Tag: Suffering
1 Why, God? A Reflection on Newtown
I started this blog six months ago and the first post then was about another mass shooting. The one in Colorado.
I was in Guatemala until the Sunday before Christmas. I missed both the media coverage and the national grieving that occurred after the Newtown shooting- though I was greeted at the Guatemala City airport with a copy of Prense Libre, the Guatemalan newspaper, whose cover story reflected on why American culture is unique in producing spree killers.
Because I away before the holiday, and missed whatever grieving and theological wrestling my congregation did while I was away, it felt a little odd to return to church on Christmas Eve and celebrate.
I’m only now processing it.
Here’s a theological reflection from the NY Times by Father Kevin O’Neil, Maureen Dowd’s, priest:
When my friend Robin was dying, she asked me if I knew a priest she could talk to who would not be, as she put it, “too judgmental.” I knew the perfect man, a friend of our family, a priest conjured up out of an old black-and-white movie, the type who seemed not to exist anymore in a Catholic Church roiled by scandal. Like Father Chuck O’Malley, the New York inner-city priest played by Bing Crosby, Father Kevin O’Neil sings like an angel and plays the piano; he’s handsome, kind and funny. Most important, he has a gift. He can lighten the darkness around the dying and those close to them. When he held my unconscious brother’s hand in the hospital, the doctors were amazed that Michael’s blood pressure would noticeably drop. The only problem was Father Kevin’s reluctance to minister to the dying. It tears at him too much. He did it, though, and he and Robin became quite close. Years later, he still keeps a picture of her in his office. As we’ve seen during this tear-soaked Christmas, death takes no holiday. I asked Father Kevin, who feels the subject so deeply, if he could offer a meditation. This is what he wrote:
How does one celebrate Christmas with the fresh memory of 20 children and 7 adults ruthlessly murdered in Newtown; with the searing image from Webster of firemen rushing to save lives ensnared in a burning house by a maniac who wrote that his favorite activity was “killing people”? How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?
The killings on the cusp of Christmas in quiet, little East Coast towns stirred a 30-year-old memory from my first months as a priest in parish ministry in Boston. I was awakened during the night and called to Brigham and Women’s Hospital because a girl of 3 had died. The family was from Peru. My Spanish was passable at best. When I arrived, the little girl’s mother was holding her lifeless body and family members encircled her.
They looked to me as I entered. Truth be told, it was the last place I wanted to be. To parents who had just lost their child, I didn’t have any words, in English or Spanish, that wouldn’t seem cheap, empty. But I stayed. I prayed. I sat with them until after sunrise, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking, to let them know that they were not alone in their suffering and grief. The question in their hearts then, as it is in so many hearts these days, is “Why?”
The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger. I remember visiting a dear friend hours before her death and reminding her that death is not the end, that we believe in the Resurrection. I asked her, “Are you there yet?” She replied, “I go back and forth.” There was nothing I wanted more than to bring out a bag of proof and say, “See? You can be absolutely confident now.” But there is no absolute bag of proof. I just stayed with her. A life of faith is often lived “back and forth” by believers and those who minister to them.
Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago.
I believe differently now than 30 years ago. First, I do not expect to have all the answers, nor do I believe that people are really looking for them. Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil. I don’t expect comfort to come from afar. I really do believe that God enters the world through us. And even though I still have the “Why?” questions, they are not so much “Why, God?” questions. We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not.
One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be God’s presence. When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh. They couldn’t explain why he died. Even if they could, it wouldn’t have brought him back. Yet the many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. They held me up to preach at Brian’s funeral. They consoled me as I tried to comfort others. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong.
A contemporary theologian has described mercy as “entering into the chaos of another.” Christmas is really a celebration of the mercy of God who entered the chaos of our world in the person of Jesus, mercy incarnate. I have never found it easy to be with people who suffer, to enter into the chaos of others. Yet, every time I have done so, it has been a gift to me, better than the wrapped and ribboned packages. I am pulled out of myself to be love’s presence to someone else, even as they are love’s presence to me.
I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.
4 What to Say When There’s Nothing to Say
Here’s this weekend’s sermon on Job. Two notes so this makes sense. I’ve always thought the beautiful poetry of the Book of Job hides the scandal of Job’s emotions and masks the piety of his friends. For that reason, in this sermon, I rewrote the friends’ dialogue to make it sound more contemporary. Additionally, I asked two actors to reenact the dialogues during the course of the sermon. Thanks to Bailey and Elliott!
—————————————————–
Many months ago, around supper time, I was in the Emergency Room, standing behind the paper curtain, holding a mother, who wasn’t much older than me, as she held her dead little boy, who wasn’t much older than my boys.
She wasn’t crying so much as gasping like you do when you’ve sunk all the way to the bottom of the deep end and have just come up for air.
She was smoothing her boy’s cow lick with her hand.
Every so often she would shush him, as though if she could just calm him down she might convince him to come back.
It was Opening Day. That afternoon my boys and I had gone to see the Nats lose to the Braves.
I still had my hat on and popcorn crumbs in my sweater and mustard stains on my pants. I didn’t look like pastor or a priest.
So when the mother got up and went into the hallway to try and get a hold of her husband and left me with her boy and when the chaplain stepped in to the room and saw the hat on my head and the mustard stains on my clothes and the tears in my eyes, she didn’t think I was a pastor or a priest.
She just thought I was part of the boy’s family.
She put her hand on my shoulder and, after a few moments, she said to me: ‘It’s going to be alright.’
‘What?’ I said, stunned.
I’ve been a pastor for 11 years.
And in that time I can’t tell you how many ER’s and funeral homes I’ve been in, how many hospital bedsides and gravesides I’ve stood at and heard well-meaning Christians say things they thought were comforting but were actually the opposite.
Even destructive.
I know people in this congregation who’ve been told- by other people in this congregation- that God must’ve given them cancer as punishment or to bring them closer to God.
I know people here who’ve been told by well-intentioned Christians that their spouse’s or their child’s death must be part of God’s plan.
I know people who’ve written God off entirely because some Christian tried to console them with talk of ‘God’s will.’
Most of us- we don’t know what to say when there’s nothing to say.
Job loses every one of his children. He loses his health, his last dime and maybe even his marriage.
For days Job is mute with disbelief.
But when Job finally does speak, his friends aren’t ready for the pain he voices. They can’t go there.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born! My life would’ve been better if I’d died in my mother’s womb. Why did God give knees for me to rest on or a mother to nurse me if God was just going to do this to me now?”
Anger is almost always what follows grief’s numbed silence.
Yet, ironically, anger is probably the most taboo emotion among Christians.
Because anger doesn’t just claim that this situation is painful, anger claims that this situation isn’t right– that what has happened should not have happened.
That kind of anger can be frightening because it calls our assumptions about God into question.
So when we’re confronted by that kind of raw, righteous anger very often our reflex is to make it stop. To silence it.
That’s how Eliphaz reacts to Job.
Eliphaz:
“I’ve been praying for what to say to you, and the Lord finally put the right words on my heart.
Have you forgotten everything you used to tell others?
You were the one to encourage people in grief. You’re the one who talked about comfort and hope. But now it’s your turn, now you’re the victim, and…what?
That’s not you. Where’s your faith?
I know you think you’re a good person and you don’t deserve what’s happened to you, but remember what scripture says: ‘we’re all sinners and fall short of the glory of God.’
I understand how you feel, but this isn’t like you: to be angry at God. Have you listened in on God’s calls and come away with his plans? What do you know that we don’t?
You know what scripture says: “God’s ways are not our ways.”
God works in mysterious ways. We can’t understand why God took them from you; we can only take comfort in knowing your kids are with him right now in heaven.
Remember what Jesus says: ‘I go to prepare a place for you in my Father’s house.’ Maybe…maybe it was just their time to go home to HIM.
Don’t throw away your faith now when it could really help you.
If I were you- I’d put that anger into prayer instead. Throw yourself at God’s mercy. Look to him for help and he’ll answer all your prayers. I know it.“
Job: “If my sorrow were put on a scale, it would outweigh the sands of the ocean. And now you have turned against me too.
My anguish frightens you. But show me how my feelings, MY feelings, can be wrong? Can’t I tell right from wrong? If I’d sinned, if I’d done something to deserve this, wouldn’t I know it?
God has broken my heart and now I can’t even speak honestly with my friend.
You’d rather argue away my despair. I’ve heard enough of your ‘consolations.’
Eliphaz is genuinely concerned for Job, but at the heart of what he says is fear. He’s afraid not just of what’s happened to Job; he’s afraid of Job.
Part of what’s troubling about Eliphaz is how it’s not clear at all who he’s trying to comfort: Job or himself.
Anyone who’s been with someone whose grief is raw and immediate, whose despair seems to open onto an abyss, anyone who’s been in that situation, knows the temptation to put a lid on it.
Because Eliphaz is so uncomfortable with what Job says, he presumes to speak for Job. He puts words in Job’s mouth and tells himself he’s just helping Job find his true voice.
Eliphaz reminds Job of who Job used to be, the beliefs Job used to have, so that Eliphaz doesn’t have to deal with who Job is right now.
The words he puts in Job’s mouth are cliches. Platitudes.
Whatever your intentions, when you speak in one-size-fits-all platitudes, when you say:
God has a plan.
God’s ways are not our ways.
God never gives us more than we can handle.
With God all things are possible.
God must’ve needed him or her in heaven.
It’s going to be alright.
When you speak like that to someone who’s suffering, what you’re really doing is signaling to them what’s out of bounds:
what they can say and what they cannot say
what feelings they can express and what they absolutely must not express.
You censor their grief, and you make it worse.
And so when there’s nothing else to say, do not resort to one-size-fits-all platitudes. Because just like one-size-fits-all clothes, they never fit.
Bildad, Job’s second friend, is less concerned about finding words that fit Job’s situation and more concerned with fitting Job into his belief system.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born!
Bildad:
“Be sensible. Stop. Stop ranting and stop filling our ears with this nonsense.
Should the laws of creation- the laws of God– all be changed for your sake?
God protects the righteous and punishes the wicked. The bible said it; I believe it, and that’s that. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe you don’t deserve the pain you’re in, but can you really be sure that your kids didn’t do anything to deserve what they got?
Look, I know it’s terrible now. But if you just give it over to the Lord, commit yourself to HIM, you will get over this. God never gives us more than we can handle.
In fact, you should use this as an opportunity for the Lord to teach you something. It’s like the bible says: ‘we should rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.’
See this as a chance to grow closer to God. That’s what will get you through this- not shaking your fist at the sky.”
Job:
How kind you are to me! How considerate of my pain! What would I do without a friend like you? And the good advice you’ve given me?
Who made you so tactful? And inspired you with such compassionate words?
I know: God’s workings are mysterious. But don’t make my suffering worse with your beliefs.
Tell me, who’s done this to me if not God? Why do you have to hurt me now too with your answers?
You honestly think I’ll get over this? I’ll get past this?
You want to know what really makes me shudder? That you don’t understand me at all and aren’t willing to try.
You can say whatever you want to excuse God, but I will never agree with you.
It’s easy to write Bildad off as insensitive.
But we’re kidding ourselves if we think Bildad is the only person to believe that there’s a reason behind our suffering.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think Bildad’s the only person to assume that God causes our suffering to teach us a lesson or to punish us.
And Bildad is hardly the only person who would back that up with scripture, chapter and verse.
But hear me: to think God causes suffering to punish you for your sin does in a very profound way nullify the cross.
Because in Jesus Christ we see that the way God punishes sin is to suffer it in our place.
It’s true that you can learn and grow from suffering but that is not the same thing as saying God makes you suffer to teach you a lesson.
When St Paul writes that “suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope” that’s Paul reflecting on his own experience.
That’s different than taking Paul’s words and imposing them on someone else’s experience.
For Bildad there’s a disconnect between what he thinks he knows about God and how Job describes his experience.
So Bildad feels the need to correct Job’s experience, to explain and give answers for it.
But if love, as Jesus says, is laying down your life for another, then that also means love is a willingness to lay down your assumptions for a friend- to care more about them than your understanding of how God or the world works.
What do you say when there’s nothing to say?
Instead of saying ‘God must be teaching you a lesson’ how about saying ‘You have something to teach me. Tell me what you’re going through. I want to learn what you’re feeling. There’s nothing you could say that will frighten or offend me.’
Zophar, Job’s final friend, has a certainty that masks a possibility too frightening to consider.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born!
Zophar:
“I’ve heard enough.
How can you be so blind? You say you’re innocent. You don’t deserve this, but how can you understand God or fathom HIS wisdom?
We’re finite and HE’s infinite. We can’t see things the way God can see them.
I know how you feel now. But you’ve got to believe God has a plan, a plan for every one of us.
I know it can be hard to see now, but everything happens for a reason. God’s behind everything. Nothing’s accidental. Nothing’s random.
If I were you, I’d open my heart to God and trust that one day you’ll understand why God’s done this.”
Job:
“It seems you know everything. It must make you feel better for there to be an answer for everything.
But I’m not an idiot. Who doesn’t know such things?
Even a child knows that the whole world is in God’s hands.
But your comfort is hollow. Would you say anything to get God off the hook? Is your piety more important than your friend?
Don’t think God won’t judge you for your empty lies.
If God has a reason for what’s happened to me then I deserve to know it. God may kill me for my words but at least I’m speaking the truth.”
I’d bet 3/4 of you at some time or another have said something like: ‘God has a plan for____________.’
And even if you’re never uttered that at the wrong time, you believe it. You think it’s true- that God has a plan for each of us.
Notice, both Job and Zophar think its true.
Both of them believe Job’s suffering is a part of God’s larger plan. Zophar just assumes that means Job deserves what’s happened to him and Job knows that he doesn’t.
But both of them assume a world of tight causality, a world without randomness, a world where everything is the outworking of God’s will.
And maybe Job and Zophar (and you and me)- maybe we assume that because the opposite is too frightening.
Maybe it’s frightening to think that our lives are every bit as vulnerable and fragile as they can sometimes feel.
Maybe it’s too frightening to think that the question ‘Why?’ has no answer.
Maybe it’s too scary to admit that things can happen to us with out warning, for no reason and from which no good will ever come.
It’s understandable that we’d want there to be a plan for each of us, (as though we were characters on Lost) but the logical outcome to that way of thinking makes God a monster.
Pay attention. Write this down.
God doesn’t have a plan for your life.
You’re not just an actor in a life that’s already been scripted.
God does not will suffering in your life because it fits into his cosmic blueprints for you.
No.
Because God’s Plan, what God Wills, is for you in freedom to choose to love God and with your life give him glory- which you could never do if every moment of your life was predetermined and micromanaged.
What do you say when there’s nothing to say?
For God’s sake, don’t say God has a plan.
Try saying ‘there’s no way God wants this for you any more than I do.’
The chaplain in the ER lifted her hand from my shoulder when I glared at her and said: ‘What?’
She blushed and apologized. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say’ she said.
But I wasn’t in the mood for sorry. I wiped my eyes and said: ‘When his mother comes back in here, don’t. say. anything.’
At first Job’s friends do the exact right thing. They just sit in silence with their friend and grieve with him. The trouble starts when they open their mouths.
And the scary thing for us?
What’s scary is that at the end of the Book of Job, 38 chapters later, after Job has cursed the day he was born, cursed God, questioned God’s justice, complained about God’s absence, accused God of abuse, and indicted God for being no better than a criminal on trial- at the end of the book, when God finally shows up and speaks, Job isn’t the one God condemns.
It’s Job’s well-meaning, religious friends.
I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that in our attempts to comfort and answer and explain sometimes we push people away from God.
And I’ve stood at enough gravesides and bedsides to know: that the only thing worse than suffering with no reason, no explanation, is suffering without God.
And for that reason, here’s my last piece of advice: when there’s nothing to say, say nothing.
1 If You Can’t Say It at a Child’s Grave…
Suffering is our theme for this weekend’s worship. Job’s our text. Sounds awesome, huh?
Having let the cat from the bag, I hope no one stays away because suffering is something that comes to all of us, sooner or later. None of us is getting out of this life alive. It’s possible to read through the entire book of Deuteronomy and never once make a connection to your own life. Read the first couple of chapters of Job, however, and it’s obvious: he is us, just drawn in starker relief.
While suffering is something that comes to all us, it’s also something nearly all of us get wrong. After ten years in ministry, I can’t tell you how many graves, bedsides, funeral homes and ER’s I’ve stood near and heard well-meaning Christians utter the most banal and even destructive platitudes. By and large we have no idea how to speak of suffering, which, when you think about it, is ironic for a people that worship a crucified carpenter.
This week I’ve been rereading David Bentley Hart’s little book, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? It’s a life-changing kind of book.
In it, David Hart recalls reading an article in the NY Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent any of his four children or his wife from being swept to their deaths.
In the article, the father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “My wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here….he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”
In the Doors of the Sea, Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father, in the moment of his deepest grief, what should one say?
Hart argues that only a ‘moral cretin’ would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation: “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation.” It’s all part of God’s plan in other words.
Hart says that most of us would have the good sense and empathy to talk like that to the father (though my experience tells me Hart would be surprised how many people in fact would say something like it).
This is the point at which Hart takes it to the next level and says something profound and, I think, true:
“And this should tell us something. For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.”
The test of whether or not our speech about God is true, then, isn’t whether it’s logical, rationally demonstrable or culled from scripture. The test is whether we could say it to a parent standing at their child’s grave.
Hart’s axiom shows, I think, how only God-talk that’s centered in the crucified and risen Christ passes the test.
3 The Best Reason NOT to Believe in God
This coming weekend we conclude our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas, with the theme of Suffering.
The author of the book whence we got the idea for this series argues that Christianity’s unique claim is that ‘not all suffering is bad.’ I’ve already mentioned how I think this book is crap (yes, it seems you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover). I’ve come clean about disliking this book but this week it’s different. This week I find its positive treatment of suffering to be both morally repugnant- and the god implied therein- and a profound misunderstanding of the Gospel, in which Death and Sin are the enemies God battles and Christ’s cross is the ‘sacrifice to END all sacrifices.’
The author’s clumsy, tone deaf theology reminded me of an analysis that is the exact opposite in sensitivity: The Brothers Karamazov.
In it, Dostoyevsky, in the character of Ivan, rages against explanation to his devout brother and gives the best reason I’ve ever encountered for not believing in God. Better than anything in philosophy. Better than anything science can dredge up. Better than any hypocrisy or tragedy I’ve encountered in ministry.
Ivan first recounts, one after another, horrific stories of tortures suffered by children- stories Dostoyevsky ripped from the pages of newspapers- and then asks his pious brother if anything could ever justify the suffering of a single, innocent child.
What makes Ivan’s argument so challenging and unique is that he doesn’t, as you might expect, accuse God for failing to save children like those from suffering. He doesn’t argue as many atheists blandly do that if a good God existed then God would do something to prevent such evil.
Instead Ivan rejects salvation itself; namely, he rejects any salvation, any providence, any cosmic ‘plan’ that would necessitate such suffering. Ivan admits there very well could be ‘a reason for everything’ that happens under the sun; Ivan just refuses to have anything to do with such a God.
So, Ivan doesn’t so much disbelieve God as he rejects God, no matter what consequences such rejection might have for Ivan. He turns in his ticket to God’s Kingdom because he wants no part of the cost at which this Kingdom comes.
When I first read the Brothers K, Ivan’s argument, which is followed by the poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor, took my breath away. I had no answer or reply to Ivan. I was convinced he was right. I still am convinced by him.
The irony, I suspect, is that Ivan’s siding with suffering of the little ones is a view profoundly shaped by the cross. It seems to me that Ivan’s compassion for innocent suffering and disavowal of ANY explanation that justifies suffering comes closer to the crucified Christ than an avowed Christian uttering an unfeeling, unthinking platitude like ‘God has a plan for everything.’