Interrogating God
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
April 29, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
Click here to listen to this sermon
First Reading: “Dirge Without Music” - Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom, I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Second Reading: Job 10, selections
Job is a good man, and he has been visited by many hardships. His friends visit him and are shocked that he dares to complain of his suffering to God. Job shakes them off and cries out, asking why God has visited such suffering upon him. Job says:
“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked?
Your hands fashioned and made me; and now you turn and destroy me. Remember that you fashioned me like clay; and will you turn me to dust again? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?
Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me. You renew your witnesses against me, and increase your vexation toward me; you bring fresh troops against me. “Why did you bring me forth from the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had seen me, and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave. Are not the days of my life few? Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort before I go, never to return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness.”
Job is telling God “I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” He is a good man, and yet bad things are happening to him. His business dries up, his friends betray him. His body sprouts painful boils all over. And then, the worst thing happens: his children die. He must shut away their loving hearts into the hard ground. The pain is too great, and Job is angry at God. He asks God—Why? Why me, God? Why this?
Human nature leads us to ask why. We seek reason and explanation behind everything. Why is the sky blue? Why is life so hard sometimes? Why is there suffering? Why is the question that often finds no satisfactory answer.
This month the shootings at Virginia Tech shocked us, terrified us. Tears came to my eyes as I read about Professor Liviu Librescu, the Holocaust survivor who managed to save his students from the shooter but died doing so. I mourned the loss of so many young people, so full of promise and hope. I remembered the tragedy at Lincoln-Sudbury high school earlier this year. For both schools, violence and death struck the innocent, on the morning of what should have been just another day. We can attach blame to mentally unstable young men, or the institution, but even so—we continue to ask not just why an individual would cause such destruction, but why such things ever happen at all. We cannot approve and we cannot be resigned.
Theodicy is the word for trying to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with a good and omnipotent God. Imagine a triangle. At one tip of the triangle: “God is all powerful.” At the second tip of the triangle: “God is all good.” And at the third tip of the triangle: “Evil exists.” This triangle is called the Inconsistent Triad, and theodicy attempts to somehow make consistent these three inconsistant things.
The late, great Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Cat’s Cradle, created a religion that told its scripture in the form of calypso music. One of the teachings of this religion says:
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
It is human nature to wonder why, just as it is the nature of the tiger to hunt and the nature of the bird to fly. It is also in the tiger’s nature to sleep, the bird’s nature to land, and human nature to create explanations for life’s questions.
Some of the ways man “tell himself he understand” the problem of evil will sound familiar to you:
- One explanation says that we deserve, through our own bad behavior, whatever suffering comes our way. Job, of course, would disagree.
- Another explanation says that God only gives us the burdens we can withstand. Yet all over we see innocent and vulnerable people, including children, being burdened with things that can and do push them to the breaking point.
- Another explanation is that while it may seem that evil is evil, really it is all part of God’s larger plan that we cannot see. This is a speculative answer to a real problem—not a solution at all. Telling someone in pain that the evil that has befallen them is somehow good is a cruel “comfort.”
- Similar to the “God’s plan” theory, others have said that evil is somehow teaching us a lesson we need to learn, that evil is a way that God grows our souls. God is compared to a surgeon, who wields her knife for good. And yet—not all who wield a knife are using it for good, and not all evil and suffering teaches a meaningful lesson. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. “Not every painful thing that happens to us is beneficial.”1
When I was a divinity school student, I spent a summer working as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It seemed like the hardest deaths came in the night, when the hospital was hushed and dim. During my overnights, as the only chaplain in the entire hospital, I truly felt that I was in a “land of gloom and deep darkness, a land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness.” At night, I blessed a small stillborn baby, holding his little form with his two weeping parents. The baby had died in the womb, but the mother still had to go through labor to produce the tiny blue body of her son. At night, I sat silently with a new widow, 26 years old, whose 27 year old non-smoking husband had just died of lung cancer. She screamed and punched the walls. At night, I struggled to find words of comfort for a family whose 19 year old son, soon to be a father himself, had been hit by a car. More and more family members gathered, until the hallways were lined with about 40 people, standing and weeping, no where to sit, nothing to say but why? Why God? Why me, why him, why this, why now?
But it was during the day that I met with a faithful minister in the Salvation Army, a woman who was raising her grandson, was a pillar in her church, and spent her life doing good works. She had survived a surgery to remove cancer in her colon. She was alive, but a colostomy meant her life would never be the same, and she was feeling a deep and abiding sorrow, a grief for the body she had lost. She told me that it was strange to be on the other side of the bed. All her life she had visited the sick and given words of comfort, but now when her friends came to her with those same words of comfort she found herself pushing them away. Their placating, upbeat words only increased her pain.
Job’s comforters also increased his pain. They told him he must have done something wrong to deserve such suffering; they told him that this was all part of God’s plan. In the end, God chastises both Job and his comforters. God challenges Job, essentially saying “could you fight all the wickedness in this world? It’s a hard job and I’m doing the best I can.” According to many scholars, the message of the book of Job is that evil does exist, and God is all good—but God is not all powerful. God does not send suffering and God cannot stop all suffering.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the bestselling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, writes that there is a loss in coming to the conclusion that God is not all powerful. He writes,
It was comforting to believe in an all-wise, all-powerful God who guaranteed fair treatment and happy endings, who reassured us that everything happened for a reason…. But it was comforting the way the religion of Job’s friends was comforting: it worked only as long as we did not take the problems of innocent victims seriously. When we have met Job, when we have been Job, we cannot believe in that sort of God any longer without giving up our own right to feel angry….
… there ought to be a sense of relief in coming to the conclusion that God is not doing this to us. If God is a God of justice and not of power, then God can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. …Our misfortunes are none of God’s doing, and so we can turn to God for help. Our question will not be Job’s question “God, why are you doing this to me?” but rather, “God, see what is happening to me. Can You help me?” We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.2
Parker Palmer, the Quaker writer and teacher, tells about a time he fell into a deep depression. His visitors meant well, but like Job’s comforters they offered sympathy that only provoked more despair. But one friend “had the courage to stand with [him] in a simple and healing way.” This friend, named Bill, having asked Palmer’s permission, came to his house every afternoon, knelt before him and massaged his feet. Palmer writes:
Bill rarely spoke a word. When he did, he never gave advice but simply mirrored my condition. He would say, “I can sense your struggle today,” or “It feels like you are getting stronger.” …
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, “love…consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.” That is the kind of love my friend Bill offered. He never tried to invade my awful inwardness with false comfort or advice; he simply stood on its boundaries, modeling the respect for me …that I myself needed if I were to endure.
Rilke describes a kind of love that neither avoids nor invades a soul’s suffering. It is a love in which we represent God’s love to a suffering person, a God who does not “fix” us but gives us strength by suffering with us. By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.3
At Brigham and Women’s, I visited with the Salvation Army minister every day. She was a wise woman, had lived through so much, and all I could do was be a companion with her in her pain. We prayed together that as one way closed behind her, that a way ahead would open. We prayed that her pain be lessened and that her heartsickness be relieved. I know I didn’t say one profound word in all my time with her. But we held hands, and cried, and she talked, and I listened. In our final conversation, she thanked me for not trying to give her wishful thinking and false easy answers. She thanked me for simply listening. For a new would-be minister, she gave me a powerful lesson that I didn’t have to have the right words to say, because sometimes the right words were no words at all. And before we said goodbye, in our final prayer together, she added the words of ordination. So if the Unitarian thing doesn’t work out, I can always be a minister in the Salvation Army.
Rabbi Harold Kushner writes that he does not mean to make suffering more senseless by saying it is not sent by God. Instead, he suggests that we can give meaning to our suffering. He writes, “The question we should be asking is not ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’ That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be, ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’”4 We do not have to approve. And we do not have to be resigned. We have the choice, the free will, in how we respond.
One sermon is far too little time to look at the problem of evil and undeserved suffering in our lives. If I were to write on this topic every Sunday, I’d have a different sermon each time and never come close to finding an answer. As the poet said, “So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind.” We stand together in shadow and in light. All of us have known suffering, all of us have faced Job’s “land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness.” We have all cried out in anguish the eternal question of why? My hope is that, though the question Why? may still whisper and shout within us, that we can turn to a new question. The question of How. How can we face evil and suffering and make a change? How can we find the courage to continue? How can we comfort and companion others in their suffering?
And so I end with this Sabbath day prayer:
We cannot merely pray to you, O God,
to end war;
For we know that You have made the world
in a way
That we must find our own path to peace.
Within ourselves and with our neighbors.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
to end starvation;
For You have already given us the
resources
With which to feed the entire world,
If we would only use them wisely.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
to root out prejudice;
For You have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people,
If we would only use them rightly.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
to end despair,
For You have already given us the power
To clear away slums and to give hope,
If we would only use our power justly.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
to end disease;
For You have already given us great minds
With which to search out cures and healing,
If we would only use them constructively.
Therefore we pray to You instead, O God,
For strength, determination and will power,
To do instead of just pray,
To become instead of merely to wish.5
May it be so. Amen.
_______________________________________________
- Kushner, 23
- Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 44-45
- Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 63-64
- Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 136
- Jack Riemer, Likrat Shabbat. Adjusted for gender-neutral language.