FEBRUARY 17, 2008 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 5:1-5; John 3:1-17
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character…
The word endurance can be defined in two main ways, as either:
1. the power to bear pain or hardships; or as
2. stamina, the ability to last despite fatigue or stress.
Endurance is a word that fills my mind’s eye with images of:
- an Iditarod sled-dog team pushing themselves beyond exhaustion;
- a person fighting cancer, struggling through cycles of chemo and radiation;
- anyone whose loved-one’s death has left a huge hole in their heart;
- someone in the military on a tour of duty in a hostile environment; …
- a teacher on Valentine’s Day, whose kids have eaten sugar since 10:00 am;
- and, in this election year, a presidential candidate who must plod through primaries, court the caucuses, and invigorate the party’s voters.
Such examples, though all challenging, are fairly obvious. And though we may not want to picture ourselves in any of those roles, we can understand what’s required to bear such challenges, to face such hardships, to somehow summon the stamina to stay the course, to survive the struggle and, hopefully, even dare to thrive. That, I think, is endurance.
Then I looked up the word character. It, too, has a lot of possibilities, most of which can also be boiled down into two categories. But here, the one is flattering and the other…well, kind of…flaky; the one honorable and the other outrageous; the one laudable and the other downright laughable.
The first category defines character in the sense of moral strength and integrity, backbone and honesty, determination and honor. The other defines character in these terms: a person who is an odd or striking individual: an eccentric, a crank or a nutcase; an odd duck, an oddball or a weirdo; a crackpot, a flake, a kook or a freak. Now, I’m pretty sure that Paul has in mind the first definition when he assures us that endurance produces character… Certainly, such suffering might, in fact, produce an assortment of characters, but I don’t think that’s where Paul is leading us.
In fact, in the preceding chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul talks about the promise God makes to Abraham and Sarah, the very experience that is recalled in our O.T. lesson for today. Out of the blue, God calls Abraham and Sarah to leave their families and go where God will lead them.
Three basic things God promises the two:
- that they will have a country to call their own,
- that they will have many descendants, and
- that in some strange way, they will bless all the families of the earth.
What a delightful declaration, a great guarantee, a particularly pleasing promise…and with that sacred assurance ringing in their ears, the two go off across the desert, eager to experience their vision of God’s word.
Now, as you may know, there was absolutely nothing immediate about their gratification. After all, our theme for today is: endurance produces character… So would someone share with us the “rest of their story?”
Years pass, and as far as the promise of a country goes: the only land they own is a burial plot; as for children: good old Ab is ancient and Sarah’s gone through menopause; finally, as for this cosmic blessing, the two have known much more pain than pleasure, sorrow than satisfaction, agony than ecstasy, bane than blessing. In fact, when God finally starts fulfilling this great promise, Abraham falls on his face and giggles (Gen. 17:17), while Sarah, though more discreet, also laughs at God’s reassurance (18:12)!
So laughable, in fact, is their frustration, that even the Apostle Paul centuries late, refers to it. Yet it’s not their discontent that he describes, but their determination to live or die by God’s dependability. Hoping against hope, Paul says of Abraham, with his body, quote, already as good as dead, and Sarah, whose womb was painfully barren (Romans 4:18-19), still: they believed…and it was reckoned to them as righteousness (4:22).
Now, as Julia said last week, I will say again today: neither suffering NOR endurance have any sense of meaning in and of themselves. Simple endurance is not salvific. Certainly there’s an element of truth in the Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote from 1888: What does not kill me, makes me stronger. But left to our own devices, our troubling times, our wasted worries, our dark days of difficult dreams, we can also find ourselves lost as we wander in a wilderness of weal and woe.
We need something more righteous than the resiliency of the human race, something more meaningful than a meticulous morality, something more virtuous than the vitality of our vigor…
Believe it or not, I’m going to do something now that I’ve only done one other time in my ministry. Are you ready? I’m going to refer to a person who was as a guest on…(drum-roll please) “The Oprah Winfrey” show. My wife caught this video from an e-mail and sent it to me – it is remarkable in many ways. Randy Pausch is a young man, husband, father of three young children, and soon to be a victim of pancreatic cancer.
A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Pausch was asked to speak at a campus gathering that led to his appearance on “Oprah.” He limited his topic for his “last great lecture” – he set aside his cancer, his impending death and his pain of leaving his family as far too personal to speak about in a large group. Instead, he said, he would talk about life and how to live. It’s a great video - all over the net – youtube, google videos, etc.
What struck me most about his lecture (or sermon!) is that the very same topic, I believe, is addressed by Jesus in today’s gospel conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:1-17). This Pharisee comes looking for some assurance that the people’s hope (and his??) will not be crushed if they dare to trust that Jesus will lead them: through the dark night of sorrow, through the valley of the shadow of death, through those murky moments when the light of life seems all but snuffed out by the sufferings of this world.
Certainly there have been disagreements debated, books blasted and opinions pinioned over the meanings of Jesus’ words. But of this I am sure: at the end of our lesson, Jesus offers to the world that something more for which we look - more righteous, meaningful and virtuous, than any hollow haven of a merely wholesome human heart.
Please turn to the lesson on the back of the bulletin, or in your pew bibles. Let’s read together those last two verses (John 3:16-17): For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. For the whole world, Jesus turns our endurance into character…and what a character that is! Amen