“Enduring the Unendurable”

Sermon by Rev. Dr. Stephen Poos-Benson

July 11, 2010

Colossians 1:1-12

I, Paul, have been sent on special assignment by Christ as part of God’s master plan. Together with my friend Timothy, I greet the Christians and stalwart followers of Christ who live in Colosse. May everything good from God our Father be yours!

Our prayers for you are always spilling over into thanksgivings. We can’t quit thanking God our Father and Jesus our Messiah for you! We keep getting reports on your steady faith in Christ, our Jesus, and the love you continuously extend to all Christians. The lines of purpose in your lives never grow slack, tightly tied as they are to your future in heaven, kept taut by hope.

The Message is as true among you today as when you first heard it. It doesn’t diminish or weaken over time. It’s the same all over the world. The Message bears fruit and gets larger and stronger, just as it has in you. From the very first day you heard and recognized the truth of what God is doing, you’ve been hungry for more. It’s as vigorous in you now as when you learned it from our friend and close associate Epaphras. He is one reliable worker for Christ! I could always depend on him. He’s the one who told us how thoroughly love had been worked into your lives by the Spirit.

Be assured that from the first day we heard of you, we haven’t stopped praying for you, asking God to give you wise minds and spirits attuned to his will, and so acquire a thorough understanding of the ways in which God works. We pray that you’ll live well for the Master, making him proud of you as you work hard in his orchard. As you learn more and more how God works, you will learn how to do your work. We pray that you’ll have the strength to stick it out over the long haul—not the grim strength of gritting your teeth but the glory-strength God gives. It is strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy, thanking the Father who makes us strong enough to take part in everything bright and beautiful that he has for us.

How do we endure the unendurable? In the congregation, I know there are many of you who are suffering the unendurable. You are going through great hardships. There is cancer, bankruptcy, MS, diabetes, depression, loneliness, death and pain.

I posted this question on Facebook this past week: How do you endure the unendurable? I had several posts from people on how they endure the unendurableable. My favorite was: With lots of chocolate! I had a lot of people write me personal messages about the unendurable things they are going through in life. What it reminded me is every single human being is going through a something. I think we all put on a good façade, a good front about who we are and if we are doing okay. But if you scratch the surface of most people, if you get people to sit down and talk with each other, you will find that we are all dealing with a something. You scratch the surface and there is pain. There’s a common human experience.

There have been some hard things I’ve had to wrestle with in my own personal life. The audacity of this passage is to say that God has given us all things bright and beautiful and God doesn’t want us to go through these unendurable times gritting our teeth, just trying to get through it, and somehow in the midst of the pain we’re to celebrate God’s presence. I read a passage like this and I say: How? How?

What’s powerful is this letter to Colossians through the church of Colosse—scholars believe that it was written right after a massive earthquake devastated the city. Archaeologists have found that the city was reduced to rubble and they believe that this letter was written to these people in the midst of their devastation.

Just think about Haiti and how that whole nation was leveled and somebody having the audacity of faith to write them and say don’t just weather this by gritting your teeth. Celebrate the presence of God in your midst! It’s audacious!

I think there are a few key points I want to lift up in this passage. One of the things that the author talks about is that we celebrate the joy of life and the power of God when we remember how God works. He says we are to be in tune to the will of God so we can be reminded of how God works. How does God work?

Let’s go back to my Lenten sermon series on God Has a Plan for your Life. The author starts the passage by saying: I, Paul, write this to you according to God’s Master Plan. It’s one of the things I preached about and I really believe that God has a master plan for our lives. Now that doesn’t mean that we are pre-destined. Remember, I don’t believe in a rigid pre-destination. God sets our lives in motion and then our lives unfold and then I talked about 3 different phases to God’s will. There’s an intentional will, there’s a circumstantial will and there’s an ultimate will. The intentional will of God is that our lives will be filled with joy and happiness and meaning but then as the circumstances of our lives unfold, all kinds of tragedies can happen to us and it doesn’t mean that God set us up to have these tragedies that just happen as a part of life. In the circumstantial aspect, the circumstantial will of God, God is present with you, working right now to reshape your life. God is rising up for you people to guide you, books to inspire you.

A lot of times these things just feel serendipitous, but haven’t you ever noticed that right when you need it the most, something appears in your life—a book just jumps off the shelf, a magazine article appears, someone says you need to read something, or you come to church on a given Sunday and the minister just happens to be preaching on Enduring the Unendurable and you wonder how is he speaking to me. I want to say, that’s how God works.

I ultimately believe there’s no such thing as a step in the wrong direction. Yes, we make bad mistakes and we can feel as though we have strayed so far from the presence of God and God’s will and God can even use every one of your bad decisions to reshape you. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your work on re-mending your life but you can’t stray so far from God that God can’t embrace you and shape you and mold you and send you in a completely new direction. That is how God works. God bestows upon you grace and love and joy and mercy.

Oftentimes, when we are going through these hard times, we feel as though God has abandoned us completely. That is not how God works. God does not abandon us. It might feel that way and when it feels that way, we need to set those feelings aside and we need to pay attention to what we know to be true and what we know to be true is that God is with us. That is how God works.

The passage says: We need to pay attention to how God works so we can do our work. What is our work? When we are going through these unendurable times, what is our work? It’s hard work. Sometimes, it’s so hard that it’s hard to even get out of bed in the morning. We’ve all been there when it felt safer to pull the sheets over your head and just stay there. I always say but eventually you have to go to the bathroom! We have to keep on going in our life. What is our work? I believe our work is to meditate and to pray and to connect with friends. Our work is to come to the faith community.

I think of the biggest mistakes people make when they are going through a hard time is they don’t go to church. They stay away from the community of faith where we can come and be nurtured and inspired and even though we might not like the music or the sermon is crazy and boring, at least you get to be with other people who care about you and love you.

One of the things I’ve talked about in the Adult Ed class is being together as a community of faith is one of the most important things we can do for one another. Someone talked about the fear that they have about leaving an old faith and kind of merging into a new faith and I said that’s what the community is for. I reach out and grab your hand to reassure you that it’s okay. Come. Before you know it, other people have gathered around you and they are buoying you up and holding you. Forget about the sermon and forget about the music. The most important thing is you in the church. When you are going through a hard time, don’t stay away. Come.

One of the hardest things we have to do is we have to lean into the pain. I take this from a Buddhist nun that I read. Her name is Pema Chodron. She is an amazing teacher and an author and I recommend her work to you. In her book, When Things Fall Apart, she talks about how we need to lean into the pain. I find that to be so wise because when we are going through pain, the one thing we want to do is run away from it. We want to flee it. We want to deny that it’s even there or when we’re going through a lot of pain, we want to try to control it.

For those of you who are control freaks in the congregation, you are trying to control the uncontrollable. One of the things that the unendurable teaches you is you’re not in control! When you lean into the pain it means that you surrender control. When you lean into the pain you stop denying how terrible it is. When you lean into the pain you confess that this is a miserable time. When you lean into the pain you surrender yourself to the presence of God and you allow God to be the God of your life. Isn’t that a concept? Allow God to be God. That’s why we call God, God. We don’t ever really want God to be God of our life.

I was typing this sermon when a church member walked in and asked if we could talk. Wow! She said I have to tell you; I’m going through bankruptcy. I have to tell you how hard it’s been and how embarrassing it has been. She said I denied it forever that I was going through this until I finally just gave up and admitted that I’m in the middle of this whole mess and I turned this whole thing over to God. (I thought: I was just writing this!) I turned everything over to God and suddenly I allowed God to shape and guide me and I began to realize that my life wasn’t over and suddenly people started appearing in my life who helped me make the right decisions. One of my friends asked how long I was going to keep beating myself over the head with a spiritual wet noodle. I realized there is no shame. She said this coming week I’m going to go sign the bankruptcy papers and she was beaming! She was anything but bankrupt. She was spiritually full. She talked about the joy in the midst of this craziness. She talked about the joy that this passage talked about because she leaned into it.

Are you leaning into it or are you fighting against it? Have you surrendered it or are you holding on to it? Our work, when we are going through these times, is to be Epaphras. The passage talked about an individual called Epaphras who lived amongst the community and taught the love of God. When we’re going through these rough times, it’s hard to hang onto God. The passage says may the line that holds us to heaven be taut with hope. When you’re going through hard times, sometimes that line just snaps. You know what an Epaphras does? An Epaphras ties the knot and takes the rope—we’re going to get through this together. That’s what an Epaphras does. An Epaphras works and walks with whoever is in pain—no judgment, not when are you going to get over this. But let’s walk with you as long as it takes. You are not alone.

This is how God works—through people coming together and when people come together, the unendurable becomes endurable. When people come together, the presence of God is known and joy is found and celebrated.

Who is your Epaphras? Who are you being Epaphras for? If it’s a common experience, the unendurable—it means that there is a lot of pain. If there is a lot of pain, it means that there is a lot of work that needs to be done. If God’s intention is for us to find joy and life, then it’s up to us to celebrate God’s joy. May you hang in there through your hard times. May you reach out to others in their hard times. May you be the joy of God.

Amen