One of the most disturbing stories I have ever read is by one of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard. I’ve got a lot of affection for Annie because she is partly responsible for my being in the ministry at all. It was a short story she wrote about weasels and how they grasp tenaciously to the jugular of their prey that made me realize that I wanted to live tenaciously. I wanted…I needed to give my life to something more than what I was doing at the time. Eventually that led to seminary.
But I didn’t come to talk about weasels today; I came to talk about a deer. Specifically, the deer that Annie Dillard writes about in a short story called The Deer at Providencia. Dillard is a naturalist and she is always looking at the world around her for insights into what life is all about and whether faith is a reliable guide. In this story she talks about taking a trip to the Amazon jungle with several other North Americans. They are visiting in a native village and enjoying the experience. They eat wonderful fish taken right from the river. They stay up late at night talking. In many ways it sounds like an idyllic setting – an invigorating retreat.
But in the middle of the village where they are staying there is a small deer tied to a tree. It has a rope around its neck and it is struggling to get free. As Dillard watches the deer puts one leg up through the noose that is holding it and falls to its side. Then another leg. Then another. So that now it has three legs stuck in the loop of rope around its neck. Some small boys go to free its legs, but it immediately goes back to pawing at its neck.
The deer is suffering horribly, so much so that the people travelling with her, who are men, watch Dillard to see her reaction. They think that maybe, she, as a woman, might be disturbed to see this. One man
says, “If it had been my wife, she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”
But Dillard has a different understanding of suffering. She has come to terms with the fact that a certain amount of suffering will always be present with us. The fish that they ate was once a living creature. And this deer would also be eaten. In fact, the reason that it was tied to the tree was because the villagers had learned that when an animal struggled it released lactic acids that tenderized the resulting meat. Suffering, in many of Dillard’s stories, is something that remains a mystery, but it is a very present mystery.[i] You can’t really escape it and it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to do with it.
The First Letter of Peter will tell you what you’re supposed to do with it. He was writing to a community that knew a lot about suffering. As members of a minority religion in the Roman Empire, the early Christians enjoyed no special standing and were frequently the target of persecution. They were always held in suspicion. They had this disturbing way of talking about their founder, Jesus, as a King, which made other earthly kings nervous. They never quite knew how much loyalty they could expect from the Christians. Jesus was everything to them.
So there was the suffering that came from their marginal status, but this section of Peter that we read is even more specific. He is talking here to Christian slaves. That’s a disturbing thing. We don’t like to think of slavery being part of the Christian heritage, but slavery was a big part of the Roman culture. We’d like to think that Christians were working to overthrow slavery. But this passage makes it sound like the Christians accepted slavery as a natural, inevitable thing.
What’s radical about this passage, however, is that it addresses Christian slaves as fully worthy people who should be treated with dignity and respect. Unlike the society around them which treated slaves like dirt, the Christians treated them like brothers and sisters, fully part of Christ’s body, no matter their social standing.
But here’s the rub: Look what this passage asks the slaves to do. “Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear.” It grinds against our sensibilities to hear this, especially since we know how this passage got misused and abused by slaveholders in this country to justify the practice of slavery. We want to say, “No, this is not right. We should not stand for it. Like Annie Dillard’s story we imagine that if it had been us there, we wouldn’t have cared what was going on; we would have dropped everything right at that moment and would not have stopped until slavery was at an end. We couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”
Certainly we wouldn’t have done what the author of this letter does, which is to tell the slave to submit, even if the punishment is harsh. That’s like telling someone in an abusive relationship that they should put up with the punishment, isn’t it? How can we allow that suffering is ever right?
I think that impulse in us is right and it is planted in us by God. We do have an innate sense that the universe is not as it should be and is not as God intended it to be. We do want to combat suffering and alleviate it and fix what needs fixing. But First Peter has a different view of the world.
You see suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Don’t get me wrong. It is terrible and the cruelty with which I see people treating one another breaks my heart. And the pain that I see in people’s lives because of chronic health problems and addictions and troubled relationships and bad choices is a source of grief and great mystery to me. But suffering is not the last word for Christians. In fact, when we suffer for doing good, we are following in the footsteps of Jesus, by whose wounds we are healed. Christians have a close association with suffering because it is built into our most sacred story. Our central symbol, the cross, is an instrument of pain and torture. We know a little about what suffering can do. But we also know a little about what a savior can do.
So the apostle here reminds us that Jesus walked this lonesome valley so that we could walk up the streets of glory together. The apostle tells us that Jesus was nailed to a cross though he was not wounded by sin and so we should live upright lives, whether it brings suffering or not. The main thing for Christians is a life with Jesus – in this world and the next. God can redo the suffering. God can transform it. God can bring some people alive even when they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and we’ve seen it happen with people in our congregation who shone the brightest even as they were going through immense pain. I’ve heard the stories about Steve Tankard, who came late to love but powerfully. We saw it in Barbara. God doesn’t let suffering and death have the last word.
But it is still a stumbling block. There are those who just can’t get their minds around why, if God is good and powerful…if God is, that the world should contain such dark shadows. Some days that’s me. You have to wonder at times why the innocent suffer.
Bart Ehrman is the chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina and the author of a new book called, “God’s Problem – How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” (Now that’s a title!) Ehrman grew up as a very faithful, fundamentalist Christian. He studied the Bible for many years and loved it. But as the title of his new book suggests, he has recently lost his faith because he feels it cannot answer his most basic question. “For many people who inhabit this planet,” he says, “life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”[ii]
I don’t want to minimize Ehrman’s struggle because I think many people believe the same thing. I have been there with him in the dark. A few weeks ago, I went through the Holocaust Museum in D.C. for the first time and it was overwhelming. I sat in the chapel at the end of the exhibit and thought to myself, “How can I go out and preach the good news again knowing about Auschwitz? How can I proclaim God’s goodness any more?”
But I did get up and come out and go forward and here’s why – even in the concentration camps there was humanity. We do a great disservice to those who suffered and died if we think of them only as victims. It is one thing to note that suffering exists but it is something else entirely to say that a person’s whole life is nothing more than a cesspool of misery. When we say that we have allowed suffering to define a person’s entire existence. God knows that we are more than that.
The other problem I have with Ehrman’s argument is that it offers us such a reduced God. For the world to be a place in which bad things didn’t happen to good people and where unnecessary suffering were precluded, we would have to be like infants – constantly protected from anything that might upset our cocoon. God would have to be a great cosmic sugar daddy who had only goodies for everyone and who would not let anyone suffer a bruise or a bump. That’s not the kind of God I want or the kind of world I want to live in. This world is fierce and vast and beautiful and devastating and God is everywhere within, playing in light and shadow and appearing in the lowest of lows but also in the highest of highs.
This is why the critics are wrong when they say that Christians are weak and that they cannot handle the complexity of the world. Do you remember a few years ago when Jesse Ventura was governor of Minnesota? He said that, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”[iii] He thought churches were places where people go to put their fingers in their ears and to sing loudly so that they can’t hear the problems in the world.
But it takes a real man to face the world as it is and to declare that God has not abandoned us. It takes a real man to face taunts and abuses for following God’s lead. It takes a real man to look death in the face and say, “You have no power here.” It takes a real man to place himself into the hands of those who would make him suffer. It takes a real man to drag a cross to Calvary, to stretch out his arms and to die for the sins of the whole world. But guess what? Jesus was a real man. And because of Jesus, we now look forward to the day when all the broken pieces of this life and this world…all the sufferings and things that just don’t make sense…will be gathered up and made whole.
Here’s the best news of all. We may have lots of questions. We may doubt like Thomas and stumble like Peter. We may wonder why we are walking in the shadow of suffering. But in the midst of our suffering God is trying to lead us back home. In fact, we have been straying like sheep, but God is returning us to the shepherd and guardian of our souls. That’s the language from First Peter. And who is the great shepherd of the sheep? This same Jesus who was led off like a lamb to the slaughter.
We don’t have many images for shepherds these days. That role is not nearly as prominent as it once was. But somebody in the time of the early church would have had very specific images of shepherds. The shepherd is one who lives with his sheep and knows them intimately. The shepherd is one who guides and directs the sheep in the path. The shepherd is one who lays down his life for the sheep. To be the ward of Christ the shepherd is to know that we walk with someone who knows all there is to know about suffering and who laughs at its pretensions to greatness. When we know this Christ, suffering takes its rightful place as one more thing that cannot overcome the love for us that God has in Jesus Christ. It was Paul who said in the letter to the Romans that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present , nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ [Rom 8:38-39].
So suffering will remain with us and will still be as mystifying and confounding as ever. But Christ remains with us until the end of the age and challenges all those who would falter in the face of suffering to discover something powerfully new in his death and resurrection the possibility of new life. Thanks be to God.
1 Peter 2:18-25
Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle but also to the crooked. For it is a credit to you if, being conscious of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. What credit is there is enduring a beating if you have sinned? But if you are doing loving things and endure suffering this finds favor with God.
You were called for this: that Christ suffered on your behalf, leaving you an example, so that you could follow in his footsteps. He did not commit sin and no treachery was found in his mouth. He was reviled but did not hurl the insults back. He suffered but did not threaten. He gave himself over to the upright judge. He offered our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. You were going astray like sheep but you have been returned to the shepherd and bishop of your souls.
But I didn’t come to talk about weasels today; I came to talk about a deer. Specifically, the deer that Annie Dillard writes about in a short story called The Deer at Providencia. Dillard is a naturalist and she is always looking at the world around her for insights into what life is all about and whether faith is a reliable guide. In this story she talks about taking a trip to the Amazon jungle with several other North Americans. They are visiting in a native village and enjoying the experience. They eat wonderful fish taken right from the river. They stay up late at night talking. In many ways it sounds like an idyllic setting – an invigorating retreat.
But in the middle of the village where they are staying there is a small deer tied to a tree. It has a rope around its neck and it is struggling to get free. As Dillard watches the deer puts one leg up through the noose that is holding it and falls to its side. Then another leg. Then another. So that now it has three legs stuck in the loop of rope around its neck. Some small boys go to free its legs, but it immediately goes back to pawing at its neck.
The deer is suffering horribly, so much so that the people travelling with her, who are men, watch Dillard to see her reaction. They think that maybe, she, as a woman, might be disturbed to see this. One man
says, “If it had been my wife, she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”
But Dillard has a different understanding of suffering. She has come to terms with the fact that a certain amount of suffering will always be present with us. The fish that they ate was once a living creature. And this deer would also be eaten. In fact, the reason that it was tied to the tree was because the villagers had learned that when an animal struggled it released lactic acids that tenderized the resulting meat. Suffering, in many of Dillard’s stories, is something that remains a mystery, but it is a very present mystery.[i] You can’t really escape it and it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to do with it.
The First Letter of Peter will tell you what you’re supposed to do with it. He was writing to a community that knew a lot about suffering. As members of a minority religion in the Roman Empire, the early Christians enjoyed no special standing and were frequently the target of persecution. They were always held in suspicion. They had this disturbing way of talking about their founder, Jesus, as a King, which made other earthly kings nervous. They never quite knew how much loyalty they could expect from the Christians. Jesus was everything to them.
So there was the suffering that came from their marginal status, but this section of Peter that we read is even more specific. He is talking here to Christian slaves. That’s a disturbing thing. We don’t like to think of slavery being part of the Christian heritage, but slavery was a big part of the Roman culture. We’d like to think that Christians were working to overthrow slavery. But this passage makes it sound like the Christians accepted slavery as a natural, inevitable thing.
What’s radical about this passage, however, is that it addresses Christian slaves as fully worthy people who should be treated with dignity and respect. Unlike the society around them which treated slaves like dirt, the Christians treated them like brothers and sisters, fully part of Christ’s body, no matter their social standing.
But here’s the rub: Look what this passage asks the slaves to do. “Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear.” It grinds against our sensibilities to hear this, especially since we know how this passage got misused and abused by slaveholders in this country to justify the practice of slavery. We want to say, “No, this is not right. We should not stand for it. Like Annie Dillard’s story we imagine that if it had been us there, we wouldn’t have cared what was going on; we would have dropped everything right at that moment and would not have stopped until slavery was at an end. We couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”
Certainly we wouldn’t have done what the author of this letter does, which is to tell the slave to submit, even if the punishment is harsh. That’s like telling someone in an abusive relationship that they should put up with the punishment, isn’t it? How can we allow that suffering is ever right?
I think that impulse in us is right and it is planted in us by God. We do have an innate sense that the universe is not as it should be and is not as God intended it to be. We do want to combat suffering and alleviate it and fix what needs fixing. But First Peter has a different view of the world.
You see suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Don’t get me wrong. It is terrible and the cruelty with which I see people treating one another breaks my heart. And the pain that I see in people’s lives because of chronic health problems and addictions and troubled relationships and bad choices is a source of grief and great mystery to me. But suffering is not the last word for Christians. In fact, when we suffer for doing good, we are following in the footsteps of Jesus, by whose wounds we are healed. Christians have a close association with suffering because it is built into our most sacred story. Our central symbol, the cross, is an instrument of pain and torture. We know a little about what suffering can do. But we also know a little about what a savior can do.
So the apostle here reminds us that Jesus walked this lonesome valley so that we could walk up the streets of glory together. The apostle tells us that Jesus was nailed to a cross though he was not wounded by sin and so we should live upright lives, whether it brings suffering or not. The main thing for Christians is a life with Jesus – in this world and the next. God can redo the suffering. God can transform it. God can bring some people alive even when they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and we’ve seen it happen with people in our congregation who shone the brightest even as they were going through immense pain. I’ve heard the stories about Steve Tankard, who came late to love but powerfully. We saw it in Barbara. God doesn’t let suffering and death have the last word.
But it is still a stumbling block. There are those who just can’t get their minds around why, if God is good and powerful…if God is, that the world should contain such dark shadows. Some days that’s me. You have to wonder at times why the innocent suffer.
Bart Ehrman is the chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina and the author of a new book called, “God’s Problem – How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” (Now that’s a title!) Ehrman grew up as a very faithful, fundamentalist Christian. He studied the Bible for many years and loved it. But as the title of his new book suggests, he has recently lost his faith because he feels it cannot answer his most basic question. “For many people who inhabit this planet,” he says, “life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”[ii]
I don’t want to minimize Ehrman’s struggle because I think many people believe the same thing. I have been there with him in the dark. A few weeks ago, I went through the Holocaust Museum in D.C. for the first time and it was overwhelming. I sat in the chapel at the end of the exhibit and thought to myself, “How can I go out and preach the good news again knowing about Auschwitz? How can I proclaim God’s goodness any more?”
But I did get up and come out and go forward and here’s why – even in the concentration camps there was humanity. We do a great disservice to those who suffered and died if we think of them only as victims. It is one thing to note that suffering exists but it is something else entirely to say that a person’s whole life is nothing more than a cesspool of misery. When we say that we have allowed suffering to define a person’s entire existence. God knows that we are more than that.
The other problem I have with Ehrman’s argument is that it offers us such a reduced God. For the world to be a place in which bad things didn’t happen to good people and where unnecessary suffering were precluded, we would have to be like infants – constantly protected from anything that might upset our cocoon. God would have to be a great cosmic sugar daddy who had only goodies for everyone and who would not let anyone suffer a bruise or a bump. That’s not the kind of God I want or the kind of world I want to live in. This world is fierce and vast and beautiful and devastating and God is everywhere within, playing in light and shadow and appearing in the lowest of lows but also in the highest of highs.
This is why the critics are wrong when they say that Christians are weak and that they cannot handle the complexity of the world. Do you remember a few years ago when Jesse Ventura was governor of Minnesota? He said that, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”[iii] He thought churches were places where people go to put their fingers in their ears and to sing loudly so that they can’t hear the problems in the world.
But it takes a real man to face the world as it is and to declare that God has not abandoned us. It takes a real man to face taunts and abuses for following God’s lead. It takes a real man to look death in the face and say, “You have no power here.” It takes a real man to place himself into the hands of those who would make him suffer. It takes a real man to drag a cross to Calvary, to stretch out his arms and to die for the sins of the whole world. But guess what? Jesus was a real man. And because of Jesus, we now look forward to the day when all the broken pieces of this life and this world…all the sufferings and things that just don’t make sense…will be gathered up and made whole.
Here’s the best news of all. We may have lots of questions. We may doubt like Thomas and stumble like Peter. We may wonder why we are walking in the shadow of suffering. But in the midst of our suffering God is trying to lead us back home. In fact, we have been straying like sheep, but God is returning us to the shepherd and guardian of our souls. That’s the language from First Peter. And who is the great shepherd of the sheep? This same Jesus who was led off like a lamb to the slaughter.
We don’t have many images for shepherds these days. That role is not nearly as prominent as it once was. But somebody in the time of the early church would have had very specific images of shepherds. The shepherd is one who lives with his sheep and knows them intimately. The shepherd is one who guides and directs the sheep in the path. The shepherd is one who lays down his life for the sheep. To be the ward of Christ the shepherd is to know that we walk with someone who knows all there is to know about suffering and who laughs at its pretensions to greatness. When we know this Christ, suffering takes its rightful place as one more thing that cannot overcome the love for us that God has in Jesus Christ. It was Paul who said in the letter to the Romans that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present , nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ [Rom 8:38-39].
So suffering will remain with us and will still be as mystifying and confounding as ever. But Christ remains with us until the end of the age and challenges all those who would falter in the face of suffering to discover something powerfully new in his death and resurrection the possibility of new life. Thanks be to God.
1 Peter 2:18-25
Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle but also to the crooked. For it is a credit to you if, being conscious of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. What credit is there is enduring a beating if you have sinned? But if you are doing loving things and endure suffering this finds favor with God.
You were called for this: that Christ suffered on your behalf, leaving you an example, so that you could follow in his footsteps. He did not commit sin and no treachery was found in his mouth. He was reviled but did not hurl the insults back. He suffered but did not threaten. He gave himself over to the upright judge. He offered our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. You were going astray like sheep but you have been returned to the shepherd and bishop of your souls.
[i] Annie Dillard, “A Deer in Providencia,” Teaching a Stone to Talk, [Harper Perennial: New York, 1982].
[ii] Excerpt from God’s Probem by Bart Ehrmanm, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19096131.
[iii] Jesse Ventura in an interview with Playboy magazine, November 1999, quoted at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-v.htm
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