Most all of us who are old enough to remember September 11, 2001 remember exactly where we were when the planes hit those twin towers. A friend of mine was speaking in West Virginia. He had just turned on the news in his hotel room when the first plane hit. And he remembers the strange way his mind worked when the second plane hit. He thought, "There is something wrong with air-traffic control! Why are they giving these pilots the wrong coordinates?"
There is something wrong with air-traffic control! I think we sometimes think about God as a kind of air-traffic control. When things go wrong and people suffer, we wonder if God just stepped out for a moment or if God possibly could have intended for us to suffer.
Our world seems to be torn apart by suffering, our cities aflame, the Middle East in crisis. The people of Nepal are devastated by natural disaster. Why does it have to happen? What is wrong with air-traffic control?
Studying religion all my life, I have come to the conclusion that suffering was not God's plan for us. No, we were meant for Eden, created for something much more harmonious and peaceful than the world in which we find ourselves. Suffering was not God's original intent. But when we chose to take our lives into our own hands, we chose free will and people were given the choice to do violence, to fly planes into buildings. God is still in control, yes, but God allows us to find our own way.
Because of the fallen nature of this world, we feel pain and loneliness and heartbreak. The question is not why we suffer but how are we to view our suffering. When you encounter hardship and sickness and loneliness, how will you respond? Jesus tells us how we should conceive of suffering in this gospel for today. How we view suffering has everything to do with the way that we understand God. By loving God and living in and with God, our suffering can teach us and even help us to grow spiritually.
We all will suffer in this broken world. But how will you respond when you?
The God of the Old Testament was understood to be a God of punishment. When the Israelites disobeyed or failed to comply with the law, God would get angry. David the King even had a child die because he was being punished for his affair with Bathsheeba and the murder of her husband. David understood God to be a God who would take the life of a child to punish a crime. That is how they conceived of a God, that God willed suffering. They believed in a God who punished.
But not Jesus. Jesus knew that God is love and that love does not punish. As the disciple John would later write in his letter that we heard this morning, it is only fear that believes in punishment.
Let me say that again. It is only fear that believes in punishment.
God does not punish. But when we have to suffer because of the nature of our fallen world, Jesus tells us to look upon our pain as a kind of pruning.
There is a rosebush in my front yard. This spring, early on, I took some sheers and I cut back its branches. I did not want to do this but I knew that a plant or tree, when pruned, will fill in stronger and will produce fruit or blooms. So I took my sheers and cut some of the branches. I did not cut them right to the stem, I left some part of the branch, but I cut off the old blooms and even some buds. It felt strange, to cut something so beautiful, but I knew that it would grow stronger because of the pruning.
Jesus often used images from nature. The people of the Galilee would have understood this image. They would have understood without having to think. But we no longer innately understand. Think with me for a minute about pruning. If God is the vine grower and Christ is the vine, then when we cut a branch back, it hurts the branch, but the branch becomes closer to the vine again....and as a result of its proximity to the source of life itself, it becomes stronger and produces fruit. It blooms.
A gardener prunes out of love, to strengthen and produce. Though it hurts, it has purpose.
Did you know that scar tissue is stronger than any other kind of skin tissue? The body, responding to the wound, fortifies itself. It ends up stronger.
The life of faith is the same way. If we know how to pray and how to rely on God and if we can believe that God does not punish but loves us, then we can approach our suffering as pruning. And in this way, it will make us stronger. Just like the cross made Jesus the Christ.
If we allow it to happen, suffering causes us to draw closer to God. When we fall ill, we pray. When we have to go to war, we pray. When we find our marriages breaking down, we pray. We are drawn closer to our maker through sheer necessity itself. It simply forces us back home to our Maker. We must understand that this suffering is not part of Gods original plan for us, but if it has to happen, then let it be a pruning and not a punishment. Let it make us stronger and draw us closer to God.
I went to Wyoming last weekend to speak to the women of the Diocese. They have so little. The head of the ECW is a priest and a cleaning lady. She makes her living cleaning houses and her church has an average attendance of seven people on Sunday. The suicide rate in Wyoming is the highest in the nation. And there she was, eager to hear whatever I had to say. She had so little but was so close to Jesus. She told me that just a month before, when the snow was still on the ground, she had baptized a raging alcoholic who dropped dead just days later on his way home from a bar at night. In his unconscious stupor, he had frozen to death. Pruned back to so little, this woman held onto Christ with all her strength. And her life was bearing fruit even in the bleakest of conditions. She listened to everything we spoke about with such intensity, as if she was starving for good teaching. And she cried whenever we sang about Jesus.
I knew a young man whose mother got addicted to drugs and abandoned him to the foster care system when he was just four years old. He had memories of brushing her hair, of how beautiful she was but how she would go into a stupor and fall asleep. When he grew up, this man became a father. He learned all about his past and had to confront great feelings of worthlessness. But he also knew for sure that he would never abandon his little boy. His boy would want for nothing. This young man could have chosen to be angry his whole life, to do violence and end up in jail. But instead, he chose to be the parent he never had. He let his suffering make him strong.
Live in me and your suffering will become pruning, Jesus says to us. We live in a fallen world of
free will. But we are never alone.
