Touching Resurrection: Leaning Into Suffering; April 26, 2026

speaker-0: Our first reading is Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his namesake. Even though I walk through the darkest valleys, I fear no evil. For you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me. in the presence of my enemy. You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

speaker-1: let us now for the word of the ⁓ from 1 ⁓ two, ⁓ verses 19 through 25. For it is a commendable thing if, being aware of God, a person endures pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do good and you suffer for it, this is a commendable thing before God. For to this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you. Leaving you an example so that you should follow in his steps. Quotations here from Isaiah. ⁓ And most of this next paragraph is the writer of Peter trying to link Jesus to this Isaiah figure that we call the suffering servant. He committed to no sin. and no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was abused, he did not return abuse. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that having died to sins, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to ⁓ Lord, tune our hearts to the melody of your grace in all seasons of our lives, that we may experience the joy of your salvation and the hope of resurrected life even in the darkest of our days. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. ⁓ Christ, our rock and our redeemer. There's a version of our faith that promises you the smoothest of roads if only you believe hard enough. If only you are good enough. Health, wealth, protection from the worst of life. At its worst, it offers God as a genie who shows up as a reward for your full-hearted trust in him, like the belief-o-meter that makes Santa's sled fly. At best, this God is a kind of cosmic insurance policy. If you've been around for any length of time, you will know that I don't preach such an understanding of God. And I suspect that most of you have lived long enough to know why the road of life isn't smooth, no matter what. Even if we've got every resource and every connection, still, God help us, find ourselves walking in the valley of the shadow of death, or at least the death of our expectations about where we ought to be walking. I think we're all well past the question of whether in this life we will suffer. We will. The questions then are what happens when we do? And to the point of this Easter Tide sermon series in particular, what difference does the resurrection of Jesus make for us when we do indeed suffer? I think it's important right off the top to remind you that while Jesus's resurrection makes all the difference for us in this conversation about suffering, that resurrection of Jesus was preceded by incredible suffering on Jesus's part. So, you know, God bless us if we ever imagined that we could be good enough or work hard enough to avoid suffering while the sinless son of God could not. And also bless our hearts if we ever imagined that God couldn't or wouldn't be present to us in and through that same suffering. We can indeed proclaim Christ present in the midst of our hardships and also take the heartbreak of those hardships very seriously. Both things can be done at once. Psalm 23 speaks precisely to this. It is among the most familiar pieces of scripture in the English speaking world. As Mary got you to confess, most of you have memorized at least bits and pieces of it. It's famous because it is especially prescient in moments of suffering. You may associate it with funerals, which is fitting because it was written for the places where death feels near and God feels far. In fact, I try to smuggle it into every call to worship at every service to the witness or service of witness to the resurrection that I do. And that is, by the way, what we call funerals in our tradition, a service of witness to the resurrection. And not to belabor that point, but I'm going to anyhow, I think that point that title is important. First, because it takes seriously the reality of death. A service of witness to the resurrection. It does not try to tiptoe around grief by calling it a celebration of life or a home-going ceremony. It reckons that there is a person in need that we all loved that is in need of a resurrection and our grief about that loss is real. And second, because it bears witness to the presence of God in the midst of that same very real suffering. We bear witness to the presence of Jesus precisely in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death. We may not be able to put the fun in funeral, but we do put the wit in witness. Current attempts not withstanding. Back to the psalm. Here's how this psalm does that for us. Its language begins at a distance. I don't know if you've ever noticed. The first three verses or so begin at a distance. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. Third person, he, him, over there. And then the context and the grammar shift quite dramatically in verse four. It goes on, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. You are with me. As soon as we leave behind the bucolic Bob Ross painting of happy little trees and dapply still waters, and we enter into a space of fear and shadow, the he over there becomes a you right here, the one that I'm talking to. The intimacy with this shepherd of our souls doesn't depart when danger arrives and reappear when it passes. The Lord is no fair weather friend, my dear ones, and thank him for that, given where we live. Instead, it's precisely in those moments when we can count on God to be present enough to speak to. You, O Lord. with me. You, O Lord, comfort me. You, O Lord, are for me when it feels like the world or circumstances or others or my very body has conspired against me. Importantly, 1st Peter identifies this shepherd and guardian as Jesus. And this is no small thing. Because unlike the Greek portraits of a God who is impassionate and impervious to all suffering, this Jesus of ours, this God in the flesh, is not some far away ideal who comes alongside us with just like good vibes. Now Jesus knows our suffering intimately. Peter reminds us, not only did Jesus suffer, but Jesus suffered unjustly. And therefore, in his unjust suffering, he did not retaliate. He did not threaten. But instead, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. We are reminded that with us isn't the shepherd's first journey through the valley of the shadow of death. Indeed, this one has been to the darkest valley before. He's experienced, he knows the road, he gets what it's like, and he's gone all the way through that darkness. God in human flesh experience what unjust suffering at its worst actually feels like. Abandonment and betrayal, the violence of a system who needs somebody to blame, the inability to be heard and to be understood. Indeed, as Thomas and the rest of the disciples would discover, this Jesus not only has been through this darkest valley, but he still bears the wounds of that ordeal in his body. And so then we can trust him as somebody who is coming along with more than mere encouragement, because not only does he love us, he knows us, and he knows our pain. And in his own pain, he threw himself in with God's love and his trust to the one who judges justly. I think it's important to say that sometimes God does not feel near in our sufferings. I suppose that's why I wanted to remind you of the goodness of God this morning. To give you ⁓ a sense of rootedness in a God who is trustworthy precisely because his resurrection makes all the difference. And at the same time, that is true, it also seems to me that the experience of the comfort of the presence of God isn't automatic. Which is a bummer, if we're really honest. I think though that it is a call to learn to lean in to it. to learn to suffer along with Jesus. When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with martial arts. The side effect, I think, of being raised on Bruce Lee and the Ninja Turtles. But I convinced my parents to sign me up for Tang Soo Do, the coolest of the martial arts, at a huge expense for my family. We didn't do things that cost money. And I was, in part, to prove to my parents that their money was well spent. And also because I was just obsessed, I was in class as many times during the week as I possibly could be. And one weekend, we played host to a judo workshop. And I jumped at that opportunity as well, because I just wanted to do it all. And while we learned a lot of really neat ways to choke each other and do lasting damage to joints, most of what we did was actually how to fall and not get hurt, which is incredibly unsexy. And not at all the sweet, sweet keister kicking that I was hoping to learn. But it was important. Foundational, actually. In Judo, and likely in your life, you're going to take a fall, right? And if you hope to be able to fight another day, you've got to learn to be able to fall so that you can get back up again, literally and figuratively. So these teachings from Peter and the Psalms help us to learn how to fall by allowing us the freedom to lean into our sufferings without denying their pain or the presence of God in the midst of them. So here are a few gleanings from these passages. The first is that suffering isn't a sign that God is punishing you. But it may be a case of the well, well, wells if that isn't the consequence of my own actions. To hear Peter tell it, if you're having a rough go of your own making, you get no heavenly brownie points. At the same time, even that doesn't mean that you are disqualified from God's grace. Remember. Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And not to get too Hebrew-y on you this morning, but that Hebrew word there for follow me, Radav, means pursue, chase, down. Follow, right? Goodness and mercy are chasing you down. We sing that from time to time over in morning light. We sing a song whose ⁓ chorus is that your goodness is running after me. Right? Your goodness is running after it's me. It's coming, it's coming, it's like Jason. Doesn't look like it's running. but still shows up, right? Time and time again, you cannot outrun God's goodness. This is true even when you are sitting in the mess of your own making that does not smell like roses. So as you are falling, as you are stumbling over the rock that you put in your own way, keep your arms reaching out for God's presence because God is still there. The second is that we can leave out having to downplay the difficulty of any given moment of suffering that we are in. It is okay to feel pressed in and even crushed because like Peter's audience, we are living after the resurrection and that changes the horizon. It's not God will protect you from suffering because if you suffer then you're out of control. God can't deal with that. No, no, we see in the death and resurrection of Jesus that there is nothing, not even death is outside of God's ability to redeem. So we don't have to worry about how if we suffer what that might mean for us. And certainly our suffering doesn't mean nothing. But instead we get the opportunity for this holy reframe where suffering is neither the final word on our lives and nor is it a sign that God has looked away from us. Jesus puts it this way, in this life you will have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world. The resurrection is the guarantee behind that promise. Otherwise, if Jesus stays dead, that's just a nice thing to say to your friends. But because he is raised, he can say, trouble is going to come. Throw your life at the mercies of God and God will care for you. Because if God can bring life out of the worst death in human history, then we have grounds for something other than despair in all our sufferings. Not certainty that suffering will end on our timeline. Not a promise that it won't get harder before it gets better, but assurance, real, grounded, costly assurance that the God who walked out of the tomb is the same God who is walking with you in the valley of the shadow of death. And it is for us, in those moments of hardship, to lean on what we know to be true. to lean on this truth that God is with us in and through all things and nothing can separate us from the love of God. It is for us in those moments to do battle with the helpless and hopeless thoughts that will crowd our mind. And it is for us to learn to trust God ahead of time, to practice falling and failing in small things so that we can learn to grab onto the buoy that is offered to us in Christ in the midst of deep and dark affliction. That is the daily practice of character shaping that Christ is calling us into. The third thing is that Jesus teaches us to suffer what is unjust and what cannot be changed. because he has placed his trust in God. If I was a preacher who preached 40 minutes, I would have more time to talk about this. We're going to have to circle back. Because I got thoughts about what it means in our society to suffer unjustly. Because I got to tell you. Maybe for the past 40 years, 60 years, 100 years, we've been told is suffering for our faith has just been like the just desserts of bigotry. But that's a conversation for another day. And it's really hard work. It's like graduate level work. And let me tell you what I think the undergrad version of this is. If we hope someday to have the strength of character to follow Christ into unjust suffering, It's probably a really solid starting place to begin how to learn to suffer our own self-inflicted wounds honestly. Which is a practice of honesty and vulnerability before God, which are their own sort of dark valleys. Can I get an amen? Again, it is there that God meets us. We are never disqualified from grace or disowned by goodness. These are gifts which in every season meet us in the undying and never-ending love of God. We cannot outkick the coverage of God's love, but we can simply live into it and give into it. Some of you I know are in valleys of varying sorts at this very moment. Some of you got there through no fault of your own. You are suffering the consequences of someone else's choices. Or because you did what was right and it went over like a lead balloon. Or because of the cruelty of systems that were never designed with your flourishing in mind. Or simply because your body is fighting you. Others of you, if you're honest, are dealing with consequences that are at least partly your own doing. Or mostly your own doing. And all of us are in that complicated middle where it's both because life is rarely simple, neat, and tidy. And in all of it, Peter's word is not, grit your teeth and take it. Thank you, sir. May I have another. His word is, look at. Look to this shepherd and guardian of your souls. Look at what Jesus did with his own suffering and imitate him. Jesus did not lash out. He did not give up. He entrusted himself to the one who sees us. The God who judges rightly. The God who does not let injustice have the last word. The good news is that the shepherd who bore the world's sin is the one coming alongside you on this journey and in this pain. My friends, you are known and you are loved. So let us learn to suffer as those who are well-loved. Let us learn to suffer from the suffering servant who is indeed the Lord of all. And let us give up our pretenses of being impervious to pain. And let us also give up our fears of being overwhelmed by our pain. For God's love is all in all, even in our sufferings. Thanks be to God. Amen.