Hilton Head Island, SC – August 18, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
II Samuel 18:9-15;31-33; John 5:2-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – One man was there, who had been ill for thirty-eight years. – John 5:5 (RSV)
Let us begin by asking a series of questions. Is there a difference between suffering and pain? Is “suffering” more painful than mere pain? Are “agony” and “suffering” synonymous? Can suffering be defined as “intense pain”? Which is the worst form of suffering: physical, mental, psychological, or spiritual? Would everyone answer the same? If suffering is inevitable, could everyone here this morning describe your own experiences of genuine suffering?
To answer my own questions, I would say that suffering and pain are not the same. Pain is usually temporary and is usually physical, although not always. Ordinarily suffering goes on for a longer time, and perhaps even for a lifetime. For example, a person may experience permanent suffering because he or she fell in love with someone, and that relationship was broken off --- by death, by the other person not reciprocating the love, by a loving relationship which eventually dissolved: whatever. Mental factors may produce suffering, as can psychological factors.
Suffering might be described as intense pain, and “suffering” and “agony” might be synonymous to most people. As to whether physical, mental, psychological, or spiritual suffering is the worst, it depends on who is suffering which kind. Those with severe rheumatoid arthritis could legitimately claim that their suffering is greater than that of people who lost a spouse or parent or child to death, but who can declare which form of suffering is the hardest?
Last week I referred to Snoopy in my sermon. This week I want to talk about Peppermint Patty. She is the little girl with stringy hair who always carries a torch for Charlie Brown, whom she always calls “Chuck,” even though all the other Peanuts characters call him Charlie Brown. It could be her nickname for her beloved is a main reason why he does not reciprocate her love; I don’t know.
Anyway, for several days in mid-June Patty was in the throes of great mental anguish over her unrequited love. Charlie Brown has always carried a torch for a little red-haired girl, whom we have never seen, and who never gives him the time of day, because he never has the courage even to say hello to her. Patty told her little brother Pigpen, “I stood in front of that little red-haired girl and I saw how pretty she was. Suddenly I realized why Chuck has always loved her, and I realized that no one would ever love me that way. I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop. I made a fool of myself, but I didn’t care. I just looked at her and I cried and cried and cried. I have a big nose and my split-ends have split-ends, and I’ll always be funny-looking. And I think I’m going to cry again.”
Everyone in Peanuts suffers over something, except for Snoopy. He always rises above his challenges, and refuses to be weighed down for long by anything.
But flesh-and-blood people do suffer. And we all suffer in our own way. There has never been a “how-to book” that tells us how to suffer as well and wisely as we can. Even the Bible, which tells us many things about many things, doesn’t give us any magic formulas for overcoming the most agonizing obstacles that life can throw into our paths.
Bernard Malamud was a famous novelist in the middle of the last century. He wrote a short novel called The Assistant. It was about a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Morris Bober, who owned a small grocery store in Brooklyn, and Frank, a young Italian, who worked for him as his assistant in the store. Toward the end of the story, after Frank had come to admire Morris even though he had several issues with him, Morris related much of his story in Auschwitz to Frank. I read this book over fifty years ago for a course in seminary, but I will never forget something the fictional store owner said to his assistant. “If we live, we suffer.”
Sadly, that is true for everyone. If we live, we suffer, in one form or another (physical, mental, psychological, spiritual) and in one way or another (temporarily, sporadically, intermittently, or permanently). Only we can comprehend the nature of our own suffering, and we may choose never to describe it at all, to anyone else and least of all to ourselves, because we think it causes us too much anguish to do so.
Morris Bober, which is to say, Bernard Malamud, is right: if we live, we suffer. Suffering is inevitable for everyone who has ever lived.
We know more details about the life of King David than about anyone else in the Bible, including Jesus. Some scholars question whether everything the Bible says about David is historically accurate, and others claim David may never have existed at all. Once Winston Churchill was told, after he had ended a sentence with a preposition, that he should never end a sentence with a preposition. To that Churchill responded, with his ever-ready Churchillian wit, “That is nonsense up with which I shall not put.” Nor shall I ever countenance the nonsense that David, son of Jesse, never drew actually breath. Not every detail about his life may be factually correct, but the essence of his story is surely valid. Nobody could make all that up.
There are several sad chapters in the account of David’s life and reign, but one of the saddest is the palace revolt of his favorite son Absalom. It is unwise for any parent to favor one child over the others, and David should have known that. But no doubt he felt even worse when it was Absalom and not any of his other sons who staged a serious attempt to seize David’s crown.
The writer of the Second Book of Samuel does not leave out any of the terrible details of Absalom’s demise. It says the rebellious son of the king had very thick hair, and as he rode his mule under an oak tree, his hair got caught in the branches of the tree. There he hung, suspended and defenseless, above the ground. Some of the men in David’s army, led by his general Joab, captured Absalom. Someone came and told Joab what had happened. Joab quickly went and thrust three darts into Absalom, and his soldiers finished off the cunning conspirator.
When David was told what had happened, he was both conscience-stricken and heart-broken. “O my son Absalom, my son, my son! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” It is a sufficiently tragic story for William Faulkner to have given the title O Absalom to one of his somber novels.
“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken/ There’s a pain goes on and on,” Marius and his friends sing after the battle at the barricade is lost in the musical Les Miserables. Some injuries are so deep, some suffering is so severe, that it seems it never goes away. It lives within us as long as we live. It cannot be otherwise. Suffering is inevitable, and inescapable, and sometimes ineradicable. Some people experience far more of it than others, but all of us face it from time to time, and in one form or another.
Last Wednesday evening there was a documentary on Turner Classic Movies. It was called Liv and Ingmar, and it was about the Norwegian actress Liv Ullman and the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. They worked together and had a close relationship for over forty years. Early on they lived together for five years, during which time they produced a daughter. The relationship was electric, tempestuous, and tortuous. For the last thirty-five years, until he died, they became inseparable friends, even if they saw relatively little of one another. She told the interviewer, recalling something he once said, “’You said to me we are painfully connected.’” That was a truthful, telling statement. That is the only way in which some relationships can exist.
The Gospel of John contains numerous incidents from the life of Jesus which are found in none of the other three Gospels. One such is the story in John, chapter 5, about a man at the Pool of Bethzatha in Jerusalem. A variant spelling of Bethzatha is Bethesda. Bethesda is an inner suburb of Washington, DC, in Maryland. It is also the location of the famed Bethesda Naval Hospital, where many famous admirals, generals, presidents, and other luminaries have been treated and cured of many maladies. Apparently that is what happened at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem.
The location of the original Bethesda still exists, although it is no longer a pool. The spring which fed the pool has long since dried up. The entire area leading down to the pool is encased in marble, as is the floor of the pool. But now there are weeds growing out of the cracks between the stones, because the waters dried up --- centuries ago, I suppose.
Presumably the waters of the pool had healing properties, like Hot Springs, Arkansas, or Warm Springs, Georgia, or Baden-Baden in Germany. John tells us that when Jesus came to the pool, he saw “a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed.” There also was a man who had been suffering from some sort of disability for thirty-eight years. John says that the man had been lying there for a long time. Whether for thirty-eight years, or less, he does not say.
Jesus asked the man if he wanted to be healed of his paralysis. He told Jesus that he did, but every time the waters of the pool came bubbling up, someone else got down into the water ahead of him, and he could not avail himself of the relief the suddenly erupting waters might give him. Therefore Jesus told him, “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” Those exact words are used in other miracle stories in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and, Mark.
What may we conclude from this narrative? Suffering happens, illness occurs, but neither God not Jesus want anyone to suffer! The divine presence, which is always with us, seeks to relieve us of our suffering and to overcome our sorrows!
What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
If we live, we suffer. But suffering is not a requirement of living. Nor does it have to continue. It may continue, but there is no necessity for that. It can be lessened, or mitigated, or even eliminated, if we seek the divine help which God alone is able to supply. Bearing it alone, whether for a short time or a long time, or for thirty-eight years, is neither required nor desired by God. Whatever it is that causes our deepest torture, God wants us to cast our burdens on Him.
There is a seventeenth century hymn whose text and tune both were composed by a German pastor named Georg Neumark. “If thou but suffer God to guide thee (and in this context the verb “to suffer” means “to allow”):
If thou but suffer God to guide thee, and hope in Him through all thy ways,
He’ll give thee strength, whate’er betide thee, and bear thee through the evil days;
Who trusts in God’s unchanging love builds on the rock that nought can move.
If we say we have never suffered, we deceive ourselves. If we think we will never again suffer, we may also deceive ourselves. Life is certainly not an unending tragedy, but neither is it an unending bowl of cherries. We all encounter experiences from time to time which leave us in deep sorrow and pain, and there is no way that can be avoided.
Fifteen years ago I told the background of our last hymn in the third sermon I ever preached in The Chapel Without Walls. I want to do it again, because it is a wonderful story.
The text for “O Love that wilt not let me go” was written by the Rev. Dr. George Matheson, who was a Scottish minister in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he was young, he fell in love with a young woman he had known for some time. However, he was slowly going blind, and she decided she did not want be married to a blind man, so she ended the relationship. The result of this was so devastating to the minister that he became totally blind almost overnight, and he never married after that life-changing experience.
A quarter of a century later, when he was a famous preacher in Edinburgh, he felt compelled to write a brief summary of how he happened to write the poem which became the hymn. In it he deliberately said nothing about the spurned love of his former years. Instead, he wrote about the day he wrote the poem. It was the day of his sister’s wedding in Glasgow, he said. He did not go to the wedding, probably because, as he wrote, “Something had happened to me which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering….I had the impression rather of having it dictated to me by some inward voice than of working it out myself. I am quite sure that the poem was completed in five minutes.”
What was “the most severe mental suffering” which caused this? And why did it happen on the day his sister was being married? Could it be that “the something that had happened” was the suffering he had suppressed for so many years over the loss of the woman he loved, and his sister’s wedding brought it all back to the surface again? Might the words for this outstanding hymn have flooded through his mind, and in a great catharsis his suffering was obliterated?
“O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee”: George Matheson suddenly realized that though the young woman’s love for him had died, God’s love for him had not. In perceiving that, he also realized that he could completely give his life to God. “O Light that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee”: the blind man was able to see anew in a non-physical way, because the deep pain he had felt for all those years was now lifted.
“O Joy that seekest me through pain…I trace the rainbow through the rain/ And feel the promise is not vain that morn shall tearless be….I lay in dust life’s glory dead/ And from the ground there blossoms red /Life that shall endless be.” When George Matheson died, the entire congregation of hundreds of people together walked to the cemetery, each with a red rose, and before the casket was lowered, all the red roses were lovingly dropped into the grave.
Suffering can be therapeutic for the sufferer, as well as for those who are close to the sufferer. Though agony overtakes us, God’s love will overtake the intense pain, if we allow it to do so.