Welcome the New Year with Hope!

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. (2 Corinthians 1:3-7 ESV)

(image from Coram Deo blog)

With 2015 growing shrinking in the review mirror, there can be absolutely no doubt that we live in a fallen world, pockmarked by sin in every corner. There are times—seeming to occur more and more often—when hope and the strength to endure get lost in the fear of terrorism, the cruelty of debilitating diseases and addictions, and the wake of destruction left behind by natural disasters. Sometimes, we feel like we just don’t have a prayer…

What can possibly be said to the parents of an infant killed during a tornado outbreak? Or to the wife of the victim of a terrorist? To the person who must helplessly watch cancer slowly steal a loved one's life?

It doesn’t seem fair to us that some are made to suffer and others are not… Though realistically, and sadly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a person alive on this Earth who has not been hurt in some way by sin…

God, who is good and does not make bad thing happens, gave us free will, the freedom to choose. And from the very git-go (see Genesis 3), we humans have been making wrong choices, the consequences of which have been compounding exponentially over the generations; today we live in a society rife with sin (war, crime, pollution, corruption, domestic abuse, infidelity, gender confusion, suicide, terrorism, pornography, destruction of the very planet we live on…the list is growing). Yet even though we often suffer at our own hand, we never suffer alone. I firmly believe we have a God who knows more about suffering and the bad side of our human nature than we will ever experience in a lifetime—that little baby in the manger will not only be subjected to Man’s inhumanity, he will suffer a slow and painful death with the sins of the world upon him. God in Jesus walked among us—and died for us—to save us from ourselves.

We have a God—a Savior—who knows us intimately, who has walked in our shoes (sandals), who not only can sympathize with our suffering, but can empathize. And every failure of humanity must still grieve him to his heart (see Genesis 6). Paul reminds us (as he reminded the church in Corinth) that “we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”

Non-denominational pastor R. Kent Hughes writes in his book 2 Corinthians: Power in Weakness, that by any estimation 2 Corinthians 1:3-7 frames the Bible's greatest text on comfort. The word "comfort" occurs no less than ten times in its noun and verb forms in this brief paragraph — essentially one-third of all thirty-one occurrences in the New Testament.' Paul says more about suffering, and more about comfort, than any other writer in the Bible. And it is here that he says the most about it. There is a reason for this, and it was to answer critics who held that the sufferings that characterized Paul's life were evidence that he was not an apostle, because if he was the real thing he wouldn't be experiencing so much trouble.” Paul's answer was that abundant suffering and abundant comfort are in fact signs of apostolic authenticity.

On New Year’s Day we look ahead optimistically, with hope, resolutions, and promises to do better…until the next let-down, the next affliction, the next act of violence, the next catastrophe. By the time we’re brought to our knees, barely able to cry “Uncle!”, we’re right back where we started, hope abandoned, strength sapped, demanding answers from a distant, even disinterested God. But Hope will have been there all along, riding out every storm the world brings upon us. My faith not only comforts me, but reminds me daily—as I am trying to remind you through this blog—that we can endure and overcome because we are NEVER alone in Christ. (And my faith also reassures me that God's will will never take me where God's will can't protect me.)

One of my heroes (and my favorite Lutheran martyr) is German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here's a New Year's poem of his from The Cost of Discipleship (published in 1937) to close this post and welcome 2016:

On October 5th, 1944, Bonhoeffer was transferred from Tegel to the main Gestapo prison in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. Although fully aware of what he had to expect there, he was perfectly calm, saying goodbye to his friends as though nothing had happened, but, as a fellow prisoner remarked, "his eyes were quite unnatural." The direct contact hitherto maintained with the outside world was now cut. In February, when the Gestapo prison in Berlin was destroyed by an air raid, Bonhoeffer was taken to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and from there to other places until he was executed by special order of Himmler at the concentration camp at Flossenburg on April 9th, 1945, just a few days before it was liberated by the Allies.

One of the last messages received from him was a poem composed at the Gestapo prison in Berlin during the very heavy air raids on Berlin. It was entitled "New Year 1945" and reads as follows:

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I'll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening:
the long days of our sorrow still endure.
Father, grant to the soul thou hast been chastening
that thou hast promised—the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But, should it be thy will once more to release us
to life's enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that we've learned from sorrow shall increase us
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

To-day, let candles shed their radiant greeting:
lo, on our darkness are they not thy light,
leading us haply to our longed-for meeting ?
Thou canst illumine e'en our darkest night.