“Redemptive Suffering” March 10, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
https://youtu.be/26tc9osy0Hw?si=yUWeqEisiRW_-4DH
Just a few days ago, on Friday, March 1st, huge crowds gathered in the streets of Moscow to attend the funeral of Alexey Navalny in spite of government efforts to stop any public display of grief for Navalny. Dozens were arrested and hundreds were detained by police but still the crowd grew, extending more than a half a mile down the street from the church where the funeral was held. Putin had withheld the body for two weeks, hoping to avoid this public display but the people of Moscow and many other communities have shown tremendous courage in response to Navalny’s death, which seems, unavoidably, to have been caused by his captors.
I have not heard anyone express any surprise that Navalny was murdered in the remote prison he had been sent to. My own surprise was that he lasted this long. He has been Russia’s most outspoken critic of the abuses of Vladimir Putin. Twice in 2017 he was attacked with a green dye that stained his face and nearly blinded one eye, making it nearly impossible for him to hide. He was clearly marked for assassination. Navalny has been poisoned 2020, arrested, and imprisoned and yet, against all reason and natural self-preservation, he kept up his good humored ridicule of Putin’s administration and even after he had been taken to Germany to be saved from the nearly fatal poisoning, as soon as he was able, he boldly returned to Russia.
I could only wish to be so brave. I know that I couldn’t have done it, but Alexey did, and I want to invite us all to spend a few minutes thinking about that fact and what it represents. Why did he do it? What does his sacrifice really mean? Was it worth it?
In theology, we have a term to describe this kind of martyrdom, it is called “redemptive suffering.” A great deal of our spiritual energy is focused on preventing or ending avoidable suffering. For example, hunger, in general, is not a matter of there not being enough food, it is a matter of distribution based on profit . . . and so we are against hunger. But in certain circumstances, we might choose to suffer in order to correct or redeem a certain social ill.
Several students at Dartmouth went on a hunger strike this past month to protest the colleges’ investments in Israel, demanding that the college defund the Israeli war on the people in Gaza. 30 students at Harvard went on a 12 hour hunger strike, which is kind of embarrassing…. That’s just interval fasting, but several students at Dartmouth were on strike for a week and some went as long as 12 days and they were hospitalized. The strike is over now and the success of their effort is not yet clear, but they courageously chose hunger to make a point. Whether you agree with the protest or not, you can see that it was a noble effort at redemptive suffering.
History is littered with examples of people who changed their culture through personal sacrifice, through choosing a form of suffering that made people think and change the way they acted.
A strong case can be made that the gospel accounts of the passion, which started with Mark, is offered in praise of martyrdom. Not that Jesus died for our sins . . . I don’t know about you, but even though I am far from perfect, I haven’t done anything that requires capital punishment or a blood sacrifice to atone to even a blood-thirsty, psychotic god. Jesus died in rebellion against a punitive and evil system while leaving us an example of radical compassion.
More recent examples may be easier for us to get our heads around:
Let me ask you to consider the case of Nelson Mandela. Though Mandela was heralded as a hero of the end of Apartheid in South Africa, for most of his life he was on America’s terrorist watch list. He was a Marxist and though he had personally been non-violent, he maintained that black Africans had a right to pursue their freedom through militant action. He was involved in the ANC, the African National Congress, and was an active revolutionary in trying to bring down the apartheid government.
He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962 for his anti-government work and he was sent to prison for 27 years, 18 of which was spent on that rock in the sea, Robben Island. Prisoners worked in the blinding sun in temperatures over 100 degrees. He was provided with a bucket in his cell for a latrine. He was rarely allowed a visitor and the prisoners had no access to news or mail.
He could have been released at any time had he been willing to publicly swear off violent means of overthrowing apartheid. He chose suffering to redeem his people.
He didn’t know if anyone noticed his suffering, he could only hope that by choosing to suffer under the heavy hand of the racist government that he was drawing worldwide attention to plight of black South Africans. He only knew from whispers that there was a “free Mandela” movement.
27 years. Forgive me for making this comparison, but when Mandela was freed in 1990, I made the observation to my congregation that the church speaks voluminously about the crucifixion of Jesus, an admittedly torturous death but, and maybe it is wrong for me to say it, but his suffering was over within a single day. Mandela spent 27 years in a cell, doing hard labor in blistering heat, to the point that he was nearly blinded from the sunlight by the time he was released, pooping in a bucket and wondering if it would ever end. . . 27 years of suffering to redeem the plight of his people.
I don’t think that I could have done it for a month, or a week. But he came out of that cell to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and to become, not only the first black president of South Africa, but the first president to be democratically elected by the whole of the population. He served one term and then devoted the rest of his life to working to eradicate poverty and HIV from Africa. South Africa still has serious problems but the fact that Apartheid was ended without a bloody civil war is due, in large part, to the fact that Mandela was willing to suffer for his people and in the end, to work with their white oppressors to turn the nation over to the majority population in a democratic government.
I wish that Alexey Navalny’s story could have ended with his release from prison and being elected to be the president of Russia but it didn’t.
Nelson Mandela didn’t know that his story would end any differently from Navalny’s, thankfully, it did, but was Navalny’s death of lesser value because he was murdered in prison? We don’t know yet if the courageous crowds in the streets honoring Navalny will maintain the protest. We don’t know if time will dilute his influence, but I am convinced that his cause was right and his courage is admirable, and I hope that he has seeded the hearts of the Russian people with a vision of what his widow now calls, of a beautiful Russia.
Folks, dictators have power, autocrats stay in power for one reason, because the majority of the population allows it. Those students at Dartmouth believed that most people would not tolerate the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza if they only knew about it, if only they were paying attention.
The majority of Americans want sensible gun laws, restrictions on the kinds of weapons citizens can own, who can own them, as well as proper training, insurance, and storage. Why, with an outrageous death toll from mass shootings, domestic violence, and suicide, can’t we get some kind of sensible gun reform? Only because the public tolerates it. We get upset when school children die in a mass murder but we don’t stay concerned.
I like to blame the NRA and Republican legislators bought off by gun lobby donations, but really, seriously, if you want to know who to blame for the fact that you are now more likely to be shot and killed than you are to die in a car crash, as V in the famous Vendetta movie says, “you need only look in a mirror.” It is our acquiescence to an insane set of gun laws that keeps this blood bath going.
Jesus was murdered by the state, Alexey Navalny was murdered by the state, Nelson Mandela was nearly murdered by the state, as John Lewis was nearly murdered on the Edmund Pettis Bridge by the state. But redemptive suffering is not always played out at the extremes. We are not often asked to run into a burning building to rescue an infant. We are more likely to accept the imperceptible sacrifice of supporting school lunches and healthcare for economically challenged families.
Let me give you another example from just a few years ago:
In 2020, the Culinary Workers’ Union in Nevada, rejected supporting Bernie Sanders’ as a presidential candidate because his “Medicare for all” would mean that their members would lose the premium health care that the union had fought for over the past several years. In fact, on the morning of the Nevada primary, the union was sending text messages to members encouraging them to vote for anyone but Sanders. However, when the Nevada primary was held, the rank-and-file members actually voted for Sanders in a huge majority.
Those who bucked the union leadership explained themselves in plain moral language . . . while they appreciate having really good health care coverage, they are aware that keeping a system in place that gives some people great coverage while leaving millions of others without care is morally reprehensible. They were willing to give up their enviable status if it would mean that their relatives, neighbors, and friends who were sick but who had no coverage, could at least receive basic care.
Of course, Bernie didn’t win the Democratic nomination, because both Democrats and Republicans labeled him as being “crazy” because he thought that the USA could have the same kind of universal healthcare that 32 of 33 developed nations already have but still, these union members knew how important healthcare is and they were willing to have less if everyone could have some. This, at least in my mind, becomes the major dividing line between the conservative and progressive political wings of our nation, of our churches, of our economic system, and everything associated with it. There is the fear and greed-based perspective of “I’ve got mine, I earned it, I deserve it, and I don’t have to care about anyone else,” I don’t make that sound very nice but you get what I mean. And, again, from my perspective, the progressive view is that our whole society is connected to one another and we all have to make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole society.
I would love to believe that this goes without saying but our recent experience with a global pandemic forces us to realize just how self-centered we can be. I mean, do you remember the run on toilet paper early in 2020? I never understood the connection between a respiratory virus and toilet paper but I know that when they finally got resupplied at my local box store that I had to stand in line to get my ration. I was probably the only single man with a bidet seat installed on my toilet in southern Missouri but I was all out of options!
As in most things, not many of us are made of the kind of stuff to become an Alexey Navalny, or a Nelson Mandela, or a Martin Luther King, or a Gandhi, but we can learn from them, we can strive to be more like them, and we can resist our innate desire to be concerned only with ourselves.
We come into the world screaming and crying to be fed, changed, comforted, held, carried . . . I’ve never understood the saying, “I slept like a baby,” because babies don’t really sleep all that peacefully . . . ask anyone with a newborn in the house. We come into the world screaming and crying to have our personal needs met and, as the pandemic revealed, a whole lot of us never grew very far past that. To become better than that, we have to choose to be better. We have to choose to consider others, even those who will live on when we are gone.
I have this piece of good news, a bit of wisdom I got from Henry David Thoreau many years ago, a quote that I have carried with me in my collection of quotes for more than 40 years now. Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than our unquestionable ability to elevate our lives by conscious endeavor.”
I am in awe of Alexey’s courage and moral sacrifice. I am no Alexey Navalny but I want to choose to become more like him and I want to invite you to, by conscious endeavor, choose to be more like him too.
