Barnraising

Excerpts from a sermon by Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair on March 2, 2025
Emerging in our discourse about race and class at Unity Church, is the deeper consideration of the wider world, our current socio-political situation, and how we got here. In his sermon on March 2, 2025, Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair described a phenomenon characterized by Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, in his book, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, as “third order suffering.” Here are excerpts from his sermon, Barnraising, in which he describes the origins of this phenomenon and its antidote.

… Despite the preacherly temptation to repeat myself, I really don’t want to get in the habit, for the next four years, of starting every sermon with a litany of crises of the week. I don’t want to, because when we do we lose track, a little, of what is going on. The crises aren’t the underlying problem. Donald Trump isn’t even the underlying problem. They are symptoms. Now, symptoms can be dangerous: anyone who has had the stomach flu can tell you that. But you do not cure a disease by treating its symptoms: you seek to understand the cause, and address that.

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn knows the symptoms well. A psychologist and theologian, he’s seen a “marked change in the people he sees now in his practice compared to 30 years ago. His patients are more on edge, experiencing an amorphous dread. The selves he encounters are more diffuse and fragmented, prone to greater levels of addictive behavior, haunted by shame and loneliness, unaffiliated, and burdened with many private sufferings.” Rogers-Vaughn also has a possible cause in mind: he sees this deterioration tied up with cultural shifts over the last generation and a half, particularly the rise of neoliberalism in creating what he calls ‘Third Order Suffering.’ (…)

First order suffering is suffering that is intrinsic to life: illness, death, heartbreak, natural disasters. This suffering presents challenges to theologians and utopians alike, but it is unavoidably part of the human condition. Second order suffering is suffering caused directly by human actions. It is the suffering of Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan, the Rohinga people, so many caught up in the system of crime and punishment in this country — both victims of crime and those who are in prison.
In third order suffering, the cause of suffering becomes more opaque. Rogers-Vaughn calls this suffering “the new chronic” rising from the cultural moment we are in. Neoliberalism (we’ll unpack this in a bit) leaves individuals more or less on their own, cut off from communities of support and consolation, left to interpret suffering as a sign of personal failure. Third order suffering is the suffering of not being able to get ahead of the bills, even when you grew up understanding that you are supposed to be better off than your parents, who never seemed to struggle in the same way. (…)

Rogers Vaughn argues that Neoliberalism turns everything into a marketplace, where value is understood in economic terms. So, education is not valuable because “an unexamined life is not worth living,” education is valuable because it is an investment in your future, specifically an investment in future earnings potential. A house is not valuable because it is a home, it is valuable because it is the vehicle for the majority of the net worth of most American homeowners. (…)

Rogers-Vaughn describes folks caught in this kind of suffering: “the terms used to describe first and second-order suffering now fail them, largely because the sources of their suffering are no longer easily identified. Their oppressors… no longer have faces. Yet to say the oppressor is some abstract ‘evil’ seems not to capture the thing. Their options are either to look within, blaming their sufferings on themselves, or to stare into the fog. Most people today take the first option. The primary [symptoms] are either profound but diffuse depressions or… addictions. An apparent symptom for the second option is a violent striking out into the fog, literally in a blind rage.” 

We can see these symptoms all around us. The symptoms are the crises we are seeing weekly in the world. “A violent striking out into the fog, literally in a blind rage,” is a description of the election last November. The system is broken, we don’t know how, so we will throw a human wrecking ball at the fog in the hopes that somehow that makes it better. That’s a symptom of third order suffering. Striking out is a response. But it is not our response.

On Sunday we tell each other we can make the world a better place. When things don’t improve that week, we repeat ourselves. What is our response, our faithful response, to this kind of suffering in the world? Religion is always concerned with understanding and alleviating suffering. What should our response be, as a church, to this particular kind of suffering? (...)

Ministry is an antidote for third order suffering, because rather than see value as economic, ministry sees value as intrinsic and connection as a need. (….)

Community Outreach Ministry Teams here at Unity, and all of them are, in different ways, courageous responses to third order suffering. In the midst of a diffuse and fragmented world, with anxieties rising and fog about who or what is to blame, these are groups of people who choose not to descent into nihilism and striking out at the fog, but to deepen their sense of ministry; to engage in connection, service, and lives of faith. (…)
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We have tools in this community, we have hope in this place, we have courage to look straight at suffering in the world, see that it is still in need of improvement, and then we repeat ourselves and get to work.