Rejoice in Suffering?

Old Testament: Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31

New Testament: Romans 5: 1-5

While in Seminary, I took a class on Dante and we read through Dante’s Hell and then moved on to Purgatory and then to Paradise. I found that it wasn’t hell that interested me nearly as much as purgatory did. As Protestants, we have not been raised to believe in Purgatory which is something Catholics often professed to believe in prior to the 1970s. I think there are some that still believe in it, but it is not as recognized a belief as it was in the past.

Purgatory is what happens to the people that are not bad enough for hell, but aren’t good enough to enter heaven either. God needed a place to put them, and so God created purgatory to help the not quite good enough people work their way to heaven. I think you can see why Protestants don’t believe in purgatory from that last sentence. We believe that Jesus Christ suffered for our sins and made us good enough to enter heaven. There is nothing WE can do to enter heaven on our own. We have too huge a debt to pay when we are on our own, and so Jesus paid it for us.

However, I’m not sure the Catholics are completely wrong on the idea of Purgatory. No, I don’t think we can earn our way to heaven through good deeds. I think we perform good deeds in response to the amazing gift we have been given through Jesus Christ. That God loved us enough to send God’s Son and that the Son loved us enough to die for us and make us righteous in God’s eyes - that is the amazing gift, and we respond by helping others, loving the unlovable, and giving whatever we can to make the world a better place.

If I believe that, then how can the Catholics be right about purgatory? Well, what if purgatory is happening now, during our lives? In this chapter of Romans, Paul tells us that we are to glory in our sufferings because suffering produces perseverance and perseverance produces character and character produces hope which is hope in God, and God never lets us down.

Protestants don’t like to talk about suffering and we really don’t like the idea of bragging about how much we suffer. We like to say things will get better because we believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. When someone asks us, “Why do so many children die and why do good people suffer?” we like to change the subject or put the suffering on our own shoulders. We rarely blame God for it.

However, what if we do suffer because God wills it? Not because Jesus is cruel and hateful and demands we work off our sins, but because we need to suffer? Think about that – what if we need to suffer? Paul tells us that suffering produces character which produces hope. I don’t think that means all of our suffering is God’s will, but perhaps some of it is. Let me put it another way.

When a person begins to work out and exercise they will often hear people tell them, “No pain, no gain.” There is an understanding that if you want a better body and a more healthy lifestyle that some suffering must happen to reach that perfect size. The same is true for our spiritual body. If we want to get closer to God, we have to exercise our spiritual body to become perfect in Christ through the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Exercising our spiritual body is not the same as exercising our physical one.

It requires prayer and meditation and cutting away the bad parts of ourselves. Getting rid of things like the tendency we have to lie when we think it will be easier than telling the truth, and being willing to suffer the consequences of that truth. The need we sometimes have to push others out of the way so we can take the spotlight. Our ability to hurt those we care about most. Our inability to sympathize with those who are different from us. These are all things that cause suffering, not only for us but for others, and we need to get rid of them to become closer to God.

Paul tells us that through our sufferings we learn to keep going and tackle any problem. The more we face our sufferings and fear the more character we develop and the easier it becomes to have hope that the Lord will help us through these afflictions.

There is something else from Dante’s purgatory that I think is true about Christian life. The closer a person in purgatory got to getting out of that self-induced suffering, the less pain they suffered. In other words, the closer they got to heaven and to God, the less they needed to suffer for they had learned many of the things they needed to learn to be a person worthy of heaven. The same is true for us in our lives.

The more we tune into Jesus and accept the Holy Spirit’s direction for our life, the less struggle we experience. It doesn’t mean all of our pains go away and that life gets completely easy. It means that we develop the ability to face any pain with fortitude and with peace. Isn’t that what we all want in our life? Peace. Peace and hope and love are the gifts that Jesus Christ offers us when he dies for us on the cross.

We all have the ability to accept these gifts. When we pray to God at the beginning of the service during the confession, we are asking God to bring us closer to God’s self. We are asking to become more like Jesus and we ask for the Holy Spirit to help us to do that. After the prayer of confession, I often say to you that the Lord has created in you a new person, or I will tell you that the Lord is making you whole. These images are used for a reason. We are not complete yet. We need a lot of help from God to be perfected and become like Jesus.

Perhaps some of you know about how steel is made. It is taking iron and carbon and other metals and melting them down. As they melt, the steel is purified. Steel can only be created through breaking down other metals to create the final, perfect product. This process is important and necessary if we want steel that will last for centuries in the buildings we create. If we want strong steel, it must be purified through fire, and it goes from being a collection of softer and less useful metals to the final product that we desire.

We all know we are not perfect. We all have flaws and imperfections. The person I was 10 years ago is a completely different person than the one I am today, and the same is true for you. Through the things you have experienced, the pain you have suffered and the pain you have witnessed in those you love – you have grown and changed. If you allow God to work in you during these moments of suffering, your character grows to be more Christ-like.

My professor called these moments of suffering our wilderness moments. Like Moses, we sometimes have to go through a long journey full of trials and temptations before we learn what we need to learn. The lesson sounds so simple – we need to have hope in God. We need to learn to depend fully on Jesus. However, it’s hard to do which Moses and the Israelites proved when it took them 40 years of going in circles before they got to the Promised Land.

We too want to get to the Promised Land; we want to get to heaven. We cannot earn our way to heaven, but there are things we need to learn before we do step through those gates. Sometimes those lessons require a burning away of our imperfections and it hurts. It’s not easy to change. It takes work. But as that old adage tells us, with no pain there is no gain. Perhaps it is time for us Protestants to stop hiding our suffering and instead rejoice in it like Paul tells us to do. Perhaps it is time for us to stop treating our suffering as a thing of shame. Instead we should remember that we are never alone in our pain for Jesus suffers with us and the Holy Spirit guides us and the Father watches over our whole lives.

When we remember this we are given peace; the peace of a people who know that the ultimate reward is ours, and we are assured that through what Jesus did for us.

Amen.