Isaiah 53:1-6
Psalm 6
Philippians 2:5-11
If you ask me, the most profound question of faith, the one that is the biggest challenge to faith, the one that is the most legitimate cause of doubt, skepticism – or just plain despair – the question that’s most worth being kept up at night, the one that sticks with us, that shouldn’t go away easily, is the question of suffering. You can talk about this in a variety of ways – the question we are using as the title for today’s sermon – today, on our second week of our four week sermon series that we’re calling “Your Four Biggest Questions about God,” during which we are addressing questions y’all submitted about God and faith – the question we used for today’s sermon is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Why do perfectly good people, people who haven’t done anything to deserve it, why do innocent people suffer? But, of course, the question of suffering goes deeper even than that – good people suffering is a real problem, but, even people who are less good, there are kinds of suffering in this world that no one deserves, no matter how kind or unkind they are, no matter what rules they’ve broken.
The classic way of putting the question is this: “If God is all powerful, and perfectly good, then why is there so much suffering and evil in the world?” Many people have answered that question by saying, simply, that the state of the world, with all the suffering, with all the evil, with all the pain and loss, is proof that God cannot possibly be who we claim God is. If there is a God, so goes this argument – if there is a God, either God is good, but not capable of stopping the evil and suffering in our world – so, God may be good, but, in that case, isn’t all-powerful – OR, God may be all-powerful, but any God who allows the horrors of this world cannot possibly be good and loving.
I mean, just look at our world, and look how broken it is. There are massive, human created evils like the Holocaust, or mass-shootings. There are more personal evils – often hidden from public view – that are nevertheless real and destructive, like domestic violence and abuse. There are evils and suffering that aren’t human-made but that nevertheless rip our lives apart – diseases, from COVID to cancer and so much in-between. Famine, war, oppression, injustice, death – there is so much that is so wrong with the world. And, if I’m honest about it, most days, I think that if you aren’t questioning God over all this mess, if you aren’t crying out to God, if you aren’t asking “God, how did you let it get so bad,” if you aren’t desperate for God to fix this world, to make it right – well, then, you’re probably not paying attention.
And, of course, that’s OK. We can’t, we just can’t, pay attention to all that’s wrong with the world every single moment of every day. It would overwhelm us. It would break us. We all need rest, we all need to focus on the moments of joy we can find. Hear me: I’m not trying to make you depressed. I’m really not. What I’m trying to do is say this: I know that many of you, at least some of the time, wonder about why, how, the world could be so broken, about how a loving God could allow this – could just sit by and let all this suffering happen. I know many of you have this question, because you submitted when we asked for your questions – and so, I want to create a space to say: when you wrestle with the world’s suffering, when it causes you to struggle, and to question, and to cry out to God for relief – when you do that, you are not alone. Many of the most faithful Christians, with deep faiths, have struggled with this question across the millenia. People like Mother Teresa – great religious practitioners and great religious thinkers have wondered – in the face of the world’s suffering and hate, where is the God of love to be found.
I also want to say, I know that this question isn’t just theoretical. It’s personal. We all have our pains, our sufferings in our life – this is a real question, that touches us deeply. This is about the real hurt we face in our real lives, the real doubts we have when we see real pain around the world. This isn’t just about ideas – this is something that impacts us deeply, day to day.
And that’s why this question is so hard to address. Because, there are lots of ways to talk about suffering in this world that are all up in our heads, but that don’t touch us where it hurts, in our hearts, in our spirits. Like, I could talk about sin – about how God has created the world perfectly good, and we humans have turned away from God, turned in on ourselves, chosen hatred over love, fear over faith, tribalism over the common good, security over hospitality, control and fear and power over faithfulness. Because, that’s real. We humans have, over and over again, turned away from God’s way. God tells us how we should live, gives us a map of the road that leads to life, and Jesus calls us to walk that road, to follow him, and we just don’t. And it’s not just individual choices – it’s a pattern, across thousands of years of human history, in which sin gets repeated, and then gets baked into the system, and then haunts us, so it does damage without our even realizing it. So, for example, when we talk about the damage that racism causes, we aren’t just talking about individual racist people doing individual racist things – it’s not just the Proud Boys and the KKK – but we are also talking about how a history of racism in this country continues to shape things, continues to form us, continues to harm all of us, turn us away from the way of love. Or, we are talking about cycles of abuse in families, how abuse gets repeated, and covered up for, across the generations, and how hard it is to break that cycle. We are talking about patterns of injustice, and people passing on prejudices to their children, and laws and structures around the world that are put in place by the powerful to make sure that the powerful stay powerful and the poor stay poor. Those patterns – that sin – is bigger than any one individual human choice, and it impacts us, it shapes us, it does us harm and causes people to suffer. We have harmed God’s good creation, we have put the world out of whack, and so it does not work as God intended – God has given us the gift of free will, and we responded by running away from God, and by doing harm to the world in which we live. God is good, and God really loves us, which means that God allows us to be free. And we, in our freedom, have done harm, have started and reinforced cycles of harm – we sin, our forebearers sinned, and, we often bear the brunt of that sin’s destructive power.
But, let’s slow down here, before we get too heady, because, again, I’m not sure that explaining the why is really helpful. A friend of mine, a fellow pastor, did a funeral this year for a 38 year-old mother of three. Another colleague of mine did a funeral for a child. We’ve seen death and destruction, from hurricanes and wars and pandemic – I mean, sometimes it feels like that’s kinda all that we’ve seen recently. At a certain point, in the face of that kind of suffering, talking about the why, giving the theory behind it, it just doesn’t matter. Is the why really helpful when you’re broken, at the bottom of the pit?
I don’t think it does. Which is part of what’s good about how the Bible handles suffering. Suffering has been a problem since the days when the Old Testament was written – and even before that – and the Old Testament wrestles honestly with suffering – but it doesn’t give us one single answer. The book of Deuteronomy seems to imply that we earn joy or suffering, good outcomes or bad outcomes, based on our behavior. But, of course, it turns out that things don’t seem to work that way – lots of good people suffer while bad people seem to prosper – and, so, the book of Job questions that formula – and seems to indicate that suffering is somewhat random, but that God is nevertheless good, because of the wonders and beauty that God has created. The psalms, and lamentations, deal with suffering through prayer – basically, encouraging us to cry out to God, to say “God, why have you let me suffer.” Instead of answering why suffering happens, they instead seem to say “suffering is the worst, but God hears us when we cry out to him, and is with us when things are darkest, when we are at the bottom of the pit.”
And that answer – the answer of the psalms, the answer of crying out to God and demanding to be heard, carries into the New Testament – and is the best word that I have to say to you about suffering. Because, on the cross, Jesus prays one of those psalms, Psalm 22, a prayer in which the speaker says, among other things “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” Jesus, on the cross, quotes his Bible, and also announces that he, too feels abandoned. It is a great mystery – Jesus is God-in-the-flesh, he is God-with-us, and yet, in that moment, in his death, he feels abandoned by God. It’s hard to say exactly what it means, but I think that, maybe, at the very least, it means that, if Jesus can question God, can wrestle with God, can feel heartbroken over the pain of this world – then, it’s OK for us to feel the same way. When we feel like God has abandoned us, when we ask “how can God be good in the face of all this suffering” – those feelings, those questions, put us in good company – in the company of our savior – and, so, if Jesus, if God-as-a-human-being can feel that way, then it’s OK for us to feel that way too. Those doubts and questions and cries don’t have to wreck our faith – they are part of a healthy faith, a faith like Jesus had.
Because, the thing is, the Christian God, the God of Jesus Christ, the God who liberated Israel from Egypt – our God doesn’t seem to be in the business of giving answers – at least not answers that look like explaining exactly why things are the way they are. Our God isn’t so much about explaining things to us – our God is in the business of doing things, of acting in the world. The Bible is not a book of answers to abstract questions. The Bible is a story – a story of God’s relationship with God’s people. And the center of that story is Jesus. God’s ultimate answer to suffering – and to so much else – is to become one of us. God addresses our suffering by joining us in it. God answers our cries of “Why, God?” by deciding to become one of us and join those cries with God’s own voice. God’s answer to our suffering is to suffer alongside us. God sees us in the pit, and jumps into the pit with us. God has walked the darkest roads imaginable, so that when we walk through darkness, we can trust that we walk with one who can sympathize, who has been there, who knows how it feels to be overwhelmed by suffering.
But there’s more to it than that – because, if we only worshiped a God who had died, there wouldn’t be much hope in that. No, the even better news is that, with God, death is not the end of the story. Suffering does not get the final word. After death, comes resurrection. After suffering comes transformation. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who is God with us, the One who suffered for our sake, was put to rest in the darkness of the tomb, but the tomb could not hold him, the grave could not keep him, and he burst forth from the darkness with a blinding light of love, he broke free from death and entered into new life. Our God has walked through the worst that this world has to offer, suffered its brutal consequences, and, defeated it. The resurrection of Jesus means that suffering is not the end of our story. There is life on the other side. As a preacher has said, “It may be Friday [as in Good Friday] – but Sunday’s comin’.” Whether in this life, or when God puts all things right, on that great gettin’-up morning, with God, the worst thing is never the last thing. Hear that again, with God, the worst thing is never the last thing. Because the last thing is, will be, Jesus Christ, our crucified and resurrected Lord, drawing all people to himself, re-creating this world in the image of the Father, renewing us by the power of the Holy Spirit, wiping away every tear from every eye. And, in the meantime, between now and the end, God is in the business – and God calls God’s people to be in the business – of wiping away tears right now, of healing the sick, right now, of fighting against injustice, right now, of working to comfort the broken-hearted and be a people of love and transformation and hope, right now. The forces of evil are strong, the forces of death are mighty, but we are a people of resurrection, we are in the business of doing our part, however small it is – and joining with God as God does the big work – to overcome the worst this world has to offer, to respond to the world’s worst with God’s very best.
So, I can’t really explain suffering. I can’t give you answers to why. But I can say this: God is with us in it. God is with refugees, and those who are fighting against disease, and those who are dying, and those who are starving, and those who have been abandoned and betrayed. If you are suffering, know that your God, the God of the universe, has felt what you feel, and will, in the end, transform your despair into hope, will overcome the darkness with the light of God’s all-consuming love, will wipe every tear from every eye and lead us into new life. And, in the meantime, we, God’s people, are with you, and will do our best to walk with you, to offer life and love and support to you. God’s people are with you. God is with you, no matter what. God has walked through death for us. And God promises to lead us through suffering, through death, into life. It’s not an answer to the problem of suffering. But it is a promise. God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
Comments