Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World
How Can There Be a God When There is So Much Suffering?
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, September 27, 2009

Psalm 22; Hebrews 2:10–18

Two weeks ago we talked about the question our skeptical friends sometimes ask, "Is there a God?" And more specifically, "Can we know there is a God?" An important question. But we ended with a more pressing, more personal question, "Does God care?" Because that's where we come in, isn't it? Where we worry, and fear and hurt, and our loved ones hurt, and our world. It's interesting and important to begin with the question, "Does God exist?", but we quickly go to this question of God caring.

Sometimes it leads us or our skeptical friends to wonder, "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?"

Right up front I want to say to you, my brothers and sisters in Christ: that when pain is acute, when loss has just happened, when the diagnosis has just come in and it's bad, when fear is deepest - this is not the time for conversation about this question. It is time for us to enter in, to come close, alongside, to have the courage to listen deeply, to pray, weep, agonize with that person who is in pain. At very least that way they might take courage.

We never forget those times when we have experienced pain and loss. When our baby daughter had a severe seizure, a pastor from the church where I worked came and sat in between Suzanne and me on a bench in the waiting room in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I remember how he was with us. It was no time for theological explanations. He just sat with us - he entered in with us. He listened as we poured out our worries, our second guessing ourselves at what we might have done differently. He put his hands on our shoulders and said, "You know, it's so tempting at a time like this to fear the very worst...", and as we wept he prayed for our little girl.

A wise old chaplain once told me, "When you walk into a hospital room where there is pain, or worry, ask this question, ‘What's it like today?'" And then listen. He knew what he was doing. Because in asking this question we are telling this hurting soul we want to be with him or her in this.

It's a kind of answer to the question, isn't it? "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?" It's an answer that we give with our bodies, our presence, our courage, our willingness to enter in, all to say, "Here's how..."

There's an important implication: to not enter in, to not have courage to come alongside someone who is in pain, to remain aloof and distant, contributes to the evidence and argument some people use to claim there is no God, or at least not a God who matters, a God who cares...

I think our first answer to the question is with our compassion. But there also come times when we can have a conversation. There are some things to say. For example, at some point it has to be raised what we mean by "suffering". When someone asks, "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering," do they mean any suffering? Is all suffering bad? Based on the commercials you see on television for extra strength, double fast acting, sugar coated miracle pills (with the noted endless caveats about side effects), you'd think any kind of pain is bad.

But what about the pain in my quadriceps after hiking up to a high Sierra lake: is that a bad thing?

Or the pain a woman experiences in child birth? (I know, I know, "Pastor Dick, you have NO idea what you're talking about! I say, give me the shot!")

How about the pain of learning calculus, or how to balance a check book?

Or having to face the truth, to stick in a difficult conversation or insist on doing the right thing when no one agrees?

There's a passage in Hebrews 12 that says, "No discipline is pleasant at the time but is painful..." A child can experience a parent's love as painful. The parent's love can actually cause suffering because the child is having to learn something they don't want to learn.

My parents tried to insist on my practicing the piano. In fairness they would remind me that I said I wanted to learn to play the piano. But I found practicing, while my friends were out in the street playing football, painful. My parents finally gave up the good fight and I quit practicing. The result? Today all I can play is Chopsticks.

Which leads to an important distinction: the difference between "pain" and "suffering". They are not the same thing. Pain is what happens to us. It hits us. It falls on our foot and breaks our toe. It invades our body and makes us sick. It blows our roof off, or shakes our shelves so all our dishes come crashing down. It wounds us with a cruel word. Pain is the consequence of loss, a death, a tragedy. It is the "stuff" that happens. And, no question, some of this stuff that happens is evil. Evil causes pain. I want to talk more about evil next week.

My point is suffering is not the same thing as pain. Pastor Jim Emerson, who taught pastoral counseling at San Francisco Theological Seminary, a wonderful, caring man, drew this distinction for me. "Pain" is what happens to us. "Suffering" is our response to what happens to us. Suffering is what we choose to do with pain. He made an interesting observation that I went back to my New Testament to check out: that the word for "suffering" in the Bible as well as in our dictionaries is a synonym for "enduring". We can spread this out a little, to include "bearing", and "carrying". So we say, "I suffer that dog barking outside my window," or, "I suffer that cell phone going off during the sermon," or "I suffer this loss", "I suffer this pain."

In other words, suffering is a choice. And it is a courageous choice. We always have the option to not suffer, don't we? We can numb ourselves to pain with drugs or drink. We can run from a struggling and painful relationship. We can enter into fantasy to avoid hard reality. We can choose to end our own life. There are lots of ways we can choose not to suffer.

But we pay a very high price when we choose not to suffer, don't we? In the real world you and I live in, there is not a day that goes by in which you and I do not in some way "suffer", or "endure", or "bear" things that happen to us, or to others. It's what we are doing when we are caring, isn't it? If we think about it, it's hard to imagine life without suffering. It certainly would not be this world, or this life, would it?

There's an important root in the Latin word we translate as "suffering". PATIR also means "passion". Call it "determination", or "heart", or "defiance", of, you name it - death, of anything that dehumanizes or reduces us down to a number, or a commodity, or a thing to be used. Imagine life without suffering. It would be a life without passion. Without caring.

Put it this way: suffering means that we are alive.

So firstly, when someone asks, "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?" I think we have a conversation about what we mean by "suffering". But we also have to have a conversation about what we mean by "God". C.S. Lewis in his classic, The Problem of Pain, invites us to think more carefully and deeply about God's love for us - that God's love is like the love of an artist for her art work. Ever notice how artists never seem satisfied with their work? That they're never done?

A friend's mother sat in our living room unable to take her eyes off the water color hanging on our wall. She had painted it years before from a photo of Suzanne and Julia as a little girl playing "Pooh Sticks" by a stream. "It's just not right..." she said. "What do you mean?" we protested. We love this painting. "No!", she insisted, "the shading is too dark in one corner. It's out of balance. Please, you must let me take it back to my studio. I promise I'll get it back to you right away..." We couldn't see what she was talking about. It was beyond us. But we agreed. And when we picked up that painting a few months later we did notice a slight change. It was subtle, nuanced, a change that we would never have thought was needed.

That's how it is with God with us. God is never done, because we are not right. So many things are out of balance, askew, dark, and we don't realize it. We don't believe we need anything to be worked on-- we don't WANT anything to be worked on. We do not desire what God desires and the difference between God's desire and our desire we can also call "suffering".

So one answer to the question, "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?" has to include, "Because God's grace and truth, God's love, God's artistry raises a tension, a difference between God and us that we cannot tolerate. That because God cares so much, at times we will suffer pain. Truth be told, maybe sometimes we'd rather that God didn't care so much...

But what about when pain is overwhelming? What about when evil and stuff that happens breaks over us like a mud slide burying a village of men, women and children, or a tsunami that wipes away thousands? What about the cruel dictator who has no regard for the value of human life. Where is God? Does God care?

It's the question put by a former pastor, and former Christian, now a professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Bart Ehrman asked this question of New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright in a conversation which took place about a year ago in San Francisco. Dr. Ehrman shared that he just couldn't work it out in his head any longer. How can you conceive of God caring in the wake of the Holocaust where millions of men, women and children perished at the hands of fellow human beings? Or a world where people are starving while governments pay farmers not to grow food? Just take a look around. How can you not wonder, "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?"

There was no rancor in his voice as he asked this. This was really a conversation between two thoughtful men. After Dr. Ehrman sat down, Rev. Wright stepped up to the microphone. His voice was calm as he spoke. I got the sense he was reaching out to a hurting former pastor and believer. He said, "Bart, all you are saying is true. But I have one question for you. What do you do about the good? What do you about love, and commitment, and generosity, compassion, and chocolate? If all you say is all there is, then how do you account for these things?"

In answering Dr. Ehrman's question, or anyone else who asks, we can't just talk about the God of the philosophers, the Unmoved Mover, the Furthest Thing Back, the Ground of All Being. We have to listen to what our Scriptures bear witness to. The psalmist cries out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This is the cry of agony. Of pain. Of suffering. These were Jesus' words as he hung on the cross suffering what we all suffer, and far, far more.

This is not the answer we, any of us, had in mind. It's not what we would have imagined or expected, how God answers our crying out in pain and confusion.

Hebrews 2:10 begins, "It was fitting that God for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering..."

It's not what the philosophers had, or have, in mind. It's not "fitting" that God would "suffer". That God would enter in with us, here, and suffer, endure, carry all this pain.

Jesus' other name is Immanuel, means "God with us". And because he enters in with us, that makes him our brother, doesn't it? Ask anyone who has gone into battle with others at their side. They call each other brothers, sisters.

When Jesus sees a homeless woman pushing her shopping cart down the street, or a man talking nonsense to the cars driving by, or the mother weeping over the child limp in her arms, he sees a brother, a sister. Wherever there is crying out, we know God hears. No one is alone.

We come full circle. "How can there be a God when there is so much suffering?" Based on what we have seen, heard and experienced of Jesus who lived, and taught, and healed, who suffered, and died, and rose, what we know to be true is that God suffers with us.

It's why we take courage to enter into the pain around us to suffer with others. By the grace, mercy and artistry of God, in the power of the Spirit of the Risen Christ, one day the picture will be finally made right. Picture this:

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.' And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.' Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.'" (Revelation 21:1-5)

 

Please, dear God, make it so. Amen.

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Questions for Reflection and recommended reading.