Problems into Possiblities:
Refining

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, February 11, 2007

I hate to admit it. And I’m not very comfortable talking about this but once, my grandmother tried to kill me. It’s true. She really did. You see, during the summers, I would go down to the farm where my grandma and grandpa lived and I would spend a week with them. And for breakfast every morning, we would have coffee cake. Now it wasn’t just any coffee cake. It was my grandmother’s coffee cake and, oh, it tasted so good. And I always wondered what was the secret ingredient in that coffee cake. We’re talking about coffee cake that was so good that even Little Debbie would be envious.

And so one day, she was putting together a batch of coffee cake. And she had some of the ingredients out on the table and Grandpa called her outside. And so as she searched for Grandpa, I was going to search for the secret ingredient. And so here I look at the ingredients and the first thing it looks like is flour. It was the biggest out of all of them, so that must have been something so I took a spoon and I put it in the flour and I put some in my mouth. Oh, it was terrible. I couldn’t stand the taste of it, so it couldn’t be that. And so I thought, “Well, maybe it’s the oil.” And so I put some on my spoon and tried that and, oh man, that even tasted worse. And the eggs were out and I’d seen Rocky. I’d seen how he ate the raw eggs. I wasn’t going to do that. That’s disgusting. And so finally, the baking powder. It had to be the baking powder as the secret ingredient and so I put in an extra heaping spoonful into my mouth and, oh, talk about gag me with a spoon!

Then I realized, “My grandma is trying to kill me.” Right? Wrong. You see, my grandma, although she might have wanted to wring my neck every once in awhile, in this case, she was taking strange and distasteful ingredients and she was working them together, refining them, to make coffee cake that tasted out of this world. And the secret, you see, is understanding how all of these ingredients work together.

Now have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt like someone was out to get you? You look at your life and maybe you’re going through a particular struggle or a particularly hard time right now. Maybe you’re just having trouble making ends meet. And you’re not sure how you’re going to be able to pay the bills. You’re not sure where the money is going to come from. You spend most of the day worrying about it because you just don’t see the light. You just don’t see how you’re going to be able to make it. Or maybe as you reflect on your life, you see yourself still caught in that terrible feeling of grief. And it’s because you miss that person so much and you just can’t picture your life. You just don’t have the strength to picture your life without him or her. Or maybe your marriage is struggling and it seems like no matter what you do or how you do it, it just seems to get worse and worse. Whatever situation may be in your life or whatever situation you will face in your life, there will be times where you find yourself looking around at each of the ingredients in your life and wondering, “Is God trying to kill me?”

And so we do what we are supposed to do, don’t we? We go to scripture. We go to see what God has to tell us in scripture and so we go to our reading for today from Romans. And what does Paul have to tell us about how we can deal with the suffering and what does he say? Rejoice in our sufferings? How am I supposed to look at my own sufferings and understand all of these strange and distasteful ingredients somehow will work together to create a life that is simply out of this world. “You’re telling me, God, that the secret is just understanding how they all work together to refine me, to somehow make me stronger than I am right now? In fact, what does Paul know about suffering? What does he know about what I’m going through?” Why don’t we look at 2 Corinthians 11 and Paul writes, “Five times I received from the Jews the 40 lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods and once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers and danger from bandits and danger from my own countrymen and danger from gentiles and danger in the city and danger in the country, in danger at sea and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep. I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food. I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressures of my concern for all the churches.” We see there certainly were people out to kill Paul. But despite all of these terrible incidences, these times of suffering Paul had to go through, Paul could still write to us to rejoice in our sufferings? How could he do that? How could he tell us to rejoice in our sufferings?

Well, Paul can say that because in the sentence right before him telling us to rejoice in our suffering, he tells us we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Now the question, My Friends, is what is this hope Paul is talking about? And this hope could be defined in one word. It’s Jesus. Matthew 12:21, “In His name, the nations will place their hope.” And the people wanted to kill Him, there was no question about that. He was mocked by the crowd. He was betrayed by Judas. He was denied by Peter. He was forsaken by the ten. He was unjustly accused in a kangaroo court. He was sentenced to death by a weak-willed Roman. He had a crown of thorns. He was scourged just short of death. He was abandoned by God the Father. No matter what I say or what words I use, they fail when we’re describing this man’s sufferings before the enormity of the cross.

But you see, we can’t look at each individual ingredient in this man’s life. No. We need to see how God the Father took these strange and distasteful ingredients in Jesus’ life and work them together. Luke 23:34 when Jesus was on the cross, it says, “He began to say,” no, that’s not even a good translation. Better would be, “He continued to say ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’” You see, all of Jesus’ hell, all of His heartbreak, all of His hurt and suffering were ingredients mixed together by God the Father for one reason. And Paul says it best in Romans 8, “For in this hope, we are saved.” Paul’s life, your life, my life. We are forgiven, we’re free forever and that’s the secret, My Friends, understanding how they all work together to refine us. Paul talks about suffering. He talks about how suffering produces endurance. And this endurance, this word represents the spiritual strength that bears up under, even gets stronger under the suffering. Because it’s that stick-to-the-faith type of mentality. He said, “I’m going to stick with this faith during this troubled time, during this suffering.” It’s almost like that long distance marathon runner who has the finish line in mind and that person’s going to make the finish line no matter how tired they are or how much they want to give up. And you see, this endurance, once we’ve made it through the suffering or even while we are in that particular suffering, turns and will produce character. Now this character isn’t just any character. It’s a tested character. It’s a quality of having a faith that has been proven, that has been strengthened, that has been refined where the suffering we go through, it helps to make little improvements by introducing subtleties and distinctions to our faith. It’s honing it and molding it and refining it. And then Paul tells us our character, that tested character, all goes back to that hope. And that hope we have in Jesus is strengthened.

Now I don’t need to say this, but I just started working out and I know you can tell. And there were many exercises I just started doing that I haven’t done in a long time and I realized I had muscles I never knew I had. And the reason is not so much because I’m doing the exercises. It’s because the next day or the day later, I’m hurting all over my body. I’m hurting in places I never thought I would hurt. But you see, with this strength and hope, our hope is strengthened because as we look to this faithful and loving God as we’re going through our suffering, we rejoice because God doesn’t leave us alone. Paul tells us to rejoice in our sufferings and he goes on and says, “He pours out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.” And His Holy Spirit sometimes is something we just don’t know is there until we hurt. And so that is why Paul can tell us a couple of chapters later in Romans and we know this, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.” Now there are two things Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t say all things are good because all things are not good. There are things that hurt us and they confuse us and they mess with our minds. And second, Paul doesn’t say we’re pretty sure all things work for the good. He doesn’t say it would be nice that all things work for the good. No, no. He says confidently, “We know that all things work for the good.” God, our heavenly Father, that faithful and loving God will take all the strange and distasteful ingredients of our lives and work them together and create a life that is just simply out of this world. Because you see, life in Jesus Christ is out of this world. It is beyond this world. It is unlike this world. It’s totally opposite of this world. This life looks at disappointments and setbacks and refuses to give in. And this life is driven by the words of 1 Peter 6, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith–of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

God allows suffering to occur in our lives and, you see, we just can’t focus on each of the individual ingredients. We need to also realize that along with these distasteful and strange ingredients, there are other ingredients mixed in, like prayer, like focusing on God and His plan for us, and also on trusting in God and that His plan, His working together of all of these ingredients are for our good and for God’s glory.

You don’t believe me? Why don’t you ask Paul? Because the secret is understanding how they all work together. Amen.

Copyright 2007 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church