Hope in the Battlefield
He sat across from me at a long table in a road-side restaurant. It was July, and in the dry region of Northern Sri Lanka it was unbearably hot. The slow ceiling fan pushed thick air around us that kicked up the smell of the curry lunch that lay between us. He was thin and old and spoke gently and thoughtfully with a thick Tamil accent, pausing in intervals to consider how best to answer my questions. He did so by telling me stories, one after another. We had been sitting there for over an hour. Over an hour during which he told me stories that sounded almost mythic…stories about bombs, like those that had fallen on his house, destroying it. Stories of the community coming together out of the rubble to rebuild his house; and then stories of the bombs that fell again, destroying his rebuilt home. He used to practice medicine he told me, but he stopped after the bombs destroyed his clinic. He used to go to the local market, he told me, but he stopped when the government soldiers took it over and the Tamils no longer felt safe there. He paused for a moment during which all was quiet except for the squeak of the ceiling fan, and then he said to me: "We have had enough of this suffering and madness. I have had enough of this suffering and this madness."
A month ago when Dan told me I would preach to you today, I summoned the day’s lectionary texts and dove in. It was smooth sailing for most of it. My heart lifted to God in a Psalm of praise. The comforting gospel passage in which Jesus promised the guidance of the Spirit of Truth in his earthly absence. And then I got to the Romans passage I just read and my magic carpet ride through the cool Arabian night of Biblical affirmation hit the cold, stone, casbah wall. "We boast in our suffering? Knowing that suffering produces endurance and character?" I paused and rewound in order to reread. Did Paul really just go there? Did he really just say we should praise our suffering because it "builds character"?!
It’s just that Paul sounds like, at best, a distracted father absentmindedly addressing his teenage daughter as she complains about her unbearable life. At worst, Paul comes off sounding just plain insensitive. My immediate reaction was defensiveness. I thought of that Sri Lankan man. I thought of friends who are wading through difficult times right now. I thought of what their reaction might have been if Paul had said this to them in the face of their suffering - on the other side of so saying, he might have had some suffering of his own to boast about. A black eye perhaps!
As many of us know, when faced with one who is suffering - an individual or even a collective group of people - it is a sin to fail to acknowledge that suffering. To fail to admit its horror at all, or to quickly paint flowers over the suffering, desperately pointing to the silver lining without first acknowledging the dark cloud that’s blocking the sun from view. Wars are started for this very reason… and I know, at least, that when I am suffering what I want is for someone I love to hold my hand and to look that suffering in the face with me. To have someone pay vigil to its horribleness with me - and to say not "Oh hon, you should rejoice in your suffering because you will have such character on the other side of it! Such great material for your poetry!" but rather, "This suffering is horrible. And it is not fair. And we are going to trudge through it together."
But maybe, maybe, I went too far in my knee-jerk reaction to Paul’s message. Maybe Paul is not glossing over suffering here, absentmindedly waving it aside. After all, Paul was no stranger to suffering. This is a man who had been beaten, starved, consistently ridiculed in public, and imprisoned. He had witnessed the persecution and execution of friends. This is a man who knew suffering all too intimately. And it is this well-worn man who has been through the battlefield of hard life speaking of the endurance and character that comes from suffering. And after everything, it’s true. Several months after losing a son in a drunk-driving accident, a man wrote, "I have gained something from all of this. Softness, better ability to empathize…I would take it all back to not have lost my son, of course, but it would be a sin if I were to refuse the gifts that have emerged out of this horrible situation."
And there’s something else Paul speaks about in this short passage. Something that is crucial. Paul speaks of the kind of hope that arises in the midst of suffering, which is a sacred hope.
In Sri Lanka last summer, where I was working with individuals to promote peace, I heard that word again and again. Telling me stories about his homes and clinic destroyed by bombs, the thin old Tamil man in the road-side restaurant did not give the final word to suffering. "We have had enough of this suffering" he told me. And then he spoke that amazing word into the space between us: Hope. A word that startled me when it followed all those stories of bombs. "I have hope," he told me as he stirred the cup of masala tea he held between two hands, "because I have seen the people in my village from both sides of the conflict come together to rebuild homes and to make peaceful markets. And I know that these brief moments of peace between people who are supposed to be at war with each other are glimpses of the greater peace my country can achieve…I have hope and so I continue in the peace movement." Hope. Even as he spoke that sacred word it was swept up in the air by the ceiling fan and sent out through the restaurant’s window to do its work.
Elsewhere in Sri Lanka I heard it again: Telling me of the suicide bombing that killed her husband who was working to convince the government to negotiate across the line of conflict, the woman spoke that word: Hope. Enthusiastically tripping over each other’s words after attending a weekend training workshop on human rights law, the young students said it again and again: hope and hope and hope. For our country, for our families, for our selves. For peace, for justice, for an end to the bombs. And each time they uttered this word, I could see a screw fall from the machinery of war that was propelling the country into more violence. Hope. Each time it was said I could see the decades-long cycle of revenge bombings inflicted by both sides of the conflict begin to stall and falter. Hope. A word of peace, a word of resistance, a word of dog-headed insistence, a word that charged out of their hearts and lips prepared to bulldoze through their own despair, and to heal the individual and social paralysis brought by endless war-induced suffering. Hope. It is a beautiful word. It is a resurrection word.
Those in Sri Lanka who spoke this word were like Paul; they had experienced suffering. They had, in fact, gone through some of the worst forms of suffering that exist on earth: that brought by decades of bombs that had taken too many family members and friends and prophets from among them. These were not naïve people, and these were not people who took the meaning of hope lightly. And yet it was these people, who truly understood the divine weight and radical absurdity captured in that small monosyllabic word who were uttering it: hope. It was the core of Sri Lanka’s peace movement, granting the energy necessary for suffering people to not only move forward with their personal lives, but to take great risks to move their country forward into peace, despite everything.
On today, Trinity Sunday, the sacred day in our Liturgical Calendar when we recall and worship the triune God, let us remember that hope is the stuff of the Spirit. It is the Spirit of Truth at work as Jesus promised us it would be in his earthly absence. It is the Holy Spirit breathing into the battlefield of our lives and helping us know, really know, that we cannot throw in the towel and so hand over victory to the forces of warfare and bombs. Hope is what happens when we embrace the radical possibility that those moments when the Kingdom of Peace pushes through the battlefield - when people from both sides of the conflict come together to rebuild a house or open a market or grieve their lost children together -- these are illustrations of a higher order of Truth. When these things happen, God is present, revealing a beautiful alternative vision of reality that is to be clutched at, nurtured, worshipped, and cultivated so that these moments will arise again and again until they out number the moments of bombs and death. This is when we find the hope that will not, as Paul assured us, ultimately let us down if we only stick with it and believe in it and enact it. This is when hope shines as the radical possibility that motivates activism, the stuff that brings peace and truth and light. The stuff that ultimately makes for victory over death and bombs and seemingly endless wars.
Us Christians, we are a people of hope, born of a God of life and peace who hears our groans, sees our suffering, and responds by offering a way out…by offering hope. We are disciples of a man who saw the suffering inflicted by the political and economic powers around him - the prostitutes and the poor- and responded with compassion and a message that brought hope and so healing and strength to them. And we are a people of the cross and resurrection who weep over unnecessary suffering on our earth and then resolve, with the endurance and the insight and, yes, even character that suffering brings, to not give up our precious world to the forces of darkness. We are a people who every day seek to remember that violence and suffering may have destroyed Jesus’ body but did not, and cannot, destroy his Spirit of Truth which has been poured within all of us so that we might carry on the work of our Prince of Peace.
We are a people of hope. Praise be to God.
Amen.