GOD AND SUFFERING: PART 2
The Rev. Mark Sherwindt, Pastor
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church
Pentecost 5: June 11-12, 2005
Some of you may remember that not long after Easter at the end of April, Marilyn and I spent a week on the Isle of Aruba, the Caribbean paradise that has been plastered all over the news these last couple of weeks, as the world has been following the search for the missing young teenager from Alabama. We know how small an island Aruba is. We know the feeling of security that surrounds its visitors. We know how beautiful the beaches are, how wonderful the water is, and how friendly Arubans can be. And now we hear every day about the agony the Hollaways have been forced to endure as they hope against hope that Natalee, the young girl they love, will somehow be found alive. What an awful story, of truly tragic proportion. No one can really understand their pain. Those who have experienced the uninvited intrusion of any kind of tragedy in life can sense the oppressive burden that parents, family, and friends must now bear.
These are the kind of experiences in life that lead many to struggle with the question of what God is doing in and through the horrible things that happen in life. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the innocent suffer? Where's the justice in life? What purpose does this kind of pain serve? What do we learn through suffering? Is tragedy really about what we can learn from it? These are the questions that form the background of Paul's curiosity in our Second Lesson. They are questions that extend beyond Paul's reflections in Romans 5. In fact, these are questions that the entire biblical narrative - from Genesis to the Book of Revelation - has been designed to address. For the biblical narrative as a whole affirms that history has direction, life has meaning, God has a purpose for creation, and you are not alone, nor ever abandoned. Your life has meaning and direction and purpose. Some day, the power of God's love will triumph … in you, in our world, in the whole of God's creation.
But I have gotten a bit ahead of myself. For in Romans 5 Paul is still talking about the reality of suffering in life, the strength to endure it, and to grow from it as we build up our character through the cultivation of the virtues, the skills and strengths of Christian living. "We are not embarrassed by the reality of suffering," Paul writes. "In fact, we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope," which is grounded in God's love, which we lay hold of through faith, which is given to us by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit." [Romans 5:4-5] My mentor at Notre Dame entitled his first book Character and the Christian Life; so, I had to become real familiar in a hurry with what in ethics is called moral anthropology, the resources and skills we possess as moral agents that allow us to form moral actions, to cultivate the habits we call virtues, which contribute to good character and establish such things as personal identity and moral integrity.
Aristotle got this whole conversation started way back in the 4th century before the birth of Christ. He defined ethics as a practical matter, dealing with the formation of skills that enabled us to live well. These skills were called virtues, and they were acquired through the force of habit. Aristotle talked about courage, self-control, generosity, and gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness, along with some aristocratic values like high-mindedness, magnificence, wittiness, and even honor. The Apostle Paul provided a similar listing, but he chose a different model, one based not on our hard work but on the gifts of God's grace; and he called his list the gifts of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. There are many similarities in these lists; and while Paul's presented the classic virtues as gifts of the Spirit, these skills in Christian living still had to pass through the crucible of human experience in order to be proven through the fire of actually facing life's challenges.
As a theoretical matter, it has always been intellectually interesting to note that for the worldly wise, including Aristotle, living well and faring well were expected to coincide. Living morally well and enjoying happiness in life were expected to go together. That expectation is not assumed by Christians, or in Paul, or from the point of view formed by the Cross of Christ. Paul knows that suffering has been and undeniably still is a big part in the experience of the people of God. In fact, the Cross turns this worldly wisdom on its head. When we look at the Cross, it should be clear that even God is not "faring well" living high on His throne in the eternal bliss of heaven. In Christ on the Cross it is clear that God bears the full weight of the sin of the world … for us. Entering into our brokenness: that's where God is; that's how God loves us. God's love can be trusted to be with us; and precisely because, as Paul writes, "God's love has been poured into our hearts", we can hope that the day will arrive when all will change, evil will be eliminated, God's love will triumph, and Christ's life will be all in all.
But that day is not the world we're living in now. This world presents us with the reality of suffering, personal pain, uninvited tragedy. Paul is not saying that suffering's presence insures the triumph of hope. Make no mistake about it; there is no necessary spiritual law that suffering will produce endurance. Suffering can break us down as well as build us up. There is no necessary spiritual law that endurance will produce character. Those who endure the suffering of real life can just as easily wind up bitter and beaten, without hope. Paul's confidence does not start with acknowledging the reality of suffering in life. It begins with the presence of the Holy Spirit empowering our faith in God's love. Because we know God's love, we have hope; and because we have this hope, we can endure the suffering life offers. We can gain from the pain we are forced to endure, not because of anything about our pain but because of the hope that is ours through our faith in God's love. It moves forward because it works backwards. We discover the strength of our hope as we find that we are enduring life's tragedies with our faith in God's love in tact.
When Paul arrives at his well-known climax in chapter 8, he does not say that he is fully persuaded that suffering will not inflict its tragic outcomes on the faithful. Paul does not say that he is absolutely convinced that living well and faring well will always go hand-in-hand for those who believe. Paul does not say that the truth of God's love revealed in Christ on the Cross means that we will no longer ever encounter the reality of tragedy and injustice that Jesus Christ suffered and endured for us. He says that he is persuaded - because of his knowledge and experience of God's love - that nothing now, nothing ever, that nothing in life, nothing in death, that no kind of affliction, no circumstance of pain or suffering, not the highest high, nor even the lowest low, nothing in the entirety of all of creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God, which is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is not a view grounded in the audacity of sheer assertion. Paul's faith is grounded in the truth about God, the truth about life, the truth about us. It is the worldly wise that live the myth of believing that those who live well should fare well, that suffering in life is evidence of our wrong-doing, or proof of God's displeasure and judgment. That is the conclusion so many so easily reach when our lives are plagued with the hardship of tragic suffering and inexplicable pain. It may give no comfort, but the Cross of Christ tells us that God did not cause the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. She did not deserve the harm done to her. God isn't measuring her parents based on their grace under fire. God bears the full weight of their tragedy. God knows the pain of our world's brokenness. God know the empty horror of a child taken, a loved one stolen by that thief we call death, and those who serve death through outright hatred, misguided values, inadvertent oversights, or sheer stupidity.
The question we have raised today is not that of theodicy, the question of why an all-powerful God would allow the tragic injustice of pain and suffering to co-exist with His goodness. Does God lack the power or the goodness to require that reality reflect the will of His kingdom? We are asking what the connection is between God and suffering. The Cross reveals how God's love enters into the brokenness of our sin-filled world. The Cross reveals that God's love is present with us, giving us a hope that sustains us, even in circumstances that defy our being hopeful. It is the gift of this hope that sees to it that our character grows stronger with endurance through the suffering we encounter. I cannot explain the why of it. As I said, there is no necessary spiritual law that makes it so. God's love, the Spirit's presence, the proven power of the hope that is in him: these are the key for Paul. Paul is so confident in his hope that he is willing to boast that suffering will produce endurance, that endurance will strengthen character. I wish there was more that I could say; but Paul is willing to let go of reasons and let God take the lead, to let go of his questions and let God give the answer. Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character plain and simply because "God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us" … in Jesus' Name. Amen
Here are the texts referred to above in the sermon: