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Questions of Faith ##2  Why Do People Suffer & Why Doesn't God Stop It?"

Psalm 88

 A number of you had questions about suffering, evil and hurt when we solicited your questions of faith, God and the Bible last month.   “Why do bad things happen to innocent people?”   “Where is God when it hurts?”   Still another put it this way: “Since God created all things, and there is evil in the world, did God create evil?”

            Ah—as we continue our series on the Questions of Faith, we come to the question of why there is suffering…and in a larger context, if God is good why does God allow bad things to happen to God’s people?

This is not only another question of faith, it is perhaps THE question of faith--the question that theologians have wrestled with for centuries.   I want to impress you with a big, unfamiliar word I know.    "Theodicy."    Anyone know what theodicy is?  

Theodicy is the issue of how an all-powerful and all-loving God can and does allow evil and suffering.   In other words, “why do terrible things happen and why does God allow it?”  This is a centuries-old, unresolved paradox.

Perhaps you’ll lower your expectations of me and this sermon if I tell you that over several hundred years, people much more intelligent that I am and more versed in Scripture than I am have spent lifetimes wrestling with the question of Theodicy and have not come to a resolution.   Not long ago, Billy Graham said that many times he has asked the question, “Why does God permit evil?”   And Graham confessed that he has never answered that question fully to his satisfaction.

The question of why a good God permits suffering and evil is at its base, a question of morality.   Not ours, but God’s.   If God is all powerful, and all good, how can God act in ways that appear to be immoral—that not doing what one can to prevent harm or suffering?”

Archibald MacLeish, a playwright in the absurdist tradition wrote a play called "J.B." the title character expresses the paradox of God and evil like this: "If God is God then God is not good, if God is good, then God is not God."  Do you hear it?  Either God is all powerful and can prevent suffering and evil.  In which case it follows logically that God is not good for it means that while God can prevent evil, God chooses not to.   Conversely, if God is good, then God is not God, meaning if God’s character and nature is good and God desires to prevent evil and suffering but cannot, then God cannot be all powerful.   MacLeish asserts that both attributes of God are mutually exclusive.  You can have one, but not the other.

This is how some have solved the paradox.   By abandoning one or the other attributes of God.  Either God is all powerful, or all benevolent, but cannot be both.   Some of you are familiar with the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner.   He suggests that we must finally reject the omnipotence of God, the all powerful nature of God, and realize that God has finite powers to influence people's actions.  Kushner taught that God remains all-knowing and all-loving, but does not have the power to prevent human evil, especially evil that results from human free will.   Kushner would conclude that God cannot prevent horrible things from happening, and suffers along with the victims.

Rabbi Kushner is a 20^th century voice.  To demonstrate how long people have been struggling with this question, let’s turn to a 5^th century voice.

Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo and great father of our faith in the early 400’s  also pondered the nature of evil.   In his great work, City of God, he maintained that since Genesis reveals that God has created all things "good", evil cannot have an independent existence.  Evil is simply the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light.  Evil, then, is the absence of good; it is not the positive presence of something.  This being the case, said Augustine, evil cannot be the efficient cause of sin; it is a deficient cause in the creature.   Evil, being the absence of good, or the presence of a lesser good, is the result of the creature's turning away from the commands of God to a lesser good: the will of the creature.  Herein is the essence of evil: It is the creature, not God, who is the creator of evil.

That may explain evil such as acts of terror, war, murder, rape, etc.   But what about natural causes of suffering and pain?   Death and suffering caused by violent storms, floods, pestilence, and drought?   Aren’t these the works of God? 

            Certainly—they are the natural created processes of the world.   But whether they are evil is a matter of perspective.  A hurricane that brings disaster and destruction and even death creates floods that deposit fine delta soil rich in nutrients and productive for the growing of crops for generations.   A fire burns across a forest destroying homes and the lives of families in its wake but cleans underbrush and dead growth and brings rebirth to the forest.   Are these evil, or necessary processes of the created order in which we humans sometimes get in the way of or interfere with and thus, get hurt?

Others may argue that sickness and disease are evidence that pain and suffering are God’s will.   Of course, there is still so much unknown how our own lifestyles and advances and human environments contribute to sickness that the jury is still out as to whether most illness is somehow linked to human causes or not.

Of course, to this point, we are talking about suffering and pain and evil as though they are academic subjects.   But the topic is not merely a curiosity, not for those who have endured suffering.  The questions are not just exercise for our intellect, they come from a very deep and dark place.   When we hurt, or those we love hurt, we want to know why.   We want to know the meaning of our hurt, and what God has to do with it.   The question is deeply personal.  

So before we go further, we ought to find a voice that speaks out of the center of suffering--and not just everyday “time will make it better” suffering, but great and incomprehensible suffering.    Such a voice is Elie Wiesel, a young man who survived the Holocaust who went on to a distinguished career writing and speaking about those atrocities he witnessed and how he reconciled that experience with his own faith.

Elie Wiesel writes about the people he witnessed being taken to the crematory.  ``For the first time I felt revolt rise up in me.  Why should I bless [God’s] name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful was silent. What had I to thank Him for?'' (Night, 31) 

He awoke to the idea that he was``alone-terribly alone in a world without God...'' (Night, 65)   No longer was Wiesel convinced that the Jews were part of some greater plan. Wiesel's mentor in the camp, Pinhas, came to this realization the day before Yom Kippur.  He told Wiesel:

“Until now, I've accepted everything, without bitterness, without reservation. I have told myself: `God knows what he is doing.' I have submitted to his will. Now I have had enough, I have reached my limit. If he knows what he is doing, then it is serious; and it is not any less serious if he does not. Therefore, I have decided to tell him, `It is enough.' (Legends, 34)

            Seen during the Holocaust, God appears cruel and is the object of Wiesel's anger. The energy once spent in worship of God was transferred to accusing God, denouncing God, and demanding an explanation from God.  Wiesel writes :  “What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy?” (Legends, 97) 

            Wiesel feels like he was in the hands of a spoiled and cruel child, rather than an omnipotent, loving, merciful God who should be saving the Jews instead of watching them die.   It was as if God didn't care what happened anymore.  

“For more than twenty years, I have been struggling with these questions. To find one answer or another, nothing is easier: language can mend anything. What the answers have in common is that they bear no relation to the questions. I cannot believe that an entire generation of fathers and sons could vanish into the abyss without creating, by their very disappearance, mystery which exceeds and overwhelms us. I still do not understand what happened, or how, or why. All the words in all the mouths of the philosophers and psychologists are not worth the silent tears of that child and his mother, who live their own death twice. What can be done? In my calculations, all the figures always add up to the same number: six million.” (Legends, 182)

And so, for 60 + years following the atrocities of the Holocaust, Wiesel has learned to live not with answers, but with the questions--unanswerable questions that are in God’s hands. 

It is the same place where Job found peace in the end.   God appears and does not have answers for Job’s questions and charges against God.   Finally Job must seek peace in role of the created, not the creator.   The questions remain.  For now, the answers are God’s and God’s alone.

But how can we find peace without knowing why?   Without the answers?   We look to the Christ.   Not the Christ who heals and teaches and walks with his disciples.  Not the Christ feeding 5000 hungry people on a mountainside.   Not the Christ who confronted the Pharisees or overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple.

We look to the Christ who suffered.   On the cross.  Who literally died with the same question on his lips:  “MY God, why have you forsaken me?”

Do the words of the Christ on the cross speak to you?   Jesus, feeling alone, abandoned.  Forsaken.  And willing to reveal those feelings to God.   “Where are you?”   “Why have you left me here?”

The suffering one has a right to utter such words—to give the reality of the spoken word to feelings so as to make them real. 

Why do innocent people suffer.   We cannot know why.  Why doesn’t God stop the suffering of God’s people?  We cannot know why.  Where is God when it hurts.   Near.   Very near.   Near enough to hear us when we call out in our pain. 

We live in a world filled with darkness, despair, sin, brokenness, suffering, hurt and death.   And that means such a world, is bound to be filled with terrible things.  Things like war, and violence.  And terror.  The brutal abduction and death of a beautiful young woman whose life was before her.  And…such a world will continue to be stage for tragic things which have no other explanation except to say, they are a part of the brokenness of the world.  Until the world is redeemed by God.   Made whole.  Healed.  New.

            In God’s word we are told the redemptive work of God is the work of love.   It is love, shown by God and lived by each of us that will finally redeem a broken and hurting world.   Here’s how.

            A 19 year old girl is stolen away and murdered.  And there is pain beyond comprehension.  There is suffering.   There is anger.  There is guilt.  There is despair. 

            However, in response to all of this pain and suffering, there is. . .kindness.  Compassion.  Arms reaching out to touch and hold one another in the pain.  Others arrive to help bear the enormous and unbearable weight of the sadness.  Pink ribbons of remembrance are made and worn and passed on to others.  Others gather with tender words to light candles in the darkness.  People offer themselves without reserve to one another.  The hugs and smiles and tears help, somehow.

            All of this, the response of love to the bitterness and brokenness of evil.

            And bit by bit, the darkness is beaten back.

            I have no answer to the question.  I only offer the community of love that is willing always, to share in suffering and pain with others, in the redemptive work of love.   We are God’s people.   That’s what we do.  

            We draw together.  In the community of faith.  Together, in the body of believers.  Together in the family of Christ.   And we declare that we are children of the light, and not darkness.   We are children of the kingdom and not the world.  And God will not let the evil and the brokenness and the death of this world ultimately lay claim to us or to those we love.