Do You Hear What I Hear?

"The invitation to a religious discourse is quite simply as follows: 'Come hither all ye who labor and are heavy laden' --and the discourse presupposes that all are sufferers, aye, that all ought to be. The speaker is not to go down among his audience and pick out one, if there be such a one, and say to him: 'No, you are altogether too fortunate to need my address,' for when such a thing is heard from the mouth of a religious speaker it ought to be made to sound like the most biting irony. The distinction between fortunate and unfortunate human beings is merely a jest, and therefore the speaker should say: 'We are all sufferers, but what we strive for is to be glad in the midst of our suffering; there sits the fortunate man for whom everything, literally everything, succeeds as in a fairy tale, but woe unto him if he is not a sufferer."

~Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Kierkegaard was no stranger to true suffering. Born to a devout Lutheran farmer and lived the life of a poor farmers son. He later succeeded in business, but suffered the death of his wife and five of his children. He knew about that which he wrote.

As I read this passage I imagined how many of us sit in the pew listening to the proclaimer in the pulpit spin his message as if on a loom and think of the many people who needed to hear the sermon being spoken. Time after time, I've heard a congregant say, "I wish my brother/sister/husband/wife/mother/father/friend/and on and on could've heard what you said this morning," while politely shaking hands and simultaneously shaking off any meaning pertaining to him or herself about what was spoken.
Sitting in a pew or a folding chair, on the floor or upon a rock around a crackling fire, hearing the word of God we often measure ourselves with the other souls surrounding us and see those who, "need," to hear what is being said, while disallowing the words to soak into our own souls knowing fully that in our human condition we all possess the same predicament, life.
While others may with arms crossed bemoan that they suffer and are more heavy laden than any other beings surrounding them. Often envying or even cursing, sometimes aloud, the fortune of others that seems to be the antithesis of their own miserable existence on this big ball we call earth.
In the realization that we all are sufferers of the same condition. Sin that leads to death. Our suit may be clean and pressed, or our worn jeans dirty and in need of a bathing, that matters not. We suffer from the condition that leads us to pray as Jesus taught us how to pray that we be led not into temptation but delivered from evil and our own proclivities to fulfill the gaps of our lives with the stuff of earth that doesn't satisfy the hunger within us.
When we gather as believers and know that the neighbor beside us, behind us, or the back of the head we see three rows ahead of us is suffering differently from us, but suffering just as we are. And the gathering is to commune with others who know that the only answer is our Savior. From the one wearing the best clothes she could find who knows that she is being whispered about over the coffee urn to the most revered saint conservatively clad in the congregation, each one is a needy sufferer who must reach for his or her Savior with the knowledge, not only intellectually, but the faith within his or her heart that the Savior already reached and suffered first.