Can You Be Happy When You're In Pain?

Isaiah 5:1-7

Heb. 11:29-12:2

Our leadership team – our elders, Session – met this past Thursday night.  And I went into it kind of grumpy.  I just wasn’t in a good mood.  It had been kind of a stressful, busy week.  I felt behind.  And I kind of projected how I was feeling onto our elders.  And so I expected to trudge through a really dull, grind-it-out elders meeting.

But something else happened.  I came away from that meeting inspired and enthusiastic and upbeat.  Do you want to know what did it for me?  Do you want to know what turned my sour mood into something like excitement?  We talked about grieving our losses.  Now that’s not what you expected was it? 

We sat around that big table in the library and shared together some of the ways we’ve experienced grief and loss, and what the process feels like, and how God has been helping us grow through all of that.

Now what was it that inspired me?  What inspired me was that I experienced a rare but beautiful thing.  I could bring all of myself to that table and be there, really be there.  I could bring all of myself there – my failures, disappointments, set backs, and losses.  And not only was I fully there.  But others were fully there too.  Don’t get me wrong.  We didn’t give voice to the specifics of our losses in a laundry list way.  But we said enough to one another about our losses – large and small – that we experienced a deep connection with one another and with God.

At one point I said: this is good news.  Saying what we’ve lost and how it feels.  This is good news.  This is freedom.  This is the opportunity that is very rarely afforded in our culture – the chance to lament, to give voice to our grief, to name our losses.  Let me say it this way, even if I was an atheist – but had heard that conversation, I would want to come to this church so I could do that too.

You see, one of the many problems with our culture’s talk about happiness is that it can smother us.  It robs us of the freedom to be unhappy, and to give voice to our unhappiness. 

When we lived in New York our kids went to the neighborhood public school.  Lots of kids stayed and played after school, and that meant that I got to know lots of other parents, grandparents, and nannies.

But there were 1,000 kids who went to this school, so you didn’t know everyone.  For a year or so I noticed a classy, stately looking older woman with black hair.  I figured she was a grandmother but didn’t know much else about her.

Then for another year we would greet one another, exchanging small talk.  And I think it was the third year that we finally began getting to know one another.

I had made all kinds of assumptions about her, and most of them were wrong.  I remember the day she told me about the French philosophy she was reading – authors with names like Foucault and Derrida – that there was more to her story. 

She was born into a well-to-do farming family in Cuba.  She earned a Ph.D. in History and was teaching at the University.  But her family opposed Fidel Castro’s rise to power.  And so Castro took their farmland from them and blacklisted the family.  She was fired from teaching and told she would never teach again.  Slowly, her family escaped Cuba and immigrated to the US.  Once here, she had trouble finding work, she was cut off from family, she struggled with poverty, and had a number of health problems.

So for two full years I saw this stately, graceful grandmother.  And she was always well dressed and smiled.  As we got to know one another she was pleasant and warm.  And all the while I didn’t know her story.  I didn’t know what she’d been through.  She was in pain.  And while I couldn’t do much to help her, just listening as she told her story over the course of a year helped her.  She got to talk about the difficulty of her life.

Isaiah 5 offers us a picture of God’s own pain.  I know that it is a fierce judgment upon God’s people.  But don’t miss God’s pain.  We are swept into what should have been a wonderful, beautiful scene.  There is a landowner, a gardener, who has planted a vineyard on a hillside. 

So don’t miss the biggest, most basic picture here.  God is a gardener, and like all gardeners, God wants his plantings to flourish.  (I have mentioned before this summer that the Bible’s images for “happiness” are often images of growth and flourishing).  Isaiah invites us to imagine God hard at work preparing this vineyard.  This is no magic snap of the fingers.  There is backbreaking physical labor. 

The gardener dug up the earth on the hillside and cleared it of stones (have you ever picked up rocks??).  He built a watchtower so as to protect the vineyard from attack or theft.  He built a winepress, anticipating now the rich harvest of sweep grapes that will be crushed to make wine.  All this work, and the sweet grapes never arrive.  What comes on the vine are disappointing, deformed little growths, good for nothing.

Here is God’s disappointment, God’s pain.  Just in case we missed the point, Isaiah adds: “The vineyard is Israel; the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in” (v. 7).  God’s delight is mixed together with pain and disappointment.  So is ours.  But it’s comforting that God knows what this feels like.

Hebrews 11 provides a list of people who lived “by faith.”  That is, they trusted God to be good to them even though it required enormous patience.  These people trust God so much that their trust wasn’t even shaken by the fact that they never received what God promised in this life.

To translate this talk into the language of “happiness,” they were content to experience only moderate and occasional periods of happiness in their lives.  They knew something bigger and better than just “being happy.”  They wanted lives that were rich, full of purpose and meaning, lives rewarding and satisfying even though they laid down on their pillows exhausted and anxious each night.  They wanted God.

The Israelites who fled Egypt and crossed through the Red Sea lived like this.  The armies that marched around Jericho for seven straight days lived like this.  Even the prostitute Rahab lived like this (that one should catch us).  The author of Hebrews doesn’t have time to list all those who have lived by faith.  But he does list what happened to them.  And it isn’t pretty.  It sure doesn’t look like “happiness” to me.

I’m not even sure we should be reading this.  I think if this gets out it will cut into our recruiting.  It’s bad marketing.  Can you imagine – a young family visits our congregation today curious about what church and faith are all about.  And they hear a description of faith full of words like torture, jeers, flogging, chains, imprisonment, stoning, sawed in two, killed by the sword, persecuted, mistreated, wandered, lived in caves and holes.  “This is the worst marketing effort we’ve ever come across,” they conclude.

Won’t following Jesus make us happy? They continue.  Well, yes and no, it depends, we say.  Jesus invites all of us to follow him and take up his way of life, but he’s pretty clear that this will be no picnic.  He invites us to carry our own crosses.  He invites us to choose a life with some pain and hardship in it.  Because that’s how you find the joy.  Keep reading, we say – where it says about Jesus, “For the joy set before him he endured the cross . . .” (12:2).

So can you be happy when you’re in pain? 

Let’s remember, we’re not working with a thin, petty, selfish version of “happiness.”  We’re talking about happiness in a way shaped by the Bible and the best of classic Christian theology.  Happiness is about growing into the fullness of who God has made you to be.  And that means that happiness is about becoming a God-lover.  It’s about becoming wiser and better at loving God and others.  That’s the life that will bring you most into touch with something life-giving.

This is important.  If you’re thinking about “happiness” as much of our culture does – as maximizing your individual pleasure by getting what you want – then of course,  the answer is NO.  You can’t be happy that way when you’re in pain. 

But if what we’re really talking about is becoming a better and wiser lover of God and other people, then we’re onto something different.  Because you can be this kind of “happy,” even in the painful experiences of your life.

Let me finish by addressing two pretty specific examples of how this can work for all of us: How to be happy even in the pain of grief and loss; and how to be happy even in the pain of difficult relationships.

Finding happiness in the pain of grief and loss.

We shouldn’t glamorize pain and suffering.  We shouldn’t talk about pain and suffering as if it’s a badge of honor.  It’s not.  We don’t go seeking it out, as if trying to grow through it.  No, none of that. 

The truth is that suffering will come and find us.  Loss will come our way.  There need be no searching on our part.  And so the question is: how will we incorporate our losses into our lives?  How will we reassemble our lives after they’ve been shattered by losses big and small?

Now I want to say something that may be surprising to some of you.  Faith in God won’t keep bad things from happening to you.  And faith in God won’t lessen the pain of your losses.  If you grew up believing these myths, it’s time to give them up.  These are childish things.  These are fantasies and fairy tales.  The horrible things that happen to all human beings don’t respect any religious boundaries.  They crush and devastate those of us whose lives are shaped by the faith of the church just as they do anyone else.  And the terrible, searing, aching, lonely pain of loss is experienced by people of faith just like anyone else.  Faith isn’t a pain reliever in that sense.

The truth is just the opposite.  The good news of faith is that you can give voice to your pain, you can feel it, you can let it go all the way down in you.  You can take your time to grieve.  You can be honest about how much it sucks the energy and life out of you.  You can be honest about the pain of dashed hopes and expectations.  It’s part of who you are.  And faith offers you the fullest experience of yourself.

But why is that good news? You might ask.  Well, because the alternative is burying or hiding or ignoring your pain.  The alternative is to be quiet about it, to hurry past it as if it’s not really a central part of who you are.  And that familiar practice in our culture is really dehumanizing.

Finding happiness in difficult relationships (i.e. forgiving our enemies).

The work of love is the painful work of forgiveness and reconciliation, the difficult project of coming to grips with urges toward hate, exclusion, and revenge – so as to offer healing to our enemies.

This is the work of life lived Jesus’ way.  The difficulty and brutal honesty of living this way is the only real path God offers to true and enduring joy.  It is the joy that comes to those who practice putting God’s kingdom first.

Writing about emotional health for Christians, Peter Scazzero says:  “I do not believe it is possible to truly forgive another person from the heart until we allow ourselves to feel the pain of what was lost. . . . I worry about fast forgivers.  They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain” (p. 164-5).

This work of healing love offered to our enemies is part of what’s “good” about the “good news”.  There is first the liberating sense of admitting that we are angry, vengeful, hateful, grudge holding people.  We don’t have to pretend to be something else. 

There is second the clarity about the project of living a life before God.  Many people play at religion – going through the motions of looking religious, but neglecting the real relationship work that is at the center of spiritual life.  Many outsiders – those indifferent, and those opposed to faith – argue that the life of faith is vague, or lacks focus, or is pious sentimentality.  This isn’t true.  The project of faith is to practice becoming a person oriented to the love of God’s new kingdom.  This is very specific, and very hard work.  And yet let us not forget that it is a real blessing to know what you’re about, to know what needs to be done.

God’s world of love, God’s kingdom, Heaven, makes no sense at all if it is not reunion, forgiveness, embrace, a new relationship between former enemies.  God calls you today to open yourself to God’s healing grace, and to extend that healing to your enemies as well. 

Practice:

In the book that our Session is reading together, Emotionally Healthy Church, Peter Scazzero writes that learning to grieve our losses is a critical component of our discipleship to Jesus Christ.  Grieving is not an interruption, not an obstacle.  Most of us can identify with how he describes his own life:

“I covered over my losses for years and years, unaware of how they were shaping my current relationships and leadership.  God was seeking to enlarge my soul and mature me while I was seeking a quick end to my pain. . . . Often, when we wonder if we are regressing and going backward spiritually, God is doing his most profound work of transformation in us” (p. 159).

The truth is, it’s not enough to hear a sermon about the importance of grieving for our lives.  We’ll have to do something different.  We’ll have to actually make a plan to stop and pay attention to our losses, large and small, past and present.

How can you do that?  Set aside a little time this week – an hour, an evening – to make a simple time-line of your life from birth to the present.  Put on that time-line significant events in your life that are difficult or sad.  And give yourself a little time to feel the pain of what you’ve been through.  Don’t try to get past them quickly.  And then I strongly encourage you to find someone you can talk to about your time line.  A friend, a spouse, or you can use me in a last resort.

Growth will come our way, but only when we stop trying to hurry it along.