The Center that Holds
Luke 5:17-26
April 24, 2005
I always try my best to preach out of my own experience, but as I approached today’s sermon, I realized that I was having trouble doing that. I can preach easily about a lot of stuff because I have experience. For example: I sometimes struggle with my faith. Sometimes I don’t know how to forgive. Sometimes I feel under incredible stress. Sometimes the right thing to do is the hard thing to do. Sometimes I don’t really know how do handle people that get on my very last nerve.
So I can preach about those things, and others, because I can understand them…at least I can understand them from the point of a fellow traveler, one who is going on to perfection, one who is a Christian-in-training.
Today, I’m preaching about chronic pain, illness, and suffering. I, quite frankly, have never that. Yes, I’ve been sick a few times. I’ve had my share of sprained ankles and stitches. I did spend 17 days in Mayo Clinic over Christmas and New Year’s in 1996 because of a ruptured esophagus…took Christmas dinner through a tube in my chest. But I have really enjoyed relatively good health during my half-century of life.
One of the things of which I am aware is that it is awfully easy for someone like me to sound trite and condescending when speaking about suffering. It is easy for folks like me to counsel others who are really ill to just suck it up and deal with it. So I am approaching this sermon with a significant amount of caution. But I do hope that I can bring some Biblical wisdom and faith answers to bear on the issue of chronic illness, pain, and suffering.
I think that we need to begin with the affirmation that the world has more than a few rough edges. (see Harold S. Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” New York: Avon Books. 1981) Let’s consider some of the rough edges for a minute. For example, let’s consider Germany. The nation that produced Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Martin Luther also gave us Hitler, Eichmann, and Goering. The United States, which gave birth to the finest constitution in the history of the world, also brought slavery, the Civil War, and genocidal policies aimed at native peoples. The technology that enables us to transplant organs and save lives has spawned the Chinese practice of executing prisoners and then selling boy parts to the highest bidder. So the world has more than its share of rough edges…and we wonder why?
Think about pain for a little while. Pain can be our friend. It tells you when you touch a hot stove. Pain tells you that it’s time to come in from the cold because your ears start to hurt. Pain tells you that you’re overdoing it on the weekend softball team.
But pain also brings waves of torment. Cancer, arthritis, heart disease, infection, and so many other ailments bring a mass of painful misery. Pain may have been intended as a smooth, efficient warning system, yet suffering is raging out of control. And we wonder…why? Why are there rough edges?
In this world, we must confront people with spinal chord injuries, survivors of the Holocaust, and victims of drunk drivers. And we have to answer the question, “Where is God when it hurts? (I am indebted to Philip Yancy’s book, “Where is God When it Hurts?” Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 1977.)
I think that the issue really has to do with causation. If God is truly in charge, why do things seem so unfair? I don’t particularly care too much if Saddam Hussein has a migraine. But I do wonder why we have loved ones die much too soon; why some babies must suffer from horrible diseases; why so many feel the grinding pinch of poverty; why families are torn apart by dissension; why wars take some of our best and brightest from us.
I always say that I could answer these questions pretty well when I was in seminary a couple of decades ago, but now I find the answers much more illusive. I wish that there were easy answers in the Bible, but there are not. The Old Testament witness seems to be one generally of reward and punishment. God seemingly intervened in human history along the way to reward the good and punish the wicked. According to the Old Testament, there are times when God employed suffering, even causing people to die. God caused armies to lose battles just to teach them a lesson. The prophets all called out lists of behaviors which would bring doom, but promised that repentance would bring restraint from heaven.
If you remember, there were some high-profile preachers in America following the incidents of September 11, 2001, who said that this was God’s punishment on America for our sins. And it would seem that there might be some Old Testament justification for an opinion like that.
But then there is Job. Job was a man who loved God with all h is heart, and yet came to incredible suffering. He lost his possessions and his family. He then became terribly sick and was covered with painful boils. Out of his suffering, his three friends and his wife offer him two different options. First, his friends argue that God is trying to tell him something. He obviously sinned greatly; therefore relief from suffering would come with confession of those sins. His wife suggests the other option – curse God and die.
But Job opts for a third course. He knows that what has happened to him cannot ever correspond with justice. He observes that evil and good are not always punished and rewarded in this life. Evil people grow prosperous sometimes, while some who are truly holy live painful lives. (See Job, chapter 21)
And then there is Jesus who dealt differently with suffering in different circumstances. In this morning’s Scripture lesson he heals a paralytic, whose friends, unable to get him close to Jesus had let him down through the roof. It would seem that the man’s physical condition is directly related to his spiritual state because the first words out of the mouth of Jesus were, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” Here it would seem that Jesus is talking about rewards and punishments, just like the Hebrew Bible. Serve God and you prosper; choose wickedness and you suffer. And in the fifth chapter of John, Jesus found the man who had been healed by the pool and told him to sin no more so that nothing worse happened to him.
On the other hand, in Luke 13, Jesus flatly denied a correlation between tragedies and spiritual condition. He speaks there about the Galileans who had been murdered by Pilate and the people who had been killed when the tower fell on them. He says not to think that the dead were worse offenders than the others living in Jerusalem at the time. He is clear here that sin is not responsible for tragedy (Luke 13:4). He made is clear in the ninth chapter of John that the man who was born blind was not blind because of either his sins or the sins of his parents (John 9:1-11).
So we come back around to the rough edges. In a world full of pain, suffering, confusion, and unknowing, we need a center that holds us together. We need an answer to the question, “Where is God when it hurts?”
I had the privilege of hearing Bishop William Canon deliver a sermon at the 1980 General Conference of the United Methodist Church meeting in Indianapolis. He confronted this question head on in what I still consider to be one of the best sermons I have ever heard. He reported that he had not seen any reliable statistical evidence to prove that fewer Christians die of cancer than non-believers. Christians are no more immune to disease than others. Christians do not live longer than other persons. We can all point to faithful believers who have had their lives cut short.
Some time ago, I read about a natural disaster in South America. One reporter said that fewer Christians died than non-Christians. That’s interesting, but suspect for me. Bishop Canon said that Christians do not escape disaster and accident more often than others. Earthquakes, fires, and floods have destroyed entire Christian communities. A tornado ripped through a church in Georgia a few years ago, killing the daughter of the pastor.
I have just finished reading Bob Dole’s newly published book about his World War II service, wounds, and recovery (“A Soldier’s Story.” 2005. New York: HarperCollins). He reminds us of all the people who have given their lives in the service of this nation. The closest I have come to war dead is through a friend who lost her brother in Vietnam. But we all know that bullets do not make detours around the bodies of Christians.
Christians are not favored with more prosperity than non-believers, regardless of what we may hear from the television evangelists and their glory gospel. I have been guests of Christian communities from the inner city of Gary to the suburban slums of Mexico City. I have met poor Christians in Jerusalem. I have eaten with Christians in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro; in Harlan County, Kentucky, and Indian reservations in Oklahoma. Wherever we look today, there are indeed righteous people who are ravaged by poverty and hunger.
Where is God when it hurts? Where do we find healing for the rough edges? Why do the good sometimes suffer and the wicked prosper?
We first must begin with the mystery of pain and suffering. To be perfectly honest, I know of no answer short of heaven. It is true that some will be recipients of miraculous cures and unexplained healings. Therefore we will not cease to pray at bedsides. Some faithful, however, no matter how ardent the prayers, will succumb to illness and disease. There will be no solution to the problem until Christ renews his Kingdom. In our humanity, we just don’t know.
So, where is God in chronic illness, in debilitating injury, when the rough edges of existence threaten us? He has been there from the beginning. He has been in the world which, despite the pain and fallen nature of its inhabitants, still bears his stamp. God has used pain to teach us to turn to him. God has promised us strength to nourish our spirits, even if our physical suffering is unrelieved. God has joined us in our pain, suffering, and death. God has bled with us and for us. When we hurt, God hurts. When we cry, God weeps. When we are in agony, God lives once again, the agony of the cross.
So we follow God not for the promise of an easy life, but simply because God is Truth, and nothing in life or in death can separate us from his love. God is to be worshiped simply because he is God, not in order that something good may happen to us. We offer our lives to God, not in order to live pain free and trouble free, but because that is our vocation as Christians. We offer our lives to God because he alone has claim on us. God is a God of the rough edges. In spite of our trouble, he remains our hope, our strength, and our salvation.
