Sermon: The LORD is Your Keeper
Sermon Series: The Book of Ruth: Keeping Faith
First Reading: Romans 15:12-21
Second Reading: Ruth 4

“Jamie, who is tall and large-boned, has to be lifted up and returned to his bed with a pulley. The effort needed to keep him comfortable is tremendous, but although he seems capable of discomfort, he at first struck me as incapable of pleasure. Yet to be in the room with (Jamie and his parents) is to witness a shimmering humanity…

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering, and what changes with these children and their extraordinary situations is the shape of suffering—and in consequence, the shape of love, forced into a more difficult  form.”

-ANDREW SOLOMON, Far from the Tree

 

“I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this), and not because I think Christianity contains more truth than other religions (I think God reveals himself, or herself, in many forms, some not religious), and not simply because it was the religion in which I was raised (this has been a high barrier). I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is that he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.) I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. I’m not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I’m suggesting that Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death even—possible. Human love can reach right into death, then, but not if it is merely human love.”

-CHRISTIAN WIMAN, My Bright Abyss

 

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