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Sunday, March 28, 2010
Suffering and Pain
Sixth in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Isaiah 52:13-15 and 53:1-5 New Revised Standard Version
52:13 See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. 14 Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals— 15 so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
53:1 Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised and we held him of no account. 4 Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
David and Nancy Guthrie live in Nashville. They are both faithful members of a very active Presbyterian congregation in their city and David is a Vice President of a large Christian music publishing company. They were featured in an article several years ago in Time magazine because they know a lot about the topic of unfair pain and suffering that we are looking at today.
Both of them are genetic carriers of a recessive gene called Zellweger syndrome which causes terrible disabilities for a child born to parents who both have this gene. The odds of two people having this same gene are one in a hundred thousand, but David and Nancy did not know they were carriers when they married.
Their second child, a daughter named Hope, had this syndrome and lived less than a year. David got a vasectomy to prevent having any future children, and they thought they were not going to risk having any other children. The vasectomy failed and the chances of that happening are one in two thousand. They became pregnant again, this time with a little boy who had the same terrible genetic disorder that had killed their daughter, the chances of that are infinitesimal.
We do not know from the Time magazine article several years ago what the outcome was of that birth. We do know that their very strong congregation was surrounding them with love and prayer. We do know that they found in the verses we read about a suffering messiah some hope and comfort, and they found in the story of Job, in the Bible, some help and healing.
We know from the story of Job that Job seemed to have found, in his suffering and brokenness, a new and more intimate relationship with God and David and Nancy said that was true for them, also. We also know that they struggled with the eternal question of WHY? Why us? Why does a loving God allow this to happen? Why is there any suffering in the world if God is loving and just?
It is the central theological question of the ages and it is a question that still keeps many people away from faith in God, even scholars seemingly as thoughtful as New Testament professor Bart Ehrman. We had Dr. Ehrman with us a couple of years ago. He is a well respected scholar and has written about fifteen books. But he is still recovering, I believe, from his very rigid and literalist upbringing and says that the problem of suffering, the problem of how God can allow suffering, has turned him into an agnostic-unsure about God at all.
Why does God allow unfair suffering and pain and loss and disaster?
Dr. James Howell, pastor of Myers Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, has a new book on The Will of God on our bookshelf. I am using several stories from it today. He reminds us of the scene in the film, Steel Magnolias. Shelby, the young mother, has died at the age of 27 leaving behind a young son. Other mourners are drifting away but Shelby’s mother lingers at the grave. Others are trying to comfort the mother with platitudes about how Shelby is now in heaven, but actor Sally Field, the mother, responds that she would rather have her here than in heaven!!
And then she screams her loneliness and pain and anger: “Why? Why? Why? O God, I want to know why? I wish I could understand. It is not supposed to happen this way. I don’t think I can take this.” (Howell p. 51)
Dr. Howell says this is one of the most compelling scenes of any film and it helps us touch our own feelings more fully.
Why do bad things happen? Why do small children get cancer? Why does a young father die in a car crash? Why does an earthquake in Haiti kill hundreds of thousands of people?
There are lots of answers in the Bible and some are more satisfying and helpful than others. The entire book of Job is designed to answer this question and so is most of the book of Ecclesiastes.
There is this answer that most of us find not helpful: “you are suffering because you deserve it!” This is the answer that Job’s so called friends give to him: “Job, the pain you are feeling from the death of your children and loss of your wealth and from your various diseases is because you deserve it so let us help you figure out what you have done wrong so you can apologize to God and repent!!”
The most recent answer like this came from preachers like Pat Robertson who said, about the Haiti earthquake several months ago, that God had sent this earthquake on the Haitian people because they deserved it for their wrongdoing.
A variation of this is to say that this bad thing has happened because you are being punished for something you did to offend God. This was even the wrongheaded theology that Jesus’ disciples show us in John’s gospel when Jesus is about to heal a blind man in chapter nine. Jesus’ friends ask him whose fault is it that this man is born blind. Is it his fault or his parents’ fault?
Do you remember Jesus’ answer? Neither, he says. It is no one’s fault.
Even though Jesus corrects that simple minded, wrongheaded theology, it has remained for the last 2000 years, and one example of that a few years ago, is from a couple like the couple we mentioned at the beginning who had given birth to a child with several terrible genetic defects. They were visited in the hospital by their wrongheaded pastor who told them when he came into the room that they must have done something really bad to cause God to send this child to them!! I think the father physically forced the pastor to leave the room. I would have done the same as that father.
There are a couple of other answers to the “Why me” question in the Bible and elsewhere. One answer to the question of pain and suffering is that our actions always have consequences and that if we do not take care of ourselves, we will suffer some bad consequences. My father died at the age of seventy. He was a life-long smoker who did manage to quit the last few years of his life, but I am sure that if he had not smoked, he probably would have lived longer.
Here is another reason. We talked last week about the sad consequences of chronic loneliness and we cited research that if we isolate ourselves from others, we will suffer the physical and emotional consequences of that.
If we eat poorly and do not move our bodies as God intended, our health will not be as good as if we eat right and follow an exercise program. If we abuse alcohol, our health will suffer.
Sometimes when there is a health problem, we may have set ourselves up for that result.
One other answer from Dr. Howell’s book as to why there is pain and suffering in the world, is that sometimes there is pain and suffering because you and I could help, but we just sit on our hands. We could make a difference in helping provide food for hungry people across the world. Bread for the World, a favorite program of travel guru Rick Steves, does this, but many people do nothing. Someone says that the opposite of Love in the Bible is not hatred, but the opposite of love is apathy, failing to do works of compassion and kindness!
The Biblical answer to the “Why Me” question that speaks best to me is that God is still creating a just and complete world. God needs our help to do that and there are still many bad things happening, not necessarily because of our wrongdoing, but there are just random events that will cause suffering.
Jesus himself subscribes to this same idea. When some bad things happen to us, they are just accidental and random. Jesus does not subscribe to the “new age” notion that there are no accidents, and he says this in Luke’s gospel when he says to his disciples, “You know that tower that fell on all those people in the town of Siloam? Do you think it was because they were worse sinners than other people? No.”
Jesus is telling us that there are just accidents that happen, that God does not cause them or send them and that we usually do not bring them on ourselves.
Our passage today from Isaiah tells us that when we are dealing with our pain and suffering that we are not alone because the messiah himself, the Christ himself, is with us as a “man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief.”
Dr. William Sloane Coffin, former pastor of Riverside Church in New York tells about a suffering God who can help us. His young adult son was killed when he drove off a bridge in a rainstorm. Dr. Coffin in his profound sermon about Alex’s death takes on the superficial comment of a woman who tells him that the accident must have been God’s will. He says that God does not go around with God’s hand on steering wheels or weapons causing suffering and death. He said that his son’s tragic accident was absolutely not God’s will, and then Dr. Coffin says this: “The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is that this was God’s will. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all of our hearts to break.” (Quoted in Howell p. 77)
Judy and I have been active for 37 years now in the disability community in our country and worldwide through our involvement as the parents of a son with Down Syndrome. I have heard other parents talk about having a disabled son or daughter as just something that was the will of God. I do not believe that and I told one father a few years ago who said that his daughter having spina bifida was just God’s will that I did not think God was like that, wanting children to be born with crippling disabilities. I also told him that I think researchers and physicians are on the side of God by lessening the chance of crippling genetic anomalies. I also believe that God has worked with me and other families to bring much good out of having family members with disabilities, and I hope that I am a better and more patient and compassionate human being from having the privilege of being Todd Martz’s father. I resonate with Dr. Coffin’s sermon when we uses the phrase, “It is just the will of God,” much too carelessly. Dr. Coffin’s article is available on the sermon wall.
We are entering the most important week in the life of Christ and of the community of followers of Christ. Jesus goes into the city on this Sunday. He forces the dishonest money changers out of the temple courts. Every day he teaches in the temple but sleeps outside the city at night, camped out or perhaps in a hidden cave on the Mount of Olives, so he cannot be arrested at night without the crowds to protest. His location is betrayed, he is taken for a trumped up trial, then brought to the Romans with the charge of treason against the government, and then he is executed by the most public and most vicious form of execution the Romans had available, hanging on a cross for several hours until he died.
He has taken upon himself the role of the suffering servant messiah that the prophet tells us about. When Isaiah wrote those words, I think he was talking about the nation of Israel itself. But, Jesus knew that passage and decided to be faithful to his mission knowing where that sacrificial faithfulness would lead him. It would lead to his death because as the front of your bulletin says, he was including and welcoming the wrong people. He was subverting the powers that be, he was shaking things up because he practiced compassion and justice for all people, not just some, and that put him on a collision course with the authorities who wanted to keep their power instead of doing what was right. Does any of that sound familiar today?
In his choice to be the suffering servant messiah instead of the warrior king messiah, he shows us the power of standing beside each other when we suffer as well, and he allows God to use his suffering for a Greater Good.
Rev. Lillian Daniel is the pastor of First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn Illinois. She is the co author of a book that our three pastors and several of our seminary students are reading together. I am closing with her story of suffering and illness and Palm Sunday.
It was last week in the Lenten Schedule in her congregation, the week before Holy Week, and her eight year old son was ill with some troubling symptoms. One morning she let her husband take him to the doctor and then for the inevitable pharmacy visit, but it did not go that way at all. She had just finished working out at the gym and picked up a call from her husband. He told her that he and their son were at the hospital being admitted because their son had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and needed to be treated immediately.
She found it very hard to believe, thought her husband had just messed things up and that she should have taken the son to the hospital herself. When she got there and spent the next few days there, she was quite sobered and scared and confused about how they would deal with this as a family. Their lives would be forever changed. She tried using the needle to inject the insulin but found with her fear of needles that she just could not do it.
They did get the doctor to agree that son Calvin could be released from the hospital for a few hours so he could come to church with them on Palm Sunday.
Sunday morning, after a sleepless night, she came to church and was in her office sitting and wondering how she could lead her congregation that day when she felt so down and discouraged. While she was sitting, a young man arrived who was going to join the church that day. He asked her how she was and she decided to just be honest. “I am not doing too great. My son is in the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes, and he may or may not come to church today. My great uncle had diabetes, he lost a leg in his thirties, he died in his forties….so How am I doing? To be honest, I am a little shaky this morning.”
The young adult new member, the picture of health, the climber of mountains, the kayaker who traveled the world said, “I have the same kind of diabetes. It is what drove me into medicine. I am passionate about helping people live healthy lives with this condition…I think that is why I am joining the church today. I am going to be a friend to your son and help all of you deal with this!” And over the next few weeks and months and years, he did that.
So many people failed to recognize Jesus as the Christ, the messiah, because God’s messiah is not meant to suffer, is he? A suffering servant messiah? Isn’t the messiah meant to be like that famous scene from the movie about General Patton who said that his soldiers were meant to cause other people to suffer!
That is the messiah that was expected, but it is only the suffering servant messiah who can help us. The man who is himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and because of His wounds, we can move through this week to Easter and be healed. Amen.