Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
03/06/05
St. Luke’s Church
“For the
LORD does not see as mortals see.”
One of the toughest questions for any religious person
is why a supposedly good God allows bad things happen.
There are many answers to this question,
but none of them ever seems to completely satisfy us.
Assuming for the moment that there actually is a God
(I hope you are with me on that one),
and assuming that God is in essence good,
you can basically sum up the possible answers in four
basic options.
Option 1: God causes everything to happen, good and bad
as a reward or punishment for our actions.
Option 2: God causes everything to happen, good and bad
for his own reasons which may have nothing to do with us.
Option 3: God causes good things to happen,
but either cannot or will not prevent the bad things from
happening.
Option 4: God does not cause anything to happen,
but simply stands back and allows nature to run its course.
So which is it?
When bad things happen,
is it because God is too weak or too uninterested
or is something else going on?
I am sure that all of us have asked this question many times.
It was a major topic after 9/11
and the recent tsunami raised it again in a big way.
Whole villages, whole islands completely wiped out.
Thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands affected.
And we want to know WHY!
Why did this happen? Why to those people? Why at
that time?
We human beings are rational animals—
we always want to know the reason for things;
we want the world to make sense.
So we always try to find a cause and effect for every event.
In some ways that’s easy.
Underwater earthquake leads to massive displacement of water
which leads to massive wave which causes massive
destruction.
Moral causes are harder.
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Rabbi, who sinned, the ACLU or the feminists,
to cause airplanes to fly into the World Trade
Center?”
“Rabbi, what did I do to cause my child to
get cancer?”
As far as I know there was no moral cause and effect for the tsunami.
The people who died were no worse sinners than you or me.
Nor were they all saints experiencing the rapture.
It was a terrible disaster. Nothing more. Nothing
less.
So where was God?
For that answer we need to look to the Bible as a whole.
And the Bible gives us a surprisingly complex answer.
But then is that really so surprising?
After all, the world is complex, we are complex,
and God is the most complex of all.
The Bible tells us several things.
First, we don’t get to understand everything that happens in this
world.
“My ways are higher than your ways and
my thoughts than your thoughts, says the Lord.”
Some things will always remain a mystery--
things like why food that is good for you
always tastes worse than food that is bad for you,
and why a good God allows bad things to happen.
We can take a shot at the answer,
but we are never going to see the whole picture
because when it comes to figuring out God
we are as blind as the man Jesus healed.
Second, the Bible tells us that some bad things are directly caused by
God.
We may not like it much, but God’s wrath is real.
Once, Genesis tells us, God sent the mother of all tsunamis
to cleanse the earth from the violence and bloodshed
caused by our ancestors.
On a smaller scale, God wiped out the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah
because of the people’s wickedness and faithlessness.
Yet, most bad things that happen are not directly caused by God.
Again and again Jesus corrects people, including his disciples
who want to link every disaster with human sin.
God is not a bully.
God does not beat people up to get them to be obedient.
In fact, God is revealed in the Bible as the one
who always invites and never coerces.
God is revealed most fully in Jesus,
“who though he was in the form of God…
emptied himself, taking the form of a slave….
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to
the point of death.”
Here we get closer to the mystery,
and closer to finding out where God is when bad things happen.
Jesus reveals the all-powerful God who deliberately chooses
weakness.
Jesus reveals the Author of Life who deliberately
chooses death.
We may not understand it, but this is how God chooses to operate.
God could certainly change the world so that nothing bad ever happens.
Instead, God chooses to deal with suffering not by removing
it,
but rather by transforming it, overcoming it from the
inside.
In Steinbeck’s great novel, The Grapes of Wrath,
Tom Joad gives this famous speech to his mother:
Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can
eat, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there . . .
. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids
laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat
the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.
Like Tom Joad, Jesus promises to be with us in our struggles and in our
suffering.
But unlike Tom Joad, Jesus is really able to redeem that suffering
by the gift of His Holy Spirit.
So where was God when the tsunami hit?
God was not absent.
God was with all those who suffered and died,
and with those who struggle to rebuild their lives
and countries.
God was and is with the legions of aid
workers,
and with all who were moved to pray
and to give.
The Bible teaches us that God never removes suffering,
but instead walks through it with us.
The twenty-third psalm says it the best.
Here is my version.
“Whenever I walk through pain and sorrow,
through catastrophes of every kind.
Even when I face down death itself,
I am not alone.
Because you Lord are with me.
Your strength and protection bring me comfort.
You give me everything I need, even when I am under attack.
You bless me with the abundance of your Spirit.
No matter how bad things get, I know that
you love me,
and that is enough and more than
enough
to carry me through to the
end.
