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November 06, 2005
When Bad Things Happen, Where is God?
Job 24: 1-12, 21-29 / Revelation 6: 7-11
November 6th, 2005
Job, sitting in misery, his body covered with sores, alone, accused by his friends of what he was not guilty, lamented:
From out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer . . . If it is not so who will prove me a liar, and show that there is nothing in what I say?
Is it any wonder that from everything Job could see God couldn’t have cared less, and he did not blush to say so.
The second passage from the Bible that we read records the Lamb of God opening the fourth and fifth seals describing the fourth and fifth kinds of pain coming before God’s restoring the earth. The gentle Lamb of God opened the fourth seal that described a pale horse—death by sword, famine, pestilence and wild beasts. The fifth seal pronounced suffering for the martyrs for the word of God. One of these cried out, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long? They were told to wait until the number of martyrs was complete.
We read from the Book of Job and the Book of Revelation words that validate the suffering we experience, and the far more vast and profound suffering beyond us. Maybe you think, “How odd that it should have to be this way when our Creator is a good, all-powerful, and loving God!”
The psalms tell us “The Lord is good.” John’s first Epistle tells us, “God is love.” The Apostle Paul tells us the ancient poet had it right in saying of God, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Which means that God is not far away, but near to us. Paul wrote of Christ, “In Him all things hold together.” Yet there are times when it seems that things are not holding together very well. God pays no attention.
Not all respond to suffering this way. Many of us knew Gavin Sinclair. He was a member here. He loved life. He loved God. It was evident. He was awfully kind. He had an irrepressible sense of humor. But he got cancer when he was about twenty-four years old. A really bad kind of cancer, so bad that all the early doctors he consulted said he had no hope. The people at Sloan Kettering were able to help, but the help they gave affected his heart and lungs. During the time we knew him his body slowly deteriorated.
Yet I have rarely met a more cheerful person. His life verse was Romans 8: 28, “All things work for God to those that love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Nothing could dissuade him that this applied to his life too. He wrote his book, All Things Work for Good as his body was slowly dying.
But not all think as Gavin did. It is clear Job didn’t. Where is God, this good, powerful God, when in His world such agonies as we cannot begin to describe happen in great quantity and agonizing variety? Remember the common vocabulary of misery: Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, AIDS, malaria, cancer, genocides, suicide bombers, serial killers, animals that eat other animals alive. The vocabulary of misery boggles the mind. We sing the Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” but we might sing another song.
There have been many thoughtful people who have decided they don’t believe in God because the almighty God they learned to trust was described as a loving God. But there is so much pain throughout every aspect of creation that it appears that God is either not powerful or not loving. Maybe, as Elijah poked fun at the prophets of Baal, God is asleep or on a journey. Maybe God is incapable of doing any better, as Rabbi Kushner proposes. When bad things happen, where is God? It is a question that matters to us because we are told to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. How do we love God when, if He is in control, He sure allows a lot of suffering to happen?
Two kinds of people ask this question. First there are those in the throes of grief or pain. Second, there are those who see not so much their own pain but the vast quantity and diversity of pain in the world. Then they ask, “How could an all powerful all loving Being possibly allow this?” These are often very compassionate people.
First, let me say that there is no completely convincing rational answer to the problem of suffering. But I am convinced that, as wise, old Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The answer to the problem of suffering takes place at the level of the heart, much more than at the level of the mind.
Gregory Boyd, a pastor and professor at Bethel Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, reported his encounter with a young woman nearing the end of the stage of life when women usually give birth. She carried a child to term, in good health, only to have it die as she gave birth. It was strangled by the umbilical cord.
Her sense of loss devastated her. She had been a marathon runner. She stopped running and became a blimp. She had enjoyed an intense loving relationship with her husband. It became as though she didn’t know him. She was an avid church-goer, apparently like you “church ladies,” a participant in everything going on, one of those cheerful souls all of us love to have around. She lost all interest in church. Her pastor trotted out words that sounded hollow to her. “There are no accidents in God’s providence. The hand that smites is the hand that heals. Trust in God.” Every pastoral word felt like a slap in the face.
It wasn’t until Gregory Boyd wept with her that healing started to come.
The problem of personal suffering is often intensified when people pull away, not knowing what to say. When our pain is accentuated with loneliness, with questions about guilt hounding us—there was something I did that caused what happened—questions that hear no reassurance, then is when we feel abandoned by God. There is always a link in our hearts between how people respond and how we think God responds. Having been abandoned by people, we feel abandoned by God.
By contrast, if those who love us come and share our grief, the sense of God’s presence emerges. Heart speaks to heart what lips can never say to the ear.
Scripture itself makes plain that it should be this way. Jesus said to His disciples when He sent them out, “Announce that the Kingdom of God has drawn near.” Where they were God was present—to do what needed doing. To His disciples again Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.” Where can I come to Jesus? Come where those who have trusted in Him are together? Paul told us we are “ambassadors of Christ.” Christ does not merely ask us to draw people to the church; He sends us out to them as ambassadors.
God appeals to the world through us, “You can be reconciled to God.” Who am I to say that?! Well, I am God’s ambassador, speaking for the Fatherland, the Kingdom of God. Where you are, the Kingdom of God is present.
There is an intentional entanglement between us and God when we come to the deepest things of life. Our tendency is to want to keep God’s domain separate from ours. We’ll do the people things as good Christians, and leave to God what is His to do.
But we need other people to feel the compassionate heart of God and they can feel His heart when it is exhibited in the beating of our hearts. One of the primary reasons why you and I should be thoroughly involved with one another in the church is that we represent God’s principle agency of healing sorrow. The local church may seem like an irrelevant society or like the most relevant of all societies. You and I are God’s first level of care for the kind of problem that is most severe. Sorrow mixed with loneliness in times of suffering makes us feel abandoned by God. Only communication to the heart can persuade us otherwise.
I have been told any number of times that our son, Stuart II resembles me very much. We share mannerisms. We speak with a similar tone of voice. You call our house and he answers you think it’s the old pastor. We have many similar instincts. This genetic connection also exists between us and our Creator-- if we will only let it develop. All that we want God to be in meeting our hearts’ needs we can provide for each other. The love of God pours out of our hearts or His love does not pour out at all—so far as we can tell. “We love because He first loved us.” Here is God’s principle resource for personal suffering. You and I are Divine agents.
I believe nobody is really surprised that pain comes to us in life. Something grim happened a long time ago that affected all of life, introducing suffering. Clearly we were made so as to hope there would be no suffering. But here it is. So how does God care for this problem? In the fourteenth century, St. Teresa of Avila, reminded her fellow Christians that WE are God's provision for this defect in creation.
"God has no hands but our hands to do his work today;
God has no feet but our feet to lead others in his way;
God has no voice but our voice to tell others how he died; _and,
God has no help but our help to lead them to his side."
This is not a truism. It is true.
The second sphere of suffering in nature, and from people against people has a similar supply of comfort from God. The terrors of the earthquake that recently hit Pakistan were accentuated in the places where no relief effort was able to come. By contrast, when people worked furiously, night and day, to dig from the rubble survivors, and when nations far and near poured in supplies, food, medicine, shelter and clothing, the misery of the earthquake was surprisingly mitigated. And people found themselves thinking not of the fearful earthquake quite so much as they thought of the wonders of their rescue and care.
The work of Jimmy Carter now in trying to eradicate diseases that are the scourge of humanity is the work of God. The efforts of Mother Theresa that caught the attention of the world drew much more attention than the suffering she tried to alleviate. People got used to seeing the desperately poor in Calcutta’s slums die in the streets. But they never got used to seeing Mother Theresa’s nuns picking them up and caring for them. The work of LUM, of Love, Inc., what you do at Jubilee Christmas, is God at work.
Paul wrote, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.” Do you see how this is supposed to work? Jesus began the work of reconciliation—a work that included not only His death on the cross to care for the problem of sin, but also healing the ill and feeding the hungry—and told His disciples, “Keep it up. You’ll do more than I can.”
I was reminded this past week by Bishop Higgi that Jesus’ final commands to His disciples included nothing churchy. He didn’t say, “Be sure you’re always in church.” He didn’t say, “Make sure you take the Sacrament often.” He said, “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned and the ill.” He said this so emphatically. “When you’re caring for them, you’re caring for me. And if you don’t, depart for the place reserved for the devil and his angels.”
It is hard to overstate how much people like you and me offer the convincing answer to the heart that the heart can understand—about the problem of suffering. Our smallest gesture can have effects beyond imagination—not only on bringing comfort to the suffering, but changing the conditions that cause suffering.
This past week as we watched on C-Span the memorial services for Rosa Parks perhaps you were reminded not only of how eloquent those African American preachers were, but of the immense consequences of that little 42 year old woman’s solitary act that day in fighting her fear at the reprisals she knew would come. God used her small act to start to undo one of nature’s grievous evils at work in our country—racial discrimination. This is a terrible problem that exists in the barnyard as in the churchyard.
It occurred to me as I listened to preachers I wished I might emulate, that God has provided in every one of us an antidote to suffering as well as the beginnings of a solution to the problem of evil. The connectedness of things is far beyond our imagination to conceive. When, in the name of Jesus, because you have chosen to make your life “an instrument of God’s peace,” as we like to sing here, you respond to human suffering, or devote your life to the correction of some problem you see, you are a channel of the restoration work of God.
I have no illusions that we can stop earthquakes or hurricanes, but there is within the capacity of the Church an incalculable resource for undoing suffering that will touch not only the physical lives of people, but will reach their hearts as well. When we are indifferent to suffering, how distant God seems. When we respond to suffering with compassion, how near God seems. How near God is. Indeed, we can see the effects of God’s presence in the changed conditions of life.
I look out on this congregation and see God’s answer to many peoples’ questions about the problem of evil. I see the source of the compassion that will heal wounded hearts. I see arms, hands, intellects, and pocket books that can bring change to conditions that spawn suffering. Jesus said, “In this is my Father glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” Here is the kind of answer that touches the heart as well as the problems that cause suffering. We are bearing fruit when we act in Jesus’ name.
You and I spend a fair amount of time and money doing a lot of things that don’t really mean all that much to us. They bring no lasting joy. They relieve some boredom. They bring a moment or two of fun. But what really brings satisfaction is realizing we have been God’s hands and feet and have helped others come to see that God really is good and strong.
But, you and I are not God. We grow weary. We become disappointed in God and in each other. We need relief from our suffering too. So our care must overlap with receiving care. We are like an incoming and out-going tide. We receive and we give comfort. We are persuaded by others as we persuade others that God is good; God is loving; God is even now overcoming evil with good. And through us God can even bring healing to nature itself.
As you take the Lord’s Supper this morning, which reminds us that for our sakes God did a whole lot about the problem of our suffering, ponder why God made you, and what effect there might be in deliberately making yourself available to others in the name of God—who loves us and wills our good.
Let us pray: O Lord, we have tried to think of matters far above our understanding. But in our hearts we know that you are good, and that your goodness overflows through us when we are yours to use. So use us, and grant us the joy of being your persuasion of your love, and agents of your relief and blessing. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 6, 2005 09:30 AM