and suffering on his people to try and make us love him more. God does not sit at a switchboard and decide that, Ah, Tommy s church attendance has been sliding recently, so let s give him Cancer and see if that helps. God does not cause suffering. And secondly, sometimes we think that if suffering is such a good thing, then we should go out and look for opportunities to suffer. Back in the Middle Ages, there were people who would walk through the streets, whipping themselves with scourges, trying to force themselves to experience misery and pain because they thought that this was what God wanted from them, and that is just crazy. There is more than enough suffering in this world without us deliberately adding to the problem, putting ourselves through pain and anguish just so we can say that we re holier or stronger. And of course, nowadays we don t do this with whips and scourges, but we have other ways of trying to tell ourselves that we re suffering, that we re being persecuted, so that we can feel very holy and pious in our pain. We tend to get very worked up every December when someone wishes us Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, as if this is a deliberate and vindictive attack on the Christ child himself, and every time Christians lose one of the privileged positions in society that we used to enjoy without question, it can feel like we re being persecuted, like the whole world is out to get us. We can be a little too fond of that kind of outrage, a little too addicted to our own self-image of the persecuted, long suffering church, when in reality as white, middle class Christians in Canada, we are pretty comfortable with very little persecution to actually complain about. God doesn t want us to seek out suffering, to revel in it and make it part of our identity. And the third way the church has missed the mark on suffering is that sometimes, we have used these verses, these encouragements to trust God in the midst of suffering and rejoice in persecution because your reward will be great in heaven, we have used these verses to keep the people who are actually suffering because of us from complaining about it. There s a lovely old hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, which some of you have probably heard, all about how God has made all the things in the world, and one of the verses says The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate, which is basically
saying to the poor guy, Cheerio, old chap, God wants me to enjoy grey poupon and caviar and you to eat nothing but pencil shavings, but just remember that God made us this way, and besides, suffering builds character, so really, aren t you the lucky one! You ll get lots of rewards in heaven, and I ll just have to content myself with my extravagant wealth now. Telling people who are suffering that they are actually better off, that they should be happy in their pain because God wants it that way, telling a woman who is being abused that she should just tough it out and take the pain and the suffering, that is just plain wrong. Using God s words to justify our own evil, to make the suffering we inflict on the people around us seem noble or virtuous, that is despicable. God doesn t want us to suffer. So if God doesn t cause us to suffer, if God doesn t want us seek out suffering, if God doesn t want us to encourage others to suffer, then what is all this talk about taking up your cross, about God blessing those who are persecuted and mocked and abused for doing right? Why do so many passages of scripture and so many of our hymns tell us that suffering is somehow good? Well, take a closer look at those scriptures that talk about suffering. In Matthew, Jesus tells us that we are blessed when we are persecuted for being his followers, for doing what is right and joining ourselves to Jesus Christ. In Corinthians, Paul tells us that our bodies share in the death of Jesus Christ. And when Jesus tells us to take up our cross and follow him, he s talking about us doing something that he himself has done we take up our cross because he has taken up his cross, and so we follow him and grow closer to him when we take up the cross. In all these passages, suffering brings us closer to Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ is someone who has suffered Jesus Christ is someone who has already taken up his cross and suffered all the persecution and mockery and abuse this world could throw at him, even entering into death itself, and so if we re going to follow Jesus, if we re going to grow closer to Jesus through how we suffer, we need to know how and why Jesus suffered. If we re going to follow in his footsteps, we need to know where those footsteps have been and where they re going if we re going to take up our cross, we need to know what Jesus did when he took up his. And when Jesus took up his cross, when Jesus was persecuted and abused and mocked, when Jesus suffered, he didn t suffer for his own sake. Jesus didn t suffer to make himself stronger, to strengthen his relationship with God, to build his character. Jesus didn t suffer because he wanted to gain some kind of personal benefit from that suffering, and he didn t enjoy it, and he didn t seek it out. Jesus didn t suffer for
himself, he did it for others. He did it for us. Jesus suffered because we were suffering. Humanity was in pain, we were in pain, lost in our sin and misery, surrounded by death and cruelty and despair, we were suffering, and God decided to enter into that suffering and join us in that pain, in Jesus Christ God became part of this world, part of this bleeding, dying, suffering world. And it didn t have to be that way. God could ve just left us to wipe ourselves out, just hit the reset button on creation and whip up a new batch of creatures who wouldn t keep murdering and raping and hating one another, but instead, God joined us in our suffering, Jesus took up his cross so that we wouldn t be alone in the trouble of this world, so that we wouldn t be forever lost. Jesus suffered because we suffer. And if that s the way that Jesus suffered, then that s the kind of suffering that all those scriptures and all those hymns are talking about, that s the kind of suffering that causes us to be blessed, not when we suffer not when bad, miserable, painful things happen to us but when we see someone else suffering, and we enter into that suffering to be with them, when we follow Jesus Christ into the pain and anguish of this world, to help someone carry their pain so that they don t have to carry it alone. When we willingly take on persecution and pain on behalf of another person, when we put ourselves in their place and share the road they travel, that s when we are blessed. We are called to go out into the world and help people carry their pain, help people to suffer, to stand with those who are abused and cast out, to lift up those who are tired and discouraged, to demand justice for those who are oppressed. We are called to go out to the hospitals and the cemeteries, to the reservations and the inner cities, to find people who are suffering and give them our love, to give of what we have so that we share in their suffering just as Jesus Christ shared in our suffering when he went to the cross for us. And when we do this, when we take up our cross and enter into the darkness and the suffering of the world around us, that s where we will meet Jesus Christ. The same God who came to meet us in the stable of Bethlehem and the hills of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem, the same God who worked with fishermen and healed the lepers and loved the outcasts, the same God who suffered and died on a cross at Calvary, Jesus Christ is here with us now. In Christ, God still enters into our suffering, into our pain, and when we share the suffering of the world, when we enter into the pain of the people around us and sit with them and cry with them, Jesus Christ is there with us. In the midst of the darkness, the light of Christ shines, and we who share in the death of Christ can there share in his life. Suffering is not something we are meant to seek out, it is not something we are meant to enjoy, it is something that
we all will face, and we are called to face it together, to lift each other up and strengthen tired hands and say to those with fearful hearts, be strong and do not fear, For our God is coming, and he is a God who saves. He is a God who enters into the darkness to shine his light, he is a God who joins us in our suffering so that we can join him in his glory, and when we follow Jesus Christ wherever he leads, when we take up our cross and enter into the pain and anguish of our brothers and sisters so that they can share in God s love, then we have God s promise that we will enter Jerusalem singing, crowned with joy, that the sorrow and mourning of this broken world will one day disappear, that the joy of the Lord will be ours, forever and ever more. Amen.