One of my favorite publications is a journal of Christian spirituality, called Weavings. Each issue has a theme, and so you don’t miss the point, the theme is printed right on the front cover of every issue. Attentiveness, creativity, patience. There is this weird God thing that goes on with Weavings. Each issue seems to be exactly what I need to be paying attention to at that moment in my personal spiritual journey. Sometimes I put off opening the mailer, because I dread what I’ll see. Call, holy work, rest. The last issue arrived with “Suffering” printed on it, I checked and breathed a sigh of relief: I wasn’t! I put the journal on my pile of things to read, it sifted to the bottom, and I forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, Weavings caught up to me, as I caught up on my reading flat on my back because of the constant back/neck/shoulder pain I had developed. God can never be too subtle with me. A lot of you live with chronic, intractable pain, and I have a new appreciation for the good grace with which you face it. Weavings and today’s lectionary texts have challenged me to understand more about pain than just suffering.

Pain is useful. It gets our attention. Touch a hot stove, it hurts, you reflexively pull your hand away to minimize the damage. Relational pain can also be useful. My mother used to say that God gave us teenagers so that it didn’t hurt as much when the kids left home. Breaking up with your steady hurts, but it’s nothing like the pain leading to it, a warning that the relationship wasn’t good for either one of you. Pain has its usefulness, but unrelenting pain is horribly distracting. It doesn’t help when some pious care-giver tells you God must love you very much, because God only tests those he loves. The Christian understanding of pain, goes beyond this, and it gives us insight into the Pharisees’ question of Jesus, “Should we pay taxes or not?”

“Suffering never saved anybody,” the Weavings article said. “Not even Jesus’ suffering saves, in and of itself. Rather, it is the way suffering is faced that makes the difference between whether pain, sorrow, difficulty, deprivation, or challenge become part of our soul’s stretching or shrinking.” In other words, just because we hurt, doesn’t mean we are on a fast track to sainthood. The difference is our attitude toward suffering, how we see it. Not that we set ourselves up for suffering, consciously or unconsciously adopting victimhood. Even Jesus didn’t go out of his way to get crucified. He faced his persecutors-the mixed bag of Pharisees and Herodians who ask him today’s question-with courage and compassion because he was rooted in goodness that is deeper that suffering. He was completely permeated by the goodness of God. Suffering was not the most important thing about Jesus. The most important thing about him was his connection to the might of the Almighty, the compassionate and tender care that gives indestructible life. This is the gospel that the church in Thessalonika received (as Paul says) “in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” Even though they would suffer for it, though persecution would result. Their lives were described by Paul as a “work of faith, and labor of love and steadfastness of hope.” Pain was not the most important thing about them.

It is so easy to be immersed in our pain. Because it is intimate, it is easy to be consumed by our hurts. That pain is so intimate means it can replace what is rightfully our most intimate relationship, that with God. Pain can be so familiar that life without it seems inconceivable. I talked to one of my friends this week. We’ve been praying for a couple we know whose marriage has gone from troubled to miserable to broken. My friend expressed the fear that this couple had gotten to a point where marital stress was so much a part of who they are that they enjoyed being miserable. They set up situations with each other so they could maintain their victimhood.

This is idolatry. Where does that theology come from? It comes from the coin handed to Jesus in the temple. He has been asked a trick question about whether it was OK to pay taxes or not. If he says not to pay taxes, the Herodians and the Empire get him for inciting rebellion. If he says they should pay taxes, he gets it in the neck from the over-taxed rabble and the hyper-religious Pharisees. Jesus answers with a question. This is not about good debate skills. This is about Jesus knowing what is most important. He asks, “Whose image is on the coin?” His question uses the same word, “icon,” that the Greek version of Genesis uses in describing how God made humanity: in the icon or image and likeness of God. Implicit in Jesus’ answer is that, while it’s OK to pay civil taxes because you use civil coinage to make payment, we “pay back” or “restore what is rightfully God’s” to God by using the coinage that is God’s. Ourselves.

Lately, the Sunday epistle readings have been asking the same question: what is most important to you? To the church in Thessalonika, Paul mentions the pain of their of persecution in passing, because that is all the importance it rates. They could meet the pain of persecution with joy because they knew what was most important about them: the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit, their relationship with God in Jesus Christ. They knew their priorities.

I read a story about a woman going through a terrible time in her life-the violent death of her son, her husband’s mortal illness, topped off by a car accident in which she sustained painful injuries requiring a long recovery. As she repeated her litany of pain and loss, she asked her friend, “Don’t you think I’m becoming a terrible complainer?” Her friend struggled between admitting the truth and defending her deserved right to do a little complaining, under the circumstances. Finally the friend admitted that no one could fault her for complaining, but did she want to get stuck on the pity pot? The woman decided that, since Jesus told us to pray for our enemies, and the pain was certainly her enemy, she would bless her pain and move on. The pain didn’t disappear, but she did what many of you tell me is the way you cope with pain: she just kept on with what she would have been doing normally anyhow.

How we think about things is very important. Christian Century ran an article entitled “Homeland Insecurity.” The article said that yes, the world is a dangerous place to live in these days. But how we respond to these fears and dangers makes all the difference. If we decide that danger is the most important thing in the world, the result will be a more dangerous world. If fear or pain defines the world for us, most assuredly, we will make the world in that image.

It’s about priorities. It’s about what defines life for us. It’s about what is on the face of that coin we hold in our hands. The image of what we see is how the world will be for us-whether it is our fear, our pain, our heart’s deepest longing, our material posessions. It’s taxation all right. Priorities have a way of shaping things around us. If the image you behold in that coin in your hand is the image of your Creator, the world will be a very different place to you than if what you see is fear or pain. If the image on the coinage looks compassionate, inviting you to imitate Jesus, there is a pretty good chance you are not simply paying taxes, but returning to God what is rightfully God’s.

Here’s a way of testing how we’re doing. If the apostle Paul wrote a letter to Springwater (like he did for the church in Thessalonika), and he started out with, “We always give thanks to God for all of you. . .” what would be on the list of things about us for what which he is thankful? Would he say, “You suffer so much” or “You are so good at finding the most important things to fear” or “You were such good shoppers”? Or would he be more likely to say, “you received the gospel with such power and conviction, you imitated your very strongest ancestors in the faith, you are generous in all things, everyone says that you serve a living and true God”? Pray God that would be true.