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Sunday, August 08, 2010
O God Why?
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Psalm 22:1 – 5 Good News Bible
1 My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? I have cried desperately for help, but still it does not come. 2 During the day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer; I call at night, but get no rest. 3 But you are enthroned as the Holy One, the one whom Israel praises. 4 Our ancestors put their trust in you; they trusted you, and you saved them. 5 They called to you and escaped from danger; they trusted you and were not disappointed.
If you read last Tuesday’s Denver Post you saw the same tragic story that I saw. A Parker, Colorado family, Robert and Lisa Behn and their son and daughter Morgan and Jordan, were returning to Colorado from Texas after being in Dallas for a baseball tournament in which their 18 year old son Jordan had played. It was almost six o’clock last Sunday morning and they were north of Dallas driving on a stretch of Texas highway that Judy and I know very well. We have traveled it over a hundred times over the years as we still have family there. The road is very close to our home town of Wichita Falls. The Behn’s car was struck at a high speed by a driver traveling the wrong way on that road because he had apparently made a u-turn and had not gotten all the way across the median between the divided four lane highway.
All of the Behn family were killed instantly as was the driver of the other vehicle who is suspected of being under the influence of alcohol according to the Texas Department of Public Safety trooper who investigated the accident.
From the last article I have seen about this, services for this admirable family are still pending at Parker Evangelical Church where they were members.
The headline of the newspaper article about this tragedy said it this way:
FOR NO REASON, THE WHOLE FAMILY IS GONE
When I reread the article, I wondered what people will say to each other and in the funeral service about the REASON this terrible accident occurred. Do you have some ideas from other tragedies such as this? It is God’s will, it was their time, and it is part of a divine plan. I hope we don’t hear those platitudes again to try and explain the deep pain that friends and family must feel.
The day after I saw that article I got an email from an old friend of mine about another difficult to explain event. A coworker of hers had just given birth to a child with a rare genetic disorder that will mean some serious physical and intellectual disabilities for this child as he or she grows up. My friend was asking for some resources and a sermon or two that I have done over the years after our son Todd’s birth. As some of you have also experienced, there are all sorts of questionable theologies when a person is born with any disability. There are people who use the same sorts of platitudes that we mentioned about God planning or willing this. There was one, really terrible example, of a young couple in Colorado whose child was born with many serious genetic anomalies and their pastor, visiting them in the hospital, said that they must have done some very terrible things to cause God to send this baby to them! That is really non Christian theology, but the point of view is still around.
So I read the newspaper article a few days ago about the deadly automobile crash, I got the Email from my friend about her coworker’s new baby, and I had just heard an interview on NPR with one of my favorite actors, Robert Duvall. One of his films raises the same agonizing question of why there is suffering and unfairness in our world. The NPR interview was about Duvall’s latest film opening this weekend in some cities, but it also covered other films this distinguished artist has given us, including perhaps his most spiritually based work, Tender Mercies.
In that film, Duvall portrays Mack Sledge, a country singer who is trying to rebuild his life and his career. He has been bitterly disappointed. He is a recovering alcoholic, his family has dissolved, and he has a broken relationship with his 18 year old daughter whom he has not seen in years. He begins a relationship with a young widow and her son in a rural Texas. She runs a motel and gas station. She is a positive influence in his life and brings him to church. He gets baptized, begins to write songs again, and stops drinking. He and the widow marry. He even finds his daughter and they begin to reconcile, but she is killed in an auto accident, and Mack Sledge finds himself in the valley of the shadow of death once more.
Here is a scene from that film that was played in his NPR interview.
The question, I don’t know why this happened, is the age old theological question about why there is tragedy, unfairness and suffering. We humans have tried to answer this for thousands of years.
One of the examples of our answers is in the Bible in the book of Job where Job, faithful and upright, is experiencing horrible suffering through disease, economic disaster, painful illnesses, and the loss of all his sons and daughters. His so called friends are trying to help him figure out what is going on.
What do his “friends” tell him? They say that he must have done something to deserve all this suffering. They say God must be angry with him, and, therefore, God has sent all these bad things to him to teach him a lesson! It is the same deterministic view point that the pastor told the couple in their hospital room as they were dealing with the birth of their child with multiple disabilities. The editor of the Biblical Book of Job is actually criticizing this simplistic point of view by the way he arranges the story and by the way he portrays Job’s friends.
Why do these bad things happen to good and innocent people? Rabbi Harold Kushner addressed the question out of his family’s personal experience of the premature death of their fifteen year old son Aaron, and he tells the stories of other families who encountered some horrible, uncomforting answers from their pastors.
One of those stories is on your bulletin cover in the words for meditation. Rabbi Kushner tells the story of Harriett Schiff who, in her book The Bereaved Parent, recounts what happened when her young son died during an operation to correct a congenital heart defect. Her pastor said to her afterward, I know this is a painful time for you, but I know that you will get through it alright because God never sends us more of a burden than we can bear. God only let this happen to you because He knows that you are strong enough to handle it. And Harriett Schiff remembers her reaction to those words: If only I was a weaker person, Robbie would still be alive.
The other part of that pastor’s statement that is troubling and also false, is that God does not send the suffering and tragedy and death of a child. God does not do that. That cruel God is not the God we see portrayed in Jesus of Nazareth.
Rabbi Kushner has a similar story about a five year old child in his neighborhood who was hit by a car and killed. At the funeral for the boy, the family’s minister said, This is not a time for sadness or tears. This is a time for rejoicing, because Michael has been taken out of this world of sin and pain with his innocent soul unstained by sin. He is in a happier land now where there is no pain and no grief; let us thank God for that.
And Kushner wisely observes, I heard that and felt so bad for Michael’s parents. Not only had they lost a child without warning, they were being told by the representative of their religion that they should rejoice in the fact that he had died so young and innocent, and I could not believe they felt much like rejoicing at that moment.
Why do these bad things happen? It is Mack Sledge’s question in the film, and it was Dr. William Sloane Coffin’s question when his twenty four year old son, Alex, drove off a bridge in a Boston rainstorm at night a few years ago and was drowned. Dr Coffin’s sermon about this is available today in printed form.
A day or so later he had an intense encounter at his sister’s home with someone who told him that his son’s death was just the Will of God, and he passionately calls that superficial theology into question saying that God does not go around like a cosmic puppeteer causing accidents or illnesses or deaths.
But isn’t that a common point of view among some of our friends and neighbors and members of other faith traditions with a deterministic or Calvinistic theology, that anything bad that happens is surely sent from God? It is a perspective that is held in common not only by Christian fundamentalists but Muslim fundamentalists as well!
By the way, there is an excellent new book on our literature rack by fellow Methodist pastor James Howell of Charlotte, North Carolina on The Will of God. We will be using that in a few months in a sermon series. I commend the book to you.
The alternative way that theology gets expressed is in the statement, Everything happens for a reason. It is a superficial statement, and it usually is a reflection of that deterministic view that there can be no accidents or random occurrences.
But there are accidents. Jesus himself says that in Luke’s gospel. The tower that fell on some people in the town of Siloam was an accident. Jesus says that. Maybe you have heard the new age statement that there are no accidents. It is wrong. Some things are just accidents. And other things, like floods and tornadoes and hurricanes, are acts of nature.
The accident that took the life of Rob and Lisa and Morgan and Jordan Behn was caused by someone who was driving the wrong way on their part of the four lane highway in North Texas. It was not divinely sent, it was an accident. It was a terrible tragedy, and if someone chooses to explain that tragedy by saying that their time was up or that God sent that tragedy, they are not talking about the God we see in Christ whose heart is the first heart to break when that suffering occurs.
We have not yet addressed the fact of human responsibility and the consequences of making bad choices and how our destructive choices can set us up for suffering. Dr. Coffin addresses that in talking about Alex’s death when he says that it was possibly a result of Alex’s unwise choice of perhaps too much to drink before he left to drive in a terrible Boston rainstorm.
Our own choices can sometimes set us up for suffering. If we choose to smoke, we are likely setting ourselves up for illness and pain. If we choose to eat wrong and avoid physical exercise, we are likely setting ourselves up for blood pressure problems and diabetes problems and foot problems and all sorts of other ailments that we are learning are connected to obesity and being overweight.
There are random events and there are genetic anomalies that happen when a child is created. These are not caused or sent by God, but when we look to God, no matter what we are asking about, when we ask the painful question, WHY Or WHY ME, God gives us hope and life and promise that we will get through the suffering and will not be overwhelmed.
We see that in the Bible in two places. The first place we can find that hope is in the scripture passage we began with today from Psalm 22. The opening words of that psalm show up in the Gospel of Mark. Do you remember where? They are the only words that Jesus speaks from the cross in Mark’s gospel before he dies. He is quoting Psalm 22. Here are some other words a little later on in Psalm 22.
God has not turned away his face but God will listen to my cry for help and so I will trust in God. The Psalm ends with an affirmation of faith in God, even in the midst of our grief and pain.
The other resource comes to us from a fellow sufferer who was an early leader in the Jesus movement. He, too, knew what it was to suffer. He was beaten, stoned, driven out of town after town, chastised and misrepresented, and shipwrecked. Many times he feared for his life and for good reason. Finally he was imprisoned unfairly and executed. His name was Paul.
Before his death he wrote these words in one of his most important congregational letters. I am convinced that there is nothing in the world, in pain or suffering, in this life or the life to come, that can separate each of us from God.
And he also said,
In all things God is able to work for good with those who love God. This is an audacious and profound statement of his faith—and our faith as well.