How to helpfully respond to suffering - Vince Brackett
SPEAKER NOTES
Leicester’s story…
Some time back, I asked my friend Leicester, who often plays drums for us here at BLV, to write about an experience he had as a teenager growing up in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
::I want to share his reflection with us again this morning.::
I honestly don’t remember anything about the message of this particular sermon, just what made me walk away. During the sermon, the pastor played a clip from an event he and 2 other pastors had in New Orleans about a year earlier. During that event he began to talk about the lack of attendance.
He spoke about how important it was to hear the word of god, and that the low attendance at his event showed a lack of faith in the New Orleans community. Toward the end of his sermon for that event, he said that “something big would happen to New Orleans” for its low attendance. He ended the clip there, and talked to us about how Hurricane Katrina was the will of god. It was punishment for the lack of people going to church in New Orleans.
I was 16 or 17 at the time and dating someone who was displaced by Katrina. So when he started to talk about how New Orleans deserved it, I felt especially hurt. He was speaking about people I had dinner with weekly, a family I loved and cared for. He was speaking about a family I watched cram into a 1 bedroom apartment as they figured out how to replace everything they had in their home. A family that saw almost everything they owned under water. This Pastor was telling me that that family was punished by God because not enough people went to his sermon.
I decided after that I wouldn’t go back to that church. It just didn’t fit with the God my parents taught me about.
So Leicester’s intuition there — that this Pastor’s interpretation was off-base in a dangerous and inappropriate and hurtful way from a faith that felt right to him — I’m guessing that’s an intuition all of us share as we hear his reflection.
But what is a response to suffering that feels the opposite of those things? That feels appropriate and good and connecting with someone who might be experience suffering?
That’s an important question right? Because if there’s one thing that ties all humans together - it’s that in one way or another eventually we all experience suffering.
Scripture
Well, for the inspiration for my talks here at Brown Line Vineyard this fall, I’ve been drawing from ::the Gospel of Luke,:: one of the four biographies of Jesus that kick off the New Testament of the Bible.
And the Luke episode from the life of Jesus I want to visit today speaks to this question of how any of us might helpfully respond to suffering…
::From Luke 13…::
There were some present who told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
(Basically Jesus is being told about a huge scandal in his 1st century Jewish world — Jewish Galilean’s blood being used in a Pagan Roman temple sacrifice was morally reprehensible to imagine for Jesus’ audience — think of the way we feel seeing images from 9/11 where a vehicle for transportation was turned into a weapon for terrorism)
2 [Jesus] asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.
4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—
(This appears to be another headline event of the day — perhaps not so much a scandal this time, but a horrible tragedy)
do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Quickly, just to get it out of the way, most modern American interpretations of this passage from Luke get lost over the “repent or you will all perish as they did” part, because it packs such a punch in our culture that is obsessed with guilt and innocence. So I want to challenge us to NOT get lost over those lines. In context, I think the best read on what Jesus is saying here is something like “are we not all human beings in the same boat?”— Like, “Won’t we are all eventually come to the end of our lives, and need to look to God for hope beyond the grave?”
But Jesus’ focus here seems to be to express grief over those who died and solidarity with those affected by these “headline” events of his day — especially in the face of people interpreting the meaning of those events with alarming certainty: that what happened must mean those who suffered were great sinners who deserved it in some way (unlike us… at least that’s the usual subtext).
To me, Jesus’ redirection of that response, and his different, empathetic response get to exactly what I long for from spiritual or civic or community leaders in the wake of tragic or horrible headline events.
::I remember President Obama speaking after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school::: showing his humanity, wiping away tears, a normally composed speaker clearly rattled uncharacteristically looking down at his notes constantly. He didn’t try to offer Americans glib or overly-certain interpretations of what happened or why, he actually quoted scriptures that promised comfort for victims (according to his team of speech writers, it was the most overtly spiritual speech he gave his entire career in office).
That’s I think as good a contemporary picture as any of what Jesus is doing in Luke 13.
::Again, many people of faith today, thankfully, seem to intuitively get Jesus’ redirection.:: We get that it is morally reprehensible to presume that if someone suffers in a particularly scandalous or tragic way, there must be an obvious reason why, like they must have done something to deserve it. And that, instead, after such things happen, what all humans truly need is comfort and hope.
But I think also of the more personal-to-us local headlines in our lives, like my experience after my mom died of cancer when I was in high school (and the experiences I’ve witnessed of friends of mine since then who have also lost parents early) — In my experience, we’re all a bit less intuitive in these situations.
Oh how often I was offered “interpretations” instead of “comfort” in that place, especially from religious people, unfortunately:
“God must have had a reason for your mom dying.” Do you hear how that is about interpretation, not comfort? That is NOT about being with someone in solidarity with their grief. That is about someone trying to fit another’s unexplainable suffering into their own conception of how God and life works.
Application, part 1
So the central question we’ve been coming back to as we look at Jesus through the lens of the Gospel of Luke this fall is:
::What kind of world do we want to live in?::
Big questions like this are what Luke’s Jesus, again and again, is pointing us back toward.
Doesn’t it feel true that we want to live in world in which there are as many people as possible responding to the headline tragedies and horrors we encounter (societal or personal) NOT with glib interpretations or certainty about why something happened, BUT with comfort and presence compassionately offered to those closest to a suffering?
::So my first suggestion:: for us this morning is:
::Try to respond like Jesus in Luke 13 to the headline tragedies and horrors you encounter.::
A couple years ago, I read a brilliantly practical way to think about how to do this written by a hospital chaplain — I think it was on a personal blog at first, but it got picked up and re-published multiple times because it was so helpful to so many people. And it applies to societal headline tragedies OR more local, personal-to-you headline tragedies.
Her idea was this:
::Imagine the person or people most affected by a suffering in the center of a diagram of concentric circles:: — so the immediate family members / inner circle of someone who died, or the survivors of an attack that claimed the lives of others around them but they lived. Or, maybe we’re far removed from the specific people at the center of a societal headline, but in the way the headline plays out in my local context, there are people in my life most affected by the news — like, in the case of the ongoing MeToo reckoning for powerful men like Harvey Weinstein, I think of people in my life who have experienced sexual harassment or assault at the center of a circle.
Okay, that’s the center of the circle. Then, with the first concentric circle out, there are the people closest to the people in the center: their family members and inner circles. And then the next concentric circle out is the family members and inner circles of the previous concentric circle. And on and on.
Okay, now we have the picture. Her rule of how to use this was simple: If you’re talking to someone closer to the center than you, ::you’re only allowed to listen and offer comfort.:: NOTHING ELSE! Only listening and comfort! ::If you’re processing your own questions or grief,:: you have to do that with someone in the same concentric circle as you or in a concentric circle farther out than you.
That feels super helpful to me. It gives me a feeling of a plan for a reality of life that otherwise makes me feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed. Sure, it is intuitive to me in theory that I shouldn’t try to offer people in pain “interpretations” for their suffering, and that I should try to just be with them in solidarity instead, but what exactly does that mean? How do I do that? What do I say to someone experiencing an injustice or a tragedy or an unexplainable hardship? I don’t always know, and so I feel a temptation to avoid them, so I don’t have to feel uncomfortable.
With a plan in mind, I think I am much less likely to avoid out of discomfort, and I am much more likely to be helpful and not harmful.
And also, I do want to process my own questions and griefs when things happen that upset me or outrage me or hurt me, and this says: totally, that’s absolutely important for me; it’s just also important I’m thoughtful about the people I do that with so I’m not unwittingly causing further pain or trauma for people closer to the center of an experience of suffering than I am.
::So what kind of world could we live in:: — here on the Northside of Chicago — if we helped start a movement of people that respond to headline tragedies and horrors this way — with the humanity Jesus shows? How much more would victims and mourners feels cared for? How much less likely would all of us be to avoid friends and family members and neighbors in pain out of discomfort if this was the norm? And how much less might inappropriate or hurtful interpretations of reality be propagated?
This is important now more than ever in the accelerated pace of our news-cycles — there are more headlines than ever before. I think if Jesus’ ministry were happening today in the Age of the Internet and Twitter and Facebook and podcasts, this episode from Luke 13 would re-appear like every other chapter of the Gospels. Because the onslaught of headlines in our world is endless — both on a societal level, and on the personal-to-us local level: with social media, we don’t have to wait till someone’s annual holiday card to find out about that hard thing that happened last summer, we know right away when it happens, and we may be privy to some of their processings and questions in real time.
But that means there is also more opportunity than ever for people to experience Jesus’ solidarity — through any one of us, if we’re willing.
Application, part 2
::My second suggestion:: is more introspective than it is practical, if you’ll allow it — it is to:
::Let Jesus’ comments here from Luke 13 encourage you in any despair or cynicism you feel about your own life right now.::
Essentially, what Jesus is redirecting his listeners away from is overly-simplistic interpretations of why life happens the way it happens: i.e. bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. When life is good, you have God’s favor, when life is bad, you must have sinned.
Even if we’re able to easily distinguish ourselves apart from such beliefs when confronted with a pastor claiming Hurricane Katrina was retribution for people not attending his sermon, in other cases I think we all are still at some level or another tormented by overly-simplistic beliefs about how life works —
If we grew up in a highly religious environment, we might find ourselves wondering if it’s a sign of a lack of God’s favor when making new friends in a new place is harder than we thought, or when adulting is not turning out the way we were promised it would, or when we just feel so consistently down and we can’t seem to shake it no matter how many of “the right things” we do.
Or, for many of us, maybe it’s that we find ourselves wondering if these things, or the unexplainable suffering of loved ones or of the poor or of our own are signs that there really is no God, because how could a good God allow such things?
And I sympathize with those despairing thoughts entirely. Overly-simplistic interpretations of why life happens the way it happens don’t leave room for experiences like that, so it makes sense that we despair.
One theologian, helpfully to me, suggested that Luke 13 is central to one of the biggest things Jesus is trying to show humanity: he flips upside down the equation we’re taught by overly-simplistic interpretations of how life works.
::According to this theologian, the equation many of us are taught is:::
God = unknowable, mysterious Life = knowable, not mysterious
It says God is so massively complex and mysterious so we can’t be sure of his thoughts, BUT what we can be sure of is life — that it is happening the way it’s happening for a reason, according to God’s will.
That is supposed to comfort us, and for some people it does. But, again, at least for me, it doesn’t. This just feels like God sounds morally questionable — can allowing horrible things to happen really be made okay simply because they “happened for a reason”? — does that really make God good?
So this theologian allows me to ask those hard questions freely, which is why I’ve appreciated his help, and from that place, according to him, ::the way Jesus flips upside down that equation that doesn’t add up to me is this:::
Life = unknowable, mysterious God = knowable, not mysterious
It’s life that is so massively complex and mysterious that we can’t be sure of the exact reason for any particular thing happening the way it does, BUT because of Jesus (God come to the world in human form) God’s character is what we can know of in the midst of the uncertainty of life.
Life is uncertain. Not God. God is like Jesus — the exact representation of God’s being and character, as the writer of Hebrews in the Bible put it.
I am so helped by that when I’m confronted with the things that feel hard or unfair or overwhelming about my life.
I don’t feel distant from God, or like God’s abandoned me, even at my most hopeless. And it’s been because of this “life is uncertain, but God is not.” idea working its way deeply into my life. Circumstances playing out differently than I’ve hoped absolutely disappoint me — of course! — but my disappointments have been with “the way life has played out” NOT with God. God is not the problem. God is like Jesus — he is walking with me! And so I’ve been able to feel God present with me in those disappointments.
If you feel like it is hard for you to separate those two things — like frustration with your circumstances automatically means frustration with God for you — then I believe Jesus wants to help you work on that separation today, so that he can be with you in what is hard or unfair or terrible for you. The unknowableness of why life happens the way it does is maddening to the point of despair often — for us all. But God is not unknowable. God is like Jesus. He has comfort for us and longs to be with us in the midst of our despair and cynicism about life.
Prayer
::To close, I would love to pray for us,:: especially if you’re feeling some of that despair or cynicism…
Luke 13:6-9 (We are exhausted with life and want to pull up the whole fig tree… Jesus is the gardener, comforting us, saying hold on, stay with this…)
6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. 7 So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ 8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”