God's Endurance... and Ours--October 6, 2023

God's Endurance... and Ours--October 6, 2023

"But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our bodies." [2 Corinthians 4:7-10]

Let's put away once and for all the wrongheaded notion that Christianity is supposed to make us richer, more popular, or free of troubles.  It just ain't so.

This, of course, is in spite of the popular voices of Respectable Religious People on TV and radio who keep selling some version of our faith (often along with their own merchandise, of course) that says following Jesus is just a means for achieving health and wealth, along with perfect kids and a winning smile.  As popular as that "prosperity gospel" may be (all those variations of "God wants you to be rich and successful, if only you'll..."), the apostle Paul doesn't believe a word of it.  His own experience following Jesus has taught him just the opposite: that walking in Jesus' footsteps tends to lead us along the path of suffering, rejection, and hardship.  But for Paul, facing those difficulties didn't lead him to conclude that the gospel must not be true (or worth proclaiming). Rather, he found that for every affliction he was given the strength of God to endure it, so that he could keep reflecting the love of Jesus for the people around him.

As Paul lived it, it was the gospel of Jesus itself that got him into so much trouble.  To read through the book of Acts, you find that the early Christian witness was seen as subversive and dangerous wherever Christians went and upset the established order.  The good news of Jesus questioned the Empire's hierarchy of things, where the Emperor was on top, the rich and powerful were next, and so on until you got to worthless slaves and undesirables on the bottom of the heap.  And the gospel came along and said, "Nope--the first will be last and the last will be first, and the ones you've regarded as nobodies are beloved and chosen by God!"  Bringing that kind of message got you into hot water, as Paul often found out.  Or when he would tell the outsiders and outcasts that they were welcomed into the community of Jesus, it would upset the religious gatekeepers who prided themselves on "purity" and "holiness," so they would run Paul out of town.  And ultimately when Paul and other Christian voices would insist that Jesus--and not Caesar--was Lord, and therefore would not give their allegiance to the Empire or burn incense to the Emperor, they paid for that claim with their lives. (When Paul was martyred, most likely in Rome in the 60s AD, the charge that would have stuck was something like treason or sedition--Rome didn't care about your religion as long as you didn't question the rule of the Empire.)

So there's Paul, living through a series of hardships and heartaches, getting run out of town, occasionally beaten or stoned by lynch-mobs, frequently arrested, and constantly on the go from place to place as he brought the news of Jesus to people wherever he went.  And so it makes perfect sense that Paul would describe himself as "afflicted... perplexed... persecuted... struck down."  He's not exaggerating or just making himself out to be the victim for other people's pity--he's describing the costs of announcing the Good News of God's Reign in Jesus.   And he was willing to keep doing that, despite the costs and the pain, because he loved both Jesus and the people whom he told about Jesus.  Love led him to endure all of that, because that's how love operates.

That's uniquely true about the Christian gospel, because at the heart of the Good News itself is the announcement that God's way of dealing with our sin, hatred, and rejection of God is to bear suffering.  The cross at the center of our faith is the place at which God's love bears the worst we can do and endures for the love of us; of course it was all that Paul could do to respond to hostility and threats with enduring love as well!  If God has chosen not to return evil for evil but to answer hatred and violence with persevering love (and Jesus reveals that God has), then the followers of Jesus are called to practice the same kind of love that bears hardship rather than inflict it back.  Christ-like love endures suffering, but does not return it back on others.

Endurance, then, in the Christian sense, isn't merely a high tolerance for pain.  It includes the deliberate choice to absorb suffering, to refuse to weaponize it back at someone else as "payback," and instead to creatively redirect or remake it into something beautiful.  Being a Christian doesn't just mean we have to be stoic and stiff-lipped like the old wartime signs that said, "Keep calm and carry on."  We don't just pretend to be made of stone while the world lobs attacks at us.  Neither can we reduce Christianity to projecting toughness so no one sees us bleed, or getting martyr complexes to cast ourselves as eternal victims of other people's "persecution." (As we've said before this month, quite often contemporary church folks want to say they're being persecuted or silenced when we are simply being called out for our un-Christ-like actions or words, or asked to make room for others at the table we were used to controlling.)

So when Paul rattles off that he is afflicted but not crushed, he is neither bitter nor bragging.  He is modeling for his readers in Corinth the posture that Jesus' followers are called to have toward the world.  If we are speaking the authentic gospel, it will mean holy troublemaking for us--and that will mean a certain amount of suffering.  And secondarily, when that suffering or hardship comes, we trust that God will give us the strength to endure without returning evil for evil.  We may be afflicted, but we will not be crushed.  Because we have confidence in that, we can endure without seeking revenge, and we can persevere without becoming vindictive.  That is how we endure--and such endurance becomes a living witness to how God's enduring love at the cross exhausted the worst that our evil could do... and still came out victorious over sin.

When other people see the ways we endure difficulty like Paul, there is at least the possibility that they'll get a glimpse of how God has loved the world.  And in the end, that's our calling: to let the world know just how deeply it is beloved, because such love is worth sharing.

For whatever difficulties may come your way because of following Jesus--whatever inconveniences we bear or trouble we get into for following Jesus' kind of love in a loveless world--today we can trust that God will give us the strength to endure without becoming bitter, and without needing to weaponize suffering back.  And today that might be just the lived parable someone else needs so that they can truly understand the way God's love encompasses the world.

May God's love give us such endurance today.

Lord Jesus, help us to trust that you will give us the ability to face whatever this day brings, so that we can face it as reflections of your love in Jesus.