Why?: Explaining When Bad Things Happen

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Psalm 88:

When my older brother was twenty, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer; the number one cancer killer of men under the age of 35.  He went into the student health clinic on Monday, had surgery on Wednesday, and my grandfather died of cancer on Thursday.  As you might imagine it was a rather rough week for my family, leaving us all with a lot of questions but without a lot of answers.  As we discussed last week when we began this series looking and answering some of our why questions, there are some fairly typical answers that have been provided for why bad things happen to seemingly good people, and one of those answers is that bad things happen as punishment for sins we have committed.  That is the answer that my father provided for himself in the midst of this.  He believed, and still believes, that my brother’s cancer was God’s punishment for my father for some sin that he had committed.

There is certainly scriptural witness for this idea.  After King David commits adultery with Bathsheba and then has her husband Uriah the Hittite killed, we are told that the first child they have together dies as an infant because of David’s sin.  And then there is the curse given to Ham, the son of Noah, that is acted out on the next generation.  But as I have said before, scriptural does not always provide a universal witness on this because the Bible is a series of books in conversation with each other and they often disagree.  And so we read in Numbers of Zelophahad’s daughters, who are not to be punished for their father’s sins, but most importantly for us is the story found in the Gospel of John.  Jesus and his disciples see a blind man, and the disciples ask him “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  And what does Jesus say, “Neither this man nor his parents.”  The reason people believe things like this are the result of sin is because we want to make some sense of what is going on.  There is also a large amount of guilt that gets taken on, some of it survivor’s guilt, of why wasn’t it me instead of them, and so we search for something to give meaning and purpose to it, but I do not believe that others are punished for our sins.  But are we punished for our own sins or for corporate sins?

Again this is something that we hear all the time. If an earthquake strikes LA or San Francisco, we’ll hear all about it being God’s punishment for the perceived sins being committed in those cities.  When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, it was the sins of the city that caused it all to happen, and we could go on down the list.  And again there is scriptural witness for this, especially from the prophets.  The reason why ancient Israel is being captured by other empires, the reason why Jerusalem will be taken and the Temple destroyed is because of the sins of the people in not following the will of God.  But do we really believe that New Orleans, or Florida, or other gulf coast states which are prone to be hit by hurricanes are filled with more sinners than Minnesota is which seemed to be spared from Earthquakes and Hurricanes?  Now I’ve lived in Minnesota and so feel safe to say that I don’t think it’s the case, and if there is more sin in New Orleans it’s because all the Minnesotans go down there to do their really good sinning.

Two thousand years ago when we didn’t understand how hurricanes form or plate tectonics worked, this might have been a reasonable explanation, and would certainly explain some things. But today we know that Haiti and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chile are not punished by earthquakes because they are sinful, but instead because they sit along fault lines.  We understand that we live on plates that are moving around, which are part of the creation.  We know that in order to have mountaintop experiences we have to have mountains and they are formed by the collision of these tectonic plates pushing against each other, and when they do that there is a lot of destruction that takes place.  We understand that the center of the earth is full of molten lava, but in order for the earth to cool itself so that the planet doesn’t explode, that lava rises to the surface where it cools and then sinks back down, cooling the planet itself, and sometimes that lava moves all the way to the surface and a volcano is formed or explodes.  We can still see this process taking place in Hawaii as the islands are continuing to be formed.

But let me put one final nail in the coffin on the idea that these things happen because of sin, or as punishment for sin.  First, it’s often said that God has to punish us for things we do wrong, because that’s what good parents do.  I certainly punish my daughters when they have done something wrong, and sometimes they don’t fully understand all the reasons, and so doesn’t God do the same?  Well here is the big difference.  When my daughters are in trouble and are being punished, they know exactly what they are being punished for.  God does not do that for us, our punishment could be for one of any numerous transgressions we have done wrong.  If I was to just go up to my daughter and spank them or send them to a timeout without telling them why they were being punished, you would rightfully question my parenting skills, and worse if I was to do something to them, like inject them with cancer or aids or paralyze them, you would rightfully think me a monster and put me in jail for a very long time, but that is the very thing that we say that God does to us and to others all the time, so what is the difference?  I’ll tell you there isn’t a difference, and God doesn’t do it.

But as Christians here is the biggest problem with this argument.  If God punishes us or others for sin, then what is the purpose and role of Christ and the cross?  If God still punishes us for sin, then Christ’s sacrifice was meaningless, because it obviously did not do any good.  It has not reconciled us with God; Christ did not bring salvation to the world, because Christ did not bring forgiveness!  If we are to take our understanding of the purpose, the mission and the results of Christ and the cross seriously then we have to abolish forever the idea that God continues to punish us or the world for its sins.  God doesn’t do that because of the cross.  If other religious traditions want to make that claim about God, they can, but as Christians for us to make that claim says that everything we have been taught and believed is a total sham, that Christ’s sacrifice for us was not sufficient and does not apply for all time, that God still needs to collect his pound of flesh.  But that is not the Christian witness.  Christ died for our sins, the price has already been paid, God doesn’t collect any more.

The answer most often given now for why bad things happen is that everything happens for a reason, that absolutely everything in the world planned out and that nothing happens without it being a part of God’s overall plan, or at the very least in contributing to God’s plan.  So no matter what happens, from someone getting cancer, to plane crashes, to infants dying, it is all part of God’s plan, and it all makes sense in some way even if we cannot understand how.  I’m sure that all of us have at least heard this idea presented before, and some of us may believe it.  There are lots of reasons given as analogies to explain this, but one of the best known is that the universe is like a rug or a tapestry.  This idea was popularized by the author Thornton Wilder, who said that all we see is the bottom of the tapestry, which has strings of various lengths and it appears random and haphazard, as if there is no real rhyme or reason, but God sees the front of the tapestry which is this beautiful image and so each of us plays a role in the beauty of the whole, and to be a part of that we sort of have to accept what happens to us as the part of that whole.  It’s a nice thought, and a nice image, and perhaps it brings comfort to some people, but I am not one of them.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you can see a series of seven tapestries known collectively as The Hunt of the Unicorn.  They are widely regarded as the greatest tapestries ever created, and thus one of the greatest works of art as well.  They were probably created in the 16th century, but no one knows for sure, they might have been done in Brussels, but no one knows for sure, and it’s possible they were made for the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Louis XII of France, but no one knows for sure.  One of the greatest masterpieces ever made is shrouded in mystery, but there was still one surprise that no one expected.  In 1998, the tapestries were taken down so that some conservation work could be performed .

At some point, linen backings had been added to the tapestries to protect them and also to help support them so they could be hung, but the backings had become brown and brittle with age, and so they were going to be removed and replaced.  But as they removed the backings, what they found astonished the conservators.  Because instead of finding the backs looking like the image given by Thornton Wilder, instead what they found was a mirror image of the front, but done in different colors from the front.  The tapestries were basically two different tapestries woven into one.  It turns out they were even more amazing than anyone had known about for centuries.  If God is weaving a tapestry that is what I imagine God’s tapestry looks like, and that we not only participate in it, but that we can also see it before our eyes.

But even though this idea that everything happens for a reason and that God is responsible might be the most popular reasoning given for our question of why bad things happen, it is also the least biblical.  While it might be used to explain natural phenomenon, although as we already discussed even that is a stretch with modern understanding, it cannot be used to explain human behavior and why we do bad things to ourselves and to each other.  All we have to do is look at scripture to see time and time and time again that God is not in control of what is happening because people are constantly doing things that God does not want them to do.  We can start with Adam and Eve and move our way through and we see this is what is happening.  Why does God bring destruction in the flood as recounted in the Noah story?  Because God is totally exasperated at what people are doing.  Why is Jerusalem being destroyed?  Because Israel didn’t do what God wanted.  Scripture continually tells us about all the ways that we disobey God, but it also tells us about the ways that people remain faithful even in the midst of suffering.

But let’s just say for a moment that God is in control of everything and that everything happens because God, at the very least, allows it to happen.  That means that a daughter who is sexually molested by her father, that’s part of God’s plan.  An infant who is born with a genetic disease and dies shortly after birth, that is part of God’s plan.  The kindergartener’s who were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary, God wanted them to die, it was part of God’s plans.  That what Hitler did was not some massive tragedy, or maybe not even evil, because it was part of God’s plans.  God needed 11 million people to die in concentration camps, and maybe at the end of time we’ll all be told why.  If God caused it, allowed it to happen, then that means that God willed it to happen.  God wrote this piece into your life story.  Is that really what we believe?

In responding to this very claim, a woman whose infant died at the age of six weeks said, “There is no way that the death of an innocent six-week old… is part of some master plan.  And if it is then I’m simply not interested in the God that has that plan.”  I agree.  If that is the God who created the universe then I will put down my Bible, fold up my degrees and hand in my ordination, because that is not a God I can believe in, and it’s certainly not a God who is worthy of worship and praise.  As Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his masterful work When Bad Things Happen to Good People said, “To try to explain the Holocaust, or any suffering, as God’s will is to side with the executioner rather than with his victim, and to claim that God does the same.”

We are told that we are made in God’s image, so where does our sense of justice, of righteousness, of kindness, of generosity, of mercy come from?  Where do we get our sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of decency and virtue, but from God?  So how can we possibly say that we find the holocaust, or the death of a kindergartner through random and senseless violence evil and repugnant unless God too finds them evil and repugnant?  How can we cry out to God in the midst of our pain if God doesn’t have any qualms with our pain, and in fact is the one who inflicted it upon us?  Is it possible that we have a better and more just sense of right and wrong or good and evil than God does?  I think that’s what we say when we say that God is responsible for everything, and that it is all part of God’s plan, that our understanding of good and evil are not complete.  I reject that idea, while I might not understand true justice, mercy, kindness, or righteousness, I know that my understanding of them is just a fraction of what God’s is and God guides me in my understanding.

I do not believe for even one minute that my brother’s cancer was given to him by God.  I do not believe for even one minute that the children of Sandy Hook died because it was God’s will.  I do not believe that the 316,000 people killed in the earthquake in Haiti, or the 283,000 killed by the tsunami in South Asia, were killed because it was God’s will.  When the Rev. William Sloan Coffin’s son was killed in an automobile accident, in an attempt to comfort him, and perhaps also to defend God, Coffin was told that “it it God’s will,” and Coffin thundered, “The hell it is.  When my boy was killed, God was the first who cried.”    The God that I believe in, the God that I know and read about in scripture, and the God that I worship knows what it is like to lose a son to senseless violence.  He knows what it is like to hear his son cry out in the midst of pain and suffering, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” and he knows the pain of watching his son take his last breath, because we are told that when that happened that the sun’s light failed and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two and I believe that that was God’s cry of pain and anguish.

But, even though we might say that everything happens for a reason, we don’t actually live our lives as if it’s true.  Because if it’s true, why do we ever go to a doctor to get better, if it’s God’s will then we will either get better or we won’t?  Why do we go to war to stop the Hitler’s of the world?  After all what they are doing is God’s will, so why are we trying to stop it?  Why do we wear seat belts, or even more why do we drive safely at all?  Why not just drive like maniacs because if it’s God’s will for us to live or die, then it’s not dependent upon what we do or don’t do?  Or more importantly for us as Christians, if everything is God’s will then we do we bother to pray, because any prayer that we lift up is just interfering with God’s plans?  With everything being God’s plan and being preordained, then prayer, which we will look at next week, is nothing more than a bunch of hot air thrown out to a God who is completely indifferent to us and to the world.

I suspect that deep down most of us do not really believe that everything is God’s plan.  As United Methodists, or at least as people who subscribe to Wesleyan theology, we also believe in free will, and that we have the ability to do God’s will and the ability not to do God’s will, and when we don’t do God’s will then bad things tend to happen.  We have within us the capacity to commit acts of absolute evil, but we also have within us the possibility to create acts of absolute beauty and love as well, but the choice lies within us.

We are told that at the beginning of creation, that everything was formless, that it was chaos, and that out of the chaos God created the earth and the heavens.  I am of the belief that creation is not done, and I see that every day I wake up.  I need look no further than my daughters to see creation still taking place, although I can see it in other places as well, and that means that there is still chaos in the world, which means that bad things happen, things that God does not ordain to happen, but which happen nonetheless.  Albert Einstein once famously said that his God did not play dice with the universe, and so he spent his life trying to disprove portions of quantum mechanics, but he was not successful.  There is even now a field of science which studies chaos theory.  This answer may be totally unsatisfactory to some of you, and obviously because of time I did not answer all concerns or all ideas, and we’ll try and touch on some of them in the next two weeks.  But here is the good news for those of you who think that what I just said is a heresy because everything is God’s will, you can’t be mad at me because it was obviously God’s will to say what I said.  And let me also say that I am not saying that God is not involved in the world, because I would not be standing here before you if God had not muddled in my life and called me into the ministry.

But here is the ultimate point: While God is not responsible for all the things we go through, the one thing we can be sure of is that God is with us as we go through them.  When we get rid of God because of our suffering or the suffering of others, we have not changed the reality of that suffering, all we have done is get rid of the only source of hope and strength and peace and assurance and healing that can be found in the midst of those events and God can bring something good out of the midst of tragedy, suffering and turmoil, not because God caused it, but because God walks with us through it.  God will be with us through everything that goes on in our lives, that is the promise we receive from God.  But today the last word comes from Rabbi Harold Kushner, who I already quoted from earlier.  His first son died of progeria, or early aging disease, at the age of 14, and he writes of the events that affect our lives, “These events do not reflect God’s choices.  They happen at random, and random is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God’s creative light has not yet penetrated.  And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”

The Ten Commandments As An Idol

There have been lots and lots of debates in the past decade or more about the display of the Ten Commandments at courthouses and other public buildings.  I noticed yesterday that the courthouse in the closest large town, which is where we go for shopping, etc., has the Ten Commandments outside of it.  I had never noticed this before.  As you enter into town there is also a large billboard with the Ten Commandments on it (it's a very conservative area).

There are lots of problems with the displays, not the least of which is the irony that most of them were placed not as a religious basis for law, but instead as publicity for Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments.  The other problem is that there is not agreement on what the ten actually are, and so to post them in any form has a specific theological bent.

But the question that hit me yesterday as I saw them and thought about the Exodus story was whether we have made these tablets into another idol?  If so it is a clear violation of the very things we are supposed to be upholding.  What made me think this was the story of the golden calf found in Exodus 32.  While Moses is up on the mountain, the people ask Aaron to make them gods for them to worship as they don't know what has happened to Moses.  When God sees what they are doing God orders Moses to go down to the people, and Moses carries with him the two stone tablets with the law on them to see what is going on.

"As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.  He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it." (Ex 32:19-20 NRSV)

In response to seeing the people worshipping an idol Moses breaks the tablets!  Now it could be that he did it simply because he was so mad he just threw them down, but I also think it's possible he threw them down in anger because he realized the people might make of them an idol as well.  That because they were written "with the finger of God" that the people might begin to worship them as being God instead of as something which points to God.  Did he fear that as soon as he went back up on the mountain that they would give allegiance to the tablets, like they did to the calf, and forget about God?  Then I wonder if we haven't done the same?  Is it time to break our tablets so that we can start focusing on what is truly important, and that is the worship not of laws and things in public spaces, but of God?

As a Christian I will have to admit that I am always a little puzzled by so many other Christians getting so upset about the display of the ten commandments.  When Jesus is asked by someone which commandments he should keep Jesus says`You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matthew 19:17-19, NRSV, also found in Mark 10:17-23.)  This led Gregg Easterbrook to recommend a compromise positions of posting the "six commandments."  (And if you aren't reading Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback posts on ESPN you should be.)

But even more important for me is is a later interaction in Matthew: "and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’" (Matthew 22:34-40, NRSV)

Now I don't think we should be hanging this up in courtrooms or on the lawns, but I understand that this is what we are called to do and to be as Christians.  Someone I know was recently  the guest preacher at another church and he was asked to preach on the Ten Commandments, which he was happy to do.  But I would have asked why?  Then I would have preached on this passage and expounded on what this means, including Luke's telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which proceeds from the question "but who is my neighbor?"

Have we missed the heart of what is going on and made the Ten Commandments an idol?  I think we have and it's time we stopped focusing on them and instead focusing on what we have actually been called to do which is to proclaim the Kingdom, for the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, and to go into the world loving God and neighbor and making disciples for Christ, or as we United Methodists say, "Make disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world."

Suing the NFL, Who's Next?

Yesterday it was announced that the family of Junior Seau has filed suit against the NFL claiming that they are partly responsible for his death from suicide.  Examination of his brain found that he suffered from CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) which means that he had significant brain damage.

Seau's family joins more than 3500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the NFL for what it knew about brain damage, but covered up.  The NFL is making great strides on awareness about concussions, not nearly enough, but they do get credit for what the have done.  But just a few years ago, when there was clear evidence to the contrary, the NFL was claiming that there were not long-term consequences from concussions.

But, what makes Seau a different case from others is that he had never been diagnosed with a concussion, so this appears to be simply the case of the cumulative damage he sustained from hits to the head, or perhaps he was cuncussed and it was either missed or ignored.  I have written a lot about concussions and football in the past, but what doctors are finding is that it is really not the one time concussion that pose a problem but the cumulative effects of hit after hit that is potentially causing the problem.

What's worse is that CTE has been found in the brains of some teenagers and those in their early 20s who had played football.  Now this sample size is nowhere close enough to draw any definitive conclusions, but it certainly does raise significant concerns, which leads me to the question of this post.

I'm wondering why his family is limiting it to just the NFL?  I understand they have deeper pockets then most, but what about the University of Southern California where he played college football?  They are an institution of higher education with a medical school, so what did they know about head trauma and what did they cover up to the detriment of their athletes?  Or what about Oceanside High School?  Or what about Pop Warner football?

I think it is only a matter of time before Pop Warner Football, at the very least, gets named in a class action suit and maybe the NCAA.  This may happen with NFL players, but is more likely to come from families whose sons never played professional football but who sustained brain damage from just the routine hits that come from being a part of the game.

When this happens then I believe we will begin to see significant changes and movement because while the NFL can duck and cover for a long long time, because they have the resources to do so, I highly doubt that Pop Warner, or American Youth Football, will be able to sustain a long, drawn-out court battle.  And when the group where the majority of people actually play football, and which is also a lot less regulated and without doctors on the sidelines to pay attention to these things, then football culture will have to change to accommodate new realities, or it will disappear all together.

Hey Phil, It's Time To Get A New Accountant

On Monday, professional golfer Phil Mickelson complained about the taxes he was paying and said that if they didn't change some "drastic" action would need to be taken.  Of course his only course of action would appear to be to stop making so much money, and retire from golf.  But what he said was that he was paying 62% of his income in federal and state taxes, and that was just too much.

When I heard that number, my first thought was not "oh, poor Phil," but instead, there is someone who needs to hire a new accountant and tax attorney.  Even living in a high tax state like California, there is absolutely no way that Phil should be paying taxes that are that high.   Fifty years ago he might have been paying that much, but it's really hard to do today.

As we have seen from recent debates, there are very very few wealthy people paying anywhere close to that number.  I won't say that the number is zero, but it has to be very very small.  Having worked with some people with very large incomes, and seeing what they were writing off their taxes, or having their companies pay for, I know that is not the case.  So what is Phil's accountant doing?  Not much if you ask me and he should immediately find a new one.

Mickelson has since backed off his remarks and "apologized" for making them, because it turns out he's realized that people don't want to hear wealthy people complain about taxes.  According to Forbes, Mickelson is the second highest paid golfer behind Tiger Woods.  Last year he earned around $45 million dollars.  Even if he paid 62% in taxes, which I highly doubt, that still means he took home more than $17 million.  I know my heart bleeds for him, how about yours?

Of course what I would like Mickelson to address is the fact that he received his college education for free at Arizona State University, a  public school, and his father was trained for his career as a commercial pilot using tax payers money since he began as a naval aviator.  So, Phil, how exactly are those things paid for except through taxes?  Was it okay for others to pay for that for you, but you don't feel it's right to pay for that for others?

I know he won't ever answer those questions, so he should simply take my advice and change the team responsible for his money because it is clear that they have no idea what they are doing.

Update:  Some reporters actually decided to do their job and investigate this further, and found that at most Mickelson would pay 51% in taxes.  The first source I used also appears to have underestimated Mickelson's earnings.  According to this article he took in around $61 million, not $45.  So if these numbers are correct the least that he made last year was $29.8 million.  The poor man, how is he ever going to be able to feed his family?

Why?: God After Auschwitz

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  We began a new sermon series on the questions of why. The text was Psalm 91:

I know that there are some people who can tell you exactly which each of the Psalms are about, and what psalm you should read for just about any occasion, but I am not one of those people.  I came across the psalm because it is one that Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens promotes, and last week after the Ravens beat the Denver Broncos he was giving thanks to God for giving him the talent, which is okay, and for giving the Ravens the victory, which I have some problems with.  Of course as he was saying this Peyton Manning was walking away, and I turned to Linda and said that God must like the Ravens more than he likes Peyton Manning, although since Denver unceremoniously got rid of Tim Tebow maybe God was indeed punishing them.  But far too many people are under the greatly mistaken belief that if you believe in Christ, that if you do what God wants you to do and are faithful that our lives with be sunshine and lollipops.  That is certainly what the Psalm that we just heard seems to imply: Believe in God and everything will be grand, we will have no worries, God will take care of everything and we will be eternally protected from anything going wrong.  But when we read the 91st Psalm we know that it doesn’t ring true.  When we look around we don’t see only the wicked being punished, and I use that word lightly, but instead we find ourselves asking why do bad things happen to good people.

And there were two stories from the past few weeks that prove this point that have left two different churches rocked to their core.  From the outside, Harriet Deison appeared to have the perfect life.  Born into one of Dallas’ oldest, wealthiest and most respected families, she married her college sweetheart Pete, who became a Presbyterian minister, with whom she had two daughters, who had given her nine grandchildren.  In addition to her work with the church, she was well known and respected in the Dallas gardening community, she was a judge for the garden club of America, but she also battled crushing episodes of depression for much of her life, and it was in one of those bouts of depression that she went to a gun store on the outskirts of Dallas, bought a gun, then went out to the parking lot and became a victim of suicide.  Leaving behind a mourning family, community and lots and lots of questions.

And then there was Rev. Terry Greer, pastor of a large United Methodist Church in Alabama, who is accused of shooting his wife to death last week, before shooting his daughter, who was able to wrestle the gun from him and flee from the house, probably saving her own life.  Rev. Greer then took a kitchen knife and proceeded to stab himself in the chest and neck multiple times trying to take his own life.  Leaving another community shocked and full of questions, trying to figure out exactly how something like this could happen and where God is in all of this.  Where is God in the midst of tragedy and turmoil, in the midst of suffering and pain, in the midst of disaster and despair, in the midst of the darkness and heartbreak that surrounds us?

When we hear about yet another school shooting we wonder why six year olds are being killed.  When we hear about a natural disaster hitting someplace, sometimes killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions more, we ask questions.  When we hear about the 25,000 people who dies of starvation each day, including 17,000 children, we wonder why this takes place in a world that has enough food to feed everyone.  When we hear about the 2,000 children who die every day because they contract malaria from a mosquito bite, which could be solved with a net which costs only ten dollars, we wonder where God can be in all this.  If God is good, and kind, and loving, and just, and all the things that we claim about God, then how can there be evil in the world, how can there be pain and suffering?

This is known as theodicy, and so we are going to be spending the next four weeks trying to deal with some of these issues, trying to answer some of the why questions.  The answer I give to these questions is going to be very different from where some of you are, and certainly some of the answers typically given by the church.  So like when we covered the book of Revelation, I am going to ask you to listen to what I say with an open mind.  For some of you it will provide you with an answer you might have been thinking but had never before heard and it will provide you with some comfort.  For others it might rock what you had been taught and thought, and maybe leave you a little unsure of what to believe anymore.  And a third group might just get angry and simply say, it can’t be that way, I refuse to believe it, and that’s okay.  But if you are in one of the last two groups I do ask that you still pay attention and take to heart so that you might be able to better respond to those who are dealing with these questions in a different way and be very cognizant of what you are saying to them, or how what you are saying can and often is interpreted by others which leads them not into relationship with God, but instead away from God.

Langdon Gilkey has said that “the reality of evil in our world is the greatest intellectual threat to the convincing power of Christian theology….”  And I would add that this is true because the answers that have been given by the church simply don’t work anymore when seen through the lens of the Holocaust.  I can tell you that in my work with youth and young adults, that this question of theodicy, how can there be a God of love and have the suffering in the world, is one of, if not the, question that leads them away from the church.  When they begin hearing about six million Jews, reportedly God’s chosen people, along with another five million others who were killed in concentration camps, or the twenty million Russians who were killed in the war, they want some answers, and to be honest the answers that the church has typically given just don’t work anymore.

In his seminal work, Night, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Eli Wiesel tells of his experiences as one of the few people to have survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.  One of the stories he recounts was of an execution that he and his fellow prisoners were forced to watch.  As they were coming back from work, they saw the gallows had been set up along to execute three prisoners including a young boy who had been accused in a plot of stealing some items.

“The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs.  In unison the nooses were placed around their necks.  “Long live liberty!” shouted the two men.  But the boy was silent.  “Where is merciful God, where is He?”  someone behind me was asking.  At the signal the three chairs were tipped over.  Total silence in the camp.  On the horizon, the sun was setting….  Then came the march past the victims.  The two men were no longer alive.  Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish.  But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…  and so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.  And we were forced to look at him at close range.  He was still alive when I pass him.  His tongue still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.  Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?”  and from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is?  This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”  That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”

Every time I read that quote, I am not quite sure what Eli Wiesel means by his claim that God is on the gallows.  The first interpretation could be that God is with us through everything and so God is there with those who were being executed, just as God was there with those who continued on in the camps.  The second interpretation could be that God is dead.  That this manifestation of evil, the suffering being inflicted on those in the concentration camps, has killed God, or at the very least rendered our understanding of God completely and totally obsolete, and either our understanding of God has to change or we have to get rid of the idea of God altogether.  I think that maybe Wiesel meant both, because for a while he did indeed turn away from his faith (death of father), but he has since returned although his comprehension of and understanding of God has forever been changed, as it must, just as it does for us when we undergo some tragedy or suffering that brings us to our knees crying out to God and asking why or where is God?

But for an ever increasing proportion of the population the answer given by religion, or at least by the church is no longer convincing.  In order to begin to answer that question we have to start with the reality that it’s okay not only to question God about that, but even to be angry and yell at God about these types of situations.  One time I said that during worship and afterwards someone asked me whether I really thought it was okay not only to question God, but even worse to be mad and yell at God, and I told her that not only did I think it was appropriate but it might even be necessary.  She disagreed.  But how can we say that we are in relationship with God if we are not being honest with God about what is really going on in our lives and what we are thinking and feeling?  And do we honestly think that God is not big enough or strong enough to deal with us being mad at God?  If God can’t handle it, then God is not really God.  In addition, what we find throughout scripture is people crying out to God, people questioning God, and people seeking answers to their questions about why people, or why they, suffer.  We need look no further than Jesus’ cry on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus is actually quoting the 22nd Psalm here.  The Psalms are the longest book in the bible, and 1/3 of all the Psalms are complaint psalms, or psalms of lamentation.  Listen to some other lines from the 22nd Psalm, or this from the 13th Psalm.  The scriptures, and in particular the Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament, is filled with people not only questioning God, and crying out to God, but also a search for answers.  The longest of the prophets is Jeremiah, known as the crying prophet, who are traditionally wrote the book of Lamentations, and if he did indeed write both then the most writings by one person in scripture are of this person crying out to God.  Then, of course, there is the book of Job, widely regarded as one of the greatest epic poems in literature, in which the main character is a righteous man who is afflicted with tragedy and suffering, and in which Job seeks answers to his questions about why he is suffering when he has been faithful and righteous.  But as it turns out there is not one consistent answer given about why there is suffering in the world, and what we have to remember is that the Bible is a document that is in conversation with itself, and because it’s a conversation it is not universal in its witness to the answers to the questions we ask.

But the answers that are sort of typically given are that everything happens for a reason, that God is in control of everything, and so things happen because God wants them to happen, even if we can’t discern the reasons why.  Or things happen because there is evil in the world, often personified in the person of Satan.  Or things happen because of sin in the world.  I have presided over funerals for an 18-month-old boy, for people who lived with advanced Alzheimer’s for long periods of time, for a teenager who died of a drug overdose, for people who died from suicide, for a man who went into the emergency room three days before his only child was to with a splitting headache and less than a month later he was dead of a brain tumor.  I have worked with people who suffer from chronic pain, those who have been sexually and physically abused, as children and as adults, people who have been left by a spouse, parents who have lost children,  and people whose worlds have been turned upside down, and none of the answers we typically hear, or that we give, are satisfactory to me or to increasing millions of people.  We have to talk about God differently than we ever have because of the reality of Auschwitz, and so next week we will look at those answers and I will tell you what I find in scripture for why there is suffering and pain in the world.

But the last word for today comes from another survivor of Auschwitz whose words are recorded in a book entitled The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors.  He says, “It never occurred to me to question God’s doings or lack of doings while I was an inmate of Auschwitz, although of course I understand others who did….  I was no less or no more religious because of what the Nazis did to us; and I believe my faith in God was not undermined in the least.  It never occurred to me to associate the calamity we were experiencing with God, to blame him, or to believe in him less or cease believing in him at all because he didn’t come to our aid.  God doesn’t owe us that, or anything.  We owe our lives to him…”  May it be so my brothers and sisters.  Amen.

How Many People Have You Brought To Christ?

At a recent clergy gathering, one of the other preachers said that the problem with the church is that we aren’t asking the right questions.  He said that the only question we should be asked is how many people we have brought to Christ this year?  When he said that everyone sort of turned their heads and looked at him sort of funny, not sure what he was actually saying.  Someone asked him to repeat himself and so he said his question again.

At this second response, I said “are you asking how many adult professions of faith we’ve had?”  And he said yes.  To which I told him “Well, I’ve had five adult professions of faith, but I am not responsible for any of them, and so I guess I would say I haven’t brought anyone to Christ.”  I then followed up by saying “there were hundreds or maybe thousands of people before me who did all the work, and then there was the conviction brought by the Holy Spirit.  None of this was my doing, I just happened to be the one who was there when they decided to make their commitment to God.  And so if you ask how many people I brought to Christ, the answer is none, because the hard work was done before me, but if you ask how many people I’ve had make a profession of faith this year, it’s five.  But those are two very different questions.”

I don’t think he was really happy with my answer, but something I find among my more conservative or evangelical colleagues is a blindness not only to see the work of others, but more importantly not to see the work of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes it even seems that they doubt the work of the Holy Spirit all together with their emphasis on all the work they must do, and have done, to get someone to “come to Christ.”  As a result they take all the credit for something I don’t think they can or should take credit for.

There is best illustrated by someone I know who is routinely going around to different areas of the country preaching “revivals” and putting more notches in his belt, which he is certain to tell you all about.  The problem is he has so many notches that his belt is bound to fall apart anytime and then I wonder what he is going to do.

Lance Armstrong Confesses And I Say "Yawn"

All the reports are saying that in an interview with Oprah scheduled to be broadcast tonight that Lance Armstrong will admit to using performance enhancing techniques in order to make himself a better cyclist.  My response: "Yawn. What else is on?"  Really?  Why do we care about this?  And more importantly why are we shocked?

Yes I know that he has defended himself vigorously for a long long time, but so has Roger Clemens and most people don't believe him.  Is it because he beat cancer?  He has certainly done a lot for cancer research and has been an inspiration to millions, and that can't be taken away.  But again why are we surprised by this?  Cycling has to be one of the most corrupt and drug using sport out there.  I think the last time the Tour de France had a winner who wasn't under suspicion was when the Wright brothers' bicycle shop was sponsoring a team.

There is a lot of speculation of whether this confession will make any difference in public opinion.  The usual cliche that Americans are a forgiving people is being trotted out, but ask Pete Rose, Mark McGwire and Marion Jones, among other notable examples, how that forgiveness thing worked for them. Will Lance ever be able to recover his glory days?  Absolutely not, and his confession won't have any impact on that.  He lost those days when the USADA declared victory and stripped him on his titles.

But once again, just like in baseball, this tirade and animosity seems to be driven by sports reporters more than the general public.  They seem upset that they were lied to and so want to "get him back."  It's a good thing they went into covering sports rather than politics, because if they flew into a tirade every time a politician lied all we would ever see would be tirades.  I think it's time for them to just get over it.

Armstrong is just another example of where we live in sports, all sports, these days. The difference is he overcame a lot more than most other athletes to get there. No athlete is ever as bad or as good as they are seen and portrayed and sports reporters need to understand this fact and stop believing the stories that they themselves are pushing.

A Baptized People

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 3:15-17, 21-22:

This week I was talking with Dan Boyd who is the pastor of the church in Carlsbad, and we were catching up on how things were going and I was telling him about the work we have had done here following the hail damage from the summer, and he told me that they were having to have some work done as well.  As you probably know, Carlsbad is famous for their caves, and during the summer they have bats which migrate up from Mexico and make the caves their homes, but apparently not all the bats like the caves, and so some of them had decided to make the church their home and their droppings and comings and goings were doing some damage, which they were having to fix. But he said the even bigger problem was trying to get them to stop coming into the church.

They had brought someone in who trapped them and took them out, but they came right back, so then they tried noise and light and everything they could think of, but the bats kept making the church their home, and so as all pastors do when they don’t know where else to go, Dan finally called his district superintendent to let her know what was happening and to get her advice, and Jane said she would think about it and call him back.  Well a few days later Jane called back and said she had thought long and hard about it and had a  solution she knew would work because it had worked in the churches she had served, and so she told Dan that what he needed to do was to go into the attic where the bats were and tell them about Jesus and the gospel and then baptize them and then he would be sure to never see them again.

On the first Sunday after Epiphany every year the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus.  The Baptism represents the beginning of Jesus ministry in all four of the gospel accounts.  In Mark it begins talking about John the Baptist and what he was doing, and then Jesus comes to be baptized.  In Matthew after we told that Mary, Joseph and Jesus have returned from Egypt, he tells us that Jesus was baptized.  The first thing to happen in the Gospel of John, after his introduction about who Jesus is, the word made flesh, he has John the Baptist making his confession about Jesus being the messiah and baptizing him, and then we have today’s baptismal story from Luke.  Of the gospels, this one from Luke is probably the least familiar, it has all the familiar pieces of the story, John out in the wilderness doing his thing, the call to repentance, John’s proclamation about Jesus, and then the baptism.  But Luke has a couple of interesting twists in his telling.

The first is that he is the only one who recounts Jesus praying, when the Holy Spirit descends in a form like a dove, and God’s voice calls from heaven “You are my son, the beloved.”  I think it is crucial to note here, especially for the Gospel of Luke, that this is the first time that we have heard God speaking in the gospels.  In all the announcement stories, to Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, the Shepherds, it is not God who speaks, but a heavenly messenger.  But when Jesus is baptized it is God the Father who speaks.  It is God who makes this proclamation to the world about Jesus, it is God who speaks, it is God who claims Jesus as the beloved, in whom God “is well pleased.”  When we think about the role that baptism plays, and what it does for us, I don’t think we can emphasize that enough, that it is God who claims Jesus, and it is God who claims us too.  In the waters of baptism God says to us “this is my son” or “this is my daughter,” in them I am well pleased.  When we receive the waters of baptize God claims us as beloved children, God claims all of us.

And it is this collective aspect of baptism that strikes me when I read or hear Luke’s version.  I encourage you to go home today and read the other accounts of Jesus’ baptism which are found in the first few chapters of all of the other gospels, and in them, while there are clearly other people around when Jesus goes into the Jordan to be baptized, their stories are more about Jesus then the crowds, they don’t even really need to be present because all the interactions are between John and Baptist and Jesus, and then of course God.  But here Jesus and John don’t even interact, and we are told “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus had also been baptized” and was then praying.  Jesus is just one among many who were baptized that day.  And notice that it does not say that Jesus was baptized into the United Methodist Church, and some others were baptized Roman Catholic, and others were baptized Southern Baptist. 

Now that may seem obvious and maybe even a little silly to say, but I don’t think it is because how many times have you heard someone claim about what is acceptable or not when it comes to baptism?  Maybe even some of you have been told that your baptism is not valid and that you need to be baptized?  I know there are people in this town who would say that I am not baptized because I was baptized as an infant.  Even more, some would claim that you are not baptized unless you have been baptized in their church.  When we make these arguments we convey a fundamental misunderstanding of baptism because these arguments move the saving action from God to us.  God’s actions are no longer important because everything is dependent on who is saying the words, where they are said, and what is being done when they are being said.  But remember that baptism is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  The grace is conveyed by God, not by us.  The forgiveness is given by God, not by us.  The adoption is given by God, not by us.  God does not depend on us to make God effective and efficient, we depend on God.  God is the primary actor in baptism, not us. 

And while we might be baptized by a particular church, we are baptized into Christ and become members of the body of Christ.  The church in its most basic form is the body of the baptized.  The church is not this building, it is not the documents that make us unique, it is not me or whoever is serving as preacher.  The church is the people who make it up.  As we meet to discuss what the future of this congregation looks like, it is incredibly important to remember that the church is the people, the work of the church is the people.  I am not the church, this building is not the church, the leaders are not the church, Jane is not the church, the bishop is not the church.  We are all the church.

After the Baptism of his baby brother in church on Sunday, little Johnny sobbed all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong. Finally, the boy replied, "That minister said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, but I want to stay with you guys."

In addition to remembering that in its most basic form the church is the collection of the baptized, what we also have to remember is what we also received when we are baptized, and that is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is one of the things that Luke emphasizes not just in his gospel but also in Acts.  In the passage we heard from Acts 8 this morning, Peter lays hands on people and invokes the Holy Spirit because they did not receive it at their baptism.  Later in Acts 19 we are told that in Ephesus Paul encountered a group following Jesus, but he finds out that they have been only been baptized into John’s baptism, or a baptism of repentance, and have not heard of the Holy Spirit.  And so Paul Baptized them in the name of Jesus and laid hands upon them and invoked on them the Holy Spirit.  While one of the common images used for the Holy Spirit is the dove, it is another form I would like to highlight, and the one Luke highlights.

John the Baptist says “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming…  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  The reason that the United Methodist symbol has the flame is to represent the Holy Spirit.  And I’m sure there are people who are a lot smarter than me that this already occurred to, but what struck me this week is that with the application of the water of baptism, we receive the fire of the Holy Spirit.  Now normally water puts out fire, but in this case the water causes the fire.  Or to give a different illustration, the Holy Spirit is like a grease fire, and instead of being put out with the waters of baptism, the water instead causes the fire to explode. 

Last week I received a note from someone that said “What can we do to get this church hot?”  At first I thought it was a complaint about the temperature in the sanctuary, but it continued “and make people to want to be a part of this church?”  “What can we do to get this church hot and make people want to be a part of this church?”  The answer to that is that we have to get hot ourselves, we have to burn with the Holy Spirit, and we have to believe that when we receive the Holy Spirit that we receive the power of the Holy Spirit.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, famously said, and you’ve heard me say this before, “I didn’t do anything amazing, I simply set myself on fire and people came out to watch me burn.”  And what happens with fire is that it wants to spread, it doesn’t want to be contained, and when people see others burning with the power of the Holy Spirit, then they too want to burn.  Its contagious and wants to spread.  When you throw water on a grease fire it explodes and spreads and cannot be contained, and that is the initiation and the gift we get when we receive the waters of baptism.

But, as much as water might require the fire of baptism to explode, there is one thing that can kill it and that is when we are SOB.  Notice that I did not say, when we are sobs, but instead  just SOB, which is medical terminology, which means?  Where are my EMT’s?  It means shortness of breath.  Like of oxygen kills a fire just as much as it can kill us, and another manifestation of the Spirit is breath.  In the opening chapter of genesis we are told “the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.”  It hovered there ready to create life in those very waters, and it is ready to create life in us, it is ready to generate fire in us, it is ready to generate power in us, but just because we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit does not mean that we have actually received it.  If we are SOB, then the Spirit is not alive within us, it is not burning in us, and if it’s not burning in us then it won’t be burning in others. 

What fire needs to burn is oxygen, fuel and heat, and so in the words of two different preachers “If you want to set someone on fire, you have to burn a little yourself,” and “a burning heart will soon find for itself a burning tongue.” Say that with me, “If you want to set someone on fire, you have to burn a little yourself,” and “a burning heart will soon find for itself a burning tongue.”  The church has always relied upon tongues of fire from its members to spread the gospel to the world, and it still does, it requires each and everyone of us because “If you want to set someone on fire, you have to burn a little yourself,” and “a burning heart will soon find for itself a burning tongue.”

As we remember our baptism today, we need to remember that through our baptism that we are baptized into the body of Christ and that the church is not the building, it is not the minister, the church is the body of the baptized, it is you and me, and the work of the church is done by us through the power, through the fire, through the breath of the Holy Spirit which is given to us, but which needs to be renewed and re-invited into our lives.  The waters of baptism set the fire of the Holy Spirit ablaze in our lives and in the lives of our communities, but only if we are willing to receive the spirit into our lives and allow the waters to cause the fire to explode in our lives.  How do we make this church hot?  How do we set it on fire so that people will come?  Well “if you want to set someone on fire, you have to burn a little yourself” and “a burning heart will soon find itself a burning tongue.  May it be so my brothers and sisters.  Amen.

Photography As Art?

Let me begin by first making it clear that I do think photography is art, and that some photographers are incredibly talented.  But, as someone once said, one of the problems with most people seeing photography as art is the fact that everyone has a camera and takes photos.  Most of us can't draw or paint or sculpt, and so we see the things that we can't do and understand the gift of art, but almost all of us have a camera and we can push a button and that seems to make a major difference in how people view the medium.

But I do have to say, and this is the point of this post, that some photographers do not do themselves any help in this matter.  After every football game you see the coaches and the players go into the middle to greet each other, and amongst them will be professional photographers taking photos.  But not just any photos, they are holding their cameras up over their heads just snapping away.  Every time I see that I know there are people thinking "Hey, I can hold a camera over my head and snap photos, maybe that's what I should do with my life," and the art of photography takes 10 steps backwards.

It's A Psalm Not a Psalms

I know this is a little nit picky, but it's a personal pet peeve of mine.  Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens was wearing this shirt last Sunday when conducting some of his post game interviews.

From LA Times

In case you can't read it it says "Psalms 91."  The entire group of them are called psalms, just as a group of the balls used for his sport are called footballs, but when it is referring to just one then we remove the "s" to make it singular.  He does not catch a footballs plural, he catches a football  singular (or not as the case may be from his last game), and it is a psalm singular when referring to only one, not a psalm

So let's reiterate one more time.  When you are talking about multiples or about the whole book it is Psalms, but when you are only talking about one it is Psalm.  Singular not plural.