Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, June 6, 2021, at 8:00 and 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
The Three Causes of Suffering
I: Non-Acceptance
“Every detail works to your advantage and to God’s glory: more and more grace, more and more people, more and more praise!” (II Cor. 4:15)
“[God] puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less.”
(II Cor. 5:5)
It’s time that we looked into why we can stay stuck in our discontents. For the three Sundays in June when I will be with you, I want us to look at some of the things that create our discontent, our unhappiness, even, yes, sometimes our misery. Because I think you may agree that we would prefer to remain consistently happy and not to be tempted to fall into sorrow, self-pity, even misery. In other words, how do we cheer up and stay cheered up?
I hasten to warn that I am not advocating that we all become cockeyed optimists or deny those times when we are sad, forlorn, disenchanted. Happiness is not about having a perpetual smile on our face. It is much too precious for this cheap imitation called perennial cheerfulness.
We are here to celebrate our humanity, not to repress it. On the other hand, there are insights we can gather and strategies we can adopt to avoid the gloomy traps of pessimism and despair.
So, the title of these three meditations is “The Three Causes of Suffering.”
And the title of this first meditation, the first cause of suffering, is our reluctance to accept reality just as it is. Non-acceptance is what lies behind many of our woes.
I know, I know. Pain is real, suffering is real. Many of us suffer from chronic pain. There is just nothing worse. Thank goodness for medications that can ease pain. But so much pain has suffering behind it, that is, is exacerbated by what we tell ourselves about it. For it is in the mind where most suffering originates. It originates with thoughts like these:
- “Why is this happening to me?”
- “I don’t like this!” “I never wanted this!”
- “It’s all his fault” or “She made me do it!”
I submit that almost every thought like this has behind it a form of unacceptance. In fact, how often do we use the term “unacceptable,” as when we say, “Well, that is just unacceptable!”
But what a silly thing to say. All it means is “I don’t like this,” for everything is acceptable once it happens. You know why? Because it happened!
There is the Peanuts cartoon when Charlie Brown complains, “I hear it said that life is full of ups and downs. But my question is why can’t life be all ups?”
We just don’t always get what we want? Are we not children to complain about this?
Resistance to change is a very human thing, for change can be fearful. And acceptance can seem unrealistic. Like the joke about the man who falls over a cliff and is hanging on to a branch over a river with alligators ready to devour him. He looks up and says, “Is there anybody up there?”
And God replies, “I am here!”
“God, help me!” he implores.
And God replies, “Let go!”
And the man hanging on says, “Is there anybody else up there?”
And, to make you feel even worse, have we considered how many times a day we engage in this fruitless exercise of not accepting something? I daresay we underestimate the times by a huge number. If we were to log the number of times we didn’t accept something during the day (from the slightest inconvenience (the weather, the slowpoke in traffic, etc., etc.) to justifiably upsetting things, like bad news about our health), I think we would be quite surprised.
Of course, as I’ve said, not accepting something isn’t what we actually do, for what is happening is what is happening. We are accepting it, all right: we are just not happy about it; we don’t like it.
Is this, you think, what God wants from us? For not accepting something is a form of suffering. Acceptance equals happiness; non-acceptance equals suffering, whether an irritation, a swear word, or clenched fists and sobbing. Non-acceptance cuts us off from other people and from our deeper selves. It is very hard to focus on other people when we are complaining and moaning. In fact, focusing on how much we don’t like what is happening cuts us off from love—love of self and love of others.
So, what is the turnaround? How do we go from a clenched fist reaction to an open palm?
Resistance to reality is a refusal to see things are they truly are. And if God is reality, even a reality we aren’t happy with, then to cease resistance is a form of faith. There is a writer who proclaims, “My God is reality.” In fact, she wrote a book entitled Loving What Is.
There is nothing worse when it comes to looking into how we move from resistance to acceptance than to listen to such cheap advice as “Cheer up! Things could be worse!” This may be true, but you know the joke, “So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse!”
No, I’m not sure advice of any sort will relieve us, at least any more than temporarily, perhaps just to get the advice giver to stop giving his or her silly advice.
So instead of giving advice (sermons should never be about this), I ask you to look into your own lives and your own experiences. Have there not been times when you first are ready to spit nails over what is happening, but then you step back, take a breath, and let the truth of what’s happening sink in? This is when acceptance naturally has its way with you. These are the times when you are resting in the divine lap of God, in the lap of grace and care.
These moments—and I am confident that all of us have had them—are templates—are they not?—of the readiness of God to comfort us in all circumstances.
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
These words, from the great Irish hymn “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” are the great affirmation of God’s presence and the acceptance of life as it unfolds for all of us. Strange, that we go very, very deep when we move towards reality and acceptance and turn away from our denial and our disenchantments. This is the miracle of grace. I’ve noticed how much smoother my day goes and how much more at peace with myself and the world I am when I give up managing everything and let life be.
The closer we draw to reality, that is the more we stare at it with open eyes and open heart, the closer we draw to God, for as hard as it is to say it, as much as we touch on great mystery, reality is kind and even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us. This is the promise of the God who birthed us and the God who made the promise of his eternal presence in the resurrection of Christ. “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
Amen.