Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Isaiah 53:4-12
4Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
It can be said in a much longer form, but for the sake of brevity, the most simple statement of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is this:
1) All of life is suffering.
2) Suffering is caused by desire.
3) You can escape suffering but giving up all desires.
4) The way to give up desires is by following the eight fold path.
Stated in this way might lead you to believe that all of suffering is bad and to be avoided at all costs. Of course, the Christian religion seems to take a rather different view, to the point of praising martyrdom and making the image of the tortured and crucified Jesus a central symbol of the faith.
I have to credit Scott Peck with this idea since he said it long before I thought of it, but Christians often think too little about the joy of our faith and Buddhists often think too little of the suffering of the Buddha. The two are not mutually exclusive, or in the words of the new Steven Jobs film, suffering and joy are not binary.
But let me be quick to say this, I totally agree with the Buddhist perspective that decreasing suffering the world is an ultimate goal. We talk about environmental concerns, not because we need to save the planet.... The planet it not in danger. The planet with survive no matter what. Human, however, are in danger from pollution. Polluting the planet causes human and animal suffering and it is the avoidance of that inconvenient reality that motivates our environmental concerns.
We are opposed to wars, to racism, to discrimination, to poverty, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse because they cause suffering. So, in that sense, Christians and Buddhists are on the same page. And it is not difficult for me to reject the old Roman Catholic way of thinking of Redemptive Suffering.... That is, that Jesus had to suffer for our sins in order to redeem us from the punishment we so richly deserve.
Any construct of the Christian religion that can be boiled down to saying, "You are so bad that God had to kill his son," cannot bear serious critical thinking. No matter how many times evangelicals say it, the notion that Jesus suffered to pay a price for your sins two thousand years before you were born is utter non-sense and in the modern age, such Iron Age mythological thinking will kill what is left of the church.
I understand why the early church attached themselves to the suffering servant songs in Isaiah. Even as you heard Chris reading these verses from Isaiah 53 this morning, it is all but impossible for we modern Christians to not hear the orchestra striking up in the background as a full-throated chorus takes up Handle's Messiah.
Mark first wrote the passion narrative to mirror this ancient concept of Israel as the suffering servant that will suffer in order to bring salvation to the world. When the prophet wrote these verses 500 years before Jesus was born, he was not thinking about a coming messiah or of any individual. He was speaking of the remnant of Judah.... Finally accepting that through their tiny tribe was not destined to rule the world that they could, through their faith and leadership, literally through their hardships and suffering, could help to save the world.
This is hard for many modern Christians to accept, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, farther from the minds of those 5th century BCE slaves in Babylon, than the hope that some savior would be born to them four hundred years after they were dead. Isaiah was not talking about Jesus or about salvation in the traditional Christian sense.
But, and I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to get to this "but" but this is the "but" that matters in this message..... But there is a sense in which suffering can be redemptive. That is, there are times when people have accepted suffering, when they have heroically accepted personal risk or even personal sacrifice in order to save others, in order to change the world, in order to being an end to human suffering.
On that first Sunday morning in March of 1965 when black activists seeking the right vote began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the state police turned their dogs on them and beat them with batons. Several were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. But two days later, they were back, marching again... still peacefully, taking in their own flesh the beatings that would eventually ignite the conscience of the white majority in America, stemming the tide of racial oppression.
You can easily see that the beatings, imprisonment, and starvation of Mahatma Gandhi was redemptive suffering in the sense that it was only through his exemplary leadership of peaceful, non-violent protest, that the British colonial rule of India was finally ended.
During my own adolescence, there were a lot of us who could see, who knew that the War in Vietnam was immoral, unnecessary, and wrong but it took many draft protestors going to jail, lead among them being Philip and Daniel Berrigan, to wake up American Catholics and a lot of the rest of us to demand a change in our government's policy of neo-colonial warfare. A lot of people were willing to demonstrate and protest but the Berrigan brothers were willing to be imprisoned.
The Christian reverence for the cross, the reason we have a cross in this little church, is because it is the willingness to suffer on behalf of others when we, especially we in the middle class, can comfortably decide to avoid almost all forms of suffering. We don't live in dangerous neighborhoods. We will not be drafted, invaded, enslaved, made to flee as war refugees, and other than having to attend some family holiday dinners, we will not be imprisoned against our will.
Many of the people I talk to say that they simply do not watch the news because the suffering in the world upsets them and they would rather not know.
In the midst of a sea of indifference someone who is willing to suffer on behalf of others becomes a shining star, a hero, an inspiration. Malala Yousafzai was only 12 years old when she began anonymously writing a blog for the BBC about what life was like for a girl in Pakistan under Taliban control.
The New York Times persuaded her to identify herself and a series of reports were done on her work, advocating for education for young girls in these repressed, Muslim controlled areas. It was this month, just three years ago, when a Taliban extremist boarded her school bus and shot her in the face in the presence of all of her fellow students.
Thankfully, Malala survived the attack, though it has left her appearance marred, and it has clearly affected her speech and general health but the attempted murder did not change her devotion to seeking education for girls. She was hospitalized for months, but two years after the failed assassination attempt, she became the world's youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
She has visited the White House and was not simply honored by being invited there but took the opportunity to school President Obama in how stupid his drone policy is and how he is causing new generations of terrorists rather than ending terrorism. She is arguably the most famous teenager in the world and she keeps up a demanding schedule of advocacy for others, even though the Taliban have publicly reiterated their intent to kill both her and her father.
It would not be anything to be ashamed of, nothing hard to understand, if Malala went into hiding for the rest of her life. She can live in the United States or in Great Britain and be safe, if only she would be quiet, but she has continued to raise her voice on behalf of young girls everywhere knowing better than anyone what suffering is really like and what fear can be realistic in her world.
In our country, we don't typically see that kind of institutional misogyny but we do see millions, hundreds of millions of people being pushed down and down into poverty, with either no employment or poorly compensated employment. We are watching the cost of sending our public school graduates to college go up and up so that education is becoming available to a smaller and smaller percentage of our children.
We are seeing labor unions undermined so that it is becoming absolutely rare for workers to have a pension fund or any realistic expectation of retirement at 65 or 70 or 75. You see our senior citizens waiting on tables and sweeping floors all around us....grandmothers in orthotic shoes carrying people's scrambled eggs and toast to restaurant tables.... Grandfathers, with bent backs and arthritic hands, mopping the floors at the mall.
Fifty years ago, young black men and women were joined with white sympathizers and they paid for access to the voting booth through the passage of the Voters Rights Act with their own blood and some with their own lives. Now, our Supreme Court can gut the Voters Rights Act without more than a whimper from the public. In the past two years, Republican controlled state legislatures have sought to make it nearly impossible for 30 million poor blacks to vote.
They cut out weekend voting. They require government issued photo IDs knowing that more than 30 million elderly and poor black families don't have a car and so they don't have drivers' licenses. And to make sure that they don't get a photo ID, Alabama just closed divers license offices in 12 counties with predominantly black residents. In some states, you have to show your birth certificate to get a photo ID and if you can't find your birth certificate, you have to show a photo ID to get a birth certificate.
All of this happens while the media and the church is silent.
Why are we silent in the face of these gross injustices? Who would shoot us in the face for challenging the violence of capitalism run to the point of insanity? No one. No one will shoot us. But some will shame us. It is could be uncomfortable. With more than a half of our local peers being ginned up and angry by the constant flow of misinformation from Fox News and Gannett Newspapers, it is uncomfortable to raise your voice for justice, for fair wages, for dignity for the elderly.
Uncomfortable and yet, for persons of conscience, necessary. I wish we were made of stronger stuff. I wish that we had more grown-ups with the courage of a child like Malala. If we had even a half a dozen members of congress who had the courage and character of Malala Yousafzai we would have a very different country right now.
What I am asking of you, what I implore our listeners on the web to do, is to decide that you are going to care, that you will be informed, that you will use your votes, your voice, your conversations to help fight against poverty, discrimination, the spoiling of our earth, and oppression of the rich and powerful over the poor and the weak. And, if you can do that, if you can practice that, to grow in your courage so that you too may be willing to bait the trap for evil with your own flesh. Very little progress has ever been made if there were not leaders who were willing to suffer to make it happen.
