I remember a day when most of us were gathered together here at Cross of Grace on a Sunday morning. The date was March 8, 2020 to be exact. It was a morning full of the usual Sunday morning buzz. The parking lot was full. People filled the sanctuary to sing, pray, listen, pass the peace, and take communion. Kids were in class down in the Sunday school wing. The narthex hosted many handshakes, hugs, and outbursts of laughter. In the fellowship hall, there was conversation over donuts and fair-trade coffee or chocolate milk. It was a usual Sunday morning at Cross of Grace.
In the midst of all that activity I was gathered with a small group in a walled-off room in the fellowship hall to continue our discussion of the book we had been reading: The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. The last chapter we discussed that morning addressed the topic of suffering and it was titled “It Can’t Be Carried Alone.”
A few days after the events of the morning I just described, we made the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily halt in-person worship due to something being referred to as the Coronavirus. We realized there was a significant chance we might not be able to gather together for Easter Sunday. We had no idea what the next months would entail. The past nine months...well, they defy description. And you’ve lived through it, so you don’t need me to remind you of what we’ve been through...or what we still have to go through.
I feel like if I had been a little more self-aware, the chapter titled “It Can’t Be Carried Alone” could have had me well-positioned to deal with and adapt to the challenges of life and ministry in a pandemic world. But the turmoil was so abrupt and thoroughly disruptive that I didn’t give the contents of that chapter another thought after that Sunday. Instead, I guess you could say I tried to carry it alone...and let me tell you it has not gone well for me. These last few months have brought me into contact with some intense emotional pain from which I am still reeling.
In preparation for this Blue Christmas worship service I returned to that chapter in The Universal Christ, vaguely recalling that there were some important ideas there that I would do well to revisit. I re-read Richard Rohr’s first-person account of feeling the weight of the world’s suffering so profoundly that he became sad not just about one thing, but sad about everything. If you were here with me I’d ask for an “Amen” in response to that idea. We’ve been sad not just about one thing but about everything. Amen?
Richard Rohr claims the only way for him to make sense of great sadness is to remember that God also experiences and carries the weight of the world’s suffering. He writes, “Once I know that all suffering is both our suffering and God’s suffering, I can better endure and trust the desolations and disappointments that come my way.” (167)
From the beginning, God chose to be one with all of creation. God’s creation has never carried its suffering alone. Christ, the Son of God, has existed throughout history, independent of time and space; independent, and yet intimately connected to the fabric of being. Rohr invites us to think about the incarnation (or enfleshment of God) in two phases. The first incarnation is the beginning of everything...because everything bears the image of God; while the second incarnation is God’s participation in human life and death in the person of Jesus. When we celebrate the birth of the Son of God, Immanuel, God with us, we are celebrating something that happened two thousand years ago, as well as something that happened at the very beginning...of everything. And, it should be noted, something that continues to happen today. Still today, Christ is with us.
This pandemic is a new experience for everyone, except for Christ, who has experienced the suffering of God’s creation from the very beginning. So it makes sense, then, why it would be important not to try to carry our suffering alone. It can’t be carried alone. It was never meant for us to carry it alone. And we’re never alone.
You are not the only one who has experienced this pandemic and suffered through it. That’s not meant as a guilt-laden dismissal of what you’ve been through or are feeling, as though your experiences don’t matter because someone else has had it worse. You are not the only one who has experienced this pandemic and suffered through it. That’s simply a reminder that you’ve never been alone and whatever suffering you are carrying cannot be carried alone.
One of the gifts of Christian theology is the promise that God is with us in our suffering. God knows what it is like to suffer, to be rejected, to love, to lose a child, to watch as best laid plans fall by the wayside, to want so desperately to be close to someone who always remains at a distance. God does not wait until we get better, or achieve something, or become successful, or do it right; God does not wait for any of those things before showering us with divine love and grace.
Recall that Immanuel, God-with-us, little baby Jesus was born as a completely helpless newborn in a feeding trough in the middle of nowhere. God cannot become any more vulnerable than that. That newborn baby, divine as he may be, could not carry anything alone. And neither can we.
So, fix your eyes and your attention on that vulnerable Christ-child. “God is in a vulnerable newborn baby in a feeding trough. We need to see the mystery of incarnation in that one ordinary concrete moment, and struggle with, fight, resist, and fall in love with it there. What is true in one particular place finally universalizes and ends up being true everywhere.”
This is not the Christmas any of us would have wanted. But maybe this is exactly the type of Christmas that we were made for. Perhaps the gift of this difficult and unique pandemic Christmas is that we will realize anew that God carries all our pain and disappointment with us and, in so doing, shows us what it means to be the hands and feet of God for the sake of the world, helping one another shoulder the load, because we can’t carry it alone.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
