Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Why do nitwits have no problem having kids? I haven’t felt that way, certainly not recently! But I’m pretty sure that over the decades, that thought might have crossed Sarah’s mind once or twice. All around her, people were reproducing prolifically, yet she was left with the ancient-world shame of barrenness. And not only that, she compounded frustration because Abraham had received promise after promise from God that he would be the father of a multitude of nations. The Lord specifically said, Sarah will bear you a son, and so far…nothing. And even though Ishmael was now a member of the family, Sarah couldn’t stand the very presence of him and his smug mother Hagar in the same tent with her. The suffering was too much to bear. I don’t understand. I should be the one with Abraham’s child, not this servant girl who now considers herself entitled over and above me. God Himself even promised it. Shows you how much you can trust Him!

Saint Paul doesn’t seem to be making it sound any better. “Suffering produces character!” Well, you may think, I must be on my way to becoming quite a character—a cartoon character at that—all stretched and distorted and caricatured out of proportion with all that comes my way in daily life. And what does it all get me? More suffering! Fewer blessings! More and more tangles in this complex web of relationships and conflicts. When am I going to have this peace that passes all human understanding that I keep hearing about? When will all my life’s struggles begin to make sense?

These are not sinful questions. Not on their own. They may even be on your heart right now. It feels terrible to be left with things in your life out of your control. We are transfixed by natural disaster. The thought of it impresses upon us how quickly the forces of nature can render people just like us completely powerless. Violence rears its ugly head on our televisions and also close to home. When illness or the threat of death impends, everything, including our sense of time, priorities, and our hectic schedules, immediately realigns. If there’s trouble at work, school, home or even church, you can easily get the feeling like you’re left all alone and everyone has turned their back on you, maybe God Himself, or so the way it seems. And you may be surprised to hear it from me, but there’s nothing wrong with pointing that out—with complaining, even! There was a church in the Kansas City area that a decade ago or so started giving out the rubber wrist bands advocating for a complaint-free world? I wonder, have they considered the parts of the Bible that have complaints of believers in them?

Think of Psalm 74, which leads off with a stinging complaint: “O God, why do you cast us off forever?… Why do you hold back your hand?” Or the 77th, in which the author is so bold as to say: “Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He in anger shut up His compassion?” These are inspired, Holy Spirit-filled words! And the psalms are recommended to us as a hymnal for believers to meditate and pray these very thoughts! Or consider St. Paul, who pleaded with the Lord three times to take away the thorn in his flesh, the messenger of Satan himself who was tormenting him with suffering (2 Corinthians 12). And there’s even Jesus Christ our Savior who, although in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, nevertheless brings up to Him repeatedly the preferable option that the cup of anguish be passed away from His lips. These are all positive, encouraging examples for you to speak honestly about your suffering, and bring the whole load of it to dump into your heavenly Father’s lap in prayer. Having the complaint itself isn’t sinful or a sign of no faith.

Our problem really is that we don’t handle our crosses and trials the way God commands. The last thing we think to do, most of the time, is turn the suffering over to Him. We’re often not listening when He is speaking His words of grace, of forgiveness and His promise of peace. Perhaps you have heard God’s Word during a great time of difficulty, but your heart refused to let it comfort you. How could God possibly use this bad ordeal to help me? I don’t buy it!

What resonates better with our sinful human nature is the world’s way of making sense out of suffering. Because in the world, there is no good news; there is only law and consequences and some people who want to hold people responsible, and other people who want to shift their proper responsibility away from themselves—we can experience that for ourselves and the only one who can make things better for us is ourselves. Christina Aguilera recorded a good song that summarizes quite clearly that worldly understanding and the self-focused use of suffering—she actually thanks the people who have betrayed her, lied to and backstabbed her, because those bad times made her fall back on her own strength and made her into a fighter. And you get the sense that, instead of forgiveness, she will be quick to take revenge with her unique emphasis on the words: “I remember!”

That’s where suffering precisely does not help us. Like Christina, we want to take action on our own, handle our suffering without God. Put our own ingenuity to work in order to relieve it. Take it out on others when the time is right. Make ourselves into the judge, jury and executioner wherever we can; or else stew in our own brand of righteous anger against all the unfair circumstances that we didn’t feel we deserve.

From the standpoint of our Old Adam inside us, we don’t want to hear the answer that we fear we will get when we entrust our whole life to our Lord and Savior. Everything will be out of our control then, and we feel vulnerable, alone, and dependent. We tell ourselves we can be fine enough Christians without suffering. I’m actually strong enough in my faith that I could handle a few more good times to come my way—do you see how easy it is to get that feeling? But when others seem to get all the blessings and I get all the setbacks, that’s what offends my twisted sense of justice, the same way it does yours.

That’s the same as Peter standing in front of Jesus, with Satan gleefully pulling the sinful, selfish puppet strings, forbidding the Lord to proceed to the cross. This shall never happen to you! That doesn’t fit my made-up fantasy world of Christian glory! It’s Sarah laughing inside the tent in unbelief at the promise of a son when the holy Angel was speaking with Abraham. Yeah, right-who will take seriously a baby shower for a ninety-year-old? The incidents and the statements themselves seem harmless, but Jesus reveals that there is the risk of great harm to our faith if we take our eyes of faith off of Him. You may not realize the danger until it is too late, so you must trust God’s Word of warning, even when the world, or even fellow believers at times, tell you there’s nothing to worry about. It’s all right—God knows you didn’t mean it. People tell you: This is just your coping mechanism; it’s what you do so you don’t drive yourself nuts with all you have going on in your life.

But watch out! Whether it helps you feel better or not, what matters is whether it turns your trust to your Lord or away from Him and to yourself. When Christina sings to her enemies about what she suffered at their hands, she is proud to announce that, only after turning inside to herself for inner strength, she has now become a fighter. But when St. Paul boasts about being beaten, stoned, scorned, kicked out of the temple, and wrongfully imprisoned, that’s because he didn’t at those times of suffering, summon some sort of strength within, rather that in all of those ordeals he was putting full trust in the Lord who will pull him through. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego even informed the King of Babylon that even if God does not save us this time—we know that He can, and we know that we will never, even when death by fiery furnace is the consequence, we will never turn our faith away from Him.

So that is how we are rightly to understand those preachy-sounding words from the book of Romans: we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. If that axiom was the only thing you heard, then you would still be poorly trained on how to understand and use your suffering that God sends your way. Suffering needs God’s promise in His Word to make it truly the cause of joy for the Christian heart. The rest of Romans 5 says that we have been justified—declared forgiven—by faith in Christ, just like Abraham believed God’s promise, and God counted it as if he had perfectly kept every law there was. Not by doing, but by believing in Jesus who did the doing for us. You have peace with God, not because you toughed it out when you faced a time of pain and rejection, but because you stand in the Lord’s everlasting grace, paid for in blood by your Savior who died on the cross and rose from the dead. You are reconciled to your enemies, not because you are waiting for the right time to get them back, but because while we all were still enemies to our Creator, Christ came and made peace by taking God’s wrath in your place.

And now that you are forgiven and made new in the image of Jesus Christ our Lord, you have much more blessing than wiping your slate clean of sin—you have the fullness of Christ’s life. You have access to the Lord’s exalted throne of grace so that you may pray with confidence. And when something happens that just doesn’t make sense to you, like Sarah who went so long without a child that she laughed when one was finally promised, that’s when you bring it up to the Lord, confessing your heart’s doubts and fears, but trusting that God will see you through, even when you cannot figure it out yet for yourself. As the Lord said to Abraham, so He says in His solemn promise to you, sealed in Baptism and in the Body and Blood of Christ, I will give you your heavenly inheritance as an everlasting possession, and I will be your God.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.