Romans 5:1-5
March 9, 2014
Therefore, since we are justified by
faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we
have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope
of sharing the glory of God. 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,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that
has been given to us.
Back when I was in tenth grade I had a painful experience
that in many ways changed my approach to life. It wasn’t traumatic, and it
wasn’t the kind of experience that most people on the outside would look at and
say, “Oh my! I feel so bad for you.” Instead, it was a minor painful experience
that had ramifications for how I decided to live the rest of my life.
At the time I had just completed about six straight years
of being a lazy, poor student. In many ways I became that student because I
became what everyone said I was. I was criticized a lot for not being a better
student, yet no one ever sat down with me and said, “Can I help you learn how
to learn.” I’ve learned that if you are criticized enough for not working hard
enough, you eventually become what they criticize. So I became a bad student,
but I was good at was sports. It was the one area where I didn’t get criticized
quite as much, and where I did get praise.
Before tenth grade my main two sports were soccer and ice
hockey. I had been a starter on the 7th & 8th grade
and 9th grade soccer teams, but as I got older my inability to use
my left foot made it harder for me to excel. I have a basic problem with my
athletic prowess. I am exceptionally coordinated with my right hand, arm, and
leg. I am also exceptionally klutzy with my left hand, arm, and leg. I can feel
it just standing still. If I raise my right hand, it feels capable of
accomplishing anything. When I raise my left hand, it just feels uncoordinated.
You give me something to do with the right side of my body, and nothing feels
beyond my ability, whether it’s throwing or catching a ball, hitting a ball,
grabbing something, or moving something. If all sports were just one-handed, I
felt like I could have been great. But my left side was a severe problem. And
it meant that my soccer career was stalling because you can only circle to your
right for so long before you have to kick the ball with your left. I can kick
the ball 60 yards with my right foot. I have a hard time kicking six feet with
my left.
At the same time, I was becoming very good in ice hockey,
where I could be just right-handed. I was a strong and nimble skater, and I had
very good stickhandling skills. I was an all-star in the Pittsburgh area in
ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades. I’ll be the first to admit that Pittsburgh
area ice hockey wasn’t the greatest, and being an all-star here wasn’t saying
much, but in all-star games against teams from Canada, and in summer ice hockey
camps with kids from New England, I held my own.
So, I faced a dilemma. I was no longer starting on the
soccer team, and my hockey practices were every Wednesday afternoon beginning
at 6 p.m. The problem was that soccer practice didn’t end till 5:30 p.m.,
meaning that I had very little time to get to the rink three miles away, get on
my hockey equipment, and get out on the rink for practice. And I loved hockey
practice. I went to the coach and asked if I could get out early on Wednesdays
so that I could get to my hockey practices. The coach, without even pausing to
consider, flatly told me “no.” So I did what any logical tenth-grader would do.
I quit.
That evening I came home and told my father I had quit
the soccer team. He asked me why, and I told him everything I just told you.
Instead of saying what I expected, which would be something like, “That’s okay,
Graham. You’re good in hockey, and you don’t like soccer that much,” he
responded in a very different way: “Graham, you don’t quit. You never quit. You
made a commitment to that soccer team, whether you like playing or not. You do not quit. I want you to go to the
coach tomorrow, apologize, and ask him if you can come back on the team.” Are
you kidding me? I made my best case, but you have to remember that my father
was a lawyer at the time, so I wasn’t going to get far. The next day I went up
to the coach in school, apologized, and asked him if I could come back on the
team. He let me back on, and I pretty much sat on the bench the rest of the
season.
Having to apologize and stay on the team had a pretty big
impact on me. Enduring soccer practices, which I had come to hate, day after
day, changed me. It taught me to persevere. It taught me to do what Paul talks
about in our passage today, and in the process it began to teach me how to
develop character.
This experience was really my first clear understanding
of what Paul said in our passage when he said, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and
character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” I realize that
sitting on the bench on the tenth grade soccer team doesn’t seem much like
suffering to an outsider, but it was to me. I did one thing well at the time,
and that was play ice hockey. It was the only thing anyone ever praised me for
at the time, and it was anguish not to practice normally for the next six
weeks. But I endured it, and in the process it taught me that I could endure
most of anything I faced, and if I did I could get better.
I was a very different person in high school than I am
now, and it’s not because I’m older now. Back then, other than for things I had
passion for, I gave up more than I put in.
And even with the things I had a passion for, I didn’t work that hard at
them (hockey was the exception). My father’s making me go back, apologize to
the coach, ask to be back on the team, and pretty much sitting on the bench for
the rest of the season started my transformation of character. The biggest
thing it taught me was to endure, which led to good things.
The experience had an impact on my grades. One reason I
had been a bad student was that I didn’t like enduring homework. I hated it. To
me it felt like suffering, and studying for tests was worse. Why endure that
pain when I could watch episodes of Star
Trek and Kung Fu instead? But
after this experience I realized I could endure homework and studying, and my
grades slowly started to improve. It took a while because I had to teach myself
the studying skills that many third-graders now have. My grades slowly got
better throughout high school, and then throughout college where I finally made
the dean’s list. They got even better in graduate school, and I was eventually
able to graduate with a 4.0 gpa for my Ph.D.
It had an impact on my eventually becoming a very good all-star
lacrosse player in high school. It also had an impact on my being able to play
on a national championship college team as a freshman, and starting on a
nationally ranked team as a senior. What allowed me to eventually play in
college wasn’t my great skill. It was the endurance I had learned from my
father. As one of my college coaches told me after I graduated, most players
come into the program at a pretty high level, and graduate at a very high
level. I came in at a very low level and graduated at a very high level. Just
like my playing ice hockey in the Pittsburgh area, which was no great shakes in
places like Canada and New England, my having played in the Pittsburgh area was
no great shakes in comparison to kids coming from Maryland and New York.
I had to have endurance to play lacrosse in college
because for those four years I was an outsider. I didn’t come from a lacrosse
area. I hadn’t played with or against any of the kids on the team, or on any
college teams. No one from this area at the time, except one teammate of mine
who became an All-American goalie, really played at the top levels of lacrosse.
The coaching and the competition we faced in high school just weren’t good
enough. So I was an outsider on the team. For those four years I practiced,
worked, and played, yet I barely had any teammates ever talk with me. I can
only guess that it was because I was an outsider, since in every other area of
my life, including every other sports team I have played on, I was fully
accepted and developed great friendships. College lacrosse was the exception.
I’m sure my teammates might have a different story to tell, but from the first
try-outs no one talked to me. I wouldn’t even get a “hi.” But I endured. I stuck
with it. More skilled and accepted players quit because they were sitting on
the bench, but I stayed with it. I had learned my lesson about quitting, and it
allowed me to eventually succeed. I always wish I had had one more year, but I
still managed to start and play at the highest level at that time. The
endurance led to develop the character to never quit, and that character led to
hope, and that hope led to joy.
This endurance had an impact on my eventually getting
into graduate school, to eventually getting a Ph.D., to writing a number of
books and carving out a unique career. And it had an impact on becoming a
pastor, and especially being a different kind of pastor. One thing I’ve learned
as a pastor is that if you don’t fit into a typical churchy box, you get
criticized. I’ve been criticized by other pastors and church members in this
town for the way we are as a church, and I’ve been criticized by other pastors
and church members in our presbytery for not being their kind of pastor. For
example, one pastor in our presbytery has complained to others that “I swear,
Graham Standish waits to see how I’ll vote before he decides to vote the other
way.” As if I’ve ever had a problem having my own beliefs and opinions. But it
doesn’t matter. What I’ve learned is to have enough character to be true to how
I’ve been called by God to be, and not to try to be what others demand that I
be. God didn’t call me to be them. God called me to be me, and I think this is
also what has allowed Calvin Church to become a church that reaches out to very
different kind of people—the kind of people who normally won’t go to a typical
Mainline church or a contemporary, conservative evangelical church.
All along, this endurance has made me a tremendously
hopeful person because I have seen how endurance pans out. If we are willing to
persevere, be self-disciplined, and endure, we find out that things work out in
the end. In fact, it is this endurance through difficulties that gives us the
time and experience to discover that what we thought was a disaster or hopeless
eventually gives way to great possibility.
It’s the lack of endurance and character, which
eventually leads to hope, that often is the problem with suicides. Suicides are
tragic, especially because most teen suicides are for kids who could have found
hope if they had hung on long enough. So often at the funerals of teen suicides
you hear testimonies of people saying that the teen had so much potential, so
much to live for. And that is true. Most likely he teen would have discovered hope
and joy if she or he had just endured. I see the same things with addictions.
Many alcoholics and other addicts aren’t willing to endure. They can’t imagine
life without their booze, drug, fix, or high. They can’t endure normalcy. But
those who get through recovery find hope because they discover that committing
themselves to something better makes things better. Giving up makes things
worse. As Paul said, if you are willing to endure struggles and suffering, the
character that comes out of it makes many things possible
I believe life is filled with joy, wonder, and great
surprises, but if you don’t form the character that comes from the willingness
to endure struggles, you can’t find it. If you spend your life complaining
about how you can’t get a fair shake, you never find that joy. The truth is
that nobody in life every gets a fair shake. It’s endurance and character that
leads to our creating fair shakes for ourselves. If you spend your life
complaining about what you don’t have, you never find that joy. If you spend
your life frustrated because things don’t come your way, and it’s all too hard,
you never find that joy. But if you are willing to endure and allow character
to be built, you can find joy in everything because you find hope in every situation.
Amen
