Sunday After Ascension Day Sermon - BMT - May 17, 2026

When I was finishing up a seminary for my Masters of Divinity at Fuller, at the end of the program, they do what's called a field education.

This is a requirement of typically a seminarian's, and really what that means is they're telling you to get out of the classroom and do a practicum, you know, get some real life, real ministry experience and you know, stop reading so many books.

And and I was near the end of my program, and I wanted to do this as quickly as possible, and uh I was looking for what field education requirement would require the least amount of hours.

Uh, this is what I did.

Most of them had like 20, 25-hour week commitments, and I was working in doing seminary, and I was like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that.

I want the least amount of hours.

And I found on the books, they probably got rid of it, uh, but I found on the books at Fuller that a 10-hour clinical internship at a hospital uh would suffice as a field education requirement.

So I began calling all these hospitals around Los Angeles and all of the that had these internship programs for chaplains, and all of them were saying, look, we've been booked up for months.

Like you should have applied 10 months ago if you wanted to be doing this right now.

So then I started calling these hospitals that didn't even have internship programs, just begging to do something like chaplaincy and have somebody write it off.

And I got a hold of this Catholic hospital in Ventura County, and and this uh uh I called the spiritual care department and got the manager on the phone, and this man uh whose name I now know is Father Colleen Tommy and he was a Byzantine Catholic priest, and he had a Romanian accent, sounded a lot like Dracula.

And he picked up the phone, and I'm I'm just like, you know, this despairing Protestant begging this Byzantine Catholic priest for some kind of uh modicum of a of a an internship, and he said, Well, we don't have you know internships here, but what you know, why don't you just come down to the office and we'll have uh an interview and we can talk after that?

Well, I drove, uh it was, I think that was like a Friday or Saturday, and then Monday morning I'm at this hospital.

I'm being interviewed by a Byzantine Catholic priest, a Roman Catholic priest, a Roman Catholic nun, and a Catholic deacon.

And they start throwing all these questions at me, and I totally fumbled like this interview.

Uh I had like no self-awareness.

All these questions were just like going way over my head, and it was terrible.

I knew for sure, like these folks are just they're not even gonna bother with me.

And we we got done, and Father Colleen looked at me and he said, You know, Colby, I I think we can work with you.

Uh he said, I'm willing, uh I'm willing to mentor you.

And and he was a huge mentor of mine.

Uh, he changed my life, Father Colleen.

But I remember what he said after that.

He said, Uh, we're gonna work with you, but I I have something I want you to think about.

And he said, I want you to ask yourself, what do you do with your pain?

What do you do with your pain?

And he said, if you do not know what you do with your pain, he said, you are not going to be able to do chaplain ministry in the hospital, uh, much less do parish ministry.

Uh he was a parish priest, he bivocational.

And I didn't know the full weight at that moment, the a question like that.

Uh I was more focused on, you know, yeah, I need to get the, I need to check the box, need to get done, get to get my uh graduate certificate.

But I knew though, in that moment as he was asking me that he this is a huge pearl of wisdom that he just put in front of me.

This inquiry.

This wisdom of knowing that we must negotiate pain.

That this is part of what it means to be human is we negotiate pain.

There's no painless life.

There's no life in this world that's free of pain, free of total suffering.

And Father Queen knew this, and uh, as a naive seminarian, I don't think I did.

But pain is not created equal.

There's all different kinds of pain, different degrees of pain, different degrees of suffering.

And the the New Testament speaks of this.

Most often it'll speak of suffering, but Paul will at times call this pain, the slight momentary pain when he's reflecting on the Christian life in this present world.

But we might think of suffering as an enduring of pain.

An enduring of pain, a bearing of pain.

And according to 1 Peter, there's actually a kind of pain and a kind of suffering that we can say is beneath the dignity of who he calls the beloved.

This is how 1 Peter addresses the church, the beloved, the loved ones.

That there's actually a kind of pain that is beneath the dignity of the beloved.

It's the pain that's born of the pain of this world.

The suffering that Peter says we need not suffer as those of the world.

And he lists, he gives some examples.

But this is the suffering, the pain that is born of hooking ourselves to the desires of the world, to the ambition of the world, the pain of resentment, the pain of bitterness, the pain of envy, the pain of shame, guilt, the pain of brutality and hatred, the pain of sadness that's born of our own selfish desire and the things we want so bad.

This is a pain that we've been liberated from.

But this liberation from pain is not to a pain-free life.

It's not to a life that's free of suffering.

In fact, a life that promises life free of suffering or free of pain, this is just the promises of the world.

Because often those promises, a life free of pain and free of suffering, they're bolstered often by commitments to mammon and money and success and comfort and possessions and luxury, and often will turn itself in being apathetic and unconcerned for those that don't have those things.

That's not a pain-free life.

That there's a the pain and suffering of the world that's underneath that.

But according to 1 Peter, we're liberated from the pain of the world, the suffering of the world, in order to enter into a different kind of pain.

The pain of God in Messiah.

The pain of Jesus.

What the New Testament authors call the sufferings of Christ.

That we're liberated from the suffering and the pain of the world to enter and participate in the pain of God in Jesus, in the suffering of Christ, so much so that Paul will even say that we are filling up what's lacking in this pain in Jesus, this suffering.

What is this pain?

We know, according to Peter and Paul and James, that this pain and joy are not mutually exclusive.

This pain, this suffering and joy are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, this kind of pain, this kind of suffering begets.

It's a catalyst for a peculiar kind of joy.

Have y'all seen that pattern in the New Testament, right?

Consider it all joy.

It has been granted to you in Christ Jesus that you should suffer.

Like it's a gift.

This pain is a gift.

The pain of Jesus.

In many ways, we can see that Jesus' call to discipleship.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, when Jesus beckons a man to come, a woman to come and follow him, Jesus bids them to come and die.

The imagery of living life commensurate with the kingdom is the imagery of crucifixion, the cross.

That Jesus, when he beckons the disciples to come to him to pick up their cross, Jesus is essentially saying, choose your pain.

Choose your suffering.

Because in this world, this world is not free of all suffering or free of all pain.

But Jesus is beckoning us to enter willingly into a very particular kind of pain.

You see, we renounce the world.

We renounce everything that the world is about, the desires of the flesh, the ambition of the world.

We renounce the world and detach from the world so that we can actually be more intimate with the world.

That we're intimate with the world at the level at which God is intimate.

The intimacy of God sharing the wounds of this world.

It's an intimacy that we see in Christ crucified.

This is the scandal, according to Paul.

This goes beyond worldly wisdom, but it's a participation of God's own pain in Christ, in full solidarity with a wounded and hostile world.

In other words, the pain of crucifixion, the pain of discipleship is the pain that necessarily follows when you have this kind of God, a God of indiscriminate, unconditioned love.

Loving the loveless, loving the enemies, loving the hostile, loving the brutal.

This is the pain we bear when we love those who withhold love from us.

When we love those who scare us, when we bless those who wish nothing but ill will on us.

The pain of this indiscriminate love, the pain of crucifixion, is the pain of discipleship.

And yet, this is the pain that Peter says that blossoms in joy.

That there's a real joy in this kind of pain.

But this pain is superseded by joy.

Joy is the largest frame of reference.

Right?

Hebrews says it's for the joy that was set before Jesus that he endured the pain of the cross.

Pain will end, suffering will end, joy goes on indefinitely.

And this is the joy that we touch upon in the present.

When we enter into a wounded and hurting world through this indiscriminate love of Jesus, it begets a pain and a suffering that is mysteriously filled with joy.

I think a wonderful image of this, I heard uh report of this, I think it was last fall, but there was this community, and I believe how you pronounce it, is Yangjin in China.

It's a rural community in the mountains.

And a group of missionaries actually went out, they were an unreached people and brought the gospel to this village that was up in the mountains.

And this village, it was made up of about 70 families, and uh these families they had uh the scripture in the Chinese language, and they're reading the Bible and they're gathering together, they're praying together, they're worshiping together, this just new believers, this whole village of 70 families.

And as they're pouring over the scriptures, they they this whole village actually gets convicted.

This is uh a true story.

Like within the last couple years, this was reported on.

And this entire village, they they become convicted, they see in scripture like the the mandates of caring for the poor and caring for the orphans and the widows.

And this entire Chinese rural village of 70 families, they got connected with an orphanage, and they adopted a hundred and sixty children.

These 70 families on the side of this mountain in rural China adopted 160 children, and every single one of these children has special needs.

Cerebral palsy, Down syndrome.

Some of them are like missing limbs, a lot of them can't even speak.

Uh, this pastor was reporting like the villagers that they were carrying just some of these kids like through the village to get a place because they couldn't walk.

70 families, 160 children with special needs.

But this pastor was just reporting on the sheer joy that these people had.

They entered willingly into pain.

They entered willingly into these children's lives to bear the cost of what it means to love them in this world right now, knowing that we're awaiting a future where love will not feel like a burden, where it gives way to joy, where this pain is just momentary.

This this village in China is so beautiful.

I think you see the mingling of both the challenge, the hardship, and yet the joy of what it means to follow this crucified and risen and ascended Jesus in this world.

And Jesus, who has ascended, does not leave us comfortless.

But what we've been reading over the past few weeks is that in the high priestly prayer, Jesus is knows he's leaving and praying to the Father to give us what we need that we might have comfort in a world full of trouble, that we might be strengthened where we feel weak.

And here, 1 Peter gives us this charge of joy that's born of our resolve to share and participate in the pain of Jesus in the world.

Amen.