Everyone lift your glass!

We know what is coming next.  A toast!  A celebration.  "To health!"  "God's blessings!"  "To a long life lived together!"  Wonderful exclamations of joy to be shared and best wishes to be showered down on others.  The more spontaneous the toast, the more joyful the response of the gathered people.

Unless of course  the cup which you have to raise is one filled with woe.  When you look into your cup and can see only endless darkness, swirling suffering, and nothing of grace and beauty, then lifting your cup takes on a bit of sadness, envy, even anger.

It is so easy to 'make sense' of your cup of woe by attributing it all to God and God's punishment.  For some reason this rationalization gives more comfort than to think that it is all random and greater suffering will fall on a few.  If we think that our suffering is God's response to our behavior, then we have something concrete to do.....we can be a better person, show more love, be more generous, pray more often, worship more regularly.....and all those things will remove this cup of woe from our hands.

Except none of that works.  Good behavior, constancy in prayer, devout worship will not remove the cup from your hands because it did not remove the cup of suffering from Christ's hands.  To suffer is to be human; to be human is to suffer.  Like Jesus, we will suffer from the brokenness of the creation, our neighbor, our families and ourselves.  Like Jesus, we look to God.

Jesus prayed fervently,

"Lord, if it is your will, take this cup from me."  

"But not my will but yours be done."

Jesus drank deeply of the cup of woe, not because he had no choice but because he trusted that the love of God would be more powerful than anything this world could pour into his cup.  Jesus stepped into our world out of love; he left this world trusting that this same love would hold him fast.

The cup we raise in our shared communion meal is not a cup of triumph; it is a cup of remembrance of the suffering of this world and the one who drank that suffering deeply.  Our sorrow, our pain, our disappointments, our own brokenness is in that cup.  When we drink, we drink the suffering of the world.  Just like Jesus did, and promises to do forever and ever.