Endurance
1992 (Year C) 25 October / Pentecost 20
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
I’ve been away for most of this week to reflect on the eight and a half years that I’ve been working here. On the face of it you might say much of it has been relatively easy. After all here was a lively church before ever I came on the scene, for looking back over the records it shows that during the first year the average number of communicants on a Sunday was 52. Things have clearly grown, and despite around 80 regular communicants leaving during the intervening years, either through death or moving house, there is an average this year of just over 80 – a rise so my calculator tells me – of 53%.
Other things have happened as well, most of which looking back on it gives a cause for encouragement. Written down it seemed almost too much. But they didn’t give a total picture. For instance there was nothing about the sleepless nights, worrying about if I’d said the right thing, or having to listen to someone saying that I certainly done the wrong thing. And then there’s the cost to the family, children being attacked, garden spoilt, house burgled. Pretty soon I was wondering whether it was all worth it.
Not that our little hardships are that much compared to other people’s. On the face of it most of us appear to be able to cope. But I know part of the cost that some of you pay for living round here. Maybe only God knows it all. I know some of the pain that loving your families bring, you know much more. All of us endure frustrations, hurts put down within this congregation from time to time. Why do we do it? Why do we endure it? If we stopped coming the pain would go away.
Some pain which comes our way cannot be avoided. Much as we would want to, most of us can’t change the place where we live. We’re simply stuck there and we have to make the best of it. The job, if we’ve got one, might be unfulfilling but it’s the only one we’re going to get so we have to bear it. It’s almost impossible to stop loving a member of the family even though they are causing intolerable pain. There is very little choice in a lot of the suffering we have to put up with.
We can see that, and we can try to deal with it. No what amazes me, is our ability to choose a course of action which we know is going to cost us in the end. Why for instance does any woman even contemplate the prospect of another child, let alone go through all the business of having one, after she’s gone through it all once. Why do we come back for more when it would be much easier to cut our losses and run.
Probably there are as many reasons as there are people here. The reason Jesus did what he did, so the Gospels tell us, is that he believed that he was doing the will of his father. That was of supreme importance, more so than caring for his own safety. That was enough to support him through the pain and suffering he had to endure. That was alright for Jesus. But I guess that there can’t be many of us who would actually claim to be so sure what the will of God was in any given situation. To endure pain and suffering when we’re not totally convinced seems a strange thing to do.
Of course it may be enough for some of us to be told that this is what we should be doing. If it brings pain then that’s too bad, we must simply endure it. Stiff upper lip; take it like a man, or maybe a woman. All I know is that I for one would find this extremely difficult to take.
There are others who endure all kinds of hardship just because it feels the right thing to do – they can’t explain it anymore than that. It feels like it’s the right thing to do. On the face of it this is nonsense. I guess that whatever pain comes my way I endure it for this reason. We all have our own ways and they are all different ways to God. But what we find when we are true to ourselves and God is that when we do endure is that life does conquer death. That there is joy as well as pain as we endure the most hideous suffering. What becomes apparent is that when we love we place ourselves in the arms of God and once there we have the power to overcome anything that’s put in our way.
St Paul says it well, ‘I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. AMEN