“A Dubious Blessing”               Dr. Julie Adkins

                   Text:  1 Peter 3:13-22

 

SERMON

 

Have you ever received a gift,

          which was a nice gift in and of itself,

                   but which had some complications attached to it?

When I was about 10,

          my friend Sharon gave me three guppies

                   from the ever-growing number in her aquarium.

Now a guppy won’t eat you out of house and home,

          and it won’t bark at night and disturb the neighbors …

And Sharon had even been careful to give me five males,

          so I wouldn’t have the population explosion problems

                   she had been having.

Even so, in order to accept my friend’s gift, I had to

-         buy a fishbowl

-         clean it out at least once a week,

which meant I also needed to buy

          a little net to catch the fishies.

I had to remember to feed them once a day,

          not more, and not less.

If my family went away for more than a couple of days,   

          I had to find someone to come feed them,

          or I had to carefully carry them and their little bowl

                   back down the street to Sharon’s house

                   so she could fish-sit for me.

Now, I liked having my guppies.

But accepting them as a gift

          meant accepting a whole lot more

than just three little fishies.

 

Peter seems to be suggesting

          that at times, our faith may be kind of like that.

Just before today’s text

          he is waxing eloquent,

          quoting poetry to his readers or hearers,

                   words to the effect that God rewards those who do good,

                   but turns against those who do evil.

And then, the section we heard today begins with,

          “Now who will harm you is you are eager to do what is good?”

But immediately he catches himself.

He comes back down to earth from his rhetorical flights of fancy,

          and remembers that many of his audience

          are only interested in what is right and good,

                   often with all the zeal of the newly-converted …

          and yet, they are suffering harm because of it.

This gift of faith does not guarantee

          a happily-ever-after, fairy-tale kind of ending;

                   at least not in this life.

Some people suffer in spite of their faith.

Some people suffer because of their faith.

Where is the good news in that?

 

What Peter tells us is this:

          “Even if you do suffer for doing what is right,

                   you are blessed.”

Okay …

But that sounds like, well,

          a not-very-motivating reward.

It’s not quite tangible, after all.

I’ve never seen a blessing,

          or held it in the palm of my hand.

This seems dangerously like a pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye

          sort of faith statement:

                   don’t worry about your suffering here and now,

                             because when you die and go to heaven,

                             everything will be hunky-dory.

          The kind of religion that Karl Marx

                   rightly called “the opiate of the people.”

In addition, when we talk about our faith struggles in terms of

          “suffer now, blessings later,”

                   it can sometimes start to sound like

                   it’s a necessary cause-and-effect.

As if to say,

          “If you want to be blessed by God later,

                   you’re going to have to suffer first.”

Or even,

          “When you suffer, that’s because God is testing you

                   to see if you’re worthy of a blessing.”

Which starts to make this whole blessing business

          sound like a dubious reward at best …

                   cruel and unusual treatment at worst.

 

But I suspect that happens because we mostly look at it

          through the lenses of our own experience.

Of course, we can’t help starting out there!

But if we can try to remove our twenty-first century lenses,

          just for a little while,

                   and try to see the world through first-century eyes,

          we may find that while the scene is somewhat the same,

                   our perspective has shifted.

For example, in our day and time

          we pretty much take for granted the notion

                   that suffering ought to be avoided,

          and that, in fact, it can be avoided.

Looking back over the span of history,

          that’s a fairly new notion.

For most of human history,

          suffering has been unavoidable,

                   so there was little use debating about

                   whether it ought to be avoided.

I wish I could remember where I read this, so I could look up the dates …

          but two of the very first women to receive chloroform

                   to manage or avoid the pain of giving birth

          were the wife of Charles Darwin

                   and the wife of Charles Dickens,

          less than two hundred years ago.

Only in the last century

          has death in childbirth become uncommon.

Only in the last century

          has it become unusual for a family to lose a child

                   to polio, or diphtheria,

                   or a whole host of other things.

Only in the past fifty years or so,

          have antibiotics been saving lives.

Only for a little over a century

          have even mild painkillers like aspirin been available.

 

And not only because of the time we live in,

          but also the place we live in.

We expect to be able to speak our minds freely

          without suffering for it.

We expect there to be plenty of food in the store

          so we don’t suffer from hunger.

We expect our air conditioners to work

          so we don’t suffer from heat!

          except maybe in that brief moment between the house and the car.

And if something goes wrong,

          and we do start to suffer,

                   we do something about it!

Whether it’s to visit the doctor,

          or call the plumber,

                   or consult a counselor,

                             or whatever.

And we expect it to work!

Preferably quickly.

 

Whereas, Peter’s audience had no such options.

I guess you could say that

          they didn’t have the luxury.

In their lives, suffering was pretty much inevitable.

So in a way,

          they probably dealt with it better than we do.

Not that they sought it out, or enjoyed it …

          but they expected it to appear from time to time.

And they would know,

          from their own past experience and the experience of neighbors,

                   that they could ride it out

                   till one day things would be okay again.

Now, I don’t want to trivialize

          the experience of suffering of people long ago.

Only to suggest that suffering,

          insofar as we theorize and speculate about it,

                   is a much bigger stumbling block for us that it was for them.

 

Okay, you can put your twenty-first century lenses back on now.

How might our lives in modern-day America look

          if we declared ourselves desirous of God’s blessing,

                   and therefore willing to endure suffering –

                             if absolutely necessary –

                   for the sake of what is good and right?

It’s not likely that any of us are going to be

          thrown to hungry lions,

                   or stoned to death,

          or tortured until we renounce our faith,

                   and/or give up the names of other practicing Christians.

The kind of suffering we might undergo

          would probably be much less physical … more subtle.

The mother of one of my college friends

          lost her job – was fired –

                   when she refused to assist her boss

                   with some unethical business dealings.

When she finally did find another job,

          it was for much less pay,

                   and so her daughter had to transfer to a less expensive school,

                   where she didn’t know anyone.

That’s doubly painful:

          to know that not only did you suffer,

                   but your child also suffered,

          because you did the right thing.

Christians in other parts of the world suffer,

          sometimes for sharing their faith,

                   sometimes just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Today’s Dallas Morning News describes for us

          the captivity of an American missionary couple in the Philippines,

                   kidnapped by Muslim terrorists

                   because they are Christians.

 

Even within our own country,

          with our religious freedom, of which we are justly proud,

                   it does seem that there are ways in which

                   we suffer for having faith, and daring to talk about it.

“Suffer” may be too strong a word …

          and it’s certainly less true here in the Bible Belt …

          but there is a growing sense in our popular culture,

                   and certainly within the academic culture,

          that people who have faith, people who are religious,

                   are just a wee bit dense.

That our belief is a crutch,

          because we don’t quite have the intellect

                   to function in the real world.

How much insult are we willing to suffer

          for the sake of the gospel?

 

Would we be willing to suffer the loss of friendships

          for the sake of doing what is good?

Would we be willing to suffer

          a lower standard of living?

Would we surrender a chunk of

          our precious leisure time?

Would we suffer daily inconvenience

          for the sake of what is right?

Are we willing to live a life that is

          out of step with the world around us?

          misunderstood by the world around us?

          made fun of by the world around us?

 

We may wish with all our hearts

          that God had arranged things differently …

That faithfulness, and goodness,

          would receive immediate, tangible rewards.

It would make it so much easier for us

          to be faithful and good more consistently.

Who knows, it might lead other people

          to try being faithful and good … for a change.

It might end a lot of suffering worldwide pretty quickly!

But you see, God doesn’t want us to be good

          because we’ll get rewarded for it.

God wants us to be good

          because it’s the right thing to do,

                   in spite of all the odds.

The reward may seem suspiciously small,

          but it isn’t, really.

God’s blessing doesn’t come cheap.

But it does last for all eternity.

Unlike our suffering,

          which will always, eventually, come to an end.

 

God doesn’t make us suffer;

          the world does that to us,

                   and sometimes, we do it to ourselves.

But God does vindicate

          our suffering for what is right,

                   just as God vindicated Christ

                             by raising him from the dead.

With that kind of power on our side,

          no suffering can overcome us.

We have God’s word on that.

We have God’s blessing awaiting us.

Come, let us do what is good.

 

Amen.

 

© 2002 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)