Sermon from November 28, 2004

Sir,
I had thought the terms of our agreement
Were quite clear.
You were to provide me length of days,
Model children by a docile wife, support for same;
Keep far away all disaster man-made
Or act of your own.
And a death if not quite painless
At least sudden, without humiliation.
I in turn would confess You Creator
Of all things seen and unseen, offering customary
Praise and adoration.

Regarding line four above
Your performance has been marginal at best,
And I have now confirmation
From two physicians
Of what I must deem willful disregard
As to length of days and dying.

I therefore recognize no further obligation whatsoever
To provide the aforesaid praise, etc.
Or, indeed, to acknowledge Your existence.

Any further communication should be directed
To my counsel
Who assures me that he knows You
From of old.
(Termination for Cause, by James F. O’Callaghan (as published in First Things, Nov. 2004, 38))

Is that how we think? Is our faith that brittle? I hope better things of us, but with the number of people threatening to leave the country and going for psychological therapy after the last presidential election, I have to assume that we might be vulnerable to this termite-like sense of entitlement to life on our terms.

It eats up our courage. It trades away hope for presumption. It deafens us to the call for self-sacrifice. It makes us ill-prepared for inevitable reversals of fortune. It nearly disqualifies us to consider one of the truly profound questions that human suffering poses to the Christian doctrine of creation.

Questioning the Goodness
You may recall that our Christian doctrine of creation builds around four foundational statements. First, the mind, will, power and freedom of God account for the universe and everything in it. Second, the heavens and the earth serve as the setting in which God seeks to be united in covenant love with mankind. Humans hold this exalted place, because God made them in His image. Third, Christians view nature as God’s creation. Where others say, "nature," we say, "creation." When we say, "nature," we mean, "creation." Fourth, creation is good.

Today, I want to take that last, foundational statement and expand it. We believe that the whole creation is good. Expanding this statement may seem straightforward, but, actually, it takes us into troubled waters.

We may enter those troubled waters by asking simply, "Is God’s creation good?" The waters grow more troubled when we ask, "Is the God who created all things a good God?" If you wonder why anyone would ask such questions, the short answer says: because there is evil in the world.

In the first place, evil compromises the goodness of every human endeavor. C. S. Lewis caught this inescapable ambivalence, when someone asked him if progress is possible in our world. He said this: "We shall grow able to cure, and to produce, more diseases – bacterial war, not bombs, might ring down the curtain – to alleviate, and to inflict, more pains, to husband, or to waste, the resources of the planet more extensively. We can become either more beneficent or more mischievous. My guess is we shall do both; mending one thing and marring another, removing old miseries and producing new ones, safeguarding ourselves here and endangering ourselves there" ("Is Progress Possible," God in the Dock, 312).

I can remember as a teenager being given that little sugar cube, laced with the polio vaccine that would protect me against the disease that had killed my cousin. The nation felt more secure as a result of Dr. Salk’s vaccine. In our innocence we had not yet learned of AIDS. The Cold War came to an end, and the nuclear warheads were no longer targeting the major cities of earth. We could not imagine at the time that Osama bin Laden would want to use nuclear weapons as an instrument of terror. There are a thousand such examples. Is a creation that has moral ambivalence built-in really good? Is the God who made it really good?

The questions grow most penetrating, when we consider the suffering of the innocent. In one of Dostoevsky’s masterpieces, two brothers, Ivan and Alyosha have a long and passionate conversation about God and suffering. Ivan says to his brother, "It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot understand" (The Brothers Karamasov, The Modern Library, 1950). Then, he offers the following proposal to explain why he doesn’t accept the world God created.

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance –...would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?"

Alyosha answered, "No, I wouldn’t" (ibid, 291). Would you? Why then did God?

So, how do we account for the suffering of the innocent in a world that we say a good God created and sustains? Why would God create a world in which He knew that the innocent would suffer terribly? Is such a creation good? Is the God who made it good? How do we respond to these questions?

We Can’t Have It Both Ways
We begin by considering the origin of evil within God’s creation, and once again we find ourselves in Genesis 3:1-6. Now, says Genesis 3:1-3, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The serpent tried to drive a wedge between God and His image-bearing creatures by misrepresenting God ("Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?")The woman corrects the serpent’s misrepresentation by recalling God’s command about the one tree.

Verses 4-5: "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." This time, the serpent tried to drive a wedge between God and His image-bearing creatures by defying God ("You will not surely die").

Eve had another look at the tree, and nothing about it seemed lethal. Quite the contrary, says verse six, it was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom. She took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

The choice to disobey God, to set oneself above God, to claim to know better than God takes us back to our doctrine of creation. With regard to the laws that govern the physical universe, "God allows the world to be itself and does not stop tectonic plates from slipping and producing an earthquake, because they are allowed to be themselves just as we are allowed to be ourselves." (Christian Belief in a Scientific Age, 13)

In other words, God created the physical universe to "run on its own." That doesn’t mean that God has nothing more to do with it. But it does mean that creation behaves predictably. We can count on it. God doesn’t decide every so often to change the periodic table or the freezing point of water. That’s why we can express mathematically how physical reality behaves. This predictability in creation makes science possible.

Humanity participates in this predictability – up to a point. But God introduced a second kind of freedom in man, when He made us in His image. He created us to participate not only in the regularities of nature; He also created us to participate in His own divine nature by giving us a limited freedom to choose.

This makes it possible to live in union and in love with Him. But we have to use our freedom in a way that is consistent with the way God intended us to work. That means we have to face difficult choices and choose wisely. Poor choices set us at odds with God and our fellow man. The consequences of bad choices are almost always not only bad for us, but also bad and even catastrophic for the people around us, even for other nations. That is the meaning of Genesis three.

In righteous indignation humanity may ask questions about evil and suffering. The case against God and His goodness may seem air-tight. We, the suffering, may seem vindicated. We are victims, not only of forces that are more powerful than we are, but also of the structure of a universe that was created without our consent and turned loose to overwhelm the weak without remedy. We cannot control it, but we can defy it and the God who made it.

Genesis three with the simplicity of an atom simply says that we are wrong. "It is not God who is on trial here. It is Man." (See Michael O’Brien, Father Elijah, chapter 11.) Adam and Eve chose to disobey, chose to set themselves above God, claimed to know better than God. Like a nauseous odor that fills a room, this choice and claim have penetrated the mind, will, power and freedom of man. So, it would be right to challenge the "case against God."

"'What did you want God to do? Did you want him to tear open the sky like a theatrical backdrop and step through? Did you want Him to send an army of angels into creation, with orders from headquarters: Kill the bad ones! Save the good ones! Did you expect a voice to come booming out of the clouds saying, Stop that! Did you expect Him to press a button and the entire cosmos would grind to a halt while the master mechanic stepped into the innards of His machine and tinkered with a broken part? Is that what you think the universe is?’” (ibid, 294)

God made man in His image; He made us free. We can’t have it both ways. Either we are free or we aren’t. Our Jewish and Christian faith says we are free. We have used our freedom to prefer ourselves to the One who made us in His image, and that self- preference can lead to horrendous evil. But we can’t have it both ways. If we want to be free, there are consequences, good and bad and potentially on a large scale. If not, we need to change our rhetoric about freedom.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Some people have a hard time remembering that human evil has not destroyed the good that God created. A person once asked C. S. Lewis about human beings, "Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?" (Mere Christianity, 42) Lewis’ answer is classic: "The better stuff a creature is made of – the cleverer and stronger and freer it is – then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong" (ibid).

The reality of evil threatens us in two opposite ways. One is the way of presumption. When I received the polio vaccine, I can remember hearing from the people around me and thinking to myself that it would only be a matter of time until medicine would eradicate all disease. That was presumption. We forgot the reality of evil.

We have a proverb among us that says, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is." That is not pessimism. That is good theology. We are remembering that sin has a hand in every human endeavor. The investment scheme that promises to double your investment in two years deserves a strong cautionary warning. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty swept through congress by a wide margin. It brought undeniable good to many Americans; it also wreaked havoc on the family structure of many lower-income Americans. From genetic engineering to school board meetings, sin touches every human endeavor.

The reality of evil also threatens us with despair. Life can become so unbearable at times that we are tempted to think nothing can reverse the downward spiral. That is despair. We forget the perdurable goodness God fired into what He created.

Joni Eareckson Tada became a quadriplegic in a diving accident in 1967, and today the organization she started provides hope and help for thousands, who have suffered similar accidents. Many saw the Watergate crimes of President Nixon and became cynical about government. But in the midst of that folly White House Counsel, Charles Colson, went to prison, became a committed follower of Christ and began Prison Fellowship, a ministry that has touched many thousands of prisoners and reduced recidivism rates. From genetic engineering to school board meetings goodness gives hope to every human endeavor.

There is a small piece of much neglected wisdom in the New Testament that gives people of faith in Jesus enormous encouragement in the face of human evil. The apostle wrote these simple words in Romans 12:21: do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Goodness goes down more deeply than evil in God’s creation. We who believe that bring to the world a realism that doesn’t minimize evil, and we also bring to the world a hope that doesn’t forget goodness.

And then, just over the horizon, something else is waiting. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies – Romans 8:19-23. In the face of human evil, let us be not faithless but believing.