Sermon to the Saint Louis Priory School, Friday, Fifth Week of Lent
Praised be Jesus Christ...now and forever!
I want to start off this refelction with a story. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. It’s a story from the life of a saint, although his name escapes me at the moment. He was born into a prosperous and loving family, raised in a supportive home, was popular with his peers, excelled in his classes—you know the saint I’m talking about, right?—he was good-looking and well educated. He grew up, got married, had several loving children and died at a happy old age. You know who I’m talking about, right? Right? No! Of course you don’t. Because that is the story of no saint EVER. You just won’t find a saint in the church’s calendar who lived without suffering. In fact, you won’t find any human person in the history of the world who lived without suffering. You’ll find plenty of examples of people who tried hard to avoid suffering. You’ll find lots of excuses for non-saints and non-heroes--stories about people who would have been heroes if everyone around them hadn’t been such jerks. But I challenge you to find a man in the history books who had a good, easy stress-free life, filled with happiness and success.
Think what our history books would be like if our heroes had made excuses rather than face their suffering: I can imagine Abraham Lincoln saying to his grandchildren, well, I would have won the war if my generals had just done what I told them. Or imagine Winston Churchill whining to his wife that England just had to surrender to the Nazis because really, what chance did they have of winning when his own cabinet wouldn’t support him. I can imagine Alexander the Great. No, we’ll call him “Alexander the Mediocre” explaining that he never conquered Greece because, well, the Greeks were really, really good soldiers. And I can imagine Jesus saying to the Sanhedrin, “Oh, fine. You don’t want my help, then I give up. You guys sort all this out yourself. I’m gonna take a nap.” But that’s not how heroes do things. It’s not the way saints do things. And it’s not the way God expects you to do things.
Because no one can keep you from being a saint—not your teachers, not your friends, not your boss, not your enemies…in fact, the harder they try, the greater saint you’re likely to be—provided you are willing to face your suffering.
A few days ago, I was complaining to a friend of mine. She’s a Dominican nun named Sister Jane Dominic. (No stranger to suffering, by the way.) We’re working on a book together, and I was a little late getting one of my drafts in, so I was making excuses---whining to her about how—you know—it’s tough being a monk. Our numbers are down and the Church is in crisis, and the culture is against us and I’ve got too much on my plate and I can’t seem to get enough sleep and blah blah blah blah. And when I was done, she sighed and she said to me, “Well, you know, Father, it would have been nice if Jesus had told us ‘Pick up your marshmallow and follow me.’ But that isn’t what he said, is it?” I’ve got to admit, she has a point.
I have another friend in the religion business who likes to say, “You can’t expect to be more successful at your job than Jesus was. And look what they did to him”.
The readings for next two weeks of Lent are going to be pretty dark:
from Jeremiah:
"Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him! All those who were my friends are on the watch for any mistake I make.”
To the psalms:
The waves of death surged round about me, the destroying floods overwhelmed me; The cords of the nether world enmeshed me, the snares of death overtook me.
Or even this, from the Gospel of John:
I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of these are you trying to stone me?
And those are just from today’s readings. We haven’t even gotten to the part where they capture, torture, beat, bully, and kill Jesus. (Yeah. Sorry, guys. Spoiler alert. Jesus dies at the end.)
But wait.
That’s not the end, is it? You know the real spoiler; that’s coming too. He rises from the dead. But there’s no resurrection without a death and a burial. There’s no heaven without a purgation. And, as Mother Teresa said, love, to be true, must hurt.
Two weeks ago, I got to preach at the Senior Retreat. I’d been reading a sermon by an eighteenth-century Puritan name Jonathan Edwards. The Puritans were a little… well… puritanical. And they were pretty big on hellfire and brimstone. And I was reading these sermons, and they’re actually pretty entertaining; so I decided to adapt one of them for my talk to the seniors.
“The Bow of God’s Wrath is bent,” I bellowed, “and the Arrow made ready on the String, and Justice bends the Arrow at your Heart, and strains the Bow, and it is nothing—nothing but the mere Pleasure of God--and that of an angry God, without any Obligation at all--that keeps the Arrow one Moment from being made drunk with your Blood. O Sinner! Consider the fearful Danger you are in! The Wrath of almighty GOD is now undoubtedly hanging over a great number of this very Congregation: So flee this wicked world: Be quick! Run for your Lives! Don’t look back! Escape to the Mountain, lest you be consumed.”
Yeah. I got pretty much the same reaction out of the seniors. Because, come on. We don’t really believe in Hell anymore, do we? Isn’t Jonathan Edwards just a little over-the-top? God’s really, really, really nice. He wouldn’t send anyone to Hell…would He?
I’ll tell you this much: for all their many faults, the Puritans at least knew what they were being saved from. And we may not remember Jonathan Edwards for his sermons on God’s Saving Mercy, but it’s rather hard to have a sense of that saving mercy when we don’t know what God is saving us from.
I’ve been reading another book this Lent by a black Southern Baptist minister. It’s called “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” There’s some stuff in it that I find problematic, but he makes one observation that has changed the way I think about Jesus’ death, and it is this: Jesus was lynched. An angry, lawless mob, executed him in a demeaning and disgusting manner while the government turned a blind eye. It was horrifying and it was dehumanizing. And it took those early Christians three hundred years before they started making sculptures and paintings of Jesus’ death. So if you’re wondering what the soldiers looked like when they laughed at Jesus on the cross, have a look at some of the photographs of lynchings. They’re not hard to find; there are lots of them. The photographs were sold as postcards to tourists. Look at the faces in these photographs. Folks like you and me. Laughing. Children with big smiles pointing at charred corpses hanging from trees. And if you think it’s a little early in the morning for such a graphic description, I’d remind you that we have sculptures of such an execution in every room of our school. Look at the crucifix. And ask yourself: was that really necessary?
You have fifty days of celebration coming up, during which you will be invited to reflect on Christ’s glorious resurrection. But for the next two weeks, you will be asked to meditate on His passion, His torture, and His death. If you do this with a sincere heart, then I promise your own suffering will lighten a little. Your suffering will begin to mean something, because your suffering will be united with Christ’s. This is how you will find the courage to be saints. And this is how your suffering will save the world.
In the name of the Father…
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