Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

During Lent, we are encouraged to take a close look at suffering and death. With the deaths of some of my favorite people—for example, Walt Johnson and Marcella Calvert—these subjects take on more immediate meaning for me. I suspect that the same is true for many of you, even if for differing reasons.

In the second lesson for this morning, Paul writes that:

I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things, in order that I may gain Christ...I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection...

The question I ask of the text is this: How are we called to share in the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ and so become like him in his death and resurrection.

A quotation from the book "The Next Day" by Bishop James Pike serves to put this discussion in a proper context. It's a summary of the Christian message:

"Christianity offers us no escape from death, no way of hiding from it. The secret is this; the Christian Church, the Christian faith invites you to die now. And if you die now you'll never have to die again, in any real sense, in any ultimately disastrous sense."

Jesus' death on the cross was a physical death, not a death in any ultimately disastrous sense. The resurrection testifies to that fact. Jesus died in that ultimate sense long before his death on the cross. He had died in relation to himself, in the sense that he lived not to satisfy primarily his own needs, but in order to meet the needs of others. "The Son of Man comes not to be served, but to serve." This was the more difficult and the more fundamental "death."

So it is also with us. We never lose our fear of the unknown which lies beyond our physical death, but that death for Christians is not the first or the most important death that we undergo. We have already died in our decision and our openness to giving ourselves to being God's channels of grace-to service, not primarily for ourselves, but for others.

This one basic decision—a continuing one—is the context for any discussion of suffering and death and resurrection.

In this context, of course, we do suffer; and we often wonder what meaning that suffering carries. Jesus' life, his path to the cross, was full of sufferings:

- How often in weariness and sorrow, he offered up prayers and supplications for himself and others.

- How often those prayers were mixed with loud cries and tears.

- How often he wept over the blindness of the people

- He wept as he looked down on the Jerusalem which was to reject him.

- He wept in the Garden of Gethsemane as he thought of the cup given him to drink.

- He cried out on the cross as every consolation was taken away from him.

We too live lives that involve suffering. It is not something God brings upon us or we seek out; it is simply what happens to us. We each bear our cross.

We all share the human condition, and that means we will all die physically. But even our death to self involves a share of suffering:

- We give up prideful and selfish ways.

- We give ourselves over to involving ourselves in the lives of other people.

- If we sacrifice to have children, a certain joy is ours; but we also forfeit some peace of mind. Children are a continual responsibility and concern.

- If we make friends or help others, we're wounded by their wounds and hurt by their misfortunes. We all grieve with those who are in our prayers. We share the pain and sufferings of the Body of Christ, and we offer that pain up to God for redemption.

I began with the question, "How are we called to share in the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ and so become like him in his death and resurrection." Part of the answer to that question lies in our prior death—our dying to our selves, our decision to become involved with others, thereby opening ourselves to suffering with others.

The rest of the answer, I believe, is ultimately beyond us; but it includes at least a commitment on our parts to a discipline of suffering, something that Paul hints at and that Jesus lived.

Jesus, by example, has shown us how to respond to our sufferings. He did not reject what he was called to suffer. He wept over it and endured it. He used his sufferings not as obstacles to life, but as opportunities to grow in grace.

And St. Paul, in the reading from Philippians, takes the same attitude. Any suffering is nothing compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus the Lord. There is, in that attitude, already a sense of the resurrection which follows death.

Let me summarize what I want to communicate to you this morning:

1) While we certainly do not seek out suffering, when it comes, we do not reject it, try to avoid it or deny its presence.

2) This is true because suffering and suffering with others (compassion), as Jesus shows us, are the only ways to maturity in the Christian faith.

Let me illustrate that point simply: During a severe winter-like the one we have had-when the snow drifts and cold made delivery of his morning papers a chore almost beyond his strength, a young man announced that he was going to quit his route. The next morning he found a note in his bundle of papers, written by his father. "You may quit your route in the summer, when the sun is shining, but not in the winter, when there is snow."

That father understood something of the way to maturity—to wholeness.

3) So, we learn to view our sufferings as opportunities, not as obstacles. St. Paul ends the passage today with the words: "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."

Paul pressed on, strained forward, in the midst of severe sufferings, knowing the power of the resurrection. The suffering in our own lives and our sufferings with others are opportunities for an experience not only of death, but of the resurrection, as we grow, mature, and are renewed for further acts of service.

I have performed marriages for couples for whom both have been previously married. I myself am in such a marriage. And I don't want to be overly judgmental of myself or others. Still I believe that the all too often marriages fail because of our avoidance (in this culture) of conflict, pain, and suffering. I think that we too often delude ourselves by thinking that we save ourselves by avoiding suffering. Suffering and strife come to marriages; this is to be expected since the New Testament teaches that marriage is a sign of Christ's fidelity and love. And yet, when difficulties arise, we often seek divorce. Many claim that the pain of the relationship is debilitating.

That is, no doubt, sometimes the case. And still, we learn from our Lord that suffering contains within it the seeds of hope for a resurrection to newness of life. Our hope for resurrection and wholeness lies often not in escape from what is painful, but in working through and being disciplined about the suffering.

I'm not suggesting here that divorce is never warranted. I am, rather, trying to make the point that many are too anxious to avoid the pain that may lead to greater wholeness, whether in marriage or in other relationships. We have a tendency to want to go around rather than through, and we thereby miss opportunities for experiences of resurrection, growth, forgiveness, compassion, and healing.

One wonders what would have happened in the stories of scripture if at Gethsemane Jesus had decided to opt out—that what he was facing was simply too hard or too destructive of his sense of self.

There may be some here who remember the well-publicized story of the kidnapping of the 20-month old son of Charles Lindbergh.

"I will write everything as I would like it to be told me," Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to her mother-in-law. "At 7:30 Betty (the nurse) and I were putting the baby to bed. We closed and bolted all the shutters except one on the window where the shutters are warped and won't close. At 10, Betty went into the room, shut the window first, then lit the electric stove, then turned to the bed. It was empty and the sides were still up. No blankets taken. You know the rest"...

Then the awful waiting. Finally, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her diary: "The baby's body was found in the woods on Hopewell-Mount Rose Road. Killed by a blow on the head. I feel strangely a sense of peace-not peace, but an end to restlessness, a finality, as though I were sleeping in a grave."

In recalling the months and years that followed, she writes: "I do not believe that suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."

This is a story about a woman afflicted by a devastating loss and how she survived it. First, by treating the suffering as an obstacle to life, and responding by entering into a kind of sleeping in the grave that numbs and deadens feeling but allows people keep going and not just stop.

And then, after surviving the pain, she began to open herself to the opportunity within the suffering, an opportunity that brought her to greater maturity and wholeness, and a fuller awareness of her humanity-in mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

Jesus calls us in Lent out of our graves to new life, out of our sufferings into greater wholeness. But in order to find that new life, we are asked, like the grain of wheat, to die to self and with Jesus face the pain. Then the obstacle becomes opportunity; and growth, knowledge, grace, and resurrection may begin to take deeper root in us. Amen.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen.