This sermon is based on (Matthew 10.26-33) (Jeremiah 20.7-13) and (Psalm 69.8-20)
I didn't sign up for this. That wasn't the plan. This isn't fair.
Which of us hasn't asked a question like that at some point in our lives, screamed perhaps as a teenager, posed rhetorically at work, squeezed through tears at a breakup or a diagnosis or in the midst of chronic pain.
Albeit melodramatically, both the prophet Jeremiah and the psalmist present us this morning with a real feature of our condition. That dread chasm between the things as we feel they should be and things as they actually are.
And it's right that we bring all that to mass with us. The Bible is full of characters suffering and indeed shouting at God. Acknowledging what we're going through as well as what we're anguished at having not got right ourselves is crucial to the growth of our souls and the growth of our relationship with our God.
We talk a lot about sin at church and we know that we're talking about that what we're talking about is not just that long list of those things we've done and left undone but that broader economy that broken economy of ill that drains us and under which we labour and suffer.
There are elements and emphases in Christianity which have laid us open at times to accusations of sacralising suffering. But ours is not a death cult. Far from it. The church has never taught that suffering is a good in and of itself. We are all called to different degrees and at different times and in different ways to different kinds of renunciation but never as an end in itself.
And indeed it is incumbent upon us as Christians to seek to alleviate the suffering of others when we see it and when we meet it. Yet at the heart of our creed is the redemptive passion of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, that man of sorrows who gave himself up to death so that we might have life.
The mass is to quote this morning's offertory the sacred banquet in which the memory of Christ's passion is renewed, renewed, experienced, embedded in our hearts.
As Christians, our suffering and his are bound up together in a number of ways. Ultimately, because his is the solution to ours, we are moved to sorrow and repentance for the ways in which our failings in love and faith have wounded him, have wounded others, and have wounded ourselves. but also given encouragement through Jesus's solidarity with us in the worst that we experience unfairly.
Reminded powerfully of his presence with us in our confusion, sorrows, and restless yearnings, our spiritual exiles. We're inspired too to go back into the world and see in the suffering of so many the suffering of the son of God.
Commissioned by the cross to stand with others in their pain and do what we can to alleviate that pain to be alongside it. and wonderfully in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are called to know that suffering doesn't have the last word that turned over to God, even our pain and alienation can teach us.
Both our mistakes and the hurt we endure can be used to the good through the goodness of God. We're given perspective and insight. False idols are stripped away by our experience.
Real compassion and patience with others grows through it. A costly but valuable education of the heart.
Today's gospel immediately precedes a passage in which the Lord warns the disciples dramatically of division and hardship. He does not explain suffering and indeed foresees that there is much more of it to come. Yet he exhorts us through the disciples in preparation for all that. Do not be afraid.
In those remarkably tender images of the sparrows and God knowing the number of the hairs on our heads, our immense individual value in the sight of the Almighty is powerfully acclaimed this morning.
In our post communion prayer today, you'll notice that it is acknowledged that it is only in the fullness of time that we shall be able to know God without fear. Shield us, it goes, from knowing more than we can bear until we may look upon thee without fear.
Fear connected, of course, to those clouds of contingency, suffering, and sin that is yet the climate in which we live. We can only get beyond those things, however, in and through our relationship with Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Valiant through his victory amidst the trials of our lives, undiscouraged by the past wrongs we have both meated out and received once we've asked for his mercy and seen them in the light of the transfiguring light of Christ.
A bodily scar may be a reminder of our woundedness, but isn't it also a reminder, a sign of our healing and how far we've come?
None of this is to diminish sin or to glorify suffering. It is to acknowledge that with Christ as our master, we can come through what we suffer stronger and with bigger, more compassionate hearts.
Finally, it's not for anyone to determine how much suffering somebody else ought to be able to bear. But I do think that part of what we are called to show the world as Christians is the glorious liberty of the children of God.
With suffering contained by the liberating bonds of hope, faith and charity, we become capable of living not for ourselves but for him who rose who died and rose again for us and through him for others. Freed ourselves from shame and from the judgement of others.
Freed from resentfulness for what we think we are owed. Freed from insatiable thirst from I want and ready to lift up our hearts in thanks and praise for what we have been given and for what we have yet to give. Have no fear, the Lord says, do not be afraid.
Let us with the prophet Jeremiah shift our cry as he does in that passage this morning from I didn't sign up for this to sing to the Lord. Praise the Lord for he has delivered the life of the needy.
