June 12, 2005

"Can We Endure?"

Rev. Evelyn Vigil

"We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurances produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our heart through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

The Apostle Paul tells us that suffering leads to other things, positive things, and it can, but more than whining is required to transform suffering into character and eventually into hope, which will not disappoint us.

Suffering alone - without faith and without community - breaks us. It doesn't transform us.

Too many of us linger in suffering. We wear it as a badge of honor. Oh sure, we might want to move over to endurance, but generally we settle for forcing others to endure tales of our suffering, or we push our suffering onto other people.

When we suffer, we want others to suffer as well.

I work as a chaplain in a men's jail and I am well acquainted with what we do to prisoners in our country, the nation with the most inmates per 100,000 in the world. Do we really have more "evil people" in our nation than other nations? If so, what would contribute to that?

I suspect, though, that our fear is what drives us to load a heap of suffering on folks who have the misfortune of being a different color, a different religion, a high-school dropout, or mentally ill. Anything that isn't lockstep with what is "acceptable behavior" is enough to warrant a visit to jail or a prolonged stay in prison.

Now, I'm not saying that we should fling open the cell doors and set all the captives free. Some folks have earned their place in lockup. But many have succumbed to the suffering we as a society visit upon them. We act as though punishment alone will affect change. In other words, as a friend said, we figure punishing them will make them good and punishing them severely and for a long time will make them "even gooder."

Suffering - the suffering of those incarcerated - is the first step we as society take, and yet there is more.

Paul speaks of suffering producing endurance. Many men in jail, many men I meet, tell me that they can endure. They know how to "do time." They can do it standing on their heads. They don't know how to live - which is what the life of Jesus and the promise of the gospels offer us - new life and life in abundance.

Endurance produces character. Yes, I believe that is true, but what kind of character? Noble character? Or shady characters?

Implicit in Paul's outline here is the promise that we do not travel this road alone. Sometimes we are accompanied by people who love us and refuse to abandon us to our sorrows, our loss of job or prestige, the depression that comes from finding ourselves misfits in a world we thought we knew. And sometimes we are accompanied only by God.

We do not go this route alone.

Those who are incarcerated find themselves cut off from family, from friends, from all the daily routines that make our lives easier, manageable, or something we can endure.

Their journeys become true tests of faith. Not long ago, for example, I met with a man in maximum security, a man who dropped out of the gangs, but whose body bears tattoos of those days. He was escorted into the interview room wearing shackles on his feet. His hands were shackled to a chain around his waist, and when he sat down, the officer leaned over, shackled him to the floor, and then turned and walked out, closing the door behind him.

"Does God have to love me?" this scary-looking man asked. "Is it God's job to love me, chaplain?"

I was taken by surprise. This man had been coming in and out of the facility for years as he fought mental illness and a horrible drug addiction. His wife was addicted to heroin as well and the two of them lived on the streets when they weren't in custody.

"Is it God's job to love me, chaplain?"

Absolutely, I said. Not only is it God's job to love you, it is God's delight to love you.

And then he began to detail his life, a life of beatings and abandonment. His mother committed suicide when he was young, and his father never recovered, which gave the father an excuse to beat his son - often.

No one had ever loved him, he felt. And he had suffered. He endured, but he had no hope.

Maybe he has no hope right now, but he's looking. He's looking for hope that "does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

"God's love has been poured into our hearts...."

When we are confused or lost, when we suffer and endure, we often lose track of the fact - and it is a fact - that "God's love has been poured into our hearts...." Through the Holy Spirit.

When Jesus went out proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness, he came to the cities and villages to tell the folks, once again, that God loves them, that God's love brings healing - which is, of course, the original meaning of the word "salvation."

We recall the original Latin when we use the word "salve," the root of salvation, which meant to heal. In other words, when we come to know the love of God, when we trust that God is with us and that God's love has been poured into our hearts, we can be healed.

Matthew tells us, "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

I don't know about you, but there have been times when I felt "harassed and helpless" like a sheep without a shepherd. I had no direction, no sense of which way to turn, no calling in my heart and no guidance at work in my life.

Jesus knew this turn of our minds. He had compassion for the crowds. He knew they suffered. He knew they longed to hear that God was at work in their lives and their world; he knew they needed to hear that God loved them deeply, just the way they were - just as God loves us just the way we are. It is that love that transforms us, that moves us from suffering to hope.

God doesn't promise us that we will breeze through life unaffected by the pain and sorrow we see around us, the pain and sorrow we visit on other folks or have visited upon us.

What, for example, do we make of the destruction and hate in our world, the senseless suffering of innocent people - women raped in Darfur, for example, or the senseless deaths of those killed by suicide bombers?

Where is the hope? It is in all of us as Christians. We are carriers of hope called to action in the world.

God promises us that we will not linger in sorrow, nor wallow in pain. That pain can be transformed into something bigger and brighter - something eternal.

The question simply is: Can we endure to see that day?

May God bless and keep us.

Amen.