Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
February 14, 2010
Luke 9:28-36

Love Letter from God

What’s a preacher to say? Beloved parents and spouses, siblings and friends die. Loved ones battle cancer and heart disease and mental illness. Soldiers come back from war changed forever. Teenagers die suddenly in acts of violence. Neighbors die in a fire. Friends fall through the ice. And then, of course, there’s Haiti and the earthquake,... and suicide bombers, ... and auto accidents....

Last Sunday, during our “Joys and Concerns,” I felt surrounded by tragedy. What’s a preacher to say in the midst of such suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?” Turn on the news. Answers are on the tips of many tongues: “It’s God’s will,” say many pastors in Haiti. “God is punishing you,” cries an evangelist. “Everything happens for a reason,” says a well-meaning friend.

We human beings need to have an answer. We want life to make sense. If we understood why, then we could regain some measure of control, be able to make decisions and affect outcomes. But we don’t understand, do we. Much of life is out of control, ours at least.

So, let’s blame someone. How about God? Take Haiti, for example: Innocent children crushed in the collapse of their school. Do we really believe this could be God’s will? If you or I willed this – and either made it happen or let it happen – we would be considered evil, wouldn’t we? Was it God’s hand that caused the earth plates to shift? Was it God who built Port-au-Prince on a fault? Was God the carpenter responsible for shoddy construction? Blaming God is easy; it takes us off the hook – a quick and easy answer.

But is it a theologically sound answer? Why do we blame God when the Bible tells us that God is good? Would a good God deliberately cause suffering? We expect that a good person would not cause suffering, so why would we think God who is good would do so? I suppose it’s an easy answer – but it’s not a helpful answer and it makes me angry. I don’t believe God causes our pain and suffering. I don’t believe God wills our suffering.

On the other hand, we might blame ourselves. And, of course, we often are culpable. We can see the cause and effect of our smoking, of our drinking and driving, of our risky behaviors and bad choices. So, sometimes we are to blame. But not always: What do we say to the children of the person who is dying of cancer? Or to the parents of an honor student who is killed in a drive-by shooting? Or to the spouse diagnosed with ALS disease?

Conservatives like Pat Robertson would say whole communities are being punished – Haiti by the earthquake for practicing Voodoo, New Orleans by Katrina for debauchery, men and women by AIDS for being gay. But the specter of an angry, punishing God does not fit with the overarching theme of God’s love for humankind, indeed for all of creation.

When the Hebrew prophet Micah speaks these words for God, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly....”, he is proclaiming that righteous living – that is, right thinking and right relationships – will bring health and redemption to the community. Rather than punishing us, God is always working to restore the breach between us.

In our beloved 23rd Psalm we read, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” We can imagine ourselves being cradled, protected, in God’s arms; feeling security and comfort. Yes, we can expect God the Good Shepherd to take care of us, but it’s also clear that God expect us to do our part.
Hear this hauntingly beautiful passage by the prophet Ezekiel which ends with a jolt:

I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed,
and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak,
but the fat and the strong I will destroy.
I will feed them with justice. [Ezekiel 34:16].

I know it’s tempting to sit back and let God do all the work in this world, but God expects us also to do our part to bring healing and restoration. In his column in the Jewish Voice & Herald two weeks ago, Rabbi Jim Rosenberg, reflecting on Abraham Heschel’s book, The Prophets, wrote, “The God of the prophets is ‘most moved’ by the plight of the widow, the orphan, those most vulnerable in biblical society.” Reading the prophets, one realizes that when someone is hurt, or lost, or injured, when someone is widowed, or orphaned, or vulnerable, their suffering is not a punishment by God, but rather a source of pain for God who is “most moved.”

When a loved one gets cancer; when an accident claims a friend’s life; when a family is falling apart; when violence divides a community; when a country is devastated by an earthquake; they are not being punished. We suffer, and when we suffer, God suffers with us.

What, then, is God’s will? God’s will is health and wholeness. You see, vengeance in the Old Testament has a different meaning from what we think of as revenge. It’s not about punishment; it’s about restoration. An angry voice raining down punishment, then, is not Biblically sound. It’s more a projection of a person’s own anger onto God than a Biblically-based position. I don’t buy the punishment argument.

The easy answer, “everything happens for a reason,” is not comforting for me, either. True, sometimes we rally in a crisis, make the best of a bad situation, or grow with suffering. We make lemonade out of the lemons of life. This does not mean that God intends that we suffer to teach us a lesson; we can get into enough trouble by ourselves without a divine push.

However, the explanation that our suffering is part of a larger plan, one that we don’t understand, begins to point us in the right direction. Consider the Book of Job: Job is beset by calamity after calamity. His wife suggests he curse God and die. But Job refuses, even as trials are heaped on trials. His friends suggest that he has sinned, and therefore he suffers. They can’t bear to think that Job is blameless; how can that be if God is just? It is too much for them to understand that life sometimes is unfair, that there is no connection to what one deserves and what one gets.

But Job continues to deny that he has sinned. He is not guilty! Why, then, is he beset by calamity? He begs God to tell him. At last, toward the end of the book, God answers Job out of the whirlwind:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?” [Job 38:4-8]

Verse after verse, in four long chapters, in a show of creation power and majesty, God puts Job in his place. Finally, Job is humbled and satisfied:

“I know that you can do everything,
That nothing you propose is impossible for You.
I had heard You with my ears,
But now I see You with my eyes;
Therefore, I recant and relent,
Being but dust and ashes.” [Job 42:2, 5-6, New Jewish Publication Society translation]

I was present when Rabbi Rosenberg delivered a paper on Job at a meeting at Brown University last month. He concludes,

So that’s what God has been up to; he is challenging Job to step outside of his limited, subjective point of view. He is offering Job a glimpse of the world not as people see it
but as God sees it. Reviewing his life from this altered perspective, Job is able
to make peace with his suffering and to thank God for the gift of this new and radically expanded vision of reality.

Further, the Rabbi wrote, “The universe is not about us. Or, to be more precise, the universe is for the most part not about us.”

What’s a preacher to say about suffering? So many questions; no good answers. Like Job, I can’t begin to understand the mind of God – but I don’t believe God either wills our suffering, or is punishing us.

How can I say that with conviction? Not only because I have read the prophets, but also because God has sent us a “love letter” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Valentine’s Day is a good day to remember this. Just as Job had difficulty understanding God, we also are out of our league trying to grasp the divine vision for our lives, trying to understand why there is suffering.

But in the life and ministry of Jesus, we have a concrete God-like person to wrap our arms – and our minds – around. Jesus – loving, just, personal, accessible – shows us what God is like, and how quickly one can go from glory to the cross.

Today’s transfiguration story takes place at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. That Moses and Elijah come to him is symbolic of his being in the long line of Hebrew prophets who preached righteousness and restoration. And now God sends us the perfect example, his Son, who taught by example, to show us how life should be lived and cared for. Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, raised the dead. He had compassion for the poor, the outcast, the immigrant. He cried over Jerusalem for its lack of understanding and would gather it under his wings like a mother hen, if he could. And even when politics and greed nailed Jesus to the cross, in the midst of his suffering, he asks for forgiveness for those who do not know what they do.

“This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” The overarching theme in the Bible is that God is love and that God loves you and me – and that God feels our pain and suffers with us.
God, then, is not in the earthquake—but in the rescue workers who dig through rubble. God is not in the fire – but in those who comfort the family and friends. God is not in the tumor – but in the doctors and nurses who bring healing.

Through the ages, hymn writers have tried to express God’s compassion in the midst of the uncertainties of life. Take comfort in a few words; they are like love letters from God:

I was there to hear your borning cry, I’ll be there when you are old....

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!

Precious Lord, take my hand....

Why should I feel discouraged?... God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I know God watches me.

O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in you;...

Be still, my soul; for God is on your side;...

When peace, like a river, upholds me each day,
when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot,
you have taught me to say, “It is well, it is well with my soul.”

May it be so! Amen.