Month: February 2023

From Suffering to Hope, Romans 5:1-11

by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Lectionary Texts, Lenten devotion, Sermon

Paul tells us that suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope.  Even though this winter has been mild I figure having lived through 77 Ohio winters; I should be one of the most hopeful characters in captivity.

Suffering is not my favorite thing about being a Christian. In fact, if we were to do a top 10 list of my favorite things about being a Christian, suffering wouldn’t even be on it.   I really identify with the Disciple Peter who argues with Jesus in Mark 8 when Peter tries to talk Jesus out of his need to suffer and die, remember what Jesus says to him – “Get behind me Satan, you re on the side of men not of God?”  Pretty harsh reply from Jesus, don’t you think.  But if we look more carefully at that story Jesus goes on to say, “take up your cross and follow me…”    you see, following requires that we line up behind the leader.  Remember those days in elementary school when you lined up to go everywhere, and this leader that we profess to follow, whose name we claim as Christians, makes it clear over and over again that cross bearing is part of what we have signed on for at our baptism. 

For Christians, suffering goes with the territory, unless we want to give up the reward for genuine suffering, which is eternal life here and forever.  In Romans 8, Paul says, “We suffer with Christ so that we may be glorified with him.”  But we still wish it wasn’t so, don’t we?  When I first heard a story about a Good Friday cross walk several years ago when the faithful from several churches gathered in Dublin, Ohio for their walk and realized they had no cross with which to walk, I said, “That’ll preach!”  Wouldn’t we love to have Easter without the suffering and pain of Good Friday and the Garden of Gethsemane? –the betrayal and denial that break Jesus’ heart long before the executioners break his body? 

I would.  I am not a fan of the” no pain no gain” school of exercise or theology.  If there is an easier way to get in shape than sweating and having sore muscles, I’m all over it.  And if someone can find an easy path to salvation, I’ll be the tour guide.  But, oops, there’s that nasty verse in the Sermon on the Mount, Mt. 7:13-14  that says the wide easy freeway leads to destruction, and that’s the one without the cross, the one most people choose, because it looks easier and lots more fun in the short run.  But when it comes to matters of faith, don’t we want to focus on goals and consequences for eternity, not just for today?

There are different kinds of suffering, and some are easier to explain or to deal with than others.  First, and easiest in some ways, is the kind of suffering we bring upon ourselves.   Kanye West and Will Smith come to mind as two of this year’s nominees in that category.  Or anyone who was injured trying to take a selfie in a dangerous place?  You can think of other nominees, less famous ones, perhaps, and if we’re honest we could all be on that list at one time or another. 

The difference for most of us is that we aren’t celebrities.  Our screw ups usually don’t show up on channel 10 news or in big bold tabloid headlines for the world to read in the checkout line at Kroger’s.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less painful or hard to live with.    Mistakes have consequences, which mean they usually hurt us and/or other people, and hurting is a form of suffering.  We all make bad choices, it goes with our free will that none of us want to give up.   We make bad choices that impact our health; we drive when we are distracted by electronic gadgets or when our judgment isn’t 100%; we say things in anger that we regret; we break promises to people we love.  We give into worldly pressure to succeed or cut corners, knowing we’re violating our own values, and we may get away with it for awhile, or think we have; but sooner or later, our chickens come home to roost and we suffer.

 That kind of suffering is very painful and hard to deal with, in part because we know there’s no one else to blame but ourselves, but at least self-inflicted suffering makes some sense.  We can understand where it comes from and why.

The second type of suffering makes less sense to me.  It’s been 12 years now, but I still remember the heart-wrenching and horrifying images of the Tsunami in Japan in 2011.   Innocent, helpless people, thousands of them, minding their own business one minute who were suddenly swept up in what looked like science fiction movie about the end of the world the next.  Or name any mass shooting or the inhumane brutality of Putin’s now year old war on Ukraine.  Suffering type number 2 is the kind caused by natural disasters or criminal attacks or lung cancer in someone who has never smoked a cigarette; the kind for which there is no justification or satisfying explanation.  Innocent children who are physically or emotionally or sexually abused.  Faithful spouses who are cheated on, taken advantage of and left with nothing to sustain life.  You get the picture. 

This is a good place to clarify what suffering isn’t.  Shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the governor of Tokyo made a public pronouncement that he believed this disaster was divine retribution on the people of Japan for their greed.  This gentleman is a follower of the Shinto religion, and I have no knowledge whatsoever of what Shinto theology is or believes.  I do know there are those tempted in most religions to resort to blaming God for things when we can’t figure any other way to justify or explain why bad things happen.  Christianity is not exempt from such bad theology, and I remember there were Christian preachers who claimed that hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast in 2005 because of the sin and wickedness of the Big Easy. 

Please understand, I’m not saying actions don’t have consequences or that sin doesn’t cause suffering – those things are built into the natural order of things.  But that does not mean that the loving God I know and worship would kick people when they are down by saying “Gotcha” or “Take that, sinner” over the broken and shattered ruins of a devastated life or city or nation.  When we need God’s comfort and strength and presence the very most, in times of tragedy and loss and despair, would God choose that time to teach us a lesson?  NO, that is the time that Emmanuel, God with us, carries us and comforts us.  When we suffer God is close enough to us to taste the salt of our tears.

Now, I know you can find plenty of places in the Bible where we are told that God punishes sinners with plagues and boils and hell fire and damnation, and we need to deal with that problem head on.   Even in our text for today Paul says we need to be saved from the wrath of God.   The Bible was written over centuries by lots of different authors who were trying to answer the hardest questions and mysteries of life.  Those who experienced God in their suffering as punitive and judgmental wrote about that experience, and almost all of them did so without the benefit of knowing Jesus Christ, who is the best revelation possible for the loving, forgiving, grace-full God we have come to know and love through Jesus.

We need to remind ourselves that the Jews who wrote their Bible, which we call the Old Testament, also knew the loving, merciful side of God, too.  That compassionate part of God’s nature had just not come into clear focus for them as it did in the incarnation of God in Jesus’ human form.  We sometimes forget that most of our great images of God, like the good shepherd of Psalm 23, or God as a mother hen gathering her chicks about her all come from the Hebrew Scriptures.  The essence of Jesus’ teaching, for example the Great Commandments to love God with all one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself are straight from the book of Deuteronomy. 

Paul tells us that suffering produces endurance, character and hope.  We can see how these first two kinds of suffering can build endurance and maybe character, but what about hope?  We need a third kind of suffering to build Hope, and that is what followers of Jesus do when we voluntarily take on suffering as an act of sacrificial compassion.  The reason Christians embrace and even boast about suffering, as Paul describes it, is that com-passion is essential to the Christian faith, and the word “compassion” comes from two Greek words that mean to suffer with.  Compassion is the kind of love Jesus came to teach and live.  Compassion is the love we feel for neighbors and enemies we don’t even know, simply because we share a common human condition.  Compassion is what we feel for the people of Ukraine because we identify and empathize with them and share their suffering as fellow members of the human family.  God doesn’t have grandchildren – just children – so our fellow human beings are not cousins once or twice removed, but are all our siblings – brothers and sisters together with Christ.

Compassion is a key to God’s very nature.  Why else would God allow Jesus to suffer and die for us while we are yet sinners?   When John tells us that God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus – that’s compassion and empathy to the max.    God becomes one of us in human form to share our existence, including our suffering.

The cross of Jesus is often misunderstood as a necessary sacrifice or punishment for the sins of the world, but when we experience the cross of Christ as an act of compassion and sacrificial love it is much easier to embrace and to imitate in our own lives.  The suffering of the cross for Jesus is an example writ large about how a person of faith handles suffering.  Jesus doesn’t repay evil for evil; he doesn’t lash out in violent anger when he is suffering. He continues to live life in harmony with the will of God, bearing the ultimate suffering in love, compassion and forgiveness – staying true to the way of love which is the essence of life and of God.  How can we follow Christ’s example and take on the suffering of life with character and hope?  Paul says, “Hope does not disappoint us [even in the worst of times] because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  We can’t do it, but God living in us can.

The cross is both a symbol of suffering and hope, because if Jesus’ life ended on Good Friday, suffering would be the final fate of human kind.  Death would define our existence.  But hold the phone; we know the rest of this story.  “Suffering produces endurance and character and hope, and hope does not disappoint.”  For those who don’t give up and leave the ball game when the score looks hopeless, there is good news.  We’ll experience that in its fullness in a few weeks on Easter morning, but for those of us fortunate to be post-resurrection people we already know that suffering and death are not the final chapter in our story.  Thanks to God’s ultimate, victorious will, we can endure suffering and even embrace it because we know it builds our character and makes us people of hope with Easter in our eyes. 

Ash Wednesday/Lenten Prayer

by Steve Harsh, posted in Lenten devotion

Holy one, I want to practice what I preach/write about as we begin this Holy season of Lent.  [See my previous post from February 21 for reference to Galatians 5 and fruits of the Spirit.] The two words from Galatians that are speaking to me this morning are “self-control,” as one of the good fruits of the Spirit and “anger” from the list of opposites.  I know righteous anger can be helpful.  Jesus and the prophets frequently address their anger at injustice and hypocrisy.  I don’t have a problem with that kind of anger.  Mine is petty, self-centered anger over little, insignificant things that don’t go the way I think they should in my daily life.  

That kind of useless anger poisons my soul.  It drowns out words of grace and mercy toward others and myself.  It blocks love of myself and others and even you when I blame you for the inconveniences I encounter which are a normal part of the imperfect world we live in.  I know people that only see me in my pastor role or even in the good face I put on in public may be surprised that I struggle with self-control and anger.  Why is it that with the one I love the most I can be the most unloving?  Is it because I am tired of pretending to be the good Steve in public that I let the dark side come out as soon as I get home?  Is it because I feel safe in a place of unconditional love that I let me anger and frustration get the best of my self-control?  Is “self-control” itself an oxymoron or a poor choice of words to be in the good fruits list?  I wonder what the Greek word that gets translated as “self-control” is, or is that an intellectual rabbit hole to avoid really looking at myself?  Might it be that I really need to surrender control instead of trying like a two year old to “do it self?” As usual I have more questions than answers, but isn’t that where faith comes in? Walk with me on this journey to resurrection, Lord, as you always have.  Amen 

Presidents’ Day, Ash Wednesday, and Lent

by Steve Harsh, posted in Faith and Values, Faith Development

My brain was working overtime on Presidents’ Day Monday.  I just finished Jon Meacham’s excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln, “And There Was Light.”  Ash Wednesday is only two days away, and a Monday book club I am in is reading “Saving Us,” an excellent book on climate change by Katharine Hayhoe.  I think the latter probably explains the song I had running in my head most of Monday morning.  I have always found a lot of meaning in song lyrics, including several from Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that our choral music department produced many decades ago when I was in high school.  Monday’s song was the title song from “Oklahoma,” or rather one line from that song:  “We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.  You’re doing fine Oklahoma, Oklahoma OK.”

Those words got me wondering what a difference it would make if we humans made a simple paradigm shift to believe we belong to the land instead of vice versa?  The whole notion of individuals or corporations owning pieces of the earth was a foreign concept to Native Americans when it was introduced by the European invaders, and given the way we have raped and pillaged the earth and started endless wars over “ownership” of the land it seems the “uncivilized” peoples may have had the better idea.  

The Lincoln story of course deals in great detail about one of those horrible wars fought over expansion of and control over the vast territory that makes up over a third of our current United States geography. The final question that pushed the slave owners to resort to violence was whether the western territories would be settled as slave or free? The best minds of the 19th century, men like Henry Clay and Lincoln could not find a peaceful resolution to that moral and existential question of human equality, and the racism upon which the U.S. Constitution was built still plagues us today. I am reminded of Exodus 20:5 which says, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.” It has been far longer than three or four generations since Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation. The institution of slavery was made illegal, but the dreadful racism at its core is still visiting iniquity on us. How long will it be until that evil has been exorcised from American hearts?

Much has been written about the spiritual revival going on the last two weeks at Asbury University in Kentucky.  Whether that event is a true revival or just a very long worship service remains to be seen.  Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits” in Matthew 7:16, and my litmus test for the fruits a true revival will bear is succinctly stated in Micah 6:8 where we read,

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
    and to walk humbly with your God?”

Ash Wednesday is but a few hours away as I write these words now, and that day marks the beginning for Christians of a 40 day preparation of our hearts and minds for the celebration of Easter.  Forty days holds great symbolism for those of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Great times of testing and reflecting on the meaning of our faith are often identified in Hebrew and Christian Scripture by the number forty.  In the flood story the rain fell for 40 days.  Moses was on Mt. Sinai for 40 days when he received the 10 Commandments.  The Israelites wandered in the wilderness 40 years on their way to the Promised Land.  Jesus was tempted by Satan for 40 days in the wilderness immediately after his baptism.  And it was forty days after Easter when the resurrected Christ ascended to Heaven.  

In our troubled times we dare not cheapen the forty days of Lent by just “giving up” something  we should never have had in the first place.  To make Lent 2023 a significant time of spiritual awakening and renewal of a right spirit within us we need to look deeply into our souls and do an honest inventory of what’s in our spiritual pantry.  Are the fruits of the spirit fresh in my life or are they rotting and moldy from lack of use.  Galatians says, “By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  (5:22-23) Those are all wonderful qualities the world desperately needs, but what do they really mean for our lives if they are to be more than pious platitudes?  And what about those two words ‘by contrast” at the beginning of that list? Sometimes we can learn what certain words mean by exploring their antonyms.  So it may be helpful to look at what Galatians has to say about other human qualities that are the opposites of the fruits of the spirit? 

The verses preceding 22 and 23 say, “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. “ (Verses19-21).

What if this Lent we made a commitment to pick one of the fruits of the spirit to focus on for our spiritual growth? Pick just one so as not to be overwhelmed and look for examples in others who embody love, joy, peace, patience, or one of the other gifts. Pick just one. Pray about it and for it. These are gifts, something we receive from God, not something we can just make up our minds to do. And when we fail to live generously, for example, as we most certainly will, don’t give up, but ask for grace and forgiveness and try again.

One of the best ways to learn a new behavior is to model our own actions after someone we admire.  When I was thinking about these intertwined themes of Presidents’ Day and Lent I was reminded of another President who has been in the news this week.  Jimmy Carter has gone into hospice care and is nearing the end of a long and remarkable life.  President Carter was not a very successful president by worldly standards.  He was denied a second term by an economic downturn and the Iranian hostage crisis.  But oh what a mark he has made on the world in the 43 years since he left office.  He and Rosalynn, his wife and partner of 75 years have lived simple lives of service to others, building homes for the poor with their own hands, building peace by applying their Christian values to international crises, being honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, and all the while continuing to live in the same humble home and teaching the Bible in their church and with their lives. 

We would all do well to pick a fruit of the spirit exemplified in the life of the Carters and spend this Lent nurturing and watering that fruit so it can multiply and feed the souls of those around us. 

Wailing and Loud Lamentation #67

by Steve Harsh, posted in Faith and Politics, Government Reform

“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”  Mass killing in Bethlehem, Mathew 2:18

67 for 45.  If that was batting average or shooting percentage or my record playing Wordle it would be truly amazing!  Unfortunately after the latest gun violence insanity 67 is the number of mass shootings in our gun-crazed country in the first 45 days of 2023.  How can we not be outraged or at least motivated to do something by this unbelievable statistic?  Because it is just that, another statistic that doesn’t move us because we have become desensitized by the frequency of these stories.  These dead and maimed young people have become just another number and not real live human beings leaving parents, grandparents, and siblings to mourn.

Even more tragic is the fact that the numbers of those who are actually killed or wounded by weapons of war are just the tip of the iceberg.  Hundreds or thousands are traumatized by living through and surviving these attacks.  Young people have seen and felt their friends and classmates bleed out in their arms.  One of the survivors last night in East Lansing had been through an active shooting nightmare in high school in Oxford, Michigan, and another almost unbelievably was a student at Sandy Hook elementary on the day the students and teachers there were used for target practice nearly 11 years ago.

And what are our brilliant “leaders” in D.C. doing about this plague?  Of course, they are taking partisan pot shots at each other over anything and everything instead of actually addressing the problem.  No matter how futile it seems I will write yet another letter to my senators and representative to let them know how I feel about this, and I would urge all who read this to do the same.  It may not make a bit of difference, but who knows when it might. 

I am especially sad about this recent incident because my father died 5 years ago this week, just two days before 17 students were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  When I went back to read what I had written about my dad that week I also found several posts about the students at that high school and what they were doing to demand changes in gun safety legislation.  They were so articulate and passionate that I wrote hopefully about what they might do to change things that my generation has failed to address.  But five years later nothing has changed, except the killings are becoming more frequent; more than 1.5 mass shootings per day is just unacceptable.  If we keep up that pace for the rest of 2023 we will have over 1800 mass shootings this year.  That’s 152 per month!  Are those more statistics that don’t mean anything?

I know there are a majority of us in this country who are in favor of common sense gun regulations like universal background checks and reinstituting the assault weapon ban.  We live in a democracy.  If a majority of us want something done that should make a difference.  But this is a complex problem.  Until we fix gerrymandered Congressional districts; until we fix campaign financing laws so special interests like the gun lobby can’t buy senators and representatives things are not going to change.  We the people are not going to have our voices heard on Capitol Hill until Citizens United is overturned, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court I know that isn’t likely to happen in my life time, and that really pisses me off.  But beneath my anger is a spark of hope that will not be hidden under a bushel.

But I am not going to let my despair stop me from speaking up, and I hope it won’t you either.  If my words can inspire my grandchildren to help create the just society we the people deserve then I will have done my job.  How about you? 

MOUNTAIN CLIMBING and Transfiguration

by Steve Harsh, posted in Lectionary Texts, Lenten devotion, purpose, Transfiguration

Two mountain-top experiences in Judeo-Christian Scripture are highlighted in the texts for February 19, the last Sunday before Lent, aka Transfiguration Sunday. Because of that latter designation I have usually focused on the Gospel lesson when preaching on that Sunday.  As Matthew’s Gospel puts it, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.”  This year I also noticed the text from Exodus 24 involves being led by God to a time of solitude by climbing a mountain in response to a divine call.

The closest I’ve come to mountain climbing in recent years has been to walk up a paved path to an observation tower on Clingman’s Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains. At 6643 feet, Clingmans’s Dome is the highest point in the Smokies, but in full disclosure, as with most tourists visiting there, I only hiked the final half mile which is a gain of 332 feet in elevation. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is a fairly steep climb that requires some effort; even though it would never be confused with scaling Mt. Everest. The question these two texts raise for me as we approach the season of Lent again his year is “How much effort am I willing to make in order to put myself in God’s presence?”

Moses responds to God’s call and scales Mt. Sinai, which at 7497 feet is just a bit higher than Clingman’s Dome. Exodus does not give any details on how hard that climb was for Moses, but I am struck by two things it does say. First, after Moses climbs the mountain he has to wait 6 days before God appears. I get really frustrated if I have to wait 30 minutes in a doctor’s waiting room. So what does that faithful, patient waiting tell us clock-driven Americans about what it takes to experience the Holy?

Isaiah tells us that “Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength,” but that text doesn’t say how long that wait will be. It may just mean that we have to surrender our own agendas if we want to be fully in God’s presence. The final sentence in the Exodus text says Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. We know that’s Bible speak for a very long time. In other words we don’t measure our time with God in chronos or clock time. Those mountain top experiences can only be described in Kairos time, which means in God’s good time and as long as it takes.

On a clear day you can see for 100 miles from Clingman’s Dome, but Moses got no such photo op on Mt. Sinai; and that’s the second detail that got my attention from the Exodus account.  It says, “Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the LORD settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud.”  Moses is totally enveloped by God’s Holy presence.  There’s no multi-tasking if we want to feel God’s manifestation.  We have to be fully committed and open to whatever God is calling us to do and become.

I get a lot of inspiration from music lyrics, and the song that I’m hearing as I ponder these biblical stories is “Climb Every Mountain” from “The Sound of Music” by Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein.  The lyrics to that song say,

“Climb every mountain,

Search high and low,

Follow every byway,

Every path you know.

Climb every mountain,

Ford every stream,

Follow every rainbow,

‘Till you find your dream.

A dream that will need

All the love you can give,

Every day of your life

For as long as you live.”

If you remember the story this song is sung by the Mother Superior to a young Maria who is wrestling with her vocation, her call from God which seems to be pulling her away from the religious life in the convent to a totally different purpose.  To surrender to God may take us in very surprising directions, but whatever that path is it will require struggle and effort, not just one mountain-top experience.  The song says climb every mountain, search high and low, and follow every rainbow to pursue a dream that requires “all the love you can give, every day of your life for as long as you live.”  Every mountain. All the love.  Every day. As long as you live.  God doesn’t ask more of us than we can give, just all we have.

Lent is a great time to ponder such things.  Jesus translates that all-in commitment to “Let the dead bury the dead.” “ Leave your nets.” “Take up your cross and follow me.” We need mountain-top experiences to refuel and renew our souls, but we don’t live on the mountain top.  Moses had to come back down to his golden calf worshipping flock.  Jesus and the disciples had to come back down the mountain and set their faces toward Jerusalem.  We need solitude and close encounters with God to empower us, but we live in the lonesome valley of dry bones and the shadow death. 

Spend time alone with God this Lent, as much time as it takes, and wrestle with whatever is on your heart about what God requires of you in this time and place. 

February 11, 2023