PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

First Peter 2:18-25                                                                 To This You Were Called

Sermon April 13, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  the Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            I want to invite you to think about something with me this morning—something so different from the way we usually think of our lives that it may just be surprising.  I want us to think about "redemptive suffering," but in the present tense—our redemptive suffering.  Where I want us to end up at the conclusion of this sermon is a place where we can say:  My stresses connect my everyday life to Christ. 

 

            The Second Lesson today is addressed to slaves.  Does it offend you that First Peter tells slaves to accept whatever their masters do to them?  "Submit with all deference to your masters…."  Our country fought a war, brother against brother, to end slavery!  We wish First Peter had thought in terms of justice, not accepting injustice.  But the text is right there in front of us:

It just doesn't sound right to us.  Of course if there's no way out of a beating, then it's persecution; and we can see how persecution is a witness to the gospel.  But First Peter seems to be saying that this is the normal way to live, not just a momentary experience; and that sounds wrong.  In First Peter's defense I will point out that no secular Roman literature in that day ever addressed slaves as if they were the writer's equal, only in the New Testament do we find the idea that slaves had the right to make their own moral choices.  In this idea, First Peter and many other passages in the New Testament, laid the foundation for an ethics of justice to come later.[1]  Still we cringe to read:  "To this you have been called." 

What a repulsive line of thought!  Except for this:  that if Christ's suffering on the cross was "redemptive suffering" for us, and if that is an example for us to follow, then might we also be able to suffer redemptively for others?  Might we somehow be able "to share in the sufferings of Christ," as Paul wrote in Philippians, "that we might share in his resurrection"?[2]

            As a matter of fact the Apostle Paul wrote about redemptive suffering in several of his letters—passages that seem hard to understand, because we want to resist the idea that our own suffering—the stresses we face because we are trying to reach up higher—might be anything other than evil—something to be rid of.  Paul wrote this astonishing sentence in his letter to the Colossians:[3]

When Paul was in prison in Rome the Christians in the Greek city of Philippi sent one of their people, Epaphroditus, to take Paul some money and some supplies, and to help him in any way he could during his imprisonment.  While Epaphroditus was in Rome he became gravely ill and almost died.  But listen to the way Paul described his experience when he wrote a "thank-you" back to Philippi:[4]

The language Paul uses to describe his helper's sickness is really a description of "redemptive suffering"—he suffered in order to sustain an Apostle.  We might say, "Oh, he just got sick."  But Paul says that Epaphroditus was sharing in the redemptive suffering of Jesus Christ! 

            And Paul isn't the only New Testament writer who thinks of Christian ethics as somehow connecting our stresses with the sufferings of Christ.  Here are some words of Jesus that are so familiar to us that we miss how clearly he's talking about sharing in his "redemptive suffering":[5]

 

            What I'm trying to show you is that the earliest Christians understood their own sorrows, whether it was persecution or not, as somehow redemptive, somehow sharing in the sufferings of Christ on the cross.  We don't think that way about our stresses, and so we've missed the connection; but somehow my stresses connect my everyday life to Christ.

 

            Now how can we get a handle on this kind of behavior?  How can we make "redemptive suffering" part of our own Christian self-understanding? 

            You men who have served in combat:  you have either seen or heard the stories of one kind of redemptive death.  In a fire fight an enemy grenade lands in your foxhole.  You don't know how much longer until it explodes and kills all your buddies.  You freeze, but one of the men you went through basic training with, who has shared all your fear and K-rations and long marches and dreams about home and marriage and life in the real world—one of those buddies throws himself on the grenade and takes the shrapnel.  He dies, and you live.  And never again for the rest of your life will you ever be able to forget that part of your life you are living for him.  That's redemptive suffering.  We know it's redemptive because of the moral tug it carries—remember in the movie "Saving Private Ryan," at the end of the story, when as an old man Ryan returns to Normandy with his wife and children and grandchildren:  he stands looking at the ranks of crosses and stars in the military cemetery.  He goes to the grave of the man who died to save his life, and he turns to his wife and asks, "Tell me I've lived a good life."[6]  Did all those deaths have a meaning that got worked out in my living and marrying and having children?  Soldiers understand what redemptive suffering is. 

            Those fire fighters who first answered the alarm at the World Trade Towers and gave their lives to save all those people—they didn't think of themselves as "heroes," be what they did was "redemptive suffering."  And we're all indebted to them—a whole nation is redeemed.  I think also about those four passengers on the fourth hijacked airliner, United flight 93, as it flew back over Pennsylvania:  they knew they were going to die, so they "made it count"—they brought the plane down in an empty field and saved hundreds of lives.  That's redemptive suffering.  And ever since that morning you and I have been asking ourselves in one way or another, "Have I been a good man?  Have I been a worthy woman?"  --that those people should give up their lives to save us? 

            But these are all extreme cases.  You can't build an ethics on extreme cases:  you have to build your ethics around the normal, the every-day, the way we really live.  Are there any examples of redemptive suffering in normal life?  Yes.  Every woman who welcomes childbirth has engaged in "redemptive suffering."  The Bible itself celebrates the moral power of the labor that brings forth life.  And it may be twenty-five years or more before the child realizes what her mother has done, but when she does, it brings her to her knees—that the mother she has tried to become independent of, argued with, lied to, or perhaps the mother whom she has befriended and learned from and loved—that this woman walked through the valley of the shadow of death to give her life.  That's a kind of redemptive suffering that can help us understand what it means to make redemptive suffering part of our normal life ethics. 

            One more example:  Martin Luther King Jr.  I'm not just talking about his death.  I'm talking about how he devoted his life to the work of justice and peace.  His children loved him, but he was rarely home.  His house was fire-bombed.  He went to jail in the process of gaining Black Alabamans the right to register and vote.  Coretta received information that he was unfaithful—information that devastated her, even though she knew that it might be false; and they had to put their marriage back together.  This suffering was immense:  and it redeemed the racial ethics of a nation.  We still have a long way to go to build full human respect and actual equality, but his life and death and legacy were for you. 

 

            We live in a consumer society:  we've been trained from childhood to think that life should be better houses, better cars, better jobs;  and if you want it, work for it and buy it.  "You deserve" it—that's the message of the advertising industry for a hundred years; and man have we bought it!  But in the multiplication of our possessions, how far are we from the clarity, the spirituality and the depth of these words in First Peter, written to slaves,  spoken to us:

            When you come in your life to one of those stressful times, one of those burdensome times not of your own choosing—not necessarily persecution, maybe not anything grand—your own failure, mistake, loss, need, suffering, whatever sorrow it may be:  when that moment comes for you,   you have three possible ways to understand it—three doors.  Behind the first door is self-pity, the question "Why me?"  Self-pity is a moral and spiritual dead end.  Behind the second door is the attitude of the rugged individualist, the surviving hero, the woman or man who is strong enough to take it.  But although the strong individualist is more morally respectable than the self-pitying person, even personal strength of character, heroic acceptance is its own limitation:  you do this for yourself.  It's still a spiritual dead end.

            But behind the third door is redemptive living—living and dying for your neighbor because of Jesus Christ.  Only this explanation can give meaning to our sorrows.  It is as Paul wrote:[7]

            Jesus' death was for others:  for you.  So if my sorrows and stresses are taken up into the sufferings of Christ, I am sharing that for-other-ness.  These are not just my own little problems:  I fulfill "the sufferings of Christ."  My "cross to bear" can become truly redemptive, not just for me but for my neighbor.  Let me train my heart to say:  My stresses connect my everyday life to Christ. 

AMEN