I have watched this particular Sunday, with its epistolary text about suffering and its effect on Christian character, as it drew closer and closer on my calendar. It is certainly true that on some snowy drives back and forth to Fairfax hospital, where my father lay injured, I had more time than I would have expected, or asked for, to consider the hope we who love God find in seasons of crisis. Then, this past Monday, I received e-mail from a friend I meet with from time to time who is battling recurrent illness. Her note read, in part:
“I'm mad. I am SO sick of being sick. I keep wondering what…good being sick like this does for God? If it's a testament to my faith while in a bad place, then I'm not exactly passing the test. […] This morning I am really discouraged by it all, including my inability to settle on some belief about God and his goodness - and that his "love" is a good thing that’s safe and really does include me, and really is love, not "love" disguising attacks. I hear things about healing not happening because one doesn't have enough faith, …that illness is teaching us something.... [but] I don't know what to believe.”

And she’s not alone, by any means. Suffering, and particularly chronic suffering, tests everyone who endures it. For those of us who strive and struggle to trust in Jesus, the crisis may be even more pointed, as my friend expresses so well. I read an English theologian some years ago named John Stott, who put this in his own way: “The real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain of it or the injustice of it, but the apparent god-forsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not. Sometimes we picture him lounging, perhaps dozing, in some celestial deck chair, while the hungry millions starve to death…” (John W. R. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 1986, p329).

Of course, the Apostle Paul knew something about undeserved suffering. In the course of his ministry, prior to the late correspondence we call Romans, Paul endured beatings, shipwrecks, violence by angry mobs, unjust imprisonment, and even the threat of death sentences. Turning from his famous expression as to how God in Christ has reconciled and justified us by the faith-worthy merit of Jesus, Paul pauses for a moment to consider what kind of life we, who have been justified before God by Jesus Christ, can expect. His mind turns to the sufferings he has endured for the sake of the Cross. He says that because of Christ’s reconciliation of us with God, we can receive the gift of his peace with God.

Some might suppose this peace means the blessing of smooth sailing, of leading a charmed life, as some televangelists seem to proclaim to those willing send in a check - but with all he’s been through, Paul knows better. Rather than ‘peace’ as the absence of conflict or pain, Paul speaks of a peace that comes to us as a gift from God, something that remains with us even when conflict is raging. According to Paul, when we have this inner comfort, this peace, suffering can produce in us perseverance, or endurance, and thereby contribute to what he calls character, using in his language a word meaning “the state of being tested and proved.” With this inward spirit, this tested character, we become stronger in the places where once we broke - the places where God mended us - and because of this healing, we take hope in the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit.

At least, that’s how Paul says it. But on days we feel overcome by pain or loneliness, hope can seem pretty far from our horizon. Then Paul’s words may sound a bit strange and otherworldly. Ours is not the first generation of Christians to notice this: no less a believer than Martin Luther once said that in our world, it can seem the very opposite about suffering is true, for we observe that quite often “suffering produces impatience, and impatience, rejection, and rejection, despair, and despair, eternal confusion” (Luther, Lectures on Romans, Works: Vol. XXV, p288).

But as we observed a couple weeks ago, when we dropped in on Paul and Silas while they were singing songs of praise in a prison cell, we who trust God are in touch with what we hold to be an objective reality: namely, that God is just, and God is always good. Now life is good, too, but sometimes life can be mired in the muck of pain and illness. When that happens, we remember that God is God, life is life, and we ought not confuse the two. God is not the sender of every cruelty, every intrusion into our lives by illness and death. There are those who believe that, I recognize, but they would protect God’s sovereignty and power at a terrible price to God’s goodness and love. Jesus warned against attributing all that causes us pain to God. God is always good.

But even those of us who want to hold to the belief that God is good can, at our worst, wonder how God could fail to show up. So profound is the pain we feel that we may project our experience of it onto God. If we are wounded and angry, we may conclude that the God of the universe is an angry, wrathful deity. If we have long held to the idea that we could control God by our religion or our beliefs, as if God were some sort of cosmic good luck charm against evil, we will almost certainly be due for a painful disappointment. We may well then in hurt and anger be tempted to abandon God.

Of course, what we would actually then be rejecting is a mistaken idea of God. We abandon the failed little god who failed to honor our contract and protect us from harm. That little god did not show up to fix things for us - and we are wise to reject such a false image of God. We leave that falsehood behind, because that is not the mysterious God Who is often silent when we demand explanations, Who often interrupts when we would prefer to be left alone! We may need to discover, however painfully, that God may be bigger than we spend our lives imagining.

And if we are forced to abandon our old notions of God, there is a new possibility for us – a new pathway to deeper relationship with the Creator. For Paul, so great is his trust and faith at what Christ has opened up for us, that his sufferings are a cause not for anguish or feeling abandoned, but are a precursor to growth in the likeness and image of Christ. We see that when trouble or heartbreak intrudes upon our lives, it is no power of ours that can save us. There is no memory verse, no remembered sermon, certainly, and no religious formula that can rescue us. When the time of trial comes, when we have laid aside the false idol of a good-luck-charm-kind of faith, we squarely face reality: we need someone to come and save us. So it will be our appointed salvation who comes, who comes when our health falters, when our job is lost, when our marriage is over, when death intrudes. After John Stott wrote about the intolerable pain of wondering at a God who does not show up, he concluded the passage this way: ít is this terrible caricature of God [as One dozing in a deck chair] that the Cross smashes to smithereens. We are not to envisage [God] on a deck chair, but on a cross (Stott, p329).

What God has to offer to those who struggle to hold on to trust is the crucified Christ. And the word on the wire is that nothing, neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nothing - can separate us from the love of God that is extended to us in him.

Thanks be to God.