Jesus was talking with his disciples one day. He explained that the course of his life was certain to bring him suffering and pain. One day he would be condemned by the authorities. In the unfolding of his life, eventually the elders and chief priests would make him suffer and even die. But, Jesus promised, his suffering and death would not be an end to him. Peter took his teacher by the arm and pulled him off to the side. In embarrassment, Peter told Jesus not to talk that way. He chastised Jesus for making such dire predictions about himself. To be condemned and executed as a criminal was something that brought shame to family, friends, and followers. To suffer at the hands of your enemies was believed to be a sign that you had offended God. So Peter told Jesus to stop talking such nonsense about himself. He told Jesus not to teach them that they should be ashamed of him, but to keep promising them that good and glorious victories lay ahead of them. Jesus was incensed, like any wise teacher would be. He said to Peter in anger, “Get behind me Satan! For you’re setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” Peter was judging Jesus by social standards of success. Jesus was striving for success in God’s eyes, which was something very different. Jesus explained to the disciples and the nearby crowds awaiting to hear his teachings that if they were waiting for Jesus to teach them the path of prosperity and pleasure, he had some bad news for them. For to follow in the way of Christ required that they deny their own desires, and embrace what society might determine to be shame. Prosperity in this day and age, Jesus explained, is not necessarily evidence of God’s favor. Just as humiliation and poverty can’t be equated with God’s condemnation. The path of faith required that followers of Christ would have to face hardship, sacrifice, even pain and sometimes martyrdom in living their faith with integrity. If anyone found such a path shameful or too costly, Jesus warned them, then they should abandon the path today. For as great as the promises of God are for tomorrow, today promises to greet us with difficulty, pain and suffering.

Ours is a painkiller culture. Our “painkiller” culture encourages us to pop a pill for every ache. Achieving a balanced understanding of suffering is difficult for us. Jesus’ healing miracles made it clear that God does not delight in human suffering. The disciples were sent out to heal and to preach. But Jesus reaffirmed that suffering and self-sacrifice were sometimes necessary. We must open ourselves to what God wills, not trying to force God to do what we will. The early Christians found the work of spreading the gospel difficult and dangerous. Even members of their own families sometimes handed Christians over for punishment.

But the path of life leads us unalterably through suffering. The way of Buddha. Buddha taught that life is suffering. The moments of passion, the moments of despair make us to embrace and try to make sense of the suffering all around us. The Buddha taught to seek the middle way, the attainment of an internal peace based not on ecstasy nor on misery, but on the steady course of gentle, meditative, reflective presence. – The words “must suffer” point toward a commitment that God made in the unfolding of God’s work of reconciliation. Jesus was not doomed to suffer at the hands of a cruel parent-God, but when Jesus will was perfectly united with the will of God, he accepted that suffering would lay in the path before him. The path of perfecting oneself in the grace of God sometimes leads directly into the path of suffering and struggle.

There’s friction between the path of Christ and the way to personal prosperity. The path of Christ calls us to see beyond our own self-interest, while the way of personal prosperity teaches us to take care of ourselves. Those who follow the path of Christ can’t expect that the larger society will match the desires and demands of Christian faith. There’s friction between what society names as success and what Christian faith names as success. The sacrifice of self-interest.

Shock – Jesus had feed thousands with a handful of loaves of bread, manipulated the weather, walked on water, made the blind to see and the lame to walk. To hear Jesus predict that he would be made to suffer and die the death of a martyr was a shock to the disciples.

The shame experienced by many families who have loved ones on death row. They’ve been known to move, to change their names, to disavow any connection with a family member condemned to death for capital crime. But the connection remains, at least internally. The execution of one’s child, one’s mother or father, or a sibling… such moments painfully wrench family members.

Clearly Peter attached significance to the title “Messiah” that excluded suffering. – The role of suffering in the exercise of faith.

Once I took a group of teenagers to what amounted to a Christian pep rally. One of the speakers witnessed to the power of God in her life. She described how she struggled with a disfiguring illness as a child. She used to cry herself to sleep because she was doomed to live as and ugly and unloved person. But, she said, there came a moment when she truly believed that God loved her no matter what she looked like. She prayed to God for healing, and gave her life completely to Jesus Christ. And that year, her doctors found the cure her disease and changed her into a physically beautiful teenage girl. The next year, so her story went, she was voted homecoming queen, and she knew everyone loved her. The point, she told all of the youth, is that if you pray hard enough and give your life over to Christ, God will make things work out for you. You know, I was right there with her in her story until the point that her doctors found a miraculous cure and she became homecoming queen. Up until that point, her story rang true. It rang true in my life and in what I knew of the lives of the teenagers with me. One teenager in my group was struggling with the fact that his parents were going through a very painful divorce. I had a girl in my group whose teenage brother had been killed in a car accident a couple years earlier. These kids had some heavy worries on their minds, and I didn’t believe God would simply solve their problems for them. God wouldn’t erase all their pains and losses once they prayed the right prayer. God wouldn’t make them all homecoming queens just because they gave their lives over to Jesus Christ. All of us can identify with that little girl who cried herself to sleep because she felt ugly, unloved, and incurable. But the rest of the story, the miraculous healing and her popularity thanks to God, not so many of us experience that outside of fairy tales.

We try to tell God how to be God. We seek to control how God behaves. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to mold our experience of God into the image of who we believe God should be. Peter tried to tell Jesus what it meant for Jesus to be the Christ. Peter pulled Jesus off to the side when he heard him saying something that didn’t sound “Christ-like.” Mark says, Peter rebuked Jesus. Rebuke is a strong word. To rebuke means to reprimand. Peter shook his finger at Jesus as if he were child and said, “Now I don’t want to hear those sorts of words coming out of your mouth.” How often do we shake our fingers at God and say, “Now this is what it means for you to be God”? The active prayer life of most Christians seems to be built on telling God how to behave. Especially when we feel most in need, we pray for God to live into our image of who God is. When we struggle, we pray for God to be a God who fights for us. When we suffer, we pray for God to be a God who heals us. When we experience injustice, we pray for God to be a God of justice for us. People have asked me, in my professional opinion, what I believe about the parts of the Bible that portray God as vindictive or abusive or bloodthirsty. I’ve been asked how do I make sense of the Bible when it portrays God as violent one minute and all-compassionate the next. The only answer I’ve ever found is to say, “The God I believe in wouldn’t do those things.” That’s still the only answer I have, but, it’s not as if my belief is somehow what matters in determining what God will do. It’s just one more way that we try to control God. We pull God off to the side plenty, to shake our finger and remind God to behave God-like. We want to tell God what it means to be God.

But God firmly rejects all our attempts to control what God can do. However bluntly we make demands of God, God has a way of reminding us that we aren’t in control. However slyly we try to manipulate God, God seems to have a way of putting us in our place. When Peter shook his finger at Jesus, Jesus refused to be patronized. Jesus’ words were even stronger than Peter’s. Jesus shouted at Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus reminded Peter to be the follower. Jesus reminded Peter that he was the teacher, and what seemed like wisdom to Peter was only shortsightedness to God. Sometimes when we think we have more control over our circumstances than we do, God puts us in our place. In the movie Jurassic Park, scientists have managed to clone dinosaurs into life again out of extinction. They’ve designed this park for dinosaurs to roam around. But they’ve only cloned female dinosaurs, in order to control how many of the animals there are. The mathematician in the movie questions this design. How do they know, he asks, that the dinosaurs won’t reproduce on their own. The scientists scoff at him and say that of course they can’t reproduce because there’s only female dinosaurs. But the mathematician says, “Life finds a way.” That’s how it is with God’s creative work. God’s creation finds a way, despite all our efforts to control or manipulate it. When we tinker with creation for our own purposes, it comes back to slap us in the face. For example, when we destroy natural habitats and cause animals to go extinct, over and over again we find that we’re the ones who suffer. Another movie, Medicine Man, tells the story of a researcher who finds a cure for cancer in these certain tropical insects in the Amazon rain forest. But even as he discovers the cure, land developers bulldoze the section of rain forest where the insects are found. The insects are destroyed, the cure is lost. All our efforts to shape what God has done to our selfish purposes only proves that we aren’t in control. God has a way of putting us in our place when we think we can manipulate the work of God to suit us.

Now the really bad news: Jesus taught that suffering is an essential element to living a Christian life. Just as Jesus was very clear in his understanding that he would suffer and die, so he made it very clear to his followers that they would suffer as well. We will face sorrow in our faith journey. We will experience pain and loss along the path that our life takes us. This message is one that we’d like to water down. Suffering is a message that we don’t like to hear. We want our faith to be the cure for a world full of danger and loss. Ours is a pill-popping culture. For every ache there’s a pill to make us feel better. Modern medicine has advanced to the place where even if we can’t cure a disease, we can usually make the symptoms disappear. Our culture is built on the faith that we have a right to live without pain and suffering. But Jesus taught that suffering is part of the package of faith. Our faith in God will lead us into moments of pain. The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do as a pastor took place at an Ash Wednesday service a couple years ago. A woman in the church I served had been struggling for almost a year with aggressive breast cancer. As a church we had prayed for her health. We all visited her often. And we all feared for her life. But she endured the ravages of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. And come Ash Wednesday, she was at the right time in her cycle of chemotherapy to be able to come to church. As each person came forward for the imposition of ashes, I made the sign of the cross on the each forehead. When she stepped up in front of me, I paused. And then I made the sign of the cross on her forehead with the ashes, and I said those same words that I’d said to everyone else, “Remember that you are dust, and dust you shall return.” It was such a sacred moment for me. It meant something deeper and richer and more painful to say those words to her. She really faced the likelihood that she would die, sooner rather than later. She could see the course of her disease, and she could see that one ending to the treatment of her disease was the real possibility that her life would end. Faith in Jesus Christ doesn’t take that away. In those ashes that I placed on her head, I felt more intensely the power of Jesus’ words about suffering. Faith is not an end to pain and suffering. Each of us will have our cross to bear. The experience of pain and loss is part of the living of a Christian life.

God’s gift of life is not a fairy tale. We don’t all end up homecoming queens or heroes. The journey of our lives takes us inevitably through times of pain and suffering no matter how faithful we are. Christian faith is not a promise that everything will work out the way we want. We are reminded over and over again that there are some parts of life and faith that remain outside of our control. There are some parts of life and faith that remain outside of our understanding. We can’t reshape the creative work that God has done, as if we know better. We can’t place ourselves in the role of God. When we do try to be God, sooner rather than later we find that eternal message that we are the creatures, not the creator. When we pray, we are to pray not in order to transform God. We aren’t to pray in order to teach God something that God doesn’t already know. We aren’t to make demands on God as if we know best how God should behave. But we are to pray. We are to pray, in order that our conversation with God will transform us. We are to commune with God daily along our journey in order that we may receive what God is offering to us. Even in times of sorrow God reaches out to us to remind us that suffering and pain and death will not be the end of our story. There is an empty tomb up ahead, with its promise and hope and mystery. Life will find way. Amen.