Knocked Off Balance

This has been a bad week. It started with one of the worst tragedies that has ever hit our country. Only wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters have caused more anguish, more grief and suffering and loss, and more questions about providence and the presence - or absence - of God. The monstrous events at Virginia Tech were followed in short order by the murder of a student at the University of Washington, bomb threats at the University of Minnesota, and ending the week with the shooting at the Johnson Space Lab in Texas.

What kind of a world do we live in?

The same kind of world we have always lived in. We have always lived in a world of senseless death and random brutality. What did Adam and Eve feel, do you suppose, when their first son Cain killed their second son Abel and God banished him to wander the face of the earth? They lost both children at once. Do you suppose they asked, “Where was God?”

These things stun us because we can never get away from them. They come too quickly. Next door is the same as across the country or around the world. Last year it was the Amish schoolchildren, the year before that was Hurricane Katrina, the year before ... it never seems to stop. Because it doesn’t.

There is something in us that wants to say it’s worse because so many were hurt at once, the images stun us with their vivid particularity and non-stop repetition. 24-hour news means 24 hours of bombardment. And eventually we have to turn it off. The farther away it is, or the more incomprehensible the numbers seem, the more quickly we become numb. Some people call it compassion fatigue. But there’s more to it than that.

As the dictator Josef Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” We can turn these images off, because the pain is not ours. True pain comes one - or maybe two - deaths at a time.

If you ask the parents of the children who were killed, I don’t think they would say that the pain would be less severe if fewer people had died. A mother doesn’t grieve less when she is alone with her grief, a father doesn’t feel better when he sees all the other young men his son used to pal around with get on with their lives. Just be-cause a disaster is on the evening news doesn’t make it more painful than the tragedy that only destroys one life. Loss and grief strike us all. Sometimes even tragedy. And the kind of pain you cannot turn off happens one person at a time, one death at a time, one loss at a time.

You all know this. We all know this. We have all known pain, from the death of children to the death of dreams, from betrayal to abuse to the shame of failure. And there is no way to measure it, and there is no way to explain it. Actually, we can explain it. We pastors have nice little theological categories that actually do work, at least on an intellectual level. We even have a name for the topic: the question of how a good God can allow such evil is called “theodicy.”

But what we are all ultimately forced back on is not an explanation, no matter how elegant. When tragedy strikes us, we have no explanation that will take away the pain. What we do have, like Job, is God. And the question is not “Where WAS God.” That’s the “why” question, and the answer - if any - helps only a little, if at all. The important question is, “Where IS God.” Because he is not only the one who can can comfort, God is also the only one who can answer the even more important question, “What do I do now?” “How can I go on?” The pastor’s job, at times like these, is to point the stricken one toward God, and speak the healing words of Christ. Because the only way to go on is surrounded by the love of God, supported by the strength of God, and trusting in the purposes of God.

And what on earth does this have to do with Paul’s Damascus road experience?

Let me tell you how I got from here to there, from this week’s tragedies to Paul’s - accident.

I had already tentatively settled on a theme and a title, which as you may have noticed is “knocked off balance.” And I had been thinking about how often God has to knock us off our feet to get our attention. Authorities on the subject of religious experience tell us that most conversions happen at times of change or crisis. Teens and young adults are the most open to hearing from God because their lives are changing so fast, they haven’t yet latched onto the certainties that will steer and anchor them through the rest of their lives. After about 25 it’s much rarer. But three other key moments in life when we are likely to hear from God are when we have children, at what is called a “mid-life crisis,” and when tragedy strikes. It’s as if the foundations of our lives have been struck by an earthquake. We run to firmer ground.