suffering

I took a person I greatly admire to task yesterday. Well, it seemed to me that he thought people who were not in Messianic house churches were less than they ought to be. He corrected that perception but admitted that he does much admire the Eastern Church against the Western one.

This is actually more understandable to me, given that I often feel the same — except that a few weeks ago, I received an article about the church in China that began to rearrange everything I thought I knew about the Body of Christ. It was a wonderful story about how often the Chinese fast, how long they pray, what miracles they are doing, how they are suffering. They express the opinion that American Christians are proud and don’t ‘get it’. I was prepared to agree and I wanted to rejoice, but something constrained me. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. I began to put two and two together.

First of all, the Chinese church of the article comes across as typically “conservative and evangelical” even though they believe they are not like Americans. They remind me very much of attitudes I was raised with. “How much suffering can you take for Jesus?” They have one ministry in the Body — evangelism. They fast continually and pray for hours every day. They say this can turn situations around in about 30 days. They are always working, working, working for Jesus. I would like to say this is a good thing — maybe even necessary, given that they still need evangelism in that country and face much hostility. But when they say, “You proud Americans….” and then proceed to talk about all their works…then I have to wonder who’s running things.

I spent three years in a Chinese-dominated group. They had some wonderful things, to be sure. They were also very rigid and legalistic. They believed they understood the Cross (and they were somewhat proud of all this). They believed that part of enduring the Cross was never to complain about anything — even if it was legitimate. It meant, in this particular situation, that leaders sometimes practiced abuse. But that is not to say the people I knew were the same as the people in the article…but the conformity, the “we’ve got it figured out”, “how much can you take for Jesus?” were all embedded in there. I suspect it represents Chinese culture mixed with the excesses of American evangelism which they learned from us.

I began to reconsider the Church. What is a good church and what is a bad church? What is it with all these people pointing fingers at one another with a “you people” attitude? A friend of mine shared that he complained to the Lord once about the deplorable state of the Body. “It is weak, it is beaten up, it has festering wounds,” he said. Then, the Lord spoke and said, “Don’t you ever talk like that about my Body again. My Body is strong, it is robust, it is healthy…”

I considered that later. Now I think it’s right. I wondered how the Lord could abandon His Body for 2000 years to wolves. But He hasn’t. Are heresies, slanders, wounds, sickness, despair, pride, envy, etc. part of the Body of Messiah? Yet there they are in what we consider too casually as His “Body”. Messiah’s Body is perfect. When we eliminate sin and sickness, only that which looks like Messiah remains. That is the Body. That is what Paul meant when he said,

Gal 4:19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

It is why Jesus said:

Mat 5:29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast [it] from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not [that] thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And why Paul said again:

Rom 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

What I am saying is that the Body is that which is according to the image of His Son. Those things rooted in sin and sickness are not part of His Body.

When I saw that, I also saw something beyond the “Here’s how you do it right” syndrome. God has spoken to His saints in many ways under the worst years of the visible church. Anyone with an open heart, He can speak to and they have the choice to take hold of His words. No one can stop you from being holy — truly, truly HOLY unless you choose not to be. One may be in prison, isolated for some circumstances of family obligation or in a situation where there are no believers in agreement.

If you will look in the Old Testament, there is The LAW. If a person transgressed, they had to make restitution — pay a penalty of some sort and make atonement. But how is it so much went on back then with seemingly no judgment? For instance, why was David allowed to eat the shewbread reserved only for priests, yet Uzzah was struck dead for steadying the ark when the oxen shook it? Why, as a Nazirite who could not come near to any dead thing, was Samson allowed to slaughter hundreds of Philistines with his bare hands and a jawbone? We see on the one hand that the LAW was not to be trifled with and on the other hand, Jesus taught that it was really about the heart.

There are many believers outside of all organization, but are they outside the Body of Messiah?

1Cr 11:29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

If we think the Lord’s Body is weak and ragged and wretched, can we say we discern His Body? If we say this one is “in” the Body because they are part of this thing and another is “out”, do we discern the Body? Perhaps the real reason the Body seems to be according to rules instead of unity is because people do NOT discern the Body. When they do, will there be unity in real time? And then will people say, “How they love one another?”

1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done. [Psalm 78, ESV]

Recently, I told a friend that I have come to appreciate the story of the Passion as the central part of an intentional service. Being raised in a Protestant background, I have sat through my share of lectures, lectures, lectures. There is nothing that compares with the narrative passed down of the Lord’s Passion and what that means to us. It is the opening chapter of the story of the Church, to which has been added stories of saints through the ages. There is only one Church in heaven and earth, comprised of all the saints who have ever lived. This is where community and persons meet — our stories added to theirs.

But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, [Heb.
12:22-23]

The institutional churches usually limit their concentration to either the community story (e.g., Roman Catholic) or the personal one (e.g., Evangelical “personal testimony”). Why can’t we have both? I think we can have both just as surely as we can have intentional worship and organic spiritual life. They are all the heritage of the Church. The Church does not know its own heritage so it wanders like an orphan in the wilderness. It’s time to wake up and know that we come from spiritual fathers whose story belongs to us and to whom we add our own story.

We share the passion of Christ; His story is our story. Paul viewed his own suffering as a continuation of the suffering of Christ, that the Church might be built up:

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: [Col. 1:24]

Jesus also said:

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. [Luke 6:40]

The way of our testimony is the way of Christ. We are his witnesses on earth that we know Him and are known of Him. And further, Paul tells us:

For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. [1 Cor. 10:17)

Put these together. It begins to make sense. Our tearing is the sufferings that fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ…for his Body’s sake, which is the Church. We are added to the bread that is Him… A friend of mine reminded me of Amish friendship bread where one person makes a starter out of which come multitudinous loaves of bread when passed around. (Remember when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?) My first thought was something my aunt taught me years ago about the reason wine is to be preferred over grape juice for communion. Wine has spirits that continually reproduce much like the yeast in Amish bread. It represents the eternal life of Christ.

The point is that we, as members of the Body, have stories to add to the parables and dark sayings of old — things that the Lord has done for us that will not be added to the record until we tell of them. Like yeast and spirits, one person’s testimony is the starter for another. The individual story must be understood in the context of the starter story. The narrative is preserved and treasured in the community life, but it is developed in the personal life. We must have experiences that speak to our hearts alone but we must also have a story to share with those who have no story.

In the next post, we will look at the how-to of passing down the story and we will examine our spiritual roots. (They may not be what we think.)

What I am about to share both breaks my heart and fills me with unspeakable hope. I had intended to do a book review but realized that there is more to be said through a recent slice of my life than in an analysis of a piece of literature. “The book” illuminated what had long puzzled and distressed me. It enabled me to put a face on a deep question that had haunted me for many years, the import of which I had completely misunderstood and had, therefore, placed on a permanent “back burner” along with all those things that “one day we will understand”. With great joy I knew this was an author who understood the impact of catastrophic loss on identity and purpose — and not only that, but also the purposes of God in shaping us for a destiny achievable by no other means on this earth.

It was with that great joy and hope that I published very quickly a short blurb for a special Internet group:

I picked up a book that everybody should read (maybe) that did for me what The Shack did for others… A Grace Disguised, by Jerry L. Sittser is the best book I have ever read on grief and loss. Every kind of loss imaginable is processed in this work. Sittser himself lost three generations in a car wreck. Although his own loss was senseless and immediate, it’s interesting to see that he got a handle also on the kinds of loss that are very, very slow as well as losses that are deliberate (resulting from cruelty) and even those that result from wrong choices. I never thought about all these avenues to loss before. He talks about the preciousness of life and how that figures into the preciousness of what we lose. I wish I could share online what it’s done for me to read such a work. In my case, I didn’t even know exactly what my loss was or why I suffered such awful depression off and on since childhood, but I finally uncovered the original cause that everything else has played into. So for me, it’s exciting to finally solve the riddle, though I don’t know yet how recovery will be finalized. Still, it gives me great hope. So, for everyone who suffers from bitterness, anger, depression or off-and-on sadness…this is the book for you.

I found the book after reading a recommendation about it on an Internet forum. When I finally read it, I was so relieved not only to find closure for a conscious matter but to realize how the conscious issue actually plugged into a loss from my childhood that I had never identified as a loss — rather, I had become bitter, angry, disaffected, suspicious of others, perfectionistic — so many things. It affected me all of my life — who I thought I was, who I thought I was supposed to be. It affected situations I set myself up for unknowingly that were bound to fail, thus feeding into the original cause. I had a deep sense of being destined to a life of failure in a particular area since the same results happened over and over. I’d managed to stalemate the effects by avoiding humans to some degree. However, when you do that it plays into not only the relationships you wish to avoid, but those with people you really care about. I often wonder if I hadn’t been so busy protecting myself would I have been a more attentive mother, a better friend, would I have engaged others more effectively? And so, one loss leads to another and another and another. But can our losses be salvaged? Are we forever to be like amputees with part of ourselves missing, unable to fully function in this world?

The question surfaced when I answered a query by a young man who suffered from depression. Fortunately, I had already moved beyond where he finds himself — my own depression had abated from lasting months and years to dwindling to weeks, days, and finally hours. I had no major struggles going on when I wrote him, but became aware later of an unconscious sadness still burning in the background that often makes it difficult for me to enjoy social events or be comfortable around people. I am not aware of being sad most of the time and the circumstances that led to this are no longer on my mind 24/7, though they still cross my mind often. Yet so much joy attends my life these days at the same time. My thought upon reading “the book” was, “Wow! Maybe God and I shall finish this business at last!”

So excited was I, so wishing everybody could come to this place, that I sent my little blurb out to a number of people via e-mail. Then, like a stab in the heart, I received this response from a friend:

“I’ll pass on this read. I have no interest in visiting this topic of depression, grief, the why or any part of it. No thanks. It may be a good book but I don’t need to revisit the past or solve the riddles; they can stay in the ground. Or, I could blow my head off like a friend of mine did.”

I gasped. “She can’t be serious,” I thought. I felt relegated to the consignment pile of those fluff-balls who go in for transactional analysis one day, deliverance the next, Freudian analysis another day, TM on Saturdays. I also felt sorry for my friend who chooses to quarantine the darkness rather than embrace the very real possibility of conquering it. After her response, I feared being completely misunderstood by those I had intended to assist or being written off as another navel gazer. Normally, such a comment would have wounded me where I am vulnerable, but I believe so strongly in the message of “the book” and its God-given inspiration that I couldn’t resist inserting a comment in the site where I posted my original recommendation:

“People, this is not a book about a bunch of folks sitting around psychoanalyzing themselves and discussing the past forever and ever. This is a wonderful book about the continuum of life, how everything plugs into what God is doing in the earth, and how we may find a wholeness of identity again. I sure don’t need another self-help book that discusses my issues ad infinitum without any closure.

What I liked about Sittser is that he states what others often don’t — that some kinds of loss are less like broken bones and more like amputations. Those kinds of loss break our very identity unless we can understand how they play into the very purposes of God in our lives and in the people He wants us to become.

I’m sorry to go on about this, but I was abhorred to receive such a response and further nauseated to think that anyone could think I am all about maintaining misery. It’s attitudes like this that prevent people from processing things properly. I’m sorry that my friend prefers to get through life by sheer grit instead of real healing. But, as I told her, I’d rather take the opportunity to become untwisted and whole if I have it.”

Nothing will do this book justice more than a quotation from its twelfth chapter. I believe Sittser has realized God’s purpose in allowing the many kinds of death that afflict us — physical and emotional — that we may enter into Christ’s resurrection rather than remain as good people living a good life. And with that said, I end my contribution and leave you with Sittser’s observations on this war between good and evil, life and death on this planet.

I have come to realize that the greatest enemy we face is death itself, which claims everyone and everything. No miracle can ultimately save us from it. A miracle is therefore only a temporary solution. We really need more than a miracle — we need a resurrection to make life eternally new. We long for a life in which death is finally and ultimately defeated. …

It is easy to be skeptical about the reliability of the stories that tell of Jesus’ resurrection. They could be mere fabrications, dreamed up by his followers who respected and loved him so much that they did not want to let him go after he died. The resurrection could have been a convenient and creative way for them to keep him alive, though he really did die on the cross and never came to life again.

It was my own experience of tragedy and grief that gave me a different perspective on the resurrection accounts. My loss helped me to understand their loss. Loss leads to unrelenting pain, the kind of pain that forces us to acknowledge our mortal fate. It is possible, as we all know, to hold this terrible truth at bay for a while. Shock does that for us initially, which explains why people who lose a loved one or suffer some other kind of loss can be downcast one moment and euphoric the next, tearful one moment and giddy the next. But shock wears off over time. Then comes denial, bargaining, binges, and anger, which emerge and recede with various degrees of intensity. These methods of fighting pain may work for a time, but in the end they too, like shock, must yield to the greater power of death. Finally only deep sorrow and depression remain. The loss becomes what it really is, a reminder that death of some kind has conquered again. Death is always the victor.

But there is one notable exception. The followers of Jesus were devoted to him. They had sacrificed much to serve him. Suddenly their hero was gone. The account says that they became profoundly disillusioned by this turn of events and terrified that they, too, might die. So the disciples scattered like seeds in a gust of wind and hid from the Roman authorities…

Yet a few weeks later these followers of Jesus were proclaiming audaciously that Jesus was alive again — not as a resuscitated corpse, which would have only put off the inevitable, but as a resurrected being who would never die again. They even claimed that they had seen Jesus, talked to him, and touched him. They stated adamantly that Jesus had died, spent three days in a tomb, and then been resurrected. So sure were they of their experience that the apostles preached it everywhere, were martyred because they would not deny it, and lived with a joy, hope, and purpose that few in history have ever achieved. There is no record that any of them broke rank, disclaiming their story and admitting that they had invented it beause they did not want to accept Jesus’ death. …

Death does not have the final word; life does. Jesus’ death and resurrection made it possible. He now has the authority and desire to give life to those who want and need it. Though the experience of death is universal, the experience of a resurrection is not. What made the disciples so different from the rest of us who have experienced catastrophic loss is not the terrible experience of loss itself, but their experience of Jesus’ resurrection.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus performed signs and wonders as signs of God’s presence on earth. The deaf were made to hear, the blind to see, the lame to walk, and the dead to live again. But sooner or later those who had their hearing restored went deaf again — if not before death, then obviously in death. Those who were given sight went blind again, those who were made to walk went lame again, and those who were given life died again. Suffering and death won out in the end. In other words, Jesus’ miracles were not the ultimate reason for his coming. His great victory was not his miracles but his resurrection. The grave could not hold him, so perfect was his life, so perfectly sacrificial his death. Jesus conquered death and was raised by God to a life that would never die again. The Easter story tells us that the last chapter of the human story is not death but life. Jesus’ resurrection guarantees it. All tears of pain and sorrow will be swallowed up in everlasting life and pure, inextinguishable joy. …

I remind myself that suffering is not unique to us. It is the destiny of humanity. If this world were the only one there is, then suffering has the final say and all of us are a sorry lot. But generations of faithful Christians have gone before and will come after, and they have believed or will believe what I believe in the depths of my soul. Jesus is at the center of it all. He defeated sin and death through his crucifixion and resurrection. Then light gradually dawns once again in my heart, and hope returns. I find reason and courage to keep going and to continue believing. Once again my soul increases its capacity for hope as well as for sadness. I end up believing with greater depth and joy than I had before, even in my sorrow. [Sittser, A Grace Disguised]