Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 20C, October 13, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 29.1, 4-7; Psalm 66.1-11; 2 Timothy 2.8-15; Luke 17.11-19.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning I want us to continue to look at the biblical understanding of God’s faithfulness, especially in the midst of human suffering. How can God be faithful and still allow human suffering to occur on such a massive scale? This is an important question for us to consider because many have sadly abandoned the faith in the face of suffering and/or seemingly unanswered prayer for deliverance from suffering of all kinds.

In today’s epistle lesson Paul passes on to Timothy (and us) an early Christian proverb. He tells us, in part, that if we deny Jesus, he will deny us. But then Paul turns right around and says that if we are faithless to Jesus, he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself. Hmmm… The psalmist tells us in our psalm lesson that God tries (or tests) his people and that God lays heavy burdens on our backs. Yet earlier in the passage the psalmist praises God for his wonderful works among humans. Then of course we have Jeremiah’s letter to the Jews in exile in Babylon, telling them to settle down and even to pray for their captors! This might sound strange enough by itself (after all, who prays for one’s enemies?). But when we stop and think that these are God’s people who have been driven from the land God promised them and who witnessed the destruction of God’s Temple, the very place where God’s people believed that God lived with them, Jeremiah’s letter seems all the more ludicrous. After all, isn’t God supposed to be all-powerful? Isn’t God supposed to defeat all his enemies and the enemies of his people? The psalmist sure thinks so! What’s going on here? Biblical schizophrenia? Is God faithful or not? Does God watch over his people and care for them or not?

The answer, of course, is that Scripture is not schizophrenic. It is quite consistent in its insistence that God is both sovereign over his creation and faithful to his people. But how does this work and what does it look like in real life? Before we look at these questions in more detail, we must first acknowledge in all humility that we do not fully understand all of God’s ways or the outworking of his purposes. God reminds us through his prophet Isaiah that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55.6-11). And God makes it very clear  in his response to Job’s complaints about God’s justice that we just are not equipped to know how God works. This is not to say that we are totally clueless about how God works. We are given glimpses into God’s ways in Scripture as our lessons this morning attest. And of course we have Jesus, the very embodiment of God himself. Still, we must humbly acknowledge that we look through a mirror dimly when it comes to our understanding of why God allows suffering.

Now to the question at hand. To help us understand some of the seeming inconsistencies we read in our lessons this morning (and elsewhere), we must keep in mind what we talked about two weeks ago. God has indeed acted to rescue his good but fallen world and its people from evil, sin, and death in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But God’s rescue plan has not yet been consummated because our Lord has not yet returned to complete his victory that he won on the cross over the dark powers. But the victory has been won nevertheless because God is sovereign over all his creation, the forces of evil included.

We see this belief reflected in Paul’s letter where he urges Timothy to remember Jesus’ resurrection and the fact that Jesus is David’s descendant. In reminding Timothy of this, Paul is telling Timothy (and us) to remember that God had acted on his promise to David to bring forth a Messiah who would eventually come from David’s lineage to rescue his people (cf. 2 Samuel 7.8-17). Paul, of course, believed that Jesus was God’s promised Messiah and this was perhaps for Paul the ultimate demonstration of God’s faithfulness, especially given what Paul believed Jesus accomplished in his death and resurrection.

And of course Paul’s reference to Jesus’ resurrection reminds us of God’s faithfulness in raising Jesus from the dead, thus vindicating him as his chosen Messiah (nobody in Jesus’ day expected a crucified Messiah) and points us to the promised new creation where God’s victory over evil, sin, and death will be gloriously consummated. This is what allowed Paul to make the remarkable claim that if we have died with Jesus we will certainly live with him and that if we endure, we will also reign with him (so much for the mistaken notion that there will be no rewards for faithful living!). Paul also talked about dying and rising with Christ in his letter to the Romans in the context of baptism (Romans 6.3-5) and here he reminds us that when God’s new creation is finally ushered in, our mortal bodies will be raised and transformed to live in God’s new world where there will be no more evil, death, or sighing (cf. Revelation 21.1-7).

But that day has not yet arrived, so we must hold on and persevere in the midst of our trials and tribulations, precisely because we believe that in Jesus God has defeated evil and defeated it decisively. This, of course, takes faith on our part. But to the enemies of the cross, it is a ludicrous claim because we still live in a world rampant with evil, sin, death, and suffering of call kinds (cf. 1 Corinthians 1.18-25). However, Paul tells us to hang on and persevere because things aren’t always as they seem. After all, who had ever heard of a dead man being raised to herald the in-breaking of God’s promised new world?

Paul could say all this because he was convinced of God’s faithfulness. Paul knew by heart the great stories of God’s faithfulness to his people Israel, from the exodus to the exhortations of God’s prophets who proclaimed God’s faithfulness to his people despite their unfaithfulness to God (cf. Isaiah 43.1-7). More importantly, Paul had a real and dynamic relationship with the Lord Jesus and nothing was going to pull Paul away from that relationship because Paul knew that in Jesus—and only in Jesus—is there life, because only Jesus is God and only in God is there life (cf. Romans 4.17). This is why Paul could make these astonishing claims about his future, the future of all God’s elect, and God’s faithfulness, even as he was in chains awaiting execution.

This also gives us an opportunity to see the dynamics of suffering in God’s economy. First, we notice that Paul does not try to explain why God allows suffering. Paul simply takes it for granted that suffering will occur because we are broken people who live in a fallen world. None of this was God’s original intention as even a quick reading of the creation narratives attests and Paul surely understood that. But because God is both sovereign and faithful, even though God allows suffering for reasons we do not understand, God promises to redeem our suffering if we remain faithful to him, even in the midst of our suffering. In other words, out of our suffering God promises to bring healing and redemption. Let me be clear. This does not necessarily make our suffering any easier but it does give us hope and as we’ve seen before, real hope can make all the difference in the world (cf. Romans 5.1-5).

We see this dynamic of God redeeming our suffering all over Scripture. Besides the poignant example of Paul writing this letter in chains from prison, we see it illustrated in our OT lesson this morning. God made it very clear to his people that they were suffering and in exile because of their failure to be his people. They had whored after other gods and in the process they had become just like the people around them God had called them to help redeem. So in this instance, God had brought punishment on his people for their unfaithfulness, something Paul affirms in our epistle lesson when he tells us that if we deny Jesus, he will deny us (cf. Matthew 25.41-46). God’s people in Jerusalem had denied him by chasing after false gods and God denied them by sending them into exile.

But even in exile, there was hope and hints of God’s sovereignty and faithfulness for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. God tells his people to pray for their captors because if things went well with their captors, it would go well for them, a clear indication of God’s faithfulness to his people. And the very fact that God’s people are in exile is clear evidence that God is sovereign, even over the nations that are hostile to him. God’s people landed in Babylon not because of the Babylonians but because God gave his people up to the Babylonians.

And of course, the root cause of the Babylonian captivity did not happen overnight. God had been faithful to his promises to David so that God’s people living in Judah and Jerusalem were not destroyed as their faithless counterparts in Israel had been. But God’s people refused to repent and this eventually forced God’s hand. Yet even though God’s people provoked him to holy anger, God lamented over having to hand them over (cf. Hosea 11.8). And even in the midst of exile we read these words later in Jeremiah 29.11, “For surely I know the plans I have for you says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

We also see the dynamic of God bringing redemption from suffering in Psalm 22.1-31. The psalm starts off with the words Jesus cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, words every one of us have uttered at one time or another. Perhaps some of us are uttering these words right now. But out of that suffering comes the psalmist’s affirmation of God’s redemption in his life and the lives of his people. Check it out and see for yourselves.

But the most powerful example of God’s love redeeming suffering comes from the great hymn found in Philippians 2.5-11. There Paul speaks of Jesus’ humiliation, both in taking on our human flesh and dying on a cross for us. And what does God do? God raises Jesus from the dead and makes him the rightful Lord of God’s creation! In these passages it is easy for us to miss the fact that there was real suffering being experienced by real people and their stories didn’t always have happy endings, at least in terms of how the world defines happy endings. Sometimes we are called to die—literally, as was Paul’s case. But because we believe God is sovereign, even over evil and death, and because we believe God is always faithful, we have hope in the midst of our suffering because we know that somehow God will redeem it and us.

But what about the seeming contradiction in Paul’s letter? How can God deny us and yet remain faithful to us? I am persuaded that Paul is not talking about folks losing their faith in Jesus completely and abandoning their relationship with him, the way God’s people in Jerusalem abandoned their relationship with God (but consider Ezekiel 18.21-24 for an alternative interpretation of these verses). Rather, I think Paul is talking about the times that our faith waivers or when we act in mistaken ways even when we think we are acting faithfully. We are fallible, finite people who are prone to error and we don’t always get matters of faith right. But Jesus knows our hearts and if we demonstrate by our lives that we really are trying to live by faith, he remains faithful to us even when we miss the mark. That is why we can have confidence that God forgives us when we confess our sins with a sincere heart and why repentance is so important in our faith journey. None of us is completely faithful to God but God is always faithful to us, thanks be to God! We see this dynamic illustrated in our gospel lesson this morning as well. Notice that Jesus healed all the lepers even though only one returned to thank him. But notice also that the other nine were obeying Jesus’ command to them. They just didn’t get it completely right, but they were still healed. And in telling us that the one leper who returned was a foreigner, Luke is reminding us that God’s love transcends race, ethnicity, and culture. God desires all people to come to him, not just a select few. This too is reason for us to take heart and hope.

So we all must make a choice in this life. How will we react in the face of suffering and/or unanswered prayer? Will we deny Jesus? If we do, we know that he will deny us. Or will we trust in the God who calls into existence things that are not and gives life to the dead? If we do, even when we muddle along and get it wrong, we have confidence that God remains faithful to us. Of course, the more we know the stories of God’s faithfulness, the easier it will be to trust God’s promise to us to be faithful, a promise most powerfully demonstrated in Jesus our Lord. To be certain, if we finally take the chance and trust God, even in the midst of our suffering, we are taking a risk. But that is what faith is about. However, the risk is worth taking because if we believe God really is sovereign and faithful to us, we will also believe that he will redeem our suffering, even when we cannot see how. We believe this because God has told us it is so. And when we really believe this, we will know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you like to respond to this sermon? Use the form below. Please keep it clean and address its points, not the perceived shortcomings of the writer.

Sermon delivered on Trinity 19C, Sunday, October 6, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Click here to listen to this powerful sermon.

Lectionary texts: Lamentations 1.1-6; Psalm 137.1-9; 2 Timothy 1.1-14; Luke 17.5-10.

Thomas Obadiah Chisholm was born in a log cabin in 1866. He experienced a conversion in his 30’s which led him to become a Methodist pastor. But shortly after becoming a pastor his health began fail. This forced him to leave the pastorate and led to a difficult life of poor health. His life was turned upside down. At age 75 looking back over his long life he saw not the numerous health problems that had plagued him, but the blessings that he had received from God each day. To celebrate his blessed life Chisholm wrote a poem. Join me in singing the first verse:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.

Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

The book of Lamentation  is a series of poems of inexpressible sadness, raw pain, and deep sorrow. Jeremiah, as most attribute this to him, put into words Israelites experience of living through enormous public and personal suffering as their home city of Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 B.C. For the Israelites, that city was the focus of dreams and hopes, the sign of God’s presence, the promise of Gods fidelity to them; its hills, its Temple, its walls and gates all spoke to travelers and residents alike of what they treasured. And now the place was gone, and they wept. They wept for being invaded, for their national identity and security damaged; they wept for abandonment by their kings; they wept for old ones killed and unburied; they wept for children dead in the streets. They wept for all the questions shouted, sighed, and whispered to God that the heavens did not answer.

In the midst of all this Jeremiah was having a really bad day. His mind was racing through all that he had been through. He was focused on his own problems which were many and he was fighting despair, His life had turned upside down.

I remember in the year 2005 when my life had turned upside down. My Father, God bless his heart, complained of not feeling well for quite some time even after receiving medication in the existing clinic in the neighborhood. I decided to take him for medical checkup in a better hospital, where he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor that was in his stomach. This was an indication that his life was not going to last long. My father and the entire family were devastated and heartbroken. Our lives were upside down. We desperately needed God’s intervention.

I remember another time also when my father in-law went drinking the whole day and at around midnight when he was going home he fell on a cliff and he was rushed to the clinic and after examination it was found out that his spine was broken and the Nurse said there was nothing they could do and that he just had few weeks to live. Philarice and the family needed friends to comfort them because their life had turned upside down. My wife needed someone to sit with her in waiting as the hours passed.

Have you ever experienced your life being upside down? I am sure most of us have at one time or another. But even if it has never happened to you or your family it happens every day in places like Syria, Sudan, Gaza and Iraq. The epidemic of HIV/AIDs turns lives upside down for millions of people and their families.

In today’s psalm the psalmist sings of the destruction of Jerusalem from the people’s perspective, their lives have been turned upside down they are longing for their home, though the home no longer exists. The last verse, however, speaks to the very human desire to have revenge, even to kill children and infants. It is a horrible verse, speaking to the horrible desire that we as human beings can have and the actions we are capable of.

When our lives turn upside down we may be angered and we try to pray so hard to God, however sometimes our prayers seem to fall on deaf hears. Is God deliberate in not answering prayers or maybe our prayers never reach God? This is the biggest fear of Christians, that our prayers never find their way to God. But listen to Jeremiah’s great reversal, “but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” In the middle of Jeremiah’s life turning upside down he began singing “Great is Thy Faithfulness”. He did this because his mind was turned from his own upside down life to the faithfulness and love of God who hears every prayer.

Jeremiah knew that God already knows the prayers that are written on our hearts. God’s love was not dependant on things getting better and better. God’s love did not depend on our hard work or our success. Jeremiah knew that the Hebrews would never be cut off from God’s love because God’s love only depends on God’s faithfulness which never ends.

We can’t earn this love. There is nothing we ever do to deserve it. Jeremiah tells it just shows up every day. Who of us by our hard work made the sun rise this morning? How much did you pay for the air in your lungs? Who of us deserves the love we receive from the person closest to us? None of us do. we receive God’s love by God’s mercy, a free gift of God’s grace.

So when our lives turn upside down what should we do? Jeremiah says to wait patiently. Just wait in silence waiting for God to act. It is only while waiting in silence that our souls go looking for God. Waiting is after all the only thing you can do when your life turns upside down. But in the silence, God reminds you of your hopes and dreams and the blessings you have received throughout your life. On our retreat somebody said you will find God everywhere but in comfort. When we think all is done God manifest himself.

The Hebrews in exile were richly blessed by God. After a Sabbatical rest of 70 years they were permitted to return and rebuild their city and God’s temple. The one blessing God withheld from them was having their own king. But they were filled with the hope of the faithfulness of God. So they longed for the day when God would fulfill his promise and restore David’s kingdom. They waited and hoped for 400 years for a descendant of David to return as the messiah. God is faithful. Around 4BC a descendant of David was born, not as the king of an earthly kingdom, but as the king of the heavenly Kingdom of God. In Jesus Christ all of God’s promises were fulfilled to those who had waited and hoped. Great is God’s faithfulness.

Paul’s greeting and opening exhortation in the second letter to Timothy that we read today says: Remember who you are, rekindle the gift in you, don’t be afraid. There is no shame in suffering when it comes from trusting and obeying the Lord. As the Gospel put we are going through what we ought to as slaves. We are obedient to the call we received.

Let us focus on God’s faithfulness when our lives are turned upside down and our faith in him will be strengthened. As we conclude let us sing Thomas’ poem prayerfully as we meditate on how great the faithfulness of God is when we feel hopelessness surrounding us.

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

Refrain

In the Name of the Father the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.