- June 14, 2026 Sermon
The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 6A
St Paul says to us this morning, “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”
This sounds suspiciously like something I read as a kid. As a child, I was one of the millions of people who loved the absolute best comic strip ever written. You might be familiar with the work of Bill Watterson and “Calvin and Hobbes.” In the strip, Calvin’s dad often would tell Calvin prior to some incredibly undesirable task or outing that the unfun activity will produce character. Going camping without screen time and toys? Building character. Doing chores? Character.
What made the comic strip genius was that it reflected nonjudgmentally on both Calvin and his dad. From a kid’s perspective, all of that suffering was ridiculous just to build “character.” And from an adult’s perspective, going through stuff builds endurance and character. The genius wasn’t that Calvin’s dad was right and Calvin would eventually grow into it; Bill Watterson was not into that kind of moralizing nonsense. No, Calvin’s protests were an authentic part of childhood and should be heard from his perspective. The suffering was real to Calvin, and all of us in touch with our inner children would understand that perspective, and understand why Calvin was not convinced by his father’s promises that it would all build character.
At first blush, it feels like St Paul’s perspective on suffering, endurance, character, and hope is like Calvin’s dad’s view on why sometimes we need to endure the mosquitos and boredom of camping when what we’d rather be doing is sitting in front of the TV eating another huge bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal. “Why go through all this suffering? Because you’ll build character.”
Through Christian history, that perspective has had a significant sway. Suffering was a royal highway to Christian perfection. Suffering meant being like Jesus, and thus enduring more suffering was a way of being even more glorified in Jesus.
It meant that a lot of our readings of the Bible have that interpretation floating in the background, that more suffering equals being more like Jesus. We might see traces of it in Jesus’ admonition to go out to preach the Good News in today’s Gospel reading, but Jesus gives straightforward advice: don’t take a lot, just go. Accept hospitality. If they welcome you, wonderful; if they don’t, wipe off that dirt and walk on. Even if things get really bad, even if there is violence, don’t be afraid. Trust in the Spirit working in you.
If we bring that “suffering builds character” lens, however, we might read it into what Jesus says. Be poor beggars because that proves you’re not in it for the money. If people are mean to you, wipe off your sandals in protest – you’re too good for them. If violence rears its head – you’re a vindicated martyr. Glorify in it.
See how that’s a very different read than Jesus’ counsel. Jesus says go, and don’t overthink it. But a “suffering builds endurance” lens can make it say something different. Suddenly the emphasis on the suffering that *could* happen becomes the centerpiece rather than just a fact in the story.
In the first centuries, people would actively seek martyrdom, and eventually rules had to be put in place that you couldn’t actively pursue being persecuted. Later centuries would find Irish monks standing neck-deep in freezing water and enduring endless fasting in the pursuit of what came to be called “Green Martyrdom”. Then time would lead to wearing barbed wire and hair shirts to increase the suffering endured by monastics. Suffering produces character, but I’m not sure what kind of character gets produced from a single-minded focus on creating suffering for ourselves.
We see that perspective continue to live on in comments about “kids these days have it so easy” or things that say because I suffered, therefore I am morally superior just by the fact of having suffered.
But that perspective has had a challenger in recent years. Now we look at that focus on suffering and recognize it can be, to use the modern overused word, “toxic.” That emphasis on suffering valorizes the suffering that people go through instead of looking at how to alleviate and stop suffering. We recognize that sometimes the emphasis on suffering is a way of resigning ourselves to a status quo that produces suffering. Those who suffer are told to just accept it, figure it out, move past it. “Life isn’t fair” is an easy phrase to toss at those who are suffering.
We also recognize whose suffering gets treated this way. When anesthesia was developed, there were men who thought it would be immoral to give it to a pregnant woman during childbirth because “well, she should suffer in childbirth because that’s what the Bible says happens because of Eve in the Garden of Eden.” That suffering is just acceptable. Or the suffering of Black communities under the injustices of slavery, or of Jim Crow, or of the ongoing political and economic disenfranchisement – grin and bear it, but don’t get angry, prove you’re better than them. Even when mobs of white people will ransack prosperous Black communities, as happened in the Tulsa Race Massacre a hundred years ago, precisely because the white community felt that the Black community was doing better than them.
And so generations have also worked to push back on the valorization of suffering. Sometimes we aren’t meant to endure suffering. We’re supposed to change it – for ourselves and for others. Suffering isn’t something we just smile and say, “Well, this produces character!” No, sometimes we have to push back. We work for justice for all people.
But … we still do live in a world where suffering happens. We live in a world where sickness and cancer happen. We live in a world where we experience setbacks and limitations. We live in a world where death, pain, and fear still plague us. There are forms of suffering that we do have to simply endure. Some suffering is brief, and some is a life-long heartache.
Suffering is a fact in the midst of life.
So what do we do with St Paul’s thoughts about suffering?
If suffering is a part of life, we don’t need to seek it out. We don’t need to make more of it – we only need to face head-on the suffering that we have in our daily lives to have more than enough. We also don’t need to be passive in the face of suffering, just suffering under a heavy load in silence. In fact, we should be active in the face of suffering. Even if all we can do is float along in a turbulent sea of suffering, we can try to be actively hopeful, ask for help, ask for people just to sit with us, ask God to be here in the midst of it. We see our strengths and weaknesses more, and we see how powerful empathy and a listening ear can be. We embrace our limitations, not in giving up, but in that we are called to be our human selves, nothing more. The Spirit is at work in us, and we will see the traces of her work sometimes only in retrospect.
This is not, perhaps, a clear-cut answer. Calvin’s dad is right – the suffering that we endure, for better or worse, is part of our story, and we can choose what we will do with that story. And Calvin is right too – suffering is experienced as suffering, not the means to some abstract character-building.
Thus, we come to be both Calvin and his dad. We are Calvin: “Why do I have to do this? Why is this happening to me? I don’t like it!” And we are Calvin’s dad: “It’s not the end of the world, truly. You’re stronger than you think. This, too, shall pass.” Suffering, endurance, character, and finally hope. Rightly considered, Paul wasn’t too far off the mark. Hope does not disappoint us. Amen.
- June 7, 2026 Sermon
The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 5A
St Paul’s letter to the Romans was the center of the Protestant Reformation. On it the whole question of justification turned. Catholicism, at the time, taught that your works were essential to your salvation and being made right before God; the Protestants, as they developed their theology, said that it was purely by God’s good gift that we are made whole, that our works do not earn any kind of reward.
The Law, as the Protestants would put it, stood in for any kind of works. If we thought that fasting on Fridays, novenas, or buying indulgences made any kind of difference to God, then God was basically a vending machine for works. Put in x amount of works, push the button, get this reward. Works could be many things: certain prayers, donations given to the poor or to the church, the list goes on. This caused Martin Luther endless anxiety, because he wondered how many works he had to put into this system in order to be sure he would receive the gift of salvation; would he find himself standing before God on Judgment Day and find that he was a nickel short of salvation?
Catholics would point to the whole concept of Purgatory. Salvation assumes that few would leap right into heaven; Purgatory made space for most of us to be purged of our sins on our way to heaven, and that while it was noble to aspire to be a capital-S saint, there was still a way for “regular” folks to get to heaven. God recognizes the messiness of life, and good works are signs that our heart still move in the right direction. God can work miracles, after all.
I imagine if that whole business of indulgences being sold hadn’t been going on, Luther’s anxiety might have been less explosive. But Luther was right in pointing out that the idea that we could buy time off in purgatory by giving money to the institutional church was blasphemous. Giving money to get my uncle out of Purgatory sounded much like a corrupt justice system – which we see in the headlines, where being rich gives access to appeals, favors, and pardons that are beyond the reach of the poor. The notion of good works earning our salvation was always going to lead back to viewing the Law as “do this, get a reward” kind of system.
And so the Protestant Reformation declared that all of this was a sham, and they went straight to the root: the Protestants said that there is absolutely nothing we can do to make God save us from ourselves and our sins. We cannot bribe God with prayer, fasting, or almsgiving. God gives salvation as a free gift, plain and simple. Salvation is through faith, they pointed out. God made a promise to Abraham, and that promise wasn’t dependent upon Abraham or his descendants doing good works. Salvation is a gift, it is grace, it is freely given because God is good. Everything stems from God good nature – God is not obligated to give, but chooses to.
In 1999, the Lutherans and the Catholics came to a common agreement around the doctrine of justification, ultimately saying: “Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.”[1]
We don’t earn our salvation; God is not bound by the Law to give us a reward in return for our works. Everything God gives is a free gift because God is good and God has promised. What we do with that gift is what we call the Christian life.
This seems like it should be a nice, tidy ending. “Hooray! We agree on this basic Christian doctrine now!” But, the truth is, the problem the Protestants were pointing out was bigger, and it would continue to plague Protestants and the world.
Protestantism in its early decades started to fracture not only around communion but also around what the Christian life entailed. If salvation was God’s free gift, then who was in and who was out? Who was saved, and who was not? If I couldn’t pick out my saintly neighbor and say, “Oh, she’s going right to heaven” and look at that terrible person down the road and smugly say, “Oh, he’s going straight to hell,” then what was the Christian life all about? If my prayers don’t get God to like me, then do I need to pray? If giving generously to the church or the poor doesn’t make a difference in my eternal destination, then do I really have to do that? If there’s no reward, then do I have to do it? Shouldn’t I just do whatever I want?
This has been a plague down the generations. When we’re young, it makes sense that we need a reward to help us get to do the right thing. We need something concrete to help us make a decision: parental approval, a treat. And then we move onto less-tangible things, like feeling good, and eventually we do it because we just simply think it’s the right thing to do.[2]
But our motivations can still be mixed. Partly that’s just out of being human. Our moral thinking is rarely tidy – we still have traces of our childhood desire to do right because others will be happy with us and maybe we can also get a cookie.
Yet we should still take the time to ask why we do what we do. Christian behavior in America would merit some reflection. Did we do it because we believed, or did we do it for something else? Generations of Christians have been persuaded that they needed to go to church to get in with the right people. We Episcopalians should be mindful that we once were the church of the well-resourced and well-connected, and that was a lot of desirable status to have access to. Generations of Christians have gone to church yet avoided the work of abolishing slavery, proclaiming the dignity of women, protecting the Indigenous nations, or aiding the causes of the working class because those were too “controversial” and the church was supposed to be piously neutral. Generations of Christians have gone to church to prove they were the right kind of people: respectable people, not moral deviants, and definitely not Communists. It’s interesting that there was a sudden drop in American Church attendance once the Soviet Union fell apart and the economic boom of the 90s started. The Protestant Reformation brought our attention to our motivation – do we do the right thing because we trust and celebrate God’s goodness, or do we want to get something out of it? Christian life is hard. Following Jesus is hard. Building community is hard. We need a spiritual, moral, and community foundation that leads us to discern the will of God not so we can get it right and get rewarded, but because we know that God is good and we are made in the image of God. God is perfect love, the Holy Spirit is at work in us, the eternal life of Jesus Christ flows in us now and forevermore – if we have this free gift now and always, do we really need something more? Amen.
[1] Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, article 15
[2] See Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development.
- May 31, 2026 Sermon
The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Trinity Sunday, Year A
It is a good tradition to be wary of the Trinity Sunday sermon. A notorious day when clergy look to find the nearest seminarian to force into the pulpit – both out of a desire to avoid writing oneself into pretzel knots to avoid heresy and out of a desire to have someone else try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that makes more sense than what has been said over the last two thousand years.
But, alas, I have no such luck – our seminarian has graduated and been ordained a deacon and now a priest, and so the church rules about heresy fully apply and we want her to enjoy the collar for a while longer before she strays into some modalistic, modern-day Sabellianism or, even worse, some kind of subordinationist Eunomianism.
And so, many clergy rush to find some fresh expression of the doctrine of the Trinity to try to be both orthodox and interesting, to avoid heresy and to make the doctrine more understandable. Generally those sermons will talk about the “divine dance” of the Trinity. I have done such a thing. But I find myself this year wondering if we need a different approach entirely. I also find myself wondering if we need to re-evaluate how we approach some of our more dogmatic, confessional statements about God and everything differently.
I am reminded of our Jewish siblings approach to the Torah: build a fence around it. Not a fence to keep people out – that’s been the erroneous interpretation in Christianity about Judaism for a long time, that the rules and principles that decide what actions are permissible and which are impermissible were just about showing who was right and good, and who was a terrible sinner. The principle of “building a fence around the Torah” is about not trampling the Torah with careless missteps. Those systems of rules are about how to show respect and honor to something so deeply important in life.
So, too, is our language around God and theology. They can give us a “fence” so we don’t step on God – not that God needs us to avoid stepping, but so we treat God as God, not an idea of God.
We see people treat God as an idea all the time. People claim God blesses their nation above every other nation, blesses their war, blesses their sports victory – God is merely an idea that always supports whatever they support. God is treated as an idea that gets trotted out to say that certain other people are bad and deserving of condemnation. God is treated like a vending machine powered by prayer. God gets reduced to an idea all the time. Another word for that would be “idol” by the way.
And so our theological, confessional language around God is meant to preserve the distinctiveness of God, the vibrant life of God, the personhood of God. If I can understand God, do I really understand God? Or do I understand my *idea* of God?
Much like when we’re in a relationship or friendship – if we think we truly, completely, absolutely understand the other person, we need to check whether we love the person or if we are in love with the *idea* we have of this person. Each of us, at heart, is a mystery. We don’t need to understand to love – but through our love we will be open to understanding more and more deeply.
Our theology of the Trinity is stated just a handful of times in the Bible, and nothing with any of the fancy words that we’ve come to know. But we know that God creates: the movement of the Creator, the breath of the Holy Spirit, the order that we call the Logos, the incarnate Word, Jesus. We know that God blesses: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship or communion of the Holy Spirit. We know that it is the action of the Trinity in bringing us to the gift of salvation we proclaim in baptism: Baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We want our words to be careful, to be respectful, to honor God as God, God who is also a holy mystery to us – a mystery to be loved, and in being loved we will grow to understand. As we turn to the summer months ahead, I am inviting you to reflect more deeply on our language about our faith. I have copies of the catechism printed out with space for notes. I want you to take your time reading the catechism from the prayer book, to reflect on it, to ask questions, even disagree and explore why. The more we honor our faith with love and curiosity, the more we will understand, and the better our language will be to talk about God whom we love deeply. We do not comprehend God, we do not have God “solved” like a math problem, and we know that God is greater than any idea that we can tame to do our bidding. God is God, and God is glorious, and God is Trinity, mystery of love unfolding and overflowing into all that God has created. Amen.
- May 24, 2026 Sermon
The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Pentecost A
“Out of the believer’s heart will flow rivers of living water.”
For us at Pentecost, we always go for the flashy flames of the Holy Spirit. We wear red, we celebrate the untamable fire of the Spirit as it descends upon the disciples of Jesus gathered in prayer. Sometimes, we’ll go with a different element. We think of the wild wind that rushes over the void in the beginning of creation, this powerful voice that brings into being order from chaos.
But Jesus in today’s Gospel points a different direction: to water.
Water is a blessing – we need it to drink, we need it for cooking, we need it for washing. We need clean water, water that is not contaminated with lead, not contaminated with chemicals or waste products from factories or data centers, not contaminated with sediment and sewage or pathogenic microbes. We need water that is fresh, not salt.
We also rightly fear water. Water that is rushing has a lot of power behind it. A flash flood can swell a river high above its banks and sweep away anything in its path. A glacial lake like Lake Bonneville 30,000 years ago could burst its boundary and flood down into the Snake River plain on its way down to the Pacific. The storm surge of a hurricane pulls seawater far inland, and a tsunami can strike from an earthquake far away on the globe.
Water is powerful. It is healing. It is not to be trifled with. As the Indigenous peoples remind us, water is life.
And so, too, is the Spirit. The Spirit is life. The Spirit is breathed into us in our creation. The Spirit is breathed into us in our baptism. The Spirit is called down upon us at confirmation, at ordination. The Spirit is life.
The Spirit, like water, flows in our veins. The Spirit gives us life to move and breathe and sing and dance. The Spirit gives us energy to serve, to understand, to preach and teach. The Spirit, who is Love, the Spirit moves in our souls to bring us to love like God loves.
This is not a comfortable truth, in a way. We might celebrate the gifts of the Spirit without fully understanding what we are asking for. We celebrate the tongues of flame and the gift of speaking the Gospel prophetically all throughout the world in every language. But what are we asking for? Are we asking for a gift that we get to possess and do nothing with? A gift that we hold without it holding us, without it molding us and forming us?
The water of the Spirit soaks down deep into our very being, into our own hearts and flows outward from there. It is alive, it is living water. It is water that might swell up and overflow the boundaries we put to it. We might be overwhelmed by water and find ourselves speaking words of prophecy, we might find ourselves preaching the Gospel (gasp! What are we introverts to do?), we might find ourselves healing others, we might find ourselves so overwhelmed by God’s love that all that is not love within us gets drowned in its depths.
Like fire and wind, water is wild, untamed and untamable. The Spirit is wild, untamed and untamable.
The water of the Spirit is alive and in our hearts. When we were baptized this water was poured over us to proclaim our re-birth in God. Reborn as a member of the Body of Christ, reborn into the body of the Resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
Pentecost is the same living water that we celebrate at the Easter Vigil when we renew our baptismal vows. Pentecost is the baptismal font swelling up from the depths of our heart to overflow in abundant and eternal life. Jesus promised us life – and he gives it now as well as forever in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water that springs up from our souls.
It is living water, full of the Spirit of Life. It is living water for a world parched and drying from desolation and despair. It is living water for a world aflame with fires of contempt, cruelty, and callousness. It is living water that threatens to drown us with life and to drown us in its love.
It can be scary to relinquish our control and let this living water flow up from us and flow throughout us and overflow from us. But the Holy Spirit loves us too much to let us stay the way we are. The Spirit is eager to give us deeper, better life.
The fire of the Spirit will thaw our icy hearts and frozen ways. The wind of the Spirit will fill our lungs with breath and song. And the waters of the Spirit will flow up from the depths of our souls to make, re-make, and renew what was dead and parched, and make it flourish like a watered garden, a fresh spring, the holy rhythm of the waves lapping on the shore. The water of the Spirit is poured out for you. Drink up. Amen.
- May 17, 2026 Sermon
The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Easter 7A
From 1 Peter this morning: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.”
Suffering is one of the core questions of religion and spirituality. What do we do with suffering and pain? We open the news on our phones and find ourselves fretting over what is happening and what might happen. We see the suffering far off in the world and we see the suffering in our local community. We see the suffering of others, and we experience our own suffering and empathy brings us to experience the suffering of those nearest to us.
Religion, spirituality, and philosophy all have to wrestle with the concept of suffering because it’s all around us. Life is not easy, and we human beings want to make sense of our lives. We want to make sense of suffering. So, what do we do with suffering and pain?
Our Buddhist friends read the question of suffering through the lens of the four Noble Truths: Life is suffering, suffering is caused by attachment, there is a way to end attachment and thus be free of suffering, and the way to end that attachment is the eightfold path of the Buddha. For our Muslim siblings, suffering is an invitation to look more closely for the work of God in the midst of it all, to seek God’s purposes. Our Jewish siblings have wrestled with the concept of suffering through long ages of persecution.
So, then, what is our Christian answer to suffering? How do we Christians make sense of suffering?
In some generations, the emphasis on suffering was about seeing God’s purposes in the midst of suffering. Christians would say that we’re supposed to see what God is teaching us, or that God is calling us to greater faithful trust. In other generations, unfortunately, suffering was seen as punishment for sins. And today that still lingers – so the people who are successful must be blessed while those who suffer must be guilty of something.
The problem with any understanding of suffering for us Christians is that at the heart of our understanding of suffering is the cross, where Jesus who is truly human and fully divine suffered and died, as we proclaim week after week. The cross, this nexus of profound suffering links God to us and links us to God and one another – the cross is the crossroads wherein a suffering humanity and a loving God meet. For us as Christians, any and all suffering is linked back to the cross.
Which means that we say something radical: the Messiah’s suffering embraces all suffering. Christ’s suffering embraces our suffering when it comes through no fault of our own. Christ’s suffering embraces our suffering that comes as a consequence. Christ’s suffering embraces our suffering when it happens almost like a bad roll of some unlucky dice.
Christ’s experience of suffering in his life and death brings God closer and closer to our daily experience. We Christians are then making a bold truth claim: suffering happens for a multitude of reasons, but no matter what, God draws near to us in our suffering. God is not pushing us away in judgment – Jesus draws closer to us with his open wounded hands in his resurrected body. God is not waiting far off for us to figure out what suffering means – Jesus’ heart is opened in empathy for us in our struggles. The experience of suffering actually unites us to other human beings and to God in Jesus Christ – we all suffer in different ways to different degrees, but our suffering brings our wounded hearts to touch one another if we let them.
Yet there are forms of Christianity that are so distorted in their relationship to suffering that they cannot accept the cross at the heart of our religion. Some forms of Christianity see suffering as failure, or suffering as something to ignore with a focus on heaven, or suffering as something to impose on others, or suffering to be wielded as a medal of righteousness.
First, suffering is not failure. False forms of Christianity try to make suffering an illusion, or that suffering only happens to bad people. They want to make suffering logical, that people who are bad get punished and those who are good get rewarded. Just point to the cross, the martyrs, the prophets – suffering happens to very, very good people, too. And there are plenty of terrible people who have had immense power and wealth in the world – doesn’t take too long looking in the history books or today’s news to see that.
Second, suffering is not something we just ignore to focus on heaven. Suffering is real – suffering is not a lack of faith, suffering is not a lack of gratitude, suffering is not an illusion. I’ve met people who think that they have to believe they are “too blessed to be stressed” in order to be faithful Christians, that if they simply had greater faith it wouldn’t be suffering. But, again, we point to the cross. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus cried out on the cross. Jesus was mocked by others. Jesus can weep and cry out – and so can we.
Third, suffering is not something we impose on others. That’s another thing I see in the world around us. So many Christians claiming the name of Christ but actively wanting others to suffer. We Christians are called to accept the cross when it comes – Jesus told us to take up our cross and follow him – but we are absolutely forbidden from crucifying others. We should be working to alleviate suffering, which is what Christ calls us to do repeatedly. He forbids us from causing suffering.
And fourth, suffering is not some medal of righteousness, a badge of perfection. This might seem odd, as so many Christians throughout the ages have been keen to accept persecution and martyrdom, but the problem is that if we view our suffering as a badge of honor then we have secretly begun to turn our focus in on ourselves, that we must be righteous and better than others. It is a blessing to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake because then we’ve actually done something – there’s evidence to convict us of goodness! But it’s still not about us. We do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and it brings us to follow Jesus. If we do good, and that leads to suffering, then we’re just following Jesus. If we do good, and it leads to praise, then still, we’re just following Jesus.
Returning, then, to our reading from 1 Peter: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.”
Rejoice? Be glad and shout for joy? Being blessed for being reviled? How does that sit with what I just said?
I put it to you this way: we rejoice because we know that whatever pain we experience in life, whatever pain and heartbreak we see in the world around us, we know that Jesus Christ himself is present. No less than God is present in the midst of suffering. When we weep because our bodies feel like they are falling apart or our brains have become our own enemy, Christ is present in the fullness of his love. When we see the heartache of those we love, or when we see the cruelty of the powerful visited upon the marginalized and downtrodden, our hearts break open just as Christ’s heart breaks open for them. When people say we’re unrealistic dreamers who actually believe in the power of God’s love, it is blessing because we’re being reminded that the way of God is vastly different from the way of the world, and at least someone noticed! Suffering, then, for us Christians calls us back to the cross, to the crossroads of God. God meets us there, God opens our hearts to the suffering of the world and even sometimes to our own suffering if we don’t notice it anymore. God meets us right there in the person of Jesus Christ and abides with us, to walk alongside us, to carry us, to help us carry one another. It is a profound blessing to know that at the heart of our Christian journey is a God who loves us so much that the suffering of the cross was simply one more way to love us. Amen.