Sermon preached by
Matthew Simpkins

Sunday 24th July 2011

The Significance of Suffering
in God’s Love

A Sermon on Romans 8:26-39
Given at St Peter Ad Vincula Church, Coggeshall
Sunday 24 July 2011

 It’s been a momentous week in our household, because our son, Jimmy has taken his first steps!  And this reminded me of our daughter Martha’s similar first efforts. After weeks of her clattering onto the floor and bouncing off furniture, I had the privilege of witnessing the moments she first stood and walked using her little toy trolley.  Toddlers express their emotions with total honesty - and at 100% intensity. And so, Martha’s joy when she toddled along for the first time was overwhelming, pure, infectious. She squealed and giggled as she trundled happily along - and then – SMACK – the trolley hit the wall and she burst into floods of tears.  I picked her up, pointed her in the opposite direction and instantly joy returned. But, inevitably – CRACK – she soon hit the opposite wall and blubbed again.  To my initial amusement – and later, considerable exasperation – this process continued relentlessly for much of the day.  Joy…sorrow…joy…sorrow…joy, and so on!

I must admit to similar faltering footsteps and swings of emotion as I endeavour to walk through life as a Christian. Just as you pick up speed and confidence in what you’re certain is God’s direction, you clatter into something unexpected.

 Paul knew that this was part of human experience, and today’s reading from Romans explains how it is that Christian hope can exist amid suffering and frustration – such frequent obstacles to our walk in faith.  Paul wrote to the church in Rome at a time when suffering and death were part of its daily rhythm. 

He wrote a pastoral letter, addressing the various obstacles this young and fragile community faced, one of which was suffering.  We know from Acts and from the historian Suetonius that the community had been expelled from Rome in around AD 50. Paul writes – probably within a decade of this – to those who would have experienced the misery of forced exile.  Death, physical and psychological pain, separation, poverty – these were the essences of the Romans’ suffering. Paul lists ‘hardship…distress, … persecution, …famine, …nakedness, …peril, …sword;’ (8:35) before quoting Psalm 44: ‘For your sake we are being killed all day long’ (8:36).  ‘The sufferings of this time’ (8:18) says Paul are ‘too deep for words’ (8:26).  Paul writes as one who has experienced suffering himself, to those who are experiencing suffering. And - of course - as we read, suffering is still potent reality – even if our suffering seems insignificant compared to that of the first Christians or of many millions of people around the globe today.  Suffering remains part of humankind’s experience, as the horrors in Norway and the appalling drought in East Africa demonstrate.

 I have an addiction to second hand bookshops. On holidays and days off I have a tendency to slink off and return smelling of dusty books, clutching a paper bag rather sheepishly.   What I’ve noticed on such expeditions is an increasing tendency to file books on Christianity under ‘self-help’. I can’t think of a less appropriate place for books about God – you might as well store your sticks of dynamite among scented candles! Christianity is the polar opposite of “self-help”. ‘Our help is the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth’ (Ps 124:8).

 Paul relates our help from God to the reality of suffering. Christianity is not the superficial lovey-dovey self-help nonsense it is sometimes portrayed as being, it is not a turning of our heads away from suffering; it is - according to God’s example in Christ Jesus – squarely facing up to suffering. The magisterial power of God’s love is shown in the perfect suffering, the perfect sacrifice, of His son. Jesus – God and man – suffered and died – and rose again. He walked among us as a man, and his Spirit walks with us now.  The measure of God’s love is that, in Jesus, He submitted to the full power of suffering on human terms. He didn’t watch from afar, he got his hands dirty, God knows human suffering; and through his Spirit who ‘pleads for God’s people as God himself wills’ (8:27 REB) he continues to know all suffering.  If God knows fully humankind’s sufferings, then his compassion – a word which means literally “suffering-with” – must be perfect compassion: active love, tailored to each and every person’s suffering.  Paul says that God’s perfect love and perfect compassion give perfect hope to all humankind.  To do this he outlines the cosmic proportions of God’s love through Christ: 

          ‘For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’  (8:38-39).   

Paul sketches out the infinite magnitude of God’s love in all the planes of human existence – death and life; the height and depth of our physical world; the rulers and powers of our human culture; time; and the whole of the created universe.  Of course, we are subject to these things: time, space, physicality, human rule; but they are no obstacles to God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - from whose love we can never be separated.  God’s love transcends the obstacles which we clatter into as we struggle to learn to walk in His way. 

Now this does not mean, however, that we should sit back and accept suffering amid our hope in God’s love.  Christian hope is not passive. Paul’s letter to the Romans demonstrates that the essence of Christian community, the essence of Church, is tackling suffering head on. And so in chapters 9-11 he reminds gentile Christians not to lord it over their Jewish Christian counterparts, before, in Chapter 14, demonstrating this in practical advice. Arbitrating in a row over diet and ritual observance, Paul makes his position perfectly clear: ‘I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself’ (8:14). But, despite his opinion, Paul’s pastoral advice here is to be tolerant of, and to respect, differing practises within the community. Paul exhorts his readers to demonstrate active compassion toward those who will suffer if intolerance is succumbed to: ‘Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another’, he writes ‘but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another’ (14:13).  

Our perfect Christian hope enables and empowers us to express compassion in the world – through words, through deeds, through prayer.  God’s love promises the defeat of suffering; and we all have a role to play in bringing about the end of suffering. 

Paul could have described the glory of God’s love first, and then said “cheer up suffering doesn’t really matter when we have this!” But he refuses to resort to the self-help mentality of the power of positive thought.  Rather, Paul first describes the significance of suffering to humankind and the significance of our suffering to God, and from that establishes the incomprehensible power and reach of God’s love.  The universal proportions of God’s love do not make suffering insignificant; rather it is the significance, the divine significance of suffering that allows us to glimpse the universal proportions of God’s love. If Christianity were just self-help and positive thinking, it would merely provide us with newer and more upbeat ways in which to crash ourselves into walls.   The ‘problem of suffering’ is often cited as an obstacle to faith and a deficiency of Christianity. But that God through Christ tackled and continues to tackle the undeniably real problem of human suffering should instead be a clarion call to Christian faith! Knowing that God cares for our suffering, that his perfect love transcends suffering, and that – empowered by Him - we have an active role to play in this, allows us to walk on in joy.

© Matthew Simpkins, 2011

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