A 6-year-old girl from North London called Katie Lee was quoted in a UK newspaper a while back giving her thoughts about God. There is one God she said, and he's the creator of heaven. God is Jesus' Father. God has glasses, I think. I don't think God has animals in the air. I think God has animals on the ground and he comes down and feeds them.
I think God has not got an oven in the air. He comes down and has takeouts. He tries lots of different sorts because there's lots of people in the world. God likes Indian and Japanese, but I think he likes McDonald's best. I think he has coffee to keep him warm. He's normally fair, but sometimes not.
Daddy's secretary was only 29 when she died in a car crash. Why wasn't God looking
on another continent? An earthquake and a tsunami kill 25,000 people. And we ask Katie's question. Another continent, a violent dictator clings onto power with cruel determination. And we ask Katie's question in our community, a woman goes to the doctor to receive the bleak results of a test. A man goes to work to be told he's been laid off.
A child lies in bed, praying that mommy and daddy would make up. And we ask Katie's question. Katie's question is one we have all asked, perhaps not in those exact words, but at some point in our life, maybe even regularly, the faith that we have that God is good seems to be in conflict with our gut feeling that things should not be the way they are.
Our belief in a loving God and our experience of a world in the throes of agony seem irreconcilable in our personal pain or in our carrying the pain of others. We cry out to God. The question that has torn at the hearts of men and women since Eden, we scream Katie's question.
There isn't usually an answer, so I tend to ask a follow up of myself. How am I going to get through this? It's another reasonable, understandable question in times of pain. Yet in today's reading from Romans, Paul calls me to ask a different question, a deeper question. In the fire of suffering, the spirit prompts me to ask, not how am I going to get through this, but what is this doing to me?
There are many possible answers. It's making me bitter. It's making me angry. It's making me despair. It's making me doubt, but those aren't the only options. Paul quite bizarrely says This suffering is making me proud. His actual words are we boast in our sufferings. Well, he might, but he doesn't speak for me.
Glorying in suffering, rejoicing in pain, or loss or sadness. Celebrating global events that make us anxious and despair for the future. This just doesn't feel right. How is it even possible? I have never experienced severe physical pain or serious bodily illness, and I bow in respect of those of you who have, I don't know how you do it, but I thank God for being my role models.
I don't know how members of our parish who are also part of the Maxwell community can face the worry of their spouses who are based overseas right now, but I thank them for being our role models. But I have felt other kinds of pain of mind and emotions. And when I've gone through seasons when pain has dominated my waking moments and invaded my sleeping ones.
So how can we boast? Suffering is bad, isn't it? We should be avoiding it, not celebrating it. And Paul says it, Nope. Wait, wait, not so fast. Let's talk some more. So this morning he pulls up a chair, smiles at us, and unops a treasure chest of wisdom. It depends on your attitude. You see if suffering is meaningless.
If it is the destructive enemy of humans, then sure we should fear it, resist it, do all in our power to avoid it. But if suffering can lead to good things. Because Paul draws up his chair and has a fire chats a fireside chat with us and gives us a reason for why Christians can rejoice in their suffering.
He says, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. And character produces hope. And Hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts Arts. Suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, crying, waiting hope, crying waiting.
Hope. Dr. King summed it up well when he said, my personal trials have taught me the value of unmerited suffering as my sufferings mounted. I soon realized that there were two ways I could respond to my situation, either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course, recognizing the necessity for suffering.
I have tried to make of it virtue, if only to save myself from bitterness. I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive suffering, produces endurance, and endurance.
Produces character, and character, produces hope, crying, waiting, hoping, crying, waiting, hoping so you start with suffering. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I can't. Pain of the body, the mind, or the spirit. Sickness, anxiety, depression, bereavement, disability, debt, unemployment, accidents, betrayal, disillusionment, you name it, and it produces, says Paul Endurance.
The longer you suffer, the more you endure it. Why do you need endurance if the suffering ends soon after it started? Sometimes we pray for God to remove our suffering, and sometimes he does, but at other times he chooses to answer our cry for deliverance in a different way. He wants to change not the situation but us.
We can't learn endurance by living an easy life. But says Paul, there's a third part of the process. Endurance produces character. The Greek word he uses usually refers to a rare metal or a precious stone that has gone through a trial by fire to test its worth. The metal or gem has character, it has integrity, it's pure, it shines, it has deep resilience.
A woman once got on an elevator and looked around to notice she was standing next to Robert Redford. Uh, she stared at him and eventually jabbed. Are you the real Robert Redford? And he replied, only when I'm alone
character is what you have when no one is looking. But it's also what you have when you are poked and prodded. Vetted, observed, thoroughly examined and tested, and the results are seen by everyone. Only after the process. Do others know that you are the real deal, the genuine article, the transparent diamond, the toughened steel.
You are not a fake. You have proven by your suffering endurance that you are authentic and genuine. That is character. And finally, character says Paul produces hope. If you were an artist, and I know some of you are, and I told you to draw or paint a picture of hope, what would you produce? Uh, I'm not an artist, so I wouldn't even try, but I think of hope in my mind's eye as a band of pilgrims, a walking triumphantly towards the golden city, for which they long.
I see a marathon runner with a few yards left in the race, A smile beginning to break out on her face as she sees the finish line. I see a dog waiting by the door staring at the handle, anticipating the return of its human, and it won't rest until they've come home, and then they will go wild with joy. I don't see what George Frederick Watts saw when he thought about hope.
Wat was an English painter from the 19th century, and his vision of hope slaps you in the face. It shocks you when you see it in the museum in London. You have to stop and study it because you can't not, and you wonder at it. In fact, you wonder about the state of mind of George Watts. Was he quite sane?
Hope is a woman wearing a blindfold and dressed in a simple slip. She sitting head tilted, shoulders hunched on top of a large globe. Her face, such as you can see it below the blindfold, is passive, unemotional. And when coupled with the shape of her body, you know, this is not a happy woman. She's also a redhead, so you know, and you can't work her out where she been in life. What has she done? What pain has she endured? Why the blindfold? And why is she called hope? She's a picture of desolation. She seems close to death. Well, maybe the answer lies in what she's holding, resting on her leg, competing for space with her sun and face and her burdened shoulders is a battered, broken, almost useless musical instrument, a stringed instrument, but only just, I don't know how many strings it had when it was new.
But now there's just one left. The others have all snapped or decayed, and you find yourself hoping that she doesn't play the instrument. Because if this one final string breaks, then her music will stop. Her story will close. Her life will end. Will she play it? Does she have the courage to touch that last surviving string and somehow make it produce a sound?
And then you realize that whats gets it? Hope is when you are down to your last string, your last breath, your last scrap of determination to go on, and your last ounce of strength to hold on even when your blindfolded, because suffering. Produces endurance. Endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
And Hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts. Hope is the assurance that we will be rescued even if we have to wait until death for it. There is a meaning in our hardships, our illnesses, our pains, our anguish, our broken hearts, our rejection. There is a meaning in our one stringed instrument.
We can't see it because we're blindfolded, but it can play a tune. It is composed by God's spirit, and even now is rising within us. Life is not a series of random events. God is behind the madness of this world and the events of our lives. We hold on, we wrestle with Katie's question. We cry, wait, and cry and wait.
But we cling to the instrument of hope, and one day we will sing. Amen.