Suffering, Separation from God - Psalm 23 - March 11, 2001

Sermon Psalm 22 Suffering, separation from God

Preachers only work one day a week
Sunday Comes 3 times a week
The getting ready stuff
Last week, call comes in at 730 C Mack is dead
Why?

Why….Andy Williams the latest school shooter
Ignored by his parents
Taunted by his friends
Acts out his pain
We cannot ignore one another
We must stop the taunting
We must call for people to be responsibe for their actions

Why? Jesus Is struggling, feeling separated from God
He is all alone
Why have you forsaken me?
Have you ever felt all alone?

Our lives are so full of struggle.
List them
Why? This is the best of all possible worlds
Or,,,Why, I do not know, no one can adequately answer

But this I know…….
Even when you feel alone….We are not alone.
Praising God
Let the Lord deliver him

Many are the travails of the righteous but the lord delivers him from them all
Psalm23
Psalm34

God did deliver Jesus, raised him from the dead
Trust in God, he will deliver you






Last Friday night was a great night for a ball game. Our team was playing well, having lots of fun. Then, like a dark cloud of misery, a swarm of mosquitoes attacked. We slapped, swatted and sprayed. It did not help. Swarm after swarm, they came. Finally and thankfully, the game ended, and we could escape our night of torture.

On Sunday, our church was having its annual church picnic. It was a beautiful morning. I was together with a community of people whom I love, enjoying a
great worship service and looking forward to an amazing lunch, all in a beautiful setting. Then they came, wave after wave of mosquitoes. We ate, squirmed and swatted. Then it rained, and we all went home, leaving our suffering behind us.

I really thought of words like “suffering” and “torture” while these two events were happening. Later, as I washed off dead mosquitoes and bug spray in the shower, I began to think. Do words like “torture” and “baseball” go together? Was I really suffering through a church picnic?

For years, philosophers, gurus and theologians have tried to answer the question: Why do bad things happen to good people? The question of how a good God can allow pain and suffering has been asked through the ages. This is an important question, though I am not sure we will discover the entire answer in this lifetime.

At the same time, I am beginning to ask a new question. What about the problem of pleasure? If there was no God, would there be baseball? There certainly would be no church picnics. Almost everywhere I look, I see things that point to the idea of a God who is good and desires to share His goodness with us. How is it that love can be such a wonderful thing? Why are there beaches, swimming pools and suntans? Why are there laughter, singing and hugs? Why are there butterflies, bluejays and raccoons? These are all questions that cannot be answered unless there is a Father God who loves to bless His kids – us.

The problem of pain can cause people to wonder: Is there really a God? The problem of pleasure causes us to wonder: How can there not be a God?


Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
The Rev. Ken Howard
March 17, 1996 (Lent 4)
Why do bad things happen to good people?
It's a question many have asked in recent years. Theologians have grappled with the issue. Books have been written about it. When I was in seminary, there were classes on the subject: Theodicy – How can a good God allow evil things to happen to good people?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Well, back in Jesus day the Pharisees, along with most other people at the time had an answer to that question: They don't. Bad things don't happen to good people. Bad things only happen to bad people. God makes them happen to bad people . . . as a punishment for sin. If people suffered, it was because of something they did wrong. If they were sick or poor or disadvantaged, it was because they sinned. If they were born that way, it was because their parents sinned. That's why the disciples wanted to know: Which one was it? Was he blind because God was punishing him in advance for the sins God knew he would commit or for the sins his parent's committed?
There's nothing unusual about that point of view. We hear it often in one form or another. "Well, his life's catching up with him," we hear heard said of a person who contracted the HIV virus. "She was asking for it," we hear said of a victim of sexual assault. "They're just lazy," we hear said of the poor and needy as though their poverty was their own fault. And we hear the same people speak of their own success as though it were God's blessing of their own goodness and hard work.
But if we're honest, we won't point the finger too long, because we know that we sometimes think that way, too. There is something attractive about that point of view – that bad things only happen to people who deserve them. Partly because bad people are almost always by definition, other people. And partly because it feels good when things are going nicely to think that you somehow deserve them. But more because it gives us a sense of control over our lives. If we do the right things, if we live by the rules, if we're "good Christians," then bad things won't happen to us. And even if they do, it's because we overlooked something, and we can correct that problem next time around. It's attractive, it's safe, it's reasuring, thinking that the world works this way. The only problem is: it's not true.
Unfortunately, that sense of control that we thought we had turns out to be an illusion. Something happens that opens up the dikes and knocks down the walls we have put up to protect ourselves, and lets the chaos of the world come swirling into our lives. A serious injury; a catastrophic illness; a lost job; a broken marriage; or perhaps even the death of someone we love. And we ask, "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?" Or we ask it on behalf of the ones we love. And even then our question betrays a need to make it make sense, a need to grasp for something that would put our lives back under our own control. That is the question we really want to ask: not "Why do bad things happen to good people?", but "Why do bad things happen to me and the people I love?"
And there are no easy answers.
In fact, sometimes there are no answers at all. When something happens like what happened in Scotland last week, when innocent children are senselessly gunned down by a madman, what can a parent say, beyond what one said last week: "Evil has visited us and we don't know why?"
No answers. Nothing that can make it make sense.
But Jesus answered.
When Jesus' disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned – he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."
God doesn't make bad kinds of things happen as a punishment for our sins. God doesn't make them happen at all. It's just the way things are. But somehow God redeems these things and us with them. God is present with us in these times. God suffers with us in these times. And God works through those things that happen to bring some good out of them; to bring some measure of healing and wholeness out of them; to bring new life out of them.
Not an easy answer. Not at all. It doesn't make those experiences any less difficult, any less painful, any easier to understand. It doesn't give them a reason. But it does give them, ultimately, meaning and purpose.
Henri Nouwen, in his book A Letter of Consolation, writes to his father after they had lost Nouwen's mother to cancer. After speaking of the pain and the loss and the tears, Nouwen made a statement to his father that was so radical that I nearly fell out of my chair. Speaking of his mother, he said to his father, "She died, that we might have life more abundantly." It sounded almost heretical at first. I mean, we reserve those kind of statements for Christ. But he went on to say how his mom's death forced him and his father to grow, and to become closer together to each other, and to become more vulnerable to God than they had ever been before. Her death was holy. Her death was sacramental. Her death brought them a new awareness of Christ's presence in their lives.
And many of us have experienced that kind of mystery. God being with us even when bad things are happening to us. God bringing meaning out of suffering. God bringing life out of death. And if you haven't yet, you will. Perhaps not in the moment; perhaps you will realize it looking back. But someday all of us will be able to speak from our own experience, to call the God our shepherd, and say: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me. . . ."
We'd like to think that bad things only happen to bad people. Why? Because that would leave us with a sense of control. If only we can be good enough, we can keep bad things from happening to us. That kind of interpretation of life feels safe to us and it helps for a while. But unfortunately, it's not true. Eventually, the chaos of the world breaks into every life. And as much as we'd like to make it make sense, we just can't. Bad things do not happen to us because we are bad. Good things don't happen to us because we are good. Both good and bad things happen to good and bad people. Just as the rain falls both on the evil and the good. And most of us are somewhere in between, anyway.
God doesn't make bad things happen as a judgement or punishment. And God doesn't good things happen as a reward, either. In this world, things just happen. And they don't always make sense. But though God doesn't make bad things happen, God does redeems them. And God uses them to redeem us, too. God uses those experience to make us aware of God and of our need for God. And God uses those experiences to bring us closer. God is our shepherd. Even in the worst of times he is there, leading us, befriending us, sharing the journey with us: some time pulling, sometimes pushing, sometimes carrying us, and sometimes just walking with us. But always, he is there. Whether we see him or not, whether he feel it or not, he is there.
If we will only let him, he will love us. If we will only let him, he will heal us. If we will only let him, he will make us whole.

One of the biggest obstacles to faith in G-d is the observed fact that life is not fair. People whom we regard as bad often attain great wealth and power, while those whom we consider good or even saintly are often just scraping by. Little children in Ethiopia, who aren't even old enough to make moral decisions, die of starvation every day. And those who strive for holiness must endure vicious persecution in many parts of the world. One is led to wonder where G-d is when all of this is going on. I actually know someone who was driven to atheism by G-d's failure to stop Hitler from perpetrating the Holocaust.
I have heard and read a number of discussions of this problem. Often the speaker invokes some unseen divine plan of which the unfairness is somehow a part, so that some greater good comes from the presence of adversity. At other times, G-d is said to be testing us in order to prove our character; those whose faith is strong, it is said, will persevere to the end, whereas those who turn back in the face of adversity never really believed in the first place. It is also often pointed out that only G-d knows people's hearts, so that those whom we regard as bad may actually be good, and those who appear to be good may actually be bad.
However, while all of this is true, it effectively begs the question. The skeptic would point out that none of the above can ever be verified, except by direct communication with G-d. The "unseen divine plan" theory seems to be born of desperation; it is hard to see why G-d should need to test us, considering that He already knows the content of our character; and to argue from our ignorance of people's hearts fails when we ourselves suffer in spite of the fact that we try to be good, or when the person who suffers is a small child who has not reached the age of reason.
I believe, however, that not only does the world's observed unfairness not contradict G-d's existence, but it is in fact a necessary consequence of G-d's existence.
While you try to wrap your mind around that one, consider what the world would be like without this unfairness. Good people would live forever. They would never lack food or drink, and anything they could possibly need or even want would be theirs for the asking. Meanwhile, bad people would perish from off the face of the earth.
Sounds like paradise, right? Not so fast! Without mortality, people could not kill each other, so murder would be impossible. With no material needs, robbery and the withholding of charity would be unthinkable. A whole litany of other evil deeds, which are commonplace in our society, would never even occur to us.
In short, free will would not exist.
People object to the existence of unfairness in the world because the people who suffer don't deserve to suffer. But the vast majority of activities prohibited in the Bible - murder, robbery, adultery, etc. - involve harm inflicted on someone who doesn't deserve to be harmed; indeed, it is on this basis that they are prohibited. If good people were impervious to harm, then it would be impossible to commit these evil acts. We would all be righteous, not because we had made a free-willed choice to be righteous, but because righteousness would be the only choice available to us.
The question all of this motivates is why G-d ever intervenes to prevent suffering. Three and a half millennia ago, He parted the Red Sea to redeem the Jews from bondage to the Egyptians. More recently, in 1948 He enabled the tiny Israeli army to defeat the surrounding Arab nations in Israel's War for Independence, despite the Arabs' vast advantage in numbers and munitions. The Bible is peppered with references to assorted other miracles which G-d performed on our behalf. So if G-d can prevent suffering on some occasions, why not on others? Why did He stop Pharaoh and the Arab nations, but not Hitler?
I believe the answer is that the very existence of atheism in the world is proof that the above-mentioned miracles did not destroy free will. But it is obvious that if suffering were eliminated in its entirety, free will would be destroyed. Where is the dividing line? I don't know. Only G-d knows when it is appropriate for Him to intervene, and when it is appropriate for Him to let the situation play out. But it is clear that the fact of bad things' happening to good people should not be an obstacle to belief in G-d.