Sermon from January 10, 2010
"Why Does God Allow Suffering?"
Job 23:1-5

Why does God allow suffering? People often shorten that question into: “Why me?” “Why this?” “Why now?” – little staccato bursts of pain that express disbelief; not in God but in reality itself. The world they knew has turned on them. They are reeling, and they hurl their questions at anyone or at no one in particular.

Suffering is lacerating. It is also isolating. It can make you feel alone in the world, as if no one else had ever suffered like you. But of course many have, and it is imperative that you find some of them and hear their stories and, if possible, let them hear yours. Here’s one from the Bible, Job 23:1-5. Then Job replied (about God):

“Even today my complaint is bitter;
     his hand is heavy in spite of my groaning.
If only I knew where to find him;
     if only I could go to his dwelling!
I would state my case before him
     and fill my mouth with arguments.
I would find out what he would answer me,
     and consider what he would say.       (Job 23:1-5)

That is a rather more eloquent way to ask, “Why does God allow suffering?” However we ask it, the question is very old. It would be arrogant of me to say that this sermon answers the question. I do not say that. When people ask me that question, I am slow to answer it. The thoughtful answers it requires and passions it inflames are a bad combination, like raking leaves in a windstorm.

My aims today are modest. First, I want to deepen the way we think about the question. In the face of suffering we will never stop asking why, but we can inject the question and blunt the superficiality of the question with wisdom. So, this sermon will talk about wisdom.

Second, this sermon needs to help us to respond when people ask why God allows suffering. Suppose someone says to you, “You’re a Christian. Why did God let 9/11 happen?” You need to say something short and wise. By the way, it is always okay to say, “I don’t know, but I believe God is good.” So, once again, this sermon is about wisdom.

Two Modern Presumptions
Let’s begin with two beliefs that people take for granted. These beliefs make it hard to consider serious answers to the question. The first belief is that we have a right to happiness. The next time you welcome friends from overseas, you can see what I am talking about in the international arrival hall at the Philadelphia Airport.

The hall celebrates the Declaration of Independence. Replicas of all the original signatures adorn the low wall facing the seats in the hall. Up above the hall neon lights spell out from the Declaration our inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To emphasize what matters, the interior decorators put three words in red: life, liberty, and happiness.

They got it wrong. The framers and signers of the Declaration of Independence said that all men are endowed by their Creator with the right to life and liberty but not happiness. They said that that our Creator endowed us with the right to pursue happiness. The word pursuit ought to be in red.

If you take it for granted that you have a right to happiness that is exempt from great suffering, then suffering will deal a devastating blow that you might never recover from. The belief that we have a right to happiness is an illusion that poisons our spirit and makes it hard to answer responsibly the question, “Why does God allow suffering?” To someone who asks you that question, you might gently ask, “Do you think we have a right not to suffer?”

The right question is, “What does the suffering mean?” However, people believe something else that prevents them from asking that question. They believe that God was wrong to allow the suffering. Some people take it a step further and say that God doesn’t exist. If He did exist, He would put a stop to unjust and senseless suffering.

How would you respond, if someone said that to you? I hope you will say, “Has something happened to you to make you say that?” If it’s that personal, maybe the person will tell you his story. Don’t try to rake leaves; the wind is blowing too hard. Just be the best listener you can possibly be.

By the way, if there is no God, whom do you see about suffering? Without God you still have all the tragedy and all the emotion and no one to turn to, who might help you make sense of it some day and even bring something good out of the evil.

I have spoken briefly about two articles of secular faith: we have a right to happiness, and God is wrong to allow suffering. It is easy to see them as arguments to be won. I prefer to see them as unexamined beliefs to be gently questioned. Don’t let people get away with them, but don’t back people into a corner. And be ready to say why you believe God allows suffering. That’s what I want to talk about next.

Two Issues of Human Dignity
Why does God allow suffering? To maintain human dignity! Do you remember the ten Amish girls in October 2006 who were lined up and shot to death in their one-room schoolhouse? Not surprisingly, people wanted to know why God didn’t stop it.

If God stopped each tragedy before it happened, what would His interference do to human freedom? We can’t have it both ways. Either we are free to do both unimaginable good and unimaginable evil and everything in between, or else we want God to interfere with our freedom, curtail our freedom. If we don’t accept both possibilities of freedom, we don’t like freedom. Maybe we prefer servitude.

When someone asks you why God didn’t stop some awful event, you might ask the person, “Which tragedies do you want God to stop? Just the one in Pennsylvania? What should God do about the children that insurgents blow up in Baghdad? What should He do about the international disgrace of human trafficking?”

The same is true of natural disasters. What should God do about the children swept away by the Tsunami in Banda Aceh or buried in the Pakistani earthquake? The earth is just doing what the earth does, with earthquake, hurricane, tornado, and tsunami.

Most human suffering comes from a misuse of human freedom. We can see it in senseless violence, but it’s also true of many natural disasters. You don’t have to live in San Francisco, but if you do, don’t blame God when the big one strikes. You knew it would come some day. But the power of freedom belongs to the image of God in us. Do we really want God to interfere? That would undermine our human dignity.

God will stop it some day. We call it the great Day of Judgment, when God reveals the secrets of our hearts and casts the devil and his works into the Lake of Fire. In the meantime God allows our freedom full play in order to maintain human dignity.

Why does God allow suffering? To bless us. Suffering brings us blessings that we can get no other way. It is not an unpleasant interruption to the main business of life. It is central to human life. Either we embrace it as central to our well-being, or it breaks us.

Listen to what the architects of our Christian faith said on this matter. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 1:29 said to the church there: It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him. Suffering had been granted to them. He made it sound like a privilege. Jesus joined the chorus when He said, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven” – Matthew 5:11-12a.

Hebrews 12:7 says: Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? The writer goes on to make his point: Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

I daresay that most of us in this room have gone through a period in our lives that we would not wish on anyone else and would not want to go through again, and yet, we acknowledge that we would not trade what we learned in our suffering for anything in the world. When people ask you why God allows suffering, you might ask them if they have ever had an experience like that.

I have spoken briefly about two reasons why the wisest and most godly among us have said that God allows suffering: to preserve our dignity and to bless us. You would be just as rational to offer those answers as others are to ask the question: Why does God allow suffering? If you have suffered and have come out on the other side intact, your answers will be more persuasive than that question.

Two Observations

That brings me to talk about people who have suffered and have come out on the other side intact but changed forever. If anyone could ask why God allows suffering, they could. And I’m sure they did and perhaps still do.

I’d like to tell you one such story in the hope that it will strengthen you to face your own sorrows. I knew this family before their great sorrow, and I have known them much longer after their great sorrow. They were people of faith in Christ before it happened, and they continue as people of faith in Christ in the years afterward.

Out of respect for them I would not want my story of them to mislead you about their pain. It was real, and I doubt that a day goes by that they don’t remember their great sorrow. The faith is as real as the pain. I dare not diminish either.

George Woodward made it possible for me to be called to my first pastoral ministry in Upstate New York. Carole and I have spent many nights as George’s and Shirley’s guests in their home. We have talked Bible, theology, and ministry far into the night. We delighted in their three daughters and one son.

In 1969 their oldest daughter, Karen, a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Arizona, died near Ithaca, NY, in a car crash. Sixteen years later, their third daughter, Cheryl, 32 years old, died of breast cancer, leaving behind an infant daughter and a young husband who had to cope early in life with much sorrow.

I conducted Karen’s funeral, and George spoke in tribute to his daughter. I’ll never forget the one sentence he said that defined the faith by which he and Shirley and their other children have lived in the ensuing years. George said, “There are no mistakes with God.”

I sometimes just look at people in this congregation and think about your life stories. I am amazed at how much people suffer and with what grace they bear it and remain people of faith in Christ. And I don’t know the half of it.

I do know that without suffering we’d be lesser human beings. Anyone can be great, because anyone can suffer. Suffering provides us the opportunity to grow, to rise above selfishness, to learn tenderness toward our fellow man. Without it we would be moral pigmies. With it we can become godlike.

Lest there be any danger of romanticizing suffering, it is necessary to say, when it’s all been said and done, that suffering may bring anyone of us to the point that Christ crucified reached when He said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And if you find yourself there, our task as your brothers and sisters in Christ is not to find fault with you or to second guess you but to come along side and help you where we can to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And when we’ve done all we can do, and it is not enough, and you go home and close the door, you will understand why people ask why God allows suffering, and God will give you will find your own answers.

Having evoked our Lord’s cry from the cross, I will end with a reflection on it. To ask the Creator of all things, “Why?” may seem like a faint squeak in this vast universe, except that the Son of God uttered the same cry. His question gives our question dignity, not only as humanity counts dignity but also dignity in heaven before God to whom we address our anguish.

We must also remember that heaven was silent in response to our Lord’s question. No relief came for His suffering; no answers came to relieve even a little of His darkness. Dignity there may have been; answers there were not. The silence of heaven greeted the anguish of earth, and all was dark.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Sooner or later anguish will grip most of us, pain like that of a woman in labor. (Jeremiah 6:24) When it happens to you, don’t cut yourself off from the Church.