Suffering in Silence

sermon by Torin Eikler
"Hymns that Shape Us" series:
Revival Camp Songs
Exodus 15: 19-23 James 5:13-18

When I was young–er, there was a song that it seemed we sang at every campfire or bible school. (Funny isn’t it how thinking about hymns tend to bring back memories of other songs we sang when we were young.) This one was called “horse and rider,” or at least that’s how we all referred to it when we called out for it to be sung again and again … and again.

“I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously – the horse and rider thrown into the sea. Yee haw!”

It started out slowly, and we got faster and faster until we couldn’t sing it anymore without the words getting garbled. Try it with me….

(slowly) “I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously – the horse and rider thrown into the sea. Yee haw!” [motion to keep going … speed up].

It’s fun isn’t it, even if it is a bit of tongue twister … especially “triumphed gloriously,” and every time we sang it we ended up laughing at ourselves and each other. I didn’t know that it was taken straight from Exodus or that it was a hymn celebrating the massacre of thousands of Egyptian troops. (pause) That came later. For me, for all of us, it was just pure fun … just one of those songs that everyone knew … an old favorite of kids and counselors alike.


The hymns we are singing today are like that. Maybe not as “fun” to sing but they are the old favorites that many of us know by heart because they cut across denominations, and we’ve sung them forever. Have you ever stopped to think what they are about, what we are saying to each other and to the world when we sing them?


Hymns from the revival era of the 19th century have a distinct feel to them. They often catch hold of our emotions in an attempt to get us to feel remorse for our sinfulness and call us back to a closer relationship with Jesus. Or, they sought to inspire people by reaching back to the early church, paint it with a sense of purity, and incite a certain amount of zeal in those who sang them. Those are not bad things. Nor is it surprising given that revivals were often filled with people who were already faithful church goers in need of a kind of “kick in the pants” to jump-start their Christian journeys of discipleship. Yet they offered a view of life that was more than a little simplistic….

“What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! … Have we trials and temptations? … Are we weak and heavy laden, ‘cumbered with a load of care? … Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? Take it to the Lord in prayer! In his arms he’ll take and shield thee – thou wilt find a solace there.”

That’s all true, … but the suggestion that all we need to feel better is to offer our struggles to God in prayer and all our problems will disappear – that “holy manna will be showered all around” to meet our needs, sooth our sorrows, and give us the strength to go and sin no more” just doesn’t bear out. In real life, we still struggle. We still suffer the pain of feeling despised and betrayed. We still ache with grief at the loss of loved ones. We still find ourselves to be imperfect people filled with guilt for the mistakes we make and the pain we cause others. The best that can be said is that we may find a sense of peace or encouragement or maybe even some much needed insight in the midst of it all if we step back for a moment, offer up our fears and struggles, and invite God to come in and help us.


The third theme, and one that is more troubling to me, is the strain of triumphalism that often comes out in so many of our hymns from this era. Triumphalism “stresses the victories … of the Christian life, the Christian church,” or (as we see it now) Christian nations. If we celebrate these triumphs as a source of personal or even community strength and encouragement, there isn’t really a problem with triumphalism. But more often, it seems, Christian participation in God's ultimate victory on earth takes on large scale, political overtones.

At the beginning of the Gulf War in 1990, I saw this taking root in my generation of Americans. I was 17 and caught up in the emotions that drive teenagers. So, I was quick to go to several marches against the war as the deadline for invasion approached. I carried signs proclaiming Christ’s call for peace … with clever phrasing, of course. None of them were quite as witty as “When Jesus said, “love you enemies,” I think he probably meant don’t kill them, but I thought they were pretty good at the time.

What surprised me, naïve as I was, were the number of people who gestured angrily as we walked or came up to us as we stood singing in front of the courthouse and shouted at us, each claiming in their own way that this was a holy war and that good Christians should be supporting the fight against Muslims. There was even one group who put together a spontaneous chorus of “We’re marching to Zion” (another good revival hymn). They didn’t know the verses, but they sang the refrain several times as proof, I assume, of divine support for their interpretation of God’s will in the matter. It’s worse now.


That kind of radical patriotism dressed up as faith saddens me more than anything else. It’s blind hatred seems to fly so directly in the face of Jesus’ teachings about loving others, and it has led to so much death and suffering laid at Christianity’s feet. I wish we could let it go. I wish that Christians in this country and elsewhere didn’t get the real story of Christ’s triumph through suffering and compassion so mixed up with our country’s efforts to change the world through force and violence. If we could get past that – if we could at least refuse to accept that what we do to other countries … other people in the name of our national security or their best interests is not always what God would have us do, then the world would surely be a better place. At least that’s what I believe…. And I think you probably believe that too.

Yet, even in this place and among people who share a commitment to peaceful discipleship, triumphalism has power. We love to sing “we’re marching to Zion.” We love the images of a world where God’s ultimate victory has been won and everyone lives in the Realm of God – for us a realm that is marked by peace and love and reconciliation. And while we don’t see that coming through the domination of others, we do claim our role in helping to bring it about.


That’s a good thing. You will never catch me saying that we should turn away from doing what we can to live the Kingdom into reality for all people. But, what does it do to people – to us - when we when we claim, without thinking about it, that all the suffering will go away as long as we offer it up in prayer and put it all in the service of seeking out an unrealistically pure church?


When I was interning as a chaplain during Seminary, I got to know a man who had only recently discovered that he suffered from diabetes. I’ll call him Frank. In the year before we met, things had gone from bad to worse for him. He became a Christian during that year and eventually asked his congregation to join their prayers for healing to his, certain that his faith and that of his brothers and sisters would save him just as it says in James. And yet, there he was in the hospital again, and this time, he was scheduled to have his right leg amputated from the knee down.

As we sat together over the course of a few days, Frank shared his fears and his sense of betrayal with me. He was afraid of what would happen after the surgery – about whether or not he would be able to adapt to having only one leg, about what he might lose the next time, about never being looked at as a whole person again. And he felt like God had abandoned him to his illness – that everything he had come to believe was a lie or that, maybe, God had it in for him in particular because of the life he had led before converting.

Those were all things that I expected to hear. They had trained us to respond to exactly that kind of spiritual crisis before they let us out onto the unsuspecting patients to practice. I used that training well – at least well enough that he felt reassured about God’s love for him. And just as I thought he had worked through most of his issues, Frank said, “I just feel so guilty.”

When I asked why, he told me that at one of the meetings with his prayer group the pastor had read the scripture from James that we heard today: “The prayer of faith will save the sick …. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” It had given him hope that day because the prayer warriors of the church were fighting against this evil for him, and he knew that their righteous zeal combined with his faith would be enough to raise him up out of his suffering. When that didn’t happen – when he got worse instead of better – the leader of the group told him that there must be a lack of faith on his part.

Frank was obviously nervous about sharing this. He was sure that he had failed in some way. He had prayed the prayer of faith as the church taught him, and nothing had happened. He had found no healing … no consolation … no rain to end his personal drought. Not even the sense of peace that his favorite hymns promised had come to him as a result. He was sure that he was unfit for the Kingdom of God because things like this didn’t happen to “good Christian soldiers” or, when they did, true faith and devotion simply accepted them as the will of God. And so he suffered in silence.


That’s the risk we take when we sing the good old hymns without thinking. When we forget to talk about what they are teaching us – about what they are saying about the life Christian discipleship, we not only set the stage for shallow, simplistic promises of comfort and overzealous calls for holy war, we might also push our brothers and sisters into a dark corner of guilt and shame.


The scriptures do promise healing to those who pray and comfort to those who suffer. They proclaim the ultimate power of God to bring victory and call us to share in the glory of that moment when the body of Christ will fulfill God’s vision. But those beautiful images and those promises stand right beside stories of suffering and disappointment. After the horse and rider were thrown into the sea, the people suffered terrible thirst in the wilderness. Before the rain came to answer Elijah’s prayer, there were three years of drought. Even in the midst of Jesus’ triumph over the sins of the humanity, there was suffering and pain.

Our lives are not so simple and pure as we would often like them to be.

Neither is the path to the Realm of God smooth and sure, lined with glowing triumphs and free from failures.

But God does walk with us through the hard times that we all experience.

There is forgiveness and comfort for all those who seek it.

And as we walk through Emmanuel’s ground, … together, …
we will find peace and joy in the love we share.