Sermon for Sunday, January 27, 2008Suffering: Why is God Doing This to Me?3rd in a series on Confronting the Controversies By Rev. Jerry Herships |
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Scripture: Job 4:1-10 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered: 1 "If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended? But who can keep from speaking? 2 See, you have instructed many; you have strengthened the weak hands.3 Your words have supported those who were stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees.4 But now it has come to you, and you are impatient; it touches you, and you are dismayed. 5 Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope? 6 "Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? 7 As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. 8 By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed. 9 The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are broken. 10 Prior to today, I have preached here at St. Andrew six times. Three Christmas Eves and three regular Sundays. Christmas Eves are fun to preach at. It is what many would call the best holiday of the year. There is much excitement in the air…even at 11:00 pm. It is a happy topic, the birth of the Lord. Another time I preached on Joy. Again, a happy topic. It might be time to give the other side of the coin its due. Suffering is a topic most preachers don’t want to touch because honestly, I don’t think any of us have it entirely figured out ourselves. The pieces that we think we do have figured out are not always what congregations want to hear, and who wants to be shown as not having all the answers. Elie Wiesel is the author of the book called Night which has won numerous awards. It was the only book I was required to read in three different classes at seminary and certainly not the least and was an Oprah book club recommended book. He has authored over 40 books but his most famous was Night. His work is so important that he has won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Here is a picture of him (picture on screen). Here he is in less joyous times (picture on screen). This is a man that has had suffering be a major component in his life. He has studied it and lived it. In an interview he gave in 2003, this is what he had to say about suffering. The interviewer said, “You believe firmly in God, but you live in a world where suffering, injustice and tyranny exist.” He responded by saying, “It’s the great torment of my entire existence. The question I don’t know how to answer and that I don’t even think anyone can answer. But even in these terrible moments I see not an absence but, rather, an eclipse.” So Noble Prize winner, celebrated author and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel can’t answer this question. Maybe a white, middle-aged, middle-class, fresh out of seminary, Midwestern former Altar boy can give a crack. The reason suffering is such a tough topic is that there are so many ideas around why it occurs. It is something that every major religion in the world addresses and none have a completely satisfactory answer for. It is so varied that there is actually a name for it: Theodicy. The problem of evil and suffering. It is a problem because of God. I know that sounds odd coming from a preacher but none the less, God is what makes us wrestle with this. In fact, it is the very issue of evil and suffering that has made so many people turn away from God and the church. The equation goes something like this:
More than a few people have said, something’s got to give. It is not for lack of reasons that people struggle with suffering. There are plenty of theories. You might have heard some of them in your darker times: Suffering is a way to test the faith and fortitude of survivors. Suffering leads to an ultimate good which is beyond our comprehension. Suffering is used for character building. And my least favorite; Suffering is God’s punishment of a sinful people or the world as a whole. Wendy Farley is a professor of Theology and Christian Ethics in the Department of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. In her book, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion- A Contemporary Theodicy she states, “One of the most terrible beliefs of Christianity is that God punishes us with suffering.” I would correct her by saying that only some forms of Christianity take this view. Maybe you were brought up in one. If this is the case, it can be very hard to break out of what Iliff Pastoral Care Professor Dr. Carrie Dohring calls your “embedded theology”. You might think different up here, but in here it is hard to break into new thinking down here. This is the theology that Job’s friends try to dump on him. After Job goes on about his pain and suffering, his friends chime in. Keep in mind, I am using the term “friends” very, very loosely. Job has three friends that are with him and this passage we read is the first of Job’s friends to speak. He opens with kind words praising the way Job has helped and treated others. Then in verse five there is a change. It is a verse that begins with a word that anyone who has had a performance review dreads hearing… but. I have heard a corporate trainer refer to this as the “But Reversal”. Everything up to the but is great and then… It usually goes something like this, “Don we have reviewed your work and we are very impressed. The way you work with your peers is exceptional, the way you interact with the people who report to you is impressive and your productivity is top notch… BUT.” No one wants to hear that! It wipes out everything said before the but. This is what Eliphaz does. He praises Job and then tells him he lost his patience too quickly! He tells him he should trust in God’s justice. He asks Job if he has ever known the innocent to be punished? It almost sounds like this guy is trying to convince himself. He knows how great a guy Job has been and has got to be thinking, “Jeest, if this happened to Job and Job is a great guy, what’s in store for me?” Many people today look at Job and think similar things. We have to remember that in the time of Job, Hebrew theology didn’t have the concept of the devil. Satan was much different. In fact the equation was much different. It was pretty simple really.
And God does all of it. That is why Job was such a struggle for Job and his friends. Job MUST have done something wrong… and it must have been a BIG something. We think a bit differently now. We do if we have lived on this earth for more than oh I’d say an hour. Who doesn’t know a good person that has gotten the lousy end of the stick? The theology of Job shows us not that good people get rewarded and bad people get punished but it shows a man who is in full relationship with God. He has praised God and cried with God. He has yelled at God and argued with God. More than anything else; he has been in relationship with God. A true, deep, honest, no holds bared relationship with God. What this doesn’t address is why is there suffering and evil in the first place. People have struggled with this for centuries. Bright people. People with names like Paul and Augustine. I want to examine what some of these people have said about suffering but I also want to look outside their views to other options. Suffering is not something that is only addressed in the Hebrew bible. Paul talks about it in Romans 5. It is there that Paul says suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces hope and hope does not disappoint us. It is a theology that works in many scenarios… like seminary. Seriously. There were days that it felt like “suffering” to go back to school… at 40. Give up my job. Move my family. Get back in debt. Many of you have made similar sacrifices. I can honestly say that what I called suffering was character building. It did build endurance it did push my faith and did produce hope. The challenge with this for many people is that not all suffering produces endurance. We only have to turn on the evening news to see the atrocities in Darfur or AIDS in Africa or famine in any number of spots around the globe. Some suffering doesn’t build faith… it destroys it. Then there is the thinking that fourth century Saint Augustine talks about. Augustine says God would not allow any evil to exist unless out of it God could draw a greater good. This is part of the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the “it’s a mystery” type of explanation. You might have heard it stated as God has a bigger plan. This might be true and I am not going to sit here and tell you that I “get” God’s big picture. What I will tell you is that this is not very useful when any of us are turning to God for comfort. The, “God’s big plan for the future is going to cause you pain in the little present” is not an answer to people who are sitting in pain. We have already seen the theology in action in Job that his friends try to give Job regarding a punishing God. You did something wrong and now God is going to punish you. This is such painful, harmful theology. It has been used to explain Katrina, and AIDS and cancer. It drives people away from God. There’s something called the informal statement regarding the problem of evil and I mentioned it earlier. I think of it as three legs of a chair. One leg is an all loving God. The other leg is an all powerful God. The last leg is that there is evil in the world. A number of theologians say that one of the three has to go away. All three can not exist together. If a God is all loving, and suffering happens, God must not have the power to stop it because an all loving God would. If God is all powerful and does have the power to stop evil and suffering… and doesn’t, that is not an all loving God. The third option, and there are people that truly believe this, is simply that evil and suffering don’t exist. We just believe that is what it is but in reality, there is no suffering. The point I am trying to make is that there are a lot of views that address suffering. There is only one that I can embrace and that is the concept of an all loving God. I want to follow that God. I want to live my life trying to model myself after that kind of God. I want to worship that kind of God. I wish I could believe there was no evil in the world but I feel like I have seen too much to think that. I think that is true for a lot of people here as well. That only leaves one thing for me and it has taken me many years to state this publicly. I might as well do it in front of a few hundred people. I don’t believe in an all powerful God. Now before someone says, “you go warm up the tar, I’ll find some feathers” hear me out. I am not saying I don’t believe in a MOST powerful God. A God that is infinitely more powerful than you or I. I believe that there is no comparison at all. But I do believe that God created space for us to have free will. It is in this space that God was willing to give up some power so that he could be in a true, non coercive, loving relationship with us. I believe God has persuasive power with us. But to force us through God’s all powerful hand to love God…. it doesn’t ring true to me. It is also in this space of free will that evil can and has taken root. For me it is more important that this all loving God is a God that is present in our suffering. God is there in the form of compassion. God cries with us. God truly does feel our pain. And it is when we act in compassionate ways towards one another that God’s compassion shines through. We are the compassionate hands of God when we treat others with love and compassion. Wendy Farley states if beautifully this way, “God is infinitely compassionate and tender towards the world. Suffering comes because our bodies are frail and because human beings can be cruel to one another—individually and through institutional structure. God labors day and night, like a mother comforting a delirious child to soothe a fever, to penetrate the suffering and despair. Nothing separates God from the world (sound like Paul in Romans), but suffering can be a veil that hides this loving presence. In the midst of suffering, compassion labors to tear the veil.” I think this brings us back to Elie Wiesel comment. It is this veil that might cause the eclipse. Suffering is the veil that acts as an eclipse. God is never gone but suffering causes us at times to not see God. It is when we act compassionately, that we come to the veil to push, tear and rip it aside to reveal God’s love and compassion. In any given day we are presented with dozens of opportunity to rip at the veil. Here’s to tearing it to shreds and revealing God’s love for the world. Amen. |
