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Psalm 73:1-6 NRSV Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment.

Psalm 73:13-14 NRSV All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning.

Psalm 73:16-17 NRSV But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.

Psalm 73:21-26 NRSV When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:28 NRSV ...I have made the Lord God my refuge....

Let us pray. Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove; descend on us, reveal your love. Word of God and inward light, wake our spirits; clear our sight. Surround us now with all your glory; speak through me that sacred story. Take my lips and make them bold. Take hearts and minds and make them whole. Stir in us that sacred flame; then send us forth to spread your name. Amen.

Have you ever been where you wished you weren’t? Some of you may be there right now! I was where I wished I weren’t when he asked the tough question. He said, “Preacher, if there really is an all-loving and all-powerful God, why is there so much evil...so much pain...and so much suffering?”

As I was gathering myself to answer what is perhaps the hardest of questions that any one of us could ask, he stopped me and said, “Preacher, let me make it specific.” He said, “There is a couple that I know that are good people. They have this beautiful daughter. She is so beautiful that people would stop them on the street to comment on her beauty. They are a wonderful family. They are people of faith. They never hurt anybody. They have a house, and in back of the house is a swimming pool. One summer day it was so nice outside that the mom took the playpen out by the pool and put the baby in the playpen just so they could enjoy being out of doors for the afternoon.”

“The telephone rang and the mom went into the house, just inside the door, just for a minute, to answer the phone. While she had turned her back, her daughter tugged at the side of that playpen and the hinge that held up the side gave way, and it fell down. It didn’t have to. God should have stopped it...God could have reached down from Heaven and kept that playpen up. But He didn’t!”

“When the mom came back out, after hearing the splash in the pool, she saw her beloved beautiful little girl at the bottom of the pool. She dove in and pulled her out of the water and did the best she could to give mouth-to-mouth, and brought the little girl back. But the brain injury that resulted from the lack of oxygen was so profound that today, that beautiful little girl is drawn into a tight knot. She drools all the time. She can speak no words and take no steps. She will be forever an infant. That family has a life of struggle and pain that no words can describe. So where was God, preacher? If God is good, why does that kind of thing happen?”

I’m guessing that more than a few of you have faced such a question. If you have ever opened the book of scripture, you’ve seen people wrestling with this kind of thing.

Some people look at the Bible and think that the Bible promises only good things to those who follow God. But if you take a second look at scripture, you find that the Bible is filled with the stories of people trying to reconcile the harsh world in which they live with a good God in whom they believe. Much of the 1st Testament is the story of a group of people with whom God has made a covenant. They are trying to figure out why they are going through all of this hell in life when God has made this covenant. (Yancey)

One third of the Psalms are Psalms of complaint and lament, like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And in the scriptures we hear God saying, “When you go through trials...when you go through the fire...I will be with you.” It doesn’t say if you go through them. It says, when it happens. And we hear Jesus say, “In this world you will have trouble.”

Much of scripture is the testimony of people struggling with faith in a world that is sometimes harsh and difficult. The biblical answer is not that God causes our pain or that God takes it away, but a promise that God will be with us and will walk with us and can redeem our pain and even bring something good from it. And in the end, the promise is that all pain, sorrow and evil will disappear.

But for now, we struggle and ask the hard questions! For the Bible affirms that God is good and merciful and loving and kind, but it also affirms that God is all-powerful. So, how do you explain pain and suffering and injustice?

Well, this morning I cannot give you a definitive answer, and not even in the second part of this message, which will come next week. But what I want to try to do is to frame the reality of God...to do a little bit of de-construction of some of the commonly held ideas of God and then come back together next week and go deeper and try to put it all back together again. But this morning I would like for us to just look at how we tend to see God and how we view the troubles that come our way.

So, let’s look at some of the kinds of things that trouble us. When I think of suffering, especially this week, I think of natural disasters. (Hamilton)

There was the Super Tuesday tornado that took more than 40 lives across the Mid-South. And then who can forget Katrina with all of its devastation and 3,000 lives lost. And then the tsunami in southeast Asia that took more than 30,000 lives. And what does your insurance policy call it when something like that happens? It calls it an “act of God.” It’s an interesting phrase because it assumes that God is the one who brings tsunamis and tornadoes and earthquakes and floods and hurricanes.

But is that really the case? I can understand how people said that a thousand years ago...maybe even a hundred years ago...when people didn’t understand how the forces of nature worked to create things like tsunamis, earthquakes and tornadoes. And before the advent of modern science, if you were standing on a beach and saw a wall of water coming at you and taking people out to sea after it crashed against the shore, you had no way to understand such a force except as the act of a very angry God.

But today, we understand the forces that cause a tornado or hurricane or tsunami. The same laws that make possible the beautiful mountain peaks of the Rockies...the same laws of volcanic action that created the Hawaiian Islands...those same laws can cause a 9.0 earthquake in the depths of the Indian Ocean and send a tsunami towards the shores of different countries that will take thousands upon thousands of lives.

I’m sure you remember that late last summer we were all praying that the warm winds of the Gulf would move northward and would water our parched earth. But we need to remember that in certain seasons of the year, when those same warm, wet winds meet colder, dry Canadian winds moving southward, that warm southern wind tries to rise, but the cold northern air blocks it. This clash causes the warm, trapped air to rotate horizontally, and the rising warm air spins upward. This creates strong winds and an internal vacuum that, under the right conditions, can suck up anything it passes over. When those fierce winds touch human structures, those winds can do great damage.

Those are forces of nature. But are those forces of nature really what we would call “acts of God” or are they part of the design process that God has created in giving us this planet as a wonderful place to live, where the rains come and water the earth and things of great beauty are created over time? And are they not a part of the cost of living in certain parts of the country and even certain parts of the world where certain forces of nature are more active than in other places?

We also understand that when human beings collide with forces of nature, human beings are almost always going to be the loser. So the appropriate response, it seems to me, is not to shake our fists at God and shout, “Why?” but to open up our hearts and hands and say, “How....how can we shape a different world and how can we relieve the suffering of those who are the victims of the forces of nature?” (Hamilton)

Then I think about sickness. We have a prayer list here at Germantown United Methodist Church and there are a lot of names on it. I want you to see it. I want you to get it sometime. You can see some of those names here in the bulletin of the church. Most of those names that are listed are not there because of natural disasters, but because of sickness.

Sometimes when I read that list, I am absolutely overwhelmed with the number of people with cancer. I look out and see some of you here this morning. And we know that cancer comes from a single cell or a group of cells whose software DNA gets mutated and goes bad and those incorrectly designed cells usually die. They can’t survive because they can’t reproduce. Or our body notices that something is wrong and our immune system takes care of it. But every once in awhile, one of those cells, or that group of cells with that faulty information, begins to multiply and reproduce and in the case of cancer, it’s like those cells are on steroids and they reproduce in ways that harm us.

So, we understand that and we get medical attention and we spend millions of dollars on cancer research. We stop smoking and we try to avoid carcinogens. But we also know that same process of cell reproduction is essential to our life because without that process of cell multiplication, our bodies wound not be renewed and we would die. But sometimes this process goes amok. And when it does, is that an act of God?

Then I think about evil people...people who betray and steal and commit injustice and do acts of violence. Do we believe that God is prompting the hearts of criminals and rapists and killers and thieves and despots? Or is their action the result of misused human freedom?

What is the alternative to evil in this world? The alternative is not having the freedom to choose between good and evil. The alternative is the absence of choice and to become moral robots. I believe God took an enormous risk in giving us the gift of human freedom.

When we look in the Bible, we find that God is not controlling all things that happen, but that God created us to be free moral agents...to be able to choose right from wrong. The alternative is a world without choices.

But I want to shift gears a moment!

At a conference that I attended last fall, Dr. Len Sweet and Dr. Adam Hamilton were in a dialogue. They were talking about two different world views, two schools of thought about the pain in this world. One of those schools of thought on one pole is deism, and on the other pole is theological determinism, and they were talking about how we, as United Methodists, tend to stand somewhere in the middle of that.

The deist believes there is a God, but God is like the clock maker. God created the laws that govern the universe, wound up the clock, and walked away. God is outside of the universe. God is watching over it, but is not actively involved. It’s kind of like the song that was recorded back in 1990 where Bette Midler sang, “God is watching us...God is watching us....from a distance.” That is deism.

But the opposite pole is theological determinism. A determinist says that God is in control of everything and everything is somehow God’s doing. According to this view -- which is held primarily by people who are of the Muslim faith, and some Christians in the south -- everything that happens...whether it be an earthquake or a tsunami or a flood or an accident or a child falling into a swimming pool, or a drunk driver who gets on the wrong side of the interstate and crashes head-on into another car and kills someone...everything that happens is because God actively wills it to happen. The determinist says that somehow, even though we may never understand it, nothing happens that is outside of God’s will and God’s plan.

Now, I have a problem with deism because the entire Biblical witness is the story of God who gets involved, who seems to roll up God’s sleeves, and gets involved with humanity in the world. It is the story of a God who creates, a God who chooses the nation of Israel, and calls Moses, who leads the people out of bondage and speaks to the hearts of the prophets. And in Jesus, God steps into human history to reveal God to us.

So, for me, deism goes way too far and excludes the possibility of God’s action. I appreciate the caution that it gives us...that God doesn’t always miraculously intervene to do our bidding. But deism excludes the possibility of God acting at all.

But I also struggle on this other side with theological determinism.

Adam Hamilton told about a preacher that he knows who is absolutely sure that God sent hurricane Katrina. He says, “I know God sent it. It’s just up to us to accept that and to grow through it and help those caught in the impact of it.” He says, “God must have done it because something like this could not have happened without God causing it to happen.”

This same minister contracted cancer. He said, “God fitted me with this cancer and gave this to me to accomplish some purpose in my life. It’s all part of a divine plan. I don’t understand it, but I know it is here to teach me something...patience, faith and perseverance...this is part of God’s plan.”

Part of me wants to say, “That must be very comforting.” But I see nothing in that view that matches the character of Christ. And I think if I had a friend who wanted to teach his child perseverance and patience and he said, “What I am going to do is inject into my child live cancer cells,” what would I do? I would be obligated to call 911, to call the police, to call Children’s Services...because that would be a monstrous thing to do.

Yet, the determinist, on this far side, says, “That’s what God does.” God gives us pain to teach us something or to accomplish some purpose.

Now, this gets very, very personal for me.

It all came into focus for me the day after Christmas in Selmer, Tennessee 35 years ago, when my son Chris, and his cousin Mike, got in their grandfather’s old Dodge to go six blocks to the store to spend their Christmas money. Charlie, Jane’s Dad, was driving the car just six blocks. And you think to yourself, what can go wrong in six blocks? Everything was fine for four blocks, but then he turned his Dodge left, out of that neighborhood, onto the main four-lane road that runs through Selmer, Tennessee where the speed limit is just 30 mph.

For some reason, Charlie didn’t see the huge red dump truck coming south on that four-lane road and pulled directly into the path of the truck. Chris was seated by the door and he was not buckled in by a seatbelt and our lives and his life were forever changed by the injury that he sustained.

Now, where was God?

The deist would say, “God was just looking on. Just checking it all out.”

The determinist would say that God was in control of that moment...that God arranged for that. God was guiding Charlie’s hand and arranged for Chris not to be wearing the seatbelt that he always wore, and arranged for that red dump truck to come down the road at 30 mph at precisely that moment.

But let me tell you how I understand what happened that day after Christmas. Charlie Graham, Jane’s dad, was driving his two grandsons six blocks to spend some of their Christmas money. Charlie never wore a seatbelt, and so he didn’t insist that two children wear theirs. Everything was fine for four blocks, but then he turned out of the neighborhood onto the main road that runs through Selmer, where the speed limit is 30 mph. And for some reason, Charlie didn’t see the big red truck coming south and pulled directly into the path of the dump truck. Two little boys were thrown against hard metal and glass. It was an accident. Nothing more. Nothing less. God did not orchestrate an accident. God did not inflict a brain injury on my son.

Oh yes, it was God’s will that Chris be a normal little boy, warm and soft, not like the terminator made out of steel that can regenerate himself. God meant for Chris to be fragile and breakable. That’s part of the joy and the pain of human life. As the psalmist says, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Yancey) We wouldn’t want it any other way! But when fragile and breakable human body comes in touch with a great force and energy and flesh and bone and brain tissue are traumatized, sometimes the result is devastating.

We are all subject to the laws of nature and the inhumanity of others and the consequences of our own poor choices and the poor choices of other people. That’s the answer for me as to why that accident happened. (Hamilton)

Now, yes, God does sometimes intervene...He sometimes miraculously intervenes...but it doesn’t happen often. That’s why they call such moments miracles. I’ve seen it and experienced some of those amazing God moment miracles. But they are rare.

Mostly God is trying to guide us. Get our attention. Lead us. God wants to help us prevent pain. I believe God was trying to guide Charlie. I don’t know why Charlie didn’t see the big red truck, but what I know is this: it wasn’t because God didn’t want him to. And even for the best of us, accidents still happen, aging takes its toll, sickness still occurs, and storms still rage.

For God’s answer to our pain and our suffering is not, “I will take away all the suffering in this world.”

That will happen in the next life when God will wipe away every tear we have ever cried; and pain and suffering will be no more. For today, God’s answer to our pain is, “I’m going to be with you in the midst of it all. I’m going to give you strength and guidance and direction. And I will work with you to make of this pain something that may even someday become beautiful.”

And though our toughest questions about suffering will not be answered this side of eternity, we are left with the gift of God’s love, the comfort and strength of God’s presence, and the hope of God’s promise.

God’s answer to our predicament is that God sent his own Son, not only to save us and to show us how to live, but to show us something even more profound: that God cares deeply about our suffering.

For in Jesus, and in this cross, we have come to know that even God is not exempt from the pain of life. If you ever forget it, walk into this room, look at that cross, and remember that we have a God who has experienced the pain of life, a God who understands where we are, who cares deeply about us in the midst of our pain, and that whenever I doubt that, or want something more, I look into the face of Christ and I see the face of a compassionate God who is acquainted with our grief. (Yancey)

In over 39 years now of ministry, I’ve been with literally hundreds and hundreds of people as they’ve faced tragedy. I’ve been with scores of others who were about to die, and others who were dealing with pain unimaginable. Part of the reason that I believe in God is precisely because of the pain and the tragedy of life. In the midst of the pain, the only meaning that I can find is that God is there with us, that God will give us strength. When I am with someone who is dying, the only meaning that I find in that is that beyond this life there is something more. God stands on the other side and there is eternity with God.

I have seen God work in the midst of tragedy...not always giving us what we want, but always giving us what we need.

Next Sunday, in the second part of this message, we are going to look at how I’ve seen God working in some of you here, in the midst of the pain and tragedies of your life. And why it is that I pray, and what it is that I pray for, and what we can expect from God when we suffer.

But for now, I leave you with the answer that is found in Psalm 73. The psalmist is contemplating the pain and the suffering and the unfairness of life and he finds no good answer. But then he goes into the sanctuary of God, and listen to what he says: “Now I understand! You, O Lord, are my hope, my strength, and my refuge.”

Let us pray. O God, in the midst of our wrestling, wrestle with us. In the midst of our questioning, come along side us. In the midst of our woundedness, remind us that you are there giving us strength and grace sufficient. Help us to turn to you. Help us to be so attentive to you and to the world around us that we would be a part of that great company of the Kingdom that prevents so much of the pain in this world, that pushes back against the injustice in the world, that offers words of grace and healing to those who are wounded. So come, Lord Jesus, and send us your peace and your strength. For we pray in the name and spirit of Christ, Amen.

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Endnotes: This sermon is based, in part, upon material from the following sources:

1. Adam Hamilton, “God and Suffering”
2. John Ortberg, “God is Big Enough to Comfort My Suffering”
3. Phillip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read
4. Phillip Yancey, Disappointment with God
5. Phillip Yancey, Where is God When It Hurts?