Message Delivered at Christ Church

Sunday, July 6, 1997

The Third in a Five-Part Series Entitled

"Five Questions People Ask"

Question Three: "If God is so good, why do bad things happen?"

If you've read the papers at all over the last couple days or listened to the news, you know that this has been a particularly deadly Fourth of July weekend on the highways of Virginia. On Thursday afternoon, down near Emporia, a van carrying six people from Richmond, three adults and three children, five of them part of the same family, swerved out of control. It was headed southbound on I-95. If it was going the speed of traffic on I-95, it was probably going at least seventy. I don't know about you, but more and more,when I get on I-95, I feel as if I am taking my life into my own hands, traffic travels so fast. The van cut across the median and hit a car headed northbound. The car was carrying two women from North Carolina headed tothe Jehovah's Witness convention held here in Richmond this weekend. The van hit the car head on, for both vehicles making it the equivalent of driving into a brick wall at about 140 miles an hour. The sedan spun and hit a recreational vehicle headed northbound, and the van ricocheted off the carand hit a tractor-trailer carrying a load full of lumber. The tractor-trailer driver hit the brakes, and skidded into the median, coming to a stop facing the southbound traffic.

The van held Clifton Harriott, his son, Anthony Bowman, and Anthony'sfriend, Leon Carter. Also in the car were Tony Bowman, age 2, Anthony's son, Skye Edmonds, Tony's half-sister age 9, and Skye's cousin, Corey Johnson, age 12. In the car were Dorothea Starks and Doris Nichols. The truck driver was Clyde Huffman of Petersburg, who had just been given an award for driving a million and a quarter miles without an accident and who had a couple weeks left before retirement. Like Huffman, Clifton Harriott had just gotten to retirement age, and was looking forward to a bunch of years doing nothing. Hewas going to "vìsit and rest and sing and not worry about working anymore," his sister-in-law said in the newspaper.

All of these people died in this accident.

There are a lot of reasons that people don't want to give God a chance. Sometimes it's because they've been hurt by the Church, when they neededto hear grace, they heard guilt. Sometimes it's because they've been hurt by people who are Christians. Sometimes it's because Christians believe things that they can't believe. Sometimes it's because they are spiritually slothful, sometimes it's because a significant part of their personality, the spiritual side, has atrophied or been stunted in its growth. Sometimes it's because of pride, sometimes it's because of fear.

But often, it's because we talk about how good God is and then things like this happen. Things like this accident, or things like the death of those two sisters in Culpepper, or things like disease, or things like natural disasters or man-made disasters. Things that leave pain, and death, and suffering, things we might call evil. We say that God is good, and then bad things still happen.

And this is a significant problem for a lot of people, for people who aren't part of the Church, and even for people who are. I bet you if we took a poll of everyone present today, a vast majority of us have all, at least once, wondered why. Wondered why, if God is so good, bad things happen.

This is the third in a five-part summer teaching series called"Five Questions People Ask."Two weeks ago we considered the question,"What do I have to believe if I am to be a Christian?" Last week the question was "How good do I have to be if I am a Christian?"This week's question is "If God is so good, why do bad things happen?"

Before getting into the question, I want to share three reflections with you.

First, if you've been around here a while you know that I have addressed this problem before, more than once. And I just feel like sharing with you that every time I ponder evil, try to talk about it, I feel as if I am stepping in muck. The problem of evil is the great bug in the computer program that is Christian theology. And when I address this problem, I feel as if I am mired in mud. It affects me. It brings up heavy memories, it brings up a lot of questions I've asked myself, and I feel as if I am playing around someplace where I shouldn't be playing. When pondering the whys of evil and suffering, I feel as if I'm a little too close to the Devil's playground. After all, the Devil is always happiest when we dwell upon what isn't rather than rejoice in what is. To ponder the whys of evil is to take a look at the dark side of life, and do so fearlessly. But it is dark enough that I'm going to give away my last point right now, so that we can all keep it in mind as we go through the morning. And it's this: God is present in the suffering, and God is present in the pain, and that it may be through the suffering and the pain that we become most human, and become most like Christ.

Secondly, there is someone here in this congregation today who is in the middle of a crisis, who is in the middle of something that can only be described as bad. It's grief, or it's loss, or it's pain, or something. I don't know who that person is, or who those persons are, or what's going on. But there is someone here that is suffering, and for whom the question "Why?" is not an academic exercise. And if that is you, I need to give warning that what I'll be saying today may sound a bit antiseptic. These words may not address your specific issue, may not answer the exact question that is on your soul. At times they may sound rather heady, without a whole lot of heart. But this is not to say that suffering and evil are antiseptic issues. Or it's to say that they are only until they hit us, and they inevitably will hit each one of us sometime.

Thirdly, this answer will ultimately be unsatisfactory. A response to the problem of suffering and evil always is. Like most of us, I have been touched by bad things happening. I have uttered prayers on behalf of people in need, have prayed to God to save them, or heal them, and they haven't been saved or healed. It is, in essence, an unsolvable problem. The problem of evil, the problem of bad things happening, I have sometimes joked, will at least give me something to talk with God about when I get to heaven because no one here, including me, sure seem to know the answer. And for this reason, I chose for the first reading today Psalm 88. Its plaintive cry, its outrage at God, is to remind us that in the psalms we have scriptural justification for being dissatisfied with the way God seems to run things sometimes. In the psalms, we have a voice to express our displeasure and eve anger with God that there sometimes seems to be no justice or sense so that the good sometimes suffer as much as the evil, and that evil and suffering make no sense in the indiscriminate way they claim their victims. So if you forget everything the speaker says today, just remember the psalms, God's way of saying that it's okay to be mad at God when bad things happen.

So let's get into it a bit, and see where we come out.

First of all, evil and suffering would not be a problem if we didn't believe some of the things we believe about God. Belief that God exists does not necessarily create a logical problem when it comes to suffering and pain and evil.

You see, we believe that God is the Creator, is the author of all that is, the entire universe. Who is responsible for this place? God is. God made it. God designed it, got it started, and made it happen. Got a question about how things happen? Talk to the boss. And if we didn't believe that God was the Creator, as some religions throughout time have believed, then we easily see the intellectual out to the difficulty. If God didn't make the universe, then when bad things happen, we certainly can't blame God. God could then be like the persons who in the middle of the mess says "Well, don't look at me! I didn't do it!" But, we believe that God is the Creator, and did create everything, out of nothing.

And we believe that God is good, right? God certainly is not evil, certainly is not capable of doing evil things. We do not believe that God does bad things. Now, if God were capable of doing bad things, that would explain why evil and suffering happens, wouldn't it. But we don't say that about God. We say that God is good, and does not wish evil upon God's creation, any part of it, and that includes us.

And we believe that God is powerful. God is all-powerful. There is nothing that God can't do. There is nothing more powerful than God, and God's power is unbounded. That's the whole story of the Exodus. God separates the waters so Israel can escape. Sarah, and Hannah, and Elizabeth are beyond child-bearing years, but that doesn't make a difference to God. God is powerful enough to give them children. In Jesus, in his miracles, God declares power over the forces of evil, over illness and death. Our God is a god who can do things, who can make things happen. And if God weren't powerful, if God were limited, then we could again easily explain evil and suffering. God just isn't strong enough to prevent it, we could say. But again, we don't say that about God.

And we believe that God is personal. In other words, we believe that God is more like a person than a thing. Now, God is not a person. God is not an old man sitting in heaven with along white beard. But God is like a person in that we can have a relationship with God and God is interested in us. Jesus says that our Father knows the number of hairs on our heads, and Psalm 139 says that God knows us even before we are born. God is in relationship with us, and is for us. God is personal, and involved in life, involved in our lives, present to us.

That's what we believe. And if God weren't personal, that, too, would provide an easy explanation for bad things happening. God just isn't interested in us enough to do anything about it! Some 300 years ago there developed a way of looking at God that is called Deism. The Deists believed that God was like a watchmaker. God made the universe, got it ticking, and then just let it go, refusing to interfere with it. The Deist God wasn't much interested in human beings, in our petty concerns. But we're not Deists, and we believe that God is very much concerned with us and our concerns, and that there is very little that is petty to God except pettiness, so that we're left wondering why, when we pray so earnestly to be kept safe, or for God to heal, why does it seem that God doesn't listen?

If we could take away just one of these beliefs, then suffering and evil would be easily explained. A child could understand it. But by holding on to them, it becomes very difficult to find an adequate answer to the problem of pain and suffering and evil things.

That doesn't mean, though, that there is no way to make sense of the problem, no adequate explanations for evil and suffering. I think there may be. But here are two ways we definitely don't make sense of it. These are two answers to the problem that don't work.

God didn't cause that accident to punish these people for something. That these people died in this accident, or that we suffer misfortune or bad things in our life, is not God doing something to us. There was not some great sin in these peoples lives, some sin greater than those we commit, that caused God to say "I'm going to snuff them out. They're done for." There have been times where we have wanted there to be that kind of cause and effect relationship between sin and suffering. It goes back as far as the Book of Proverbs, which insists that the good prosper and the wicked are punished, and it is as recent as people who say that AIDS is God's punishment against people who are gay, even though people who aren't gay can suffer from AIDS. But even scripture didn't agree that God operates this way, which is why the Book of Job is there. Strangely enough, sometimes people believe it is more comfortable to believe that God is vengeful like that rather than believe that this accident, for example, was just an accident. At least that way, everything makes sense. But it doesn't work that way, and God doesn't work that way.

Secondly, inevitably someone will say to one of the friends or family members of the victims of that accident,"God must have wanted them in heaven," or something like that. Have any of us who have suffered loss ever been on the receiving end of that line? It is a polite, well-meaning kind of thing we say to someone who is grieving when we may not know what to say at all. And it is, of course, true. God did want them in heaven. But God didn't kill them to get them to heaven faster. God doesn't work that way, either.

These two responses to the problem of evil and suffering are easy, but they don't work very well. But let me offer something that may be a bit more constructive.

Maybe the first step in making sense of the problem is to recognize that some of the things we call evil may not be evil at all. They may be disastrous, and they may cause suffering, but that does not mean that they are evil. The flooding of a river in Southeast Asia ravages an entire nation. An earthquake in South America causes an avalanche that demolishes a village. A tornado sweeps through Texas and kills 100 people.

Those things create suffering and pain. But they are not evil, they are natural. We would not say an earthquake in the Antarctic, where no one lives, is evil. We would not say that a tornado sweeping through the empty plains of South Dakota is evil. We would not say a hurricane that never hits land, that ships and planes avoid, is evil. We would not say that a flood on a river where there are dikes and levies and flood walls is evil. Dangerous, yes. You don't want to be around these things, you don't want to get to close. But evil, no.

You see, when we look at nature, a truth is revealed about God. God is biased towards life, always. God likes life. That's why we exist. And the essential nature of life is that it is always changing. Biased towards life, God even gave nature the dynamism of life so that nature is not static, but is always changing, itself, and always unpredictable and dynamic. Do you know that one of the first human creations was the straight line? It is a purely human creation because there are not straight lines in nature. Instead, nature is filled with curves and sharp edges and abrupt changes in direction because life, in itself, is that unpredictable and that subject to change. And just as in human life, in animal life, there can be moments of violent change, so in nature there can be moments of violent change, violent change that causes hardship when we get in the way of it, that can even cause suffering.

Secondly, some of the things that cause suffering and pain are not without their explanations. A plane crashes, a balcony collapses, an automobile has an accident. "Why do these things happen, Lord?" When we ask that question we're often looking for some metaphysical, spiritual answer, when really the answer may not be so complicated. Because not everything is unpredictable. Not every action has a mysterious consequence. If I try to take a corner at fifty miles an hour that can only be taken at fifteen, I will crash. If an essential piece of metal holding up a balcony rusts through and weakens, then the balcony will collapse. If an airplane fails to have enough lift because it is underpowered or because of some mechanical failure, it will crash. If I eat Egg McMuffins and Big Macs morning, noon, and night, and never get any exercise, I shouldn't be surprised if I die young of heart disease. God did not leave us completely to our own devices in trying to make our way through life. Not everything, not all of nature, not all of life, is unpredictable. There are some pretty clear rules as to how things operate, and as long as we operate within the rules we should end up being okay. When we don't, either intentionally or by accident, then there will be suffering. Why did the balcony collapse at the UVA graduation? Because when exposed to water and air, iron rusts. And when it rusts, it weakens. And whentoo much weight is put upon weakened metal, it will break. Why did the accident on I-95 happen? Maybe because the driver fell asleep at the wheel, maybe because he took his eye off the road to give the two-year old a bottle, maybe there was structural damage to the van that caused it to break apart. I don't know. But it happened for one of those reasons, or a reason like that, more than it happened because God did something to make it happen.

There is also the evil we do to one another, when we murder, or steal, or slander, or deceive, or whatever. You fill in the blank. We all do it sometimes. There have been the great evil ones, who have on their hands the blood of millions. And then there is the more pedestrian evil that regular folk can do. And in a peculiar way, this may be the kind of evil and suffering that is easiest to explain.

You see, when humanity was created it was created in God's image. Being created in God's image, it means that we were given freedom. God is radically free, and we, too, are free. We are free to follow God's will, or free to follow our own. And it is when we follow our own will that we end up doing evil to one another. Instead of following God, we make ourselves gods, and do what we want. And that is always when we end up harming another, or harming ourselves. And I guess it would be possible that God could have made us something other than free, could have made us robots that always do what they're programmed to do. Then, I guess, we'd be perfect. But we wouldn't be alive. The price of life is freedom, and the cost of freedom is that we may misuse it. And when we misuse it, is when we create evil and suffering for one another. God does not smile on it. It does not make God happy. God is constantly working in us to prevent us from disobeying God's will. Our conscience tells us to obey, our culture usually even tells us to obey, and scripture always tells us to obey. But God rarely uses coercion, and will not coerce us into obedience. We are free to follow God's way, or our own. "Okay, Paul, I think I see what you're saying. Things like natural disasters, things even like disease, that's just nature being nature, and nature is unpredictable that way because God made nature to be like life, itself, because God likes life.. And sometimes, some bad things thta happen have pretty good explanations thta have nothing to do with God. Sometimes, things just happen. And human beings were given freedom so that they could love, and that means we may use this freedom to do what we want instead of what God wants. I get it. So God's off the hook for causing evil and suffering. I'll buy that. But now, tell me why God rescues some people and not others. Tell me why God sometimes seems to stop the suffering of some, but not others. I know that God doesn't cause all these things, but I want to know why sometimes God stops these kinds of things, and sometimes doesn't."

And that, my friends, is an answer I can not give you. It is a mystery to me why some people are physically healed, why some people are miraculously saved from disaster, and some aren't. I can only tell you what I've learned from being alive and being around the block once or twice in the priest business.

First, there are miraculous healings, and sometimes God answers prayers the exact way we want them answered. Sometimes the healings are physical, but those don't last because even persons healed miraculously still die someday. Even more powerful are the spiritual and emotional healings that God provides regularly, and those healings last forever, and I've seen that happen a lot.

And in the face of evil and suffering, what I have learned is to not limit my prayer. When someone is suffering, maybe an illness or some other kind of evil, I always have a choice. I can limit my prayer to my own expectations, or I can risk it all and pray that God will heal, and expect that God will do it. And while there once was a time my fear of disappointment that God would not do what I thought needed to be done was so great I was afraid to pray for a miracle, I'm not afraid of that anymore. Because I know, now, always, that God will answer my prayer. God may not answer it the way I want it answered, but God will do something for the person I am praying for, and will give to them what they need. After all, God knows what they need better than I do. We sometimes think that death is the worst thing. To God, it's not. God doesn't like it any more than we do, but God knows that which we need to live more fully is more important than the things we need to live longer or with less suffering.

You see, I keep coming back to Jesus. I keep coming back to Jesus being fully God and fully human, truly God and truly human, completely God and completely human. And I keep coming back to God intent for us that we become more human, and more Christ-like. And sometimes, maybe even most of the time, those things come more through suffering and hardship and pain than they do through the good times. That doesn't mean that God causes these things. God doesn't like death or sadness or pain. God isn't like the fates in Walt Disney's Hercules, cutting the string when it's our time to go. It's just that God can use these things, even use them to transform us.

I can not separate these words from my experience, from the fact that persons close to me have died before their time, as children. And I prayed that they wouldn't. And I won't make bones about it. Why God has saved some, and not others, is a mystery to me and at least gives me another thing to talk with God about when I get to heaven. And here I allow my faith to kick in on something I can't understand. But what I know is that the suffering I experienced in their loss, and the suffering I witnessed in them and in those who loved them more than I did, made me a bit more like the truly human being God wants me to be, and therefore made me a bit more like Christ. It cracked a shell of invincibility and invulnerability a bit, and made me a bit more real. Maybe it is suffering that truly brings us into the human experience, and makes us most real, for it seems that those who suffer, or who have suffered, have the least patience for pretense, or deceit, or judgment, or grudges, or gamesmanship in relationships because they realize how precious life is, that it isn't something to mess around with. Maybe more than being the worst thing for us, it is suffering that brings out the best in us, that brings us closer to what God intends for us. We don't wish it upon anyone, nor does God. But Jesus went to the tomb before he rose from the dead, and maybe we should expect nothing less for ourselves. We tend to want to believe that when there is suffering and grief and evil, God has abandoned us. But instead, I would suggest, that is when God is truly working in us most powerfully, transforming us most manifestly.

So why do bad things happen? For a whole bunch of reasons. Sometimes we misuse our freedom, and sometimes we're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, things just happen.

Does God make them happen? No. Not at all.

Can God make something out of them? Yes. God does it all the time because God is right there in the middle of it. To the extent that there is any adequate answer to the question why, it may lie in this truth: that it is the difficult times, not the good times, that usually make us more merciful, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more generous, more forgiving, more alive, more human, and more Christ-like.