Last week, in the midst of sermon prep, George’s graduation, and all the other things pastoring, partnering, and parenting require, I was fielding texts from a group of friends who were going to hike up Mt. Norwottuck on Saturday morning. It’s a challenging hike, between 700 and 1000 feet up to the top, but I was all in. I walk everyday and hiking is my happy place.

However, since I returned from Spain, I’ve had some pain in my hip, pain that was getting more acute as the week wore on. And yet, every time a text came through about rain or adjusting the route, I assured everyone that I was coming. It never occurred to me that the pain might be an indicator that I should rest and heal rather than tackle a mountain because I have been conditioned from youth to either push through pain, ignore it, or accept it as the price one must pay to succeed in this world.

Perhaps it was having a coach for a dad, coming of age in a capitalist society that propels us to turn even our pain into profit, or simply a product of growing up in the school of hard knocks we now just refer to as "the 80’s,” but where I come from we learned to “walk it off” when we got hurt, “not waste our pain” but use every set back as a catalyst for growth, and stop our crying before someone gave us something to cry about. Expressions like: “no pain, no gain,” “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and “suck it up, buttercup” were seen as signs of love - tough love - but love all the same.

Anyone here know what I’m talking about? I’m sorry. Though it’s a good thing I can feel your pain now even if I can’t always feel my own.

Well anyway, fast forward to last week. Like I said, I was all in for that hike until I stood up at the end of George’s graduation and realized that after 2 and half hours of sitting in an auditorium, I could barely manage to get up the stairs without the help of the railing.

I had been living in this body all week, and yet in complete denial about how much it was hurting. I turned to Andrew and said, “I don’t know how I have failed to make the connection between this pain and my plans, but I don’t think I can hike tomorrow.” And so I texted my friends and begged off.

But that disconnect has stuck with me.  Especially when I turned to the reading for this week from Romans.

“[W]e boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God,” says Paul, “And …we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.”

Who knew that Paul grew up in the 80’s too. I mean at first blush this totally sounds like the biblical equivalent of suffering your way to success, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of verse they would have put on the Christian equivalent of a Successories poster back in the day.

You remember those posters with words like “Courage” or “Innovation” on them? They all had pictures of eagles soaring or rivers meandering and phrases like “wisdom is knowing the way, integrity is walking it” in sans serif fonts.

Can’t you just see this verse from Romans on a poster under the word “Endurance” with a body builder straining to lift, or a mountain climber struggling to reach the peak, or a worn out ballet shoe off stage with a successful ballerina in soft focus under the lights? I sure can.

And so the first thing I want to say is beware. Be careful. This kind of glorification of suffering in society and in the church can be really dangerous. A verse like this, taken out of context, can be used to justify, condone, or encourage harmful thoughts, compulsive behaviors, or callous indifference to the needs of others and ourselves.

Which is ironic given that the central theme of Romans is all about liberating us from thinking we need to work harder, get it together, or get it right, in order to earn God’s love. No, says Paul, our hope lies in the fact that while we were still sinners - that is, before we believed what was right or did what was right - God loved us.

In fact, God loved us enough to come to us in the form of Jesus. The same Jesus we then crucified! And yet God persisted in loving us even still. God refused to let the cross or our sin have the last word, but brought Jesus back from the dead with peace and forgiveness for all, so we would know that absolutely nothing in all of creation - nothing we could ever do or fail to do; not even crucifying God’s son - can separate us from the love of God.

So again, let us be careful here. Paul is not encouraging any of us to suffer our way toward being a better person so God will love us or save us. Paul is not glorifying suffering as step number one on the path toward spiritual success.

Nor, while we are at it, is this verse here to help us alleviate the suffering of others by oh so helpfully letting them know that their suffering may be hard in this moment, but at least it will all be worth it in the end. In fact, if you’re ever with someone who is suffering, try not to use the words, “but at least” at all.

I’m sorry your dog died, but at least…. at least what? Trust me there is no good ending to that sentence. “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” is a full sentence.

And I know it’s hard to stop there and I’ll admit that I slip up all the time and say more because when someone is hurting all I really want to do is make it better. But many years of saying the wrong thing has taught me that the best thing we can do when someone is hurting is simply let people feel what they feel and then find the strength and grace to sit with them in the pain so they at least know they are not alone.

And friends, if that is all you get out of this sermon, that’s fine. But having told you what this verse is not about, I’m hoping you’ll hang in here with me as I try and explain what’s really going on here. It’s a move which requires putting this verse back in it’s historical context which might sound boring, but here’s the amazing thing: we may be separated by 2000 years, but our context is remarkably similar to Paul’s, especially right now.

You may remember that Paul is a Jew writing to the church in Rome, two cultures that have a strong sense of honor and shame.  The Romans believed in honor at all costs: an honor affirmed and maintained through power, wealth, strength, and victory. To be seen as weak, a loser, poor, or powerless, was to be put to shame. Just like our president, they loved winning.

Likewise, there was a strain in both Judaism and Roman mythology, where wealth, health, and influence were seen as signs of God’s blessing upon good people and suffering was regarded as a sign of being cursed by the God’s for being a bad person. They would have fit in perfectly with today’s “#blessed” crowd.

And let’s just say that bringing honor to your parents, your ruler, your homeland were all important markers of good character and achievement. To succeed was to be welcome, to be lauded, to belong. But to suffer: suffer the loss of one’s health, ability, home, income, or freedom was to be pitied, ostracized, and left behind.

I think, if we’re honest, that’s not all that far from how most of us see the world even now.

Furthermore - and this is sadly, very relevant - if you were an adult, male, Roman citizen you were accorded the full rights a human being deserved under the law. If you were anything other than an adult, male, Roman citizen, you were seen as less than fully human and lived at the mercy of those in power.

But then along comes Jesus with an inconvenient reminder for his people and anyone else who would dare to follow him, that God’s ways are not our ways. All throughout the Hebrew scriptures, God may bless God’s people with power, wealth, and strength, but always and only with the intent that they will be a blessing to others. In fact, it’s the others with whom God always seems to be most concerned.

You may have noticed that the God of Abraham and Issac, Jesus and Paul, constantly acts with a preference and concern for the unlikely and undeserving: the younger son, the weakest link, the poor and the marginalized, the forgotten and forsaken, the widow and the immigrant.

Contrary to the old saying, it would seem that God cares deeply about helping those who cannot help themselves. And God calls on God’s people to help too, calls on us to remember that we are all God’s children and deserve to be treated as such.

And then, to further confound everyone’s expectations, as angry as God gets when we fail, God refuses to give up on us even then. God just seems to persist in loving us, forgiving us, and trying over and over and over again to get us to love one another.

To follow God in Paul’s time and our own, then, requires a willingness to suspend the age old markers of honor and shame and just see all people as worthy of God’s love and our own.

I am sad to say that 2000 years of Christianity notwithstanding, it is still profoundly countercultural to view all people as unconditionally worthy of honor and care simply because they are people. It is.

It is profoundly countercultural, right now, in the United States of America, to view all people regardless of their status, identity, citizenship, race, orientation, gender, or ability, as fully human, as children of God, as people who have as much of a right as I do to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And this is where suffering comes in, for us and for the people Paul is writing to in Rome. The parallels are uncanny. Paul and this new band of Christ followers were in violation of the social norms of their day because they welcomed everyone regardless of their identity or status.

To these 1st century Christians, it didn’t matter who you were, what you believed, where you came from, how much money you made, if you were male or female, jew or gentile, slave or free. If you were a human who wanted to follow in the way of Jesus you were welcomed and fed, honored, and housed amongst them. And that extravagant welcome cost them in the eyes of the wider community.

It cost them to eschew power for lives of service, to give up their wealth in order to hold all things in common, to treat all people as if they were equal in the eyes of God in a society that was profoundly hierarchical and tribal.

Their families would have shamed them for this and been ashamed because of them. Their faith communities would have cast them out for consorting with outcasts. We know Paul and his friends were often arrested and publicly beaten because this sort of behavior is disorderly, it upsets the status quo, it disturbs the peace. But they persisted because they believed they were living by a higher law. They endured because they knew they were answering a higher call.

In fact with this back drop of honor and shame in mind, I can tell you that a better way to translate this verse would be as follows:

Rather than “we boast,” it really should read: “[W]e rejoice.

Rather than “suffering,” you can insert the word “oppression.”

And rather than “disappoint,” you can read “will not put us to shame.” So listen again:

“We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God, and …we also rejoice in our oppression knowing that our oppression produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and this hope will not put us to shame.”

We rejoice in our oppression, says Paul, because we are unashamed to bless the people that God cares about and stand up for the people Jesus stood up for. We rejoice in our suffering because we are daring to live in a new way that we believe will lead to a better world for all of God’s people.

You can cast us out for our extravagant welcome, you can beat us down for lifting up the downtrodden, you can call us out in public for speaking up for the silenced, or arrest us for thinking that no human being is illegal, but we know we are on the right side of history because God has told us what is good and it’s not wealth or fame or power, but kindness, humility, and justice for all.

So my friends, if you find yourself suffering in this moment for the sake of doing what is right, hurting because you refuse to look away from what is happening to the most vulnerable in our midst, doing without so others can make do, turning the other cheek and blessing those who persecute you, being cast out of families who don’t understand you for loving the wrong people even if that person is you, Paul wants you to know that your suffering is not in vain.

This is pain worth feeling because it is a pain that connects us to each other and to the hope God still has for this beautiful, broken world that God loves so much.

“In times like these,” says Cameron Trimble, “numbness …can seem like the smart choice… to disengage, to go silent, to retreat behind a wall of indifference, self-righteousness, sarcasm or cynicism. But those strategies of self-protection eventually become self-abandonment.”

Which is to say, when we cut ourselves off from feeling the suffering of others we eventually cut ourselves off from feeling anything at all, and let me tell you from personal experience, not being able to feel is dangerous. It does not lead anywhere good.

Cameron continues, “Tenderness, then, is not weakness— (allowing yourself to ache for those who are suffering) is resistance in its most radiant form. It’s how we stay soft without surrendering. … Tenderness ….refuses to be numbed by cruelty or conformed to despair.”

She’s right. To be tender right now hurts. But the only way not to hurt, is to not care, and if we don’t care then nothing will change. Our willingness to suffer, to feel the pain of this moment, is our guide. It is our hope, our only hope, of finding our way toward a better future.

Cameron continues: “When we reach for one another with care—when we peacefully protest, offer a gentle word, hold silence with someone in pain—we resist the Empire’s logic of separation. …When the world numbs, staying tender is a revolutionary act…To stay tender is to remain attuned to the pain and the possibility.”

And that possibility, my friends, is nothing less than the possibility of a better world. Walter Bruggeman once said: “Those who cannot weep cannot hope.” Our hope is in our tears. Our suffering enables us to hope for a better world, not just for ourselves, but for all people. And First Churches we can and we will bear the weight of that hope no matter how much it hurts, because thanks be to God, we get to carry all of this together. Thank you for being you. Amen.