Called To Suffer by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 15 March 2020
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Philippians 1:12-26 I want you to know, beloved that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters, having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear. Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill. These proclaim Christ out of love, knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel; the others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death.
For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again.
This past week and change has been a little bit interesting for all of us. I'm preaching to an empty room right now except for Johnny who's in the back. This is a weird experience for me, but I have found that this week has been full of weird experiences. When I made the decision to cancel worship services for this Sunday, it wasn't an easy one. It wasn't an easy one to take into account all of the different sides of what gathering together as a worshiping body means, to make sense of how we live well together, how we honor God and honor our neighbor, and how we make sense of a pandemic that most of us have never seen in our lives before. I certainly never learned in seminary how to lead through pandemics.
Then I got to preparing the sermon on suffering, which has been my plan for many months, it just so happens to fall on the first week of COVID pandemic canceling. I wondered to myself, is this the time to change my text, to rework my sermon? Do I really talk about suffering in the midst of suffering? Then I was reminded that that is our job. Our call as Christians is to rejoice and suffer together in the midst of suffering. Now, I want to be very clear as we read this text and wrestle with what's happening in the world around us and what has been happening in the world all around us. I want to tell you that I do not believe in a God who sent COVID to rid the world of people. I do not believe in a God who uses us as though we were chess pieces, or if you're of the more millennial generation, a God who treats us like Sims, which is a computer game in which you build a world and people, and you control their actions. I do not believe in a God who treats us like that.
No, I believe in a God who is incarnate and who is with us, a God who knows that because of the nature of the world that we live in, because when we were created God gifted us with the profound gift of free will, that there is sin rampant throughout our communities, throughout our lives, throughout our history, and that always that sin causes rifts within us. I do not believe in a God who causes sin, but I believe in a God who is with us in the brokenness. I believe in a God who is incarnate, a God who showed up into a broken world and lived the life we should have lived, and died the death that we should have died, so that we would be reminded in times of panic and anxiety and deep crisis, that God is with us, and that God calls us to more than the panic and the anger and the hatred and the belittling and the marginalizing that we all do when that fear takes over. We talk about being called to suffer. It is not that God puts suffering in our midst, on our journey, so that we can learn something. Instead, we know that suffering is a part of life and it is how we respond to the suffering that shows the world who we believe God to be.
We are in the middle of a pandemic. There is no getting around that. Your social media, your news, pretty much everything that we are consuming these days, is telling us again and again and again that there is a problem and it is a big problem. There are many of us who want to respond in an overly anxious way that takes all of the things that we are getting from the news sources around us, that causes that fear to rise up in us so that we become hoarders and fighters instead of being proclaimers of the gospel, right? God calls us to do two things in Jesus Christ; it is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Our calling even in the midst of the heightened suffering and anxiety and overwhelmingness is to love God and to love our neighbor.
Not gathering together in person is one way that we love our neighbor, that we say that we are taking this pandemic seriously. We, as church leadership, are taking a stand to help protect all of those around us. Many of you have probably seen the graphics that are going around about flattening the curve, which means that instead of completely overwhelming the medical system that we have, we let the outbreak take a little bit longer and we flatten the curve of this pandemic. Because in the midst of the anxiety and the scarcity and the fear, we remember that God is still God and that we are called to love our neighbor.
May this be a time in which we use the suffering of the world to boast the gospel of Jesus Christ. May we become the people who watch out for our neighbors, that we pick up the phone and we call the folks around us to make sure they're doing okay, that we all pick up the phone and call those in our beloved family, in our beloved community, that we know may be more vulnerable than others and we check in, that we offer to pick up groceries or to drop off a meal, that we pray for those who are affected and those who will be affected, that we pray for those who contract this virus and will inevitably die. We pray for the doctors and the nurses and the EMTs and all of our first responders, all of our healthcare officials, our government officials who are trying to make sense of this pandemic, slow it and bring us to a place in which we experience life fully again. But in the meantime, let us listen. Let us listen for the voice of God, the voice of God that says, "No matter where you are, or what circumstances you find yourself in, I am God and I am with you."
What does it look like for us to take the anxiety and the fear of this world and use it as a way to be able to proclaim a Christ with all that we are? What does it look like for you and I to become people of calm, people who are listening to the things that are going on around us and taking appropriate precautions, but being calm in the midst of it? What does it look like for you and I to be creative now about the way that we do community? What does it look like for you and I to be creative now about the way that we share the gospel with those around us? What does it look like for us to take the time that we are being asked to lay low to deepen our relationship with God, to not listen to the busy-ness, to not listen to the noise, or to take time to be centered? What if we looked at this time as an opportunity for a way for us to be proclaimers of the gospel instead of a fearful situation that paralyzes us.
My friends, in the midst of Paul's journey, he is a man who suffers greatly. He's thrown into prison, he's beaten, he is rejected, he is cast out, he is chased down. Still, in the midst of all of it, Paul prevails that his life is better because of Christ, that even though he is hard pressed on all sides still he knows that living is Christ and to die is gain. He trusts that belief that no matter what happens, he does it in Christ, and no matter what happens when it is his time to go, he knows where he is going. The trust, that belief, it comes to us. We truly believe that God loves us is a peace unlike any other, is what gives us peace in the midst of panic. It is what gives us a calm in the sense of anxiety. It is what allows us to see that while God did not cause our suffering, perhaps there is something in the suffering that we can use to help us proclaim the message of Christ. We talk often about all of the things that we carry within us, the darkness in our own selves, the brokenness that we all feel and experience and live in. How is God using our stories of finding God in the dark to bring light to others?
I want you to think about all of the places in your life in which God has broken into the dark and scary places and offered you wholeness again. That story that you hold on to is the story that someone else needs to hear. Someone else needs to hear how in the midst of this wildly anxious time you are remaining calm and committed to loving God and your neighbor. There are people who need to hear your story of how God walked into the broken, darkest places of your life and breathed life and light again. People need to remember that they are not alone.
So during this time when you and I have all of this extra time to ourselves, I want you to meditate on this. In the Psalms, the Psalmist often uses a Hebrew term Selah, S-E-L-A-H. Many people have no idea what that means or what it's there for, but it is a break. It is instruction for a pause. It is a reminder to us that sometimes we need to be still and listen for God even in the midst of the noise of the world. What if we looked at this time that we are being called to stay in, to hunker down, as a selah, a time for us to quiet the noise, to listen for God, to be non-anxious in an anxious time, to breathe deeply and to know that God calls us to proclaim the gospel even in the midst of suffering?
May you use every part of who you are to be the bearer of God's word of hope, of light, of peace today, and every day. Amen.
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