Tested
Hebrews 4:12-16
Click here to view the full sermon for October 10, 2021, entitled "Tested."
Back in 2015, a comprehensive study of 66 of the nation's big-city school districts by the Council of the Great City Schools found that from kindergarten to the 12th grade, a student will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 112 standardized tests. Those are just the ones required for measuring a person’s academic progress. That number doesn’t even touch the number of math tests, spelling tests, vocabulary and history tests that are a part of the course work over those thirteen years of schooling. If you’ve been to school, you know what it is to be tested.
It was a year ago that our family had its first up-close brush with COVID. A student at our son’s school had reported being infected. As someone who had been potentially exposed, our son got tested. We drove over to the Expo center and sat in a long line of cars that moved people through the mobile testing station set up there. For the past year-and-a-half the average number of daily COVID tests performed in this country alone has run from 1-2 million to as many as 3.5 million. When we came back from our vacation in Mexico this summer, our whole family had to be tested before being allowed through security to board our plane. Even fully vaccinated, to travel across the Atlantic, Marie and Grace had to receive a negative test within 72 hours of their flight last month. Going through this pandemic, we know what it is to be tested.
But, of course, identifying whether or not you have the virus is not the only way we have been tested since March of 2020. We have been tested by shutdowns, by social distance and isolation. We have been tested by public health orders intended to protect us all and the need to wear masks that keep us from potentially spreading the virus unknowingly. We’ve been tested by long absences from loved ones we were unable to travel to see. And of course, we have been tested by the terrible toll this virus has taken on families who’ve lost loved ones. Just this week a study was released that estimated some 140,000 children in this country alone have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID. Our hospitals have been tested; our medical workers have been tested. But perhaps even more than that, the spirit of neighborliness, the social cohesion that comes from commonly agreed upon facts and truth has been tested. And unlike the score of a standardized test, or the simply positive/negative binary of a medical test, it’s unclear if we are passing or failing.
I will confess that for much of 2020, and a good part of 2021, it has felt like we were failing these tests. It hasn’t just been a marathon; it has been and ultra-marathon and finding the will to keep going hasn’t always been easy. But then, it doesn’t take a global pandemic unlike any seen in our lifetime to make a person feel that way. Normal, everyday life can feel like a test. Just getting up in the morning, facing the world, doing what needs to get done, it can all be a little overwhelming at times. Life can be hard in the best of circumstances, let alone when we’re on our guard against a highly transmissible and potentially deadly virus. Even now as the Delta variant appears to be making its retreat and the percentage of people getting vaccinated improves toward a potential herd immunity, we can see that we haven’t weathered the storm quite as well as we would have liked. Friendships strained by misinformation are suffering. Bodies and minds stuck in front of endless Zoom meetings have grown soft and less agile. Neighborhoods and communities have been split over things as trivial as wearing a mask and as substantial as acknowledging entrenched systems of racism. It has all clearly taken its toll.
Only, here’s the thing, and it’s not a small thing. While the context may be unique and the subject of the disagreements new. There is nothing that we are going through - even in this remarkable time - that humans before us haven’t gone through in some way, shape, or form. That isn’t to minimize the validity of how we are being tested, but simply to name the very significant truth that this is what it means to be human. A friend posted a funny tweet this week riffing on the trendy internet challenges out there. “The challenge I’m doing this month is called October,” it read. “And it’s where I just try to get through every day in October.” To be human is to be tested by life, tested by circumstances, tested by our own willingness to get up every day and go out the door. To be human is to be tested by the limits of our knowledge and our capacity to trust what cannot be known or anticipated. It is to be tested by the randomness of unforeseen adversity and the recrimination of self-inflicted pain. To be human is to be tested by a world in which love is betrayed, power abused, and our ability to prevent either is limited at best.
So when the writer of Hebrews says that Jesus was tested in every way as we are, it’s no small thing. He may not have had to sit for the SAT, or had a swab stuck up into his nose, but the point is that he was human. His priestly role is so much more than some sacrificial mechanism, an exchange of this for that so that we can get in on the goods. Part of what saves us, what gets set right in Jesus is the way he enters fully into the human experience; knowing what we know and don’t know, feeling what we feel, being tested by all the things that test us all. Which means that the promise of faith is that there is nothing that we go through that we have to go through alone. Jesus knows our fears, our misgivings, our hurts and heartbreaks because he too was afraid in the garden, he too had misgivings about the power structures of his day, he too hurt and was heartbroken by the pain and suffering in the world. Jesus is the answer to the question that plagues Job. Is God indifferent to our suffering and out-of-touch when it comes to our struggles? No. of course not. Jesus knows human suffering. Jesus has experienced human weakness.
And the word of God that cuts through it all, the word of God that has the capacity to diagnose what tests us, what tries us, what ails us, is sharp enough to perform surgery on our souls and to excise what needs to go. That word of God isn’t just what we hear through the words of scripture, naming the truth that we aren’t always willing to admit, laying bare the distance that so often comes between us and God. That word of God is embodied in the one who can sympathize with us in our weakness, the one who bridges the divide, bringing heaven down to earth and earth up to heaven. That second part may be the key to taking this test we call life. The things that test us, truly test us, aren’t really pass/fail, even though it may feel like we’re failing at the time, like it’s felt for much of this past year-and-a-half. The test is what reveals our weakness and strengthens us for the journey ahead. It is how we get from here to there. Knowing that Jesus is at our side through it all, especially through the times when we are absolutely certain we are failing, is how we know that -all evidence to the contrary- we will get from here to there. We will get through this pandemic. But more than that we will get through the division and misunderstanding, the fatigue and the disappointment; we will get through the social distance and isolation, the disinformation and the distrust. We will get through every last thing that we are sure will end us by staying as close to him and he is to us and trusting that because he not only endured it all but also overcame it all, that we will too.
This word of God that pierces the darkness is the truth that empowers us to approach what God is doing in our lives and in the world with boldness. By it we are assured of God’s mercy in our weakness, with it we are gifted with all that we need not only to survive, to get through it all, but to thrive, to rise.