Joan Vennochi is an occasional columnist for the Boston Globe.  Besides being a journalist she has received a purple heart and a silver star for her dedication teaching a seventh grade Sunday school class at her church.  One Sunday not long ago the lesson was on Jesus, and how he went about doing good, resisting violence, turning the other cheek, and generally being a heavenly presence in a messy world.

 

Of course, the purpose of the lesson was to set up Jesus as a wonderful role model worthy not only of our adoration but also our emulation.  However, the reaction of the class to this suggestion was depressing if instructive.  For instead of seeing Jesus as a role model, they saw him as a loser, someone who would not get very far in the real, hurly-burly world in which they were living.

 

Ms. Vennochi commented, “Their role models are athletes, actors, and anybody who makes money; and when asked if any one they knew reminded them in any way of Jesus, they fell uncharacteristically silent.  They could not think of a soul."

 

If you are a Christian sitting in church on Sunday, it has to be a little depressing to hear that your hero is not getting his due.  But upon reflection that has always been the enigma of the Christian faith, our hero was a loser.  The Bible itself makes no bones about it.  He was trashed and humiliated and was forced to suffer a manner of death that had a special curse upon it.

 

We call him a “suffering servant” as if that title bestows meaning on a good life that had a tragic ending.  Our patron saint, John Calvin, tries to help us out when he writes, “Christ passed to celestial glory through a labyrinth of many woes.”  In spite of that triumphant summary, the fact for many of us is that the complexity and immensity of the suffering of our world sometimes overwhelms us causing us to feel lost in a maze of miseries.  Now I just used two words in that paragraph that provide two completely different perspectives on suffering -- labyrinth and maze.  And I want to suggest that perhaps the difference between the two can give us a clue for dealing with suffering.

 

 

I.  The Path of Suffering -- A Labyrinth or a Maze

 

One doesn’t have to be very spiritual or terribly religious to be troubled by Harold Kushner’s popular question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  And it keeps coming back to us because it happens again-and-again.  It causes some to be angry with God.  It causes some to reject God.  And interestingly enough, it brings some closer to God.

 

There was the young dentist in a former congregation whose son had been diagnosed with leukemia.  Bob had been pretty much of a Christmas and Easter guy.  I remember dropping by one evening to see how he and Sue were doing, and I have never forgotten his response, “I know this kind of thing provides a crisis of faith for many which drives them away from God.  Just the opposite is happening to me.  I am getting closer to God and I don’t know why.”

 

I don’t know why either.  If I did, I would bottle it.  But I think it has something to do with the difference between a labyrinth and a maze.  If you have traveled in Europe, you know that some of the great cathedrals are famous for their labyrinths.  And more recently walking a labyrinth has become a popular spiritual discipline for many in this country.  Here in Grand Rapids, there is one at Marywood.

 

So what’s the difference between a labyrinth and a maze, and there is a difference even though some of the resources I consulted make them synonyms.  Finally, I discovered a web site that helped me to understand the difference.  According to my source, “A labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness.  It combines the imagery of a circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path.  The labyrinth represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world.  It is a metaphor for life’s journey.”

 

Okay, it has something to do with wholeness and purpose!  What about a maze?  A maze is different (I discovered) because it is more like a puzzle to be solved.  It has twists and turns and blind alleys while a labyrinth has only one path.  The way in is the way out, and there are no blind alleys.  In a maze it is easy to get lost and there is a sense of futility about it.  There are so many choices to make and the final escape can seem almost accidental.

 

Not so with the labyrinth!  There is really only one choice to be made -- whether to enter or not.  Part of the beauty of the labyrinth experience is that there is a sense of being guided rather than being bombarded with choices.  Once the choice is made to enter, the only requirement is to keep moving.  This thought especially resonates with me because every time I pass the front desk on my way home at night and my friend Bill Esch is on duty, he will remind me, “Remember, the key to life is to keep moving!”

 

II.  The Purpose of Suffering

 

You see, Biblically, life is like a labyrinth and not a maze.  It has purpose and it leads somewhere if we allow ourselves to be guided by the Spirit.  That is the condition and the trick if you will.  There is a difference between existing and living.  Existence happens the moment we take our first breath, and through the gift of modern technology we know that we can continue to exist long after we have stopped living.

 

The Bible attaches quality, content, substance, and purpose to life.  It talks about choosing life.  Jesus tells us that he offers “abundant life”.  That abundant life is like a labyrinth.  It is the choice to walk the journey with God.  Part of that journey from which none of us can escape is suffering.  It is part of the path of transformation to the center which is called "glory".  As Paul puts it, “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us and the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.”

 

Let me pause here to remind us all that sometimes in an attempt to make sense out of suffering, out of why bad things happen to good people, we talk too glibly about it.  We talk about it as if somehow all suffering is God’s will.  It is one thing to experience the pain of exercise in order to become a stronger, more fit person.  But let us be very careful about comparing that to the child who is killed senselessly in an automobile accident or the person who is struck down with a dreaded disease.

 

My friends, let’s be clear about this -- suffering never saved anybody.  Not your suffering.  Not mine.  Not even Jesus’ suffering saves in and of itself.  But as Robert Morris puts it, “It is the way suffering is faced that makes the difference between whether pain, sorrow, difficulty, deprivation, or challenge will become part of our soul’s stretching or shrinking.”

 

It is the way suffering is faced that makes the difference.  I had a funeral last summer for one of the great saints of this church and of this community, and this was the scripture that he asked to be read at his service.  Bill Cayce was a physician of the old school -- his patients became his friends and his friends became his patients.  He knew them not only as medical charts but within a wider context of relationships.

 

Bill saw his share of sickness as a doctor, and knew his share of suffering as a husband who watched the process of Alzheimer’s that took his beloved Ruth.  In the end as his own body began to decay and he felt death closing in around him, this one who was loved and admired by so many took his own life.

 

Now because of that you can rightly ask why I would even mention him in a sermon where I am challenging you to live the labyrinth.  And I will admit that may be the question you take home with you today that will destroy the neatness of my three point sermon -- designed as it is for you to see suffering as a part of life with which you and I can and must deal as we make our way through the labyrinth of life.

 

As I said at his memorial service, my only comfort is to trust in his character and integrity to the end.  I choose to believe that Bill’s end was not an avoidance of suffering.  That would have been out of character for a man who had faced so much of it.  Rather, I choose to believe that somehow, Bill came to the profound realization that in the providence of God his life was complete.  And make no mistake about it, this walk through the labyrinth of life is not an easy mindless activity.

 

III.  Where is the Hope

 

Where does that leave us on our journey through the labyrinth as we seek to deal with the suffering of life?  It leaves us in search of hope for that is what motivates us and gives us courage on this journey that has so many obstacles.  Paul says as much in Verse 24, “For in hope we were saved.” 

 

I have quoted frequently in recent weeks from Lew Smedes’ spiritual memoir, My God and I.  You must be getting the drift by now that either I’m getting a kick-back from Eerdmann’s or I really do think that there is a lot of wisdom packed into this little book.  I return to it now in order to borrow some insights about hope.

 

Hope is the staple of good preaching.  I made the mistake of leaving hope out of a sermon once and have never forgotten the terrible result.  It was part of a Lenten series and I had chosen the theme of loneliness as in “Jesus walked this lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself.”  I was in my Marshall McLuen phase where the medium was the message so I felt that my job that Sunday morning was to get that congregation to feel really feel the alienation, the distance, and the darkness of the kind of loneliness Jesus must have felt.  It must have been a really good sermon because I had those people literally crawling out of the sanctuary that morning.

 

We do have to deal with reality but because we are Christians, there is always hope.  But what does that hope look like.  Too often we polish it up a bit, wave it around and believe that like Tinker Bell’s magic dust it will put a smile and a shine on everything.  That is not hope.  At least that is not Christian hope.

 

Lew Smedes helped me to see the nature of hope as I had not seen it before.  He points out, “Hope can feel unbearable; when we passionately long for what we do not have and it is taking too long to come, we are as restless as a farmer waiting for rain after an August without a drop.  Even if having hope is 100 percent better than not having it, living by hope can get awfully wearying.”

 

We may be saved in hope according to Paul but that hope is like the groaning of creation under the labor pains of birth.  We’re not talking about the boredom of waiting here but rather the perseverance of a patience that is tested at every turn.  Therefore, our labyrinthine-type existence takes us back to the old admonition of one day at a time, one step at a time.  The glory that is to be revealed doesn’t diminish the suffering but it helps us to face it and endure it.

 

And make no mistake about it, suffering never saved anybody.  But we participate in Christ’s suffering when we participate in his way of meeting suffering believing that God is with us each step of the way.  I close with these verses from a poem by Jennifer Lynn Woodruff entitled:

 

                           “Prayer After Midnight”

 

O what is there to do but going on

Another moment in the uphill road

Another shifting of a heavy load

How soon both peace and pain are past and gone

O what is there to do but going on.

 

The strange sweet savor of the tempting path

Still lingers on the tongue; the wind is cool --

Somewhere between a pilgrim and a fool

Never quite left behind, the longing lasts

The strange sweet savor of the tempting path.

 

There is no freedom from our private thorn

We tremble on the brink, but never fall

We cannot keep ourselves at all, at all

From all this dying and this being born

There is no freedom from our private thorn.

 

 

And yet we draw the greater grace and strength

Because there is hope, because we stand

Knowing we cannot stand by our own hand

Reaching the depth, the height, the breadth, the length

And yet we draw the greater grace and strength.

 

Amen.

 

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