Two days.
Thirteen states in the storm’s
direct path, more impacted by the outlying parts of the Hurricane Sandy:
·
7.5
million without power;
·
an
estimated $30 billion in property damage with another $20 billion in economic
losses;
·
possibly
the most damaging hurricane ever[i] ;
·
The
latest report I heard said 110 dead[ii] .
I mourned with the mother
whose two- and four-year olds were swept from her arms after their car was
caught in the rising waters. [iii]
We can’t hear about
this kind of devastation, the gut-wrenching loss without asking “why?”
Why does God allow
things like hurricanes and tornados and tsunamis and earthquakes?
Why?
We ask:
Why
does God let all these bad things happen in our world today, like war and hate,
poverty and hunger?
Why
is there so much unrest in the world?
May God help us all!
Why
is there sickness in the world?
Why
do children have to die so young?
Why
do children get cancer? Why does anyone get cancer?
Why
does God allow innocent children to suffer at the hands of abusive parents and
allow belittling in communities?
Why
does God allow such horrible suffering for good people and the evil ones seem
to go on unharmed?
Why
is there pain and suffering in the people that have faith in God?
(Dramatic pause as we turn to the gospel)
“Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died!”
“Could not he who
opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Why?
Back when I asked you to write down your questions
about God and faith I said that there would be some questions we wouldn’t be
able to answer. Questions that
theologians had wrestled with for centuries.
This is the question I had in mind.
Why is there suffering in the world? And if there
has to be suffering, why do the innocent suffer? Why do people of faith suffer?
The same morning I
heard that those two young boys’ bodies had been found, I heard an answer given by a couple of pastors - this awful storm was a
punishment from God on America.
That's one way to answer the 'why.'
Maybe thinking that God
is responsible makes it easier to think about suffering – it’s punishment for
sin, we’ve displeased God somehow. God
is testing us. God is teaching us a
lesson. It’s all part of God’s
plan.
Those may all answer ‘why.’ But I believe it’s not
a very biblical answer.
Because that’s not the
God we find standing at Lazarus’ graveside.
Jesus wept.
Those are perhaps the
two most startling words of the Bible.
Jesus wept.
Jesus – God with us - wept.
God weeps.
If God is love – and we
believe that God is Love – then love cannot remain unmoved. Love has compassion. Love has empathy. Love weeps.
God does not sit up in
heaven unmoved by our pain and our suffering.
No, God comes down to
us. God is with us in those times of
suffering.
God is standing at the
graveside, weeping with us, holding us, greatly moved.
God makes sure death
and suffering never have the last word.
The last word belongs
to God.
God speaks, “Come out.”
Come out of the stench
of death. Come out of the grave. Come out of the place of suffering. Be unbound from the winding cloth and be free.
God speaks words of
resurrection and re-creation. God speaks
words of healing to our hearts.
I heard a story this week[iv]. A woman had suffered a great loss. In the midst of her grief, she turns to the
church. As she tells her story, she says
that she came to the church for the wrong reason. She wanted to escape the pain. But church didn’t help her escape the pain.
It held her through the pain. She discovered that faith is not about
avoiding pain and suffering. Faith is
about the God who understands pain and suffering, who loves us enough to come
down and experience that pain and suffering first hand, who holds on to us
until we can move through the suffering.
As Lutherans, we like to say that God’s power is
revealed in weakness and God is most fully present at the cross. That’s maybe a fancy way to say that in our
own times of suffering, God is with us.
This woman discovered that faith was also about being
the community that is the Body of Christ, about being with each other and
holding each other through the hard times of life. About showing God’s presence
to a world that is blinded by pain.
I may have shared this story before. After my mother died, a couple of co-workers
spent a lot of lunch hours listening to me cry.
They’d ask how I was doing. They
would listen to my stories. They sat
beside me as I cried out my broken heart - week after week, until finally the
worst of the pain had passed.
My clearest memories of that job are those
lunches. I remember them because that’s
where God met me, where God sat with me while I cried and God wept.
I’ve been on the other side of the table. When I was doing my clinical pastoral
education, I had the opportunity to meet with a woman every day during her
mother’s last week on this earth. I
walked with her through the first code blue, a second code blue, the
realization that her mother was not going to get any better, her grief as she
came to realize that her mother was dying.
I listened to her as she remembered her mother’s love of life, mourned
her upcoming death, debated what her mother would done medically, and finally
signed the DNR order. I held her hand as
she cried after the final code blue.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened those weeks
that I served as a hospital chaplain.
But I remember her. And her
mother. And how God’s presence changed a
dying woman’s hospital room into a holy place.
Why?
I don’t know.
All I know is we live in a world of brokenness - a world that God is in the
process of re-creating. Until that day
when the new heaven and the new earth come down, there will be sickness and
pain and suffering and death.
And all I know is that until that day, God is in the
process of wiping the tears from our eyes, comforting our grief, of sitting
with us, holding us.
All I know is that when it's time for us to move from that place of grief, God
calls us to come out of the brokenness and stench of death and take a deep breath life.
[i] Statistics
from The Examiner; http://www.examiner.com/article/hurricane-sandy-likely-to-be-the-most-damaging-ever-recorded-us-history-why
[ii] http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-hurricane-sandy-deaths-climb-20121103,0,6945430.story
[iii] I
heard about this on The Today Show, November 1, 2012
[iv]
From a video called ‘Jesus Wept’, theworkofthepeople.com
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