Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Romans 8:18-39:
I was just
two months into my first pastoral appointment when I received a call asking me
to perform a funeral. While I had
assisted with one funeral during my internship, I didn’t do much for it, and
the person it was for died at age 96, so it wasn’t really a surprise. This would be the first funeral I ever did by
myself, and it was for a family that had lost their son. Ethan had been born with a genetic defect
called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. It is a
disease caused by a recessive gene which means that both parents have to carry
the gene, and even if both parents carry the gene there is only a 25% chance of
the child being born with it.
Jane and
Anil had two children when Ethan was born, neither of whom had the disease, and
they did not know they were carriers until they sought help from their
pediatrician when around three months Ethan stopped progressing in growth, and
were told that not only would he not improve, but he would never be strong
enough to lift his head, let alone walk or crawl. The disease would cause his muscles to
continue to deteriorate with respiratory functions usually being most
affected.
His lungs would fill with
fluids and mucus making breathing difficult, so that his parents and caretakers
would have to pound on his chest and back numerous times each day to break the
mucus up, as well as having to stick a catheter through his nose several times
a day to drain the fluids out of his lungs and that with all of this he might
live to be two years old. He didn’t make
it that long, dying at 15 months, and so I was called to work with this family
and to perform my first funeral for Ethan.
Any time a
child dies, especially an infant or toddler, there are bound to be some hard
questions asked of God. At the time of
Ethan’s death my oldest daughter was 18 months, and Linda was three months pregnant with
our second child, so this hit really close to home, and I’ll be honest I didn’t know
what to do or what to say. What can you
say at a time like this? So I sat with the family and listened to their
story. I made some mistakes, as is to be
expected, but those mistakes did not include the things that are often said to
parents who have lost children.
I know that
some people inevitably said to Jane and Anil, that God loved Ethan so much that
God wanted Ethan to be in heaven with God.
But if God is everywhere, and if God is with us, then why would God need
Ethan in a specific place. Or maybe they
said, as they did to Harriet Sarnoff Schiff when her son Robbie died of a
congenital heart defect, “I know that this is a painful time for you. But I know that you will get through it all
right, because God never send us more of a burden than we can bear. God only let this happen to you because he
knows that you are strong enough to handle it.”
Schiff remembers her reaction to those words, “If only I were a weaker
person, Robbie would still be alive.”
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to answer what we
think are questions, or to defend God or make ourselves feel better, that we
truly miss the other’s statement all together.
In the Book of Job, Job is a righteous man who cries out , why has this
happened to me, and his friends seek to provide him with some answers, but end
up making him feeling worse, because Job is not really looking for answers. Instead his cry of despair, just like those
who make similar cries, should not be heard with a question mark, but instead
with an exclamation point. Job was not
asking a question, he was crying out to the universe in despair, seeking not an
answer but compassion and to know that he was not alone in his suffering, that
people cared about what happened to him, that he still had self-worth and that
God cared about what happened to him.
In the 121st
Psalm, we hear “I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven
and earth.” Notice that the psalmist
does not say, my pain, or my suffering, come from God, but that my help comes
from God. As we looked at two weeks ago,
I do not believe that God causes us to have pain and suffering, God did not
cause Ethan to be born with a genetic disease as part of some grand master plan
that we don’t understand, but what I do believe is that God was with Ethan and
his family the entire time.
On the night
that Ethan died, Jane said that they took turns holding Ethan, rocking him and
telling him how much they loved him.
Jane said that Ethan’s death was the most heartbreaking and heart
wrenching experience of her life, but at the same time the most peaceful. She and Anil felt incredible calm in the
midst of everything, and Jane, pregnant with another child, said that the baby
was rolling and kicking Ethan as she held him, almost like a sign that
everything was going to be okay, but what she also said was that they found God
present in everything that happened throughout Ethan’s life, from the support
they got from friends and neighbors, to the doctors, nurses and social workers
who not only gave all they had to the family, but who gave themselves to so
many others in need, and to the way that Ethan lived his life and the way he
approached everything he had to undergo.
As I
prepared to do the funeral sermon, I could not get through it without bursting
into tears, and I really didn’t know how I was going to make it through, and so
I stopped and prayed to God to give me the strength to get me through it, and I
knew that at the same time that other friends and colleagues were praying for
me, because I had asked for their prayers, and I was able to find within me a
strength that I never knew that I had, and that I know that I wouldn’t have had
without the strength I received from God as a result of those prayers. And one of the members of my congregation was
also there that didn’t know the family, she simply came because she knew that I
would need the support, and so she came to be there to support and pray for me,
and that is where I found God and how God was able to transform this experience
in my life. I find it in the strength
and peace and hope and endurance that we never thought possible that we receive
from our prayers, and it is the presence of each other as we support and carry
each other. This is how God tells us
that we are not alone, that we have not been abandoned, and that God cares what
is happening to us.
Now if the
Chitkara family were to truly ask me why this had happened to them, I would
have told them that God was not the cause.
God was not punishing them for something, God was not trying to teach
them a lesson, God was not using them to demonstrate faith and perseverance,
that God did not allow this to happen because God thought that they could
handle it, or that having lived with Ethan that they might be better people or
that others would learn from how Ethan approached life and become better
themselves. Instead I would have said
that there is chaos in the world, and that Ethan had a defect on the SMN1 gene
that codes for a specific protein needed for motor neurons to survive, which is
the medical reason, but does that really answer anything? I could tell them that we are all mortal, and
since we are mortal that means that children die, just as middle-aged people
die, as wrong as that might be, and the pain that we feel from that I believe
is part of the pain of childbirth that God talks about when Adam and Eve are expelled
from the garden of Eden. But does that
really answer anything? I could simply
say, as I did two weeks ago that the reason that bad things happen to good
people, is because creation is still taking place in the world, which means
that there is still chaos in the world, which means that there are things which
happen contrary to how God might want them to happen, and so cells and genes
sometimes go wrong causing negative things to happen, and we also have free
will and so we sometimes choose to do things that bring negative consequences
to us, or others choose to do differently than what God would have them do, and
we are sometimes caught in those negative consequences as well. But do those answers really answer the
question? The reason why those answers
are not satisfactory is because none of those answers really give any true
meaning or purpose to what we are undergoing.
This past
week we celebrate Samantha’s birthday, and I am also coming up on the 2nd
anniversary of my being struck with a kidney stone. Now what those two events have in common,
which I am sure you were wondering about, is the fact that according to doctors
these are the two most painful things that we can undergo as humans. But even though the pain might be the same,
there is a significant difference between these events. While child birth might be painful, there is
some positive outcome, some purpose that makes it all meaningful and
worthwhile, and makes it so worthwhile that women are willing to undergo the
experience more than once. But anyone
who has ever had a kidney stone will say, without exception in my experience,
“I hope I never have to do that again.”
Because a kidney stone has no underlying purpose of meaning, it’s simply
a mistake that’s happened in the body which has caused the pain. When we ask the question why, we really
aren’t searching for answers so much as we are searching for meaning and
purpose, because we feel we can bear anything as long as we feel that there is
some greater reason why we must endure.
In her
seminal work, Suffering, the German theology Dorothee Soelle says, says that in
the midst of suffering we should focus not on where it comes from, but where it
leads, what is going to be the result of this, how are we going to redeem this
in our lives and in the lives of others.
Science and medicine can tell us about illness and disease, about
earthquakes and hurricanes and other natural disasters, but science and
medicine cannot give meaning or purpose to these events, only we can do that by
allowing God to transform these events in our lives. We shouldn’t be worrying so much about the
why questions, because in most ways the answers are unsatisfying and for some ultimately
unanswerable, but we can give these events meaning, we through God’s works in
our lives, can redeem them, we can give them meaning.
In today’s passage from Romans, Paul tells us, just as we
heard last week, that the Holy Spirit, as the gift of prayer, “intercedes with
sighs too deep for words,” and that God makes all things work together for
good. Notice that he does not say that
everything that happens is good, which is what those who claim that God causes
everything might say, but instead that God makes everything work out for the
good. That even in the midst of the
worst tragedies of our lives, that something good can come from them, not
because God caused these things in our lives, but because God can use them and
work and walk with us through them, so that they can be redeemed, so again the
question we must ask is not really why, but instead what? Now that this has happened, what am I going to
do about this, how can God use me and this situation to make something better?
When Joe and Sherril Garrett lost their 7-month-old son to
what used to be referred to as SIDS, they were devastated. “It just seemed like our whole world just
collapsed and we didn’t really know what to do,” Sherril said. But then they found a way to make a
difference. She and a friend had
previously talked about how expensive it could be for girls to go to prom, and
as her friend’s daughter prepared for this event, he friend said, “You know, I
want to tell you that as I sit here and listen to my daughter talk about who
she’s going to go to the prom with, and I couldn’t help but think that 15 years
from now you’re going to wonder who Jake would have taken to the prom.” Sherril’s initial thought was “15 years from
now? I just need to get through
today.” But that conversation planted a
seed in her mind, and together she and her husband founded Dresses for Jake’s
Dates, an organization which loans out prom dresses, shoes and jewelry, to
girls who otherwise would not be able to afford to go to the prom. “If we can provide financial relief for one
family and make one little girl feel like a princess for one night, then we’ve
accomplished what we set out to do,” Sherril said. “We could crawl into a hole and feel sorry
for ourselves because we lost our son, we really could. But we don’t feel like that’s what God would
have us do.” Does this group make them miss
their son anymore? No, but they are
allowing God to transform their loss, to move from the why, to what are we
going to do about it.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who we’ve heard from quite a bit these
past few weeks, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, writes of
his son’s death “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more
sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have
been without it. And I would give up all
of those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all the
spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences,
and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, and indifferent counselor,
helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright,
happy boy. But I can’t choose.”
What he could choose, however, was what he
was going to do with it, how he was going to make his son’s death meaningful,
what meaning he was going to give not just to his son’s death, but his son’s
life, and he has made meaning for millions of people. I know that walking with Ethan’s family has
made me a different person and a different pastor than I would have been
without it, which is why I talk about this even, but like Rabbi Kushner if I
could choose to have it never to have happened, to be who I would be without
that event, to have Ethan being a healthy happy little boy and his family
unaffected by tragedy I would make that decision in an instant, but I too
cannot choose, you cannot choose, none of us can choose. But what we can do is to allow God to
transform our whys and make them meaningful not just for us but for others as
well.
When we decide to get rid of God because of our tragedies,
we don’t change the realities of the situation, they still remain tragedies and
all we’ve done is to remove the only thing that can give us hope and peace and
assurance and strength and power and mercy and grace and all the other things
that we need to be able to move through these events in our lives, when we try
and remove God we get rid of the only person who can work to transform our whys
and instead to work together all things for good.
“Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed
away,” John says in the book of Revelation, “and I heard a loud voice from the
throne saying, ‘see, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his
people and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their
eyes, death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no
more.” What God tells us, what scripture
tells us is that tragedies and suffering do not have the last word in our
lives, God has the last word, and that God can transform our whys, God can transform
the worst events in our lives to the good, God can give them and us meaning and
purpose if we allow God to do so. In
Deuteronomy, God says “Behold, I have set before you the path of good and the
path of evil, the way of life and the way of death. Choose life” (Deut 30:19). May it be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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