Why Do We Suffer?
Sermon
Rejoicing In Life's 'Melissa Moments'
The Joys Of Faith And The Challenges Of Life
He died all alone in a little cabin far removed from his family. It was not the way anybody wanted it, but Uncle Volney had smallpox. It happened nearly 100 years ago. I heard the story from my grandmother. Volney Smith was her brother. The story of how he died while still quite a young man is one of those memories that connects me with the past. As Grandmother Martha Harris told it, people all around were dying, although some survived and took care of others. Uncle Volney was one of the unlucky ones. He was put off in a little cabin by himself. To reduce the danger of spreading the disease, his food was taken halfway from the kitchen to his cabin. He would come the rest of the way to get his meals when everyone had gone. One day he didn't come out. He died all alone, isolated from his family. Some men in the community who had survived the epidemic came to get his body. They put Uncle Volney in a wagon and took him to New Hope Baptist Church at midnight. They rang a bell all the way to warn those who had not had the disease to stay far away. They buried his body in the middle of the night. Once again he was alone in death as he had been at the end of his life.
The world is full of sad stories. Any week that passes will produce enough tragedy to keep the earth flooded with tears. Suffering goes on all around us all the time. During the past few days prior to my writing these words, the following stories have been in the news: A little five-year-old girl was snatched away from her mother in a public place and at last report had not been found. One moment she was there by her mother, the next minute she was gone. A family of four was brutally murdered in a nearby city not too long ago. They were attacked, tortured, and killed in their own homes by strangers who randomly chose their house. More than a dozen women in the Rochester, New York, area were murdered. Nearly all of them were involved in prostitution and connected with drugs. A young man went berserk in Canada and killed fourteen women on the campus of the University of Montreal. Having known much failure and rejection, he was full of hostility. He expressed it in one moment of violent madness that finally left him as well as his victims suddenly robbed of life. Terry Anderson was a captive of terrorists in Lebanon for many tears. We never know when we will hear of another shooting in a school. No more than five minutes after I had written the previous sentence on March 22, 2001, my wife called from downstairs to tell me that another school shooting had occurred.
A television show recently told the story of a young man in Chicago who had in desperation broken into the intensive care unit where his child was being kept alive by machines. He waved a gun to keep people away and pulled out the plugs. He held his son until he died. The child had swallowed a balloon and almost choked to death. His brain had been deprived of oxygen for a long time. He had no hope of ever being more than a vegetable. Doctors agreed that the infant would never be conscious again. The court refused permission to take away the technology that kept him breathing. The father out of love for the child and in desperation took extreme measures to relieve the suffering of all involved. Fortunately, a grand jury had the good sense not to indict him.
Seldom does a day pass but that we read newspaper accounts of people being killed or maimed by drunken drivers. A trial took place in Kentucky in which an intoxicated man ran into a bus and killed 27 people. Hardly a more heart-wrenching sight can be imagined than a mother full of agony and anger telling how her teenage daughter's life was taken in a crash caused by a driver stupid enough to drive a car while poisoned with alcohol. I can no longer laugh at impersonations of drunks with slurred speech. The list can be made as long as we want it to be. We have not mentioned the thousands of children at this moment dying of hunger, the homeless who roam the streets, the victims of cancer and AIDS and a hundred other diseases. There are the lonely, the despairing, the unloved, the unwanted, the mentally ill, all the rest of those who suffer from the manifold ills to which this frail flesh of ours is heir.
A few years ago one of the books that stayed high on the best-seller list for a long time was Rabbi Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That idea touches something deep in all of us. For who is there who has not at some time wondered about and agonized over the fact that bad things happen to good people? By good people we do not mean perfect people. There are none. We have in mind folks who by and large try to do the right thing, people who would not deliberately do anything cruel or harmful to other people. They have done much good in their lives. Suddenly the evil days come upon them. They are solid citizens whose hearts are usually in the right place and whose deeds testify to a kind of basic integrity. Why do such bad things happen to people like that?
By bad things we mean those terrible afflictions of body and spirit that make life miserable. Accidents, disease, and violent crime come upon us without our consent. Disease strikes randomly without warning. Babies are born with congenital defects. Things can be going well, when an accident suddenly maims and mangles us for life. On November 30, 1988, I began to have chest pains about 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night. I spent eight days in Strong Memorial Hospital and came out with a fresh sense of the frailty and mortality of human flesh. On May 13, 1997, my wife noticed symptoms that suggested that I might be having a stroke. I was and spent two weeks in the hospital. Fortunately, I have fully recovered from both events and am in splendid health. But who knows what might happen to me or to you within the next 24 hours?
We need not multiply examples. The fact and the mystery of suffering are all around us. Says Job in the midst of his misery, "I am not at ease; nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes" (Job 1:26). Says the Psalmist, "I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God" (Psalm 69:3). These ancient cries are as modern as the computer on which I write these words. No fact of life raises more difficult problems for our Christian faith. How can so much pain and injustice exist in a world created by a God who is supposed to be perfectly good and all-powerful? In the classroom, we call it the problem of evil. We look to the Scriptures and to the great thinkers of the Church, past and present, for insight and understanding.1
I have struggled with this problem as long as I can remember. Yet my own life has been almost uninterruptedly good. My question most often is, "Lord, why have so many good things happened to me, when others have known such tragedy?" Oh, I have had my own heartache and struggle. On one occasion years ago life seemed dark and hopeless. I can recall a few hours in deep despair when I came to know in my own heart how people could get desperate enough to take their own lives. That episode of hopelessness pales, however, in the face of all the good years and all the success and happiness I have known.
Nevertheless, as a preacher and theologian, it is the problem of evil and suffering that has concerned me over the years. I do not wish to immerse you in the endless debates of the theologians and philosophers who have wrestled with Job's predicament. There is no simple answer or set of propositions that applies to all the miseries and injustices that plague the world. In the Bible many different things are said about suffering. Nowhere is there a systematic analysis of its sources or meaning. Life is complicated and multidimensional. Many things are true about our lives and our distress. What applies to some circumstances is not pertinent to others. Neither the Scriptures nor human reason gives us a satisfactory solution to all our questions.
I offer a few considerations that have been helpful in my own struggles. Let us proceed by looking at the world God has created and at our place in the world. In the first place, much of the suffering in the world is caused by what people do to each other. God has given us the power of choice. We bring a lot of misery on ourselves by our foolishness, our carelessness, and our selfishness. Murders, cruelty, crime, and all sorts of meanness and injustice are committed by people out of fear, hate, and greed. Drunken drivers who kill and maim are abusing their freedom, however much they may be suffering from a disease. We hurt ourselves, and people hurt each other by their acts, attitudes, and choices. We all, in varying degrees, dishonor the freedom which God has given us.
All this does not necessarily mean that a person could have done otherwise than he or she did at a given moment. Some people may be addicted to their bad habits and act out of compulsions over which they have little or no control. What we decide expresses what we are. If we develop an evil character, we will do evil deeds. Nevertheless, if we choose to do what hurts others, we are responsible, since we did it. We cannot hold God directly responsible for the misery which we cause by our own actions.
In the second place, the very nature of reality makes it inevitable that accidents, diseases, and destruction will sometimes occur. Look at it this way. Atoms, molecules, stones, trees, animals, and people all have parts arranged in a certain way that make them what they are. If this organization is disturbed, destruction occurs. This means everything is vulnerable, fragile, and subject to disruption. This is closely related to the fact that we live in an interdependent, law-abiding world. Things interact with good and bad effects. They may interfere with each other. Destruction may result. Accidents happen. Things collide, get broken, fall apart, blow up, erode, rust, and rot. If we are talking about living organisms, disorganization among their parts causes pain and eventually death. Suffering is a disturbance of healthy functioning in the body or mind of a living being. Human bodies get sick and die. They are mangled and destroyed by stones, bullets, storms, earthquakes, and other devastations too numerous to list. It may be that any real world worth living in will be like this. It is hard to conceive of free, interacting beings that are not vulnerable. We are flesh. We bleed, hurt, suffer, and die.
It would appear that there cannot be a world in which good things can happen without the possibility of bad things happening. We cannot have one without the other. The very principles and processes that produce pleasure and happiness when they work properly produce misery when things go wrong. Let me illustrate. The digestive system is constructed to give us satisfaction when we eat good food. It follows that we can get a stomach ache if something upsets normal functioning.
Moreover, the more good that is possible, the more suffering is possible. Worms and cats cannot experience the heights of happiness that people can. Neither can they know the depths of misery we do. The fact that human beings can experience meaning and purpose that give us happiness means that we can also experience despair and hopelessness that make life awful. The same capacities that make human enjoyment possible make possible human suffering. We cannot have one without the other.
Finally, notice that complicated things are easy to break down. Consider the human brain. The complexity of this system of cells and connections is mind-boggling. It is this intricate arrangement of tissue that makes possible thought, love, choice, and all that makes human life distinctive. Yet this same complexity makes it very vulnerable. So much more can go wrong with a brain than with a mountain.
Note then:
1. The very same processes that make possible health and happiness when things go right lead to suffering when things go wrong. We cannot have good without the possibility of evil.
2. The more complex an organism is,
a. the more good it can experience,
b. the greater evil it can suffer, and
c. the more can go wrong.
It does not seem possible to escape these facts and connections in our world. They may apply to any world that God might create.
What is the conclusion of the matter? Some bad things happen because people make them happen to themselves and each other. Some bad things happen because it is in the very nature of our world that they can occur. We might save ourselves from a lot of grief if we simply accepted the fact that people and things are the immediate causes of misery. Hence, it is not true that God directly causes particular instances of suffering. God does not make specific evil things happen for some reason. If we ask whether God wills this or that instance of suffering in an immediate way, the answer must be "No." Some passages of Scripture teach otherwise, of course. I do not believe we ought to see things this way today. God is ultimately responsible for the possibility of bad things happening, since God made the world. But God does not cause each instance of suffering for a particular purpose.
Rather when accident, disease, and violence bring great pain and misery to us, I believe that God's heart is broken like ours. God feels our pain and suffers our agony with us. Only if this is so can I believe that God is truly full of love and compassion. Yet in our sorrow God and we can make the best of it from now on to bring new life and enjoyment out of the broken pieces.
God uses every event, good and bad, as an opportunity to work in us and through us and in all things to bring the greatest possible happiness, joy, and love into being. In that fact we can trust. So believing we can try to attune our lives to that saving purpose, knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Yes, in one sense, Uncle Volney died all alone. In another sense, he was surrounded by the love of God and by the love of his family. Around him was the tender compassion of all those who wished more than anything else they could be with him to hold his body and to comfort his spirit when his life was slipping away. Uncle Volney suffered, but he did not suffer alone. In that realization there is comfort and hope.
____________
1. The preceding paragraphs were originally published in The Many Faces Of Evil, CSS Publishing Co., Lima, Ohio, 1997, pp. 21-23. Used by permission.
The world is full of sad stories. Any week that passes will produce enough tragedy to keep the earth flooded with tears. Suffering goes on all around us all the time. During the past few days prior to my writing these words, the following stories have been in the news: A little five-year-old girl was snatched away from her mother in a public place and at last report had not been found. One moment she was there by her mother, the next minute she was gone. A family of four was brutally murdered in a nearby city not too long ago. They were attacked, tortured, and killed in their own homes by strangers who randomly chose their house. More than a dozen women in the Rochester, New York, area were murdered. Nearly all of them were involved in prostitution and connected with drugs. A young man went berserk in Canada and killed fourteen women on the campus of the University of Montreal. Having known much failure and rejection, he was full of hostility. He expressed it in one moment of violent madness that finally left him as well as his victims suddenly robbed of life. Terry Anderson was a captive of terrorists in Lebanon for many tears. We never know when we will hear of another shooting in a school. No more than five minutes after I had written the previous sentence on March 22, 2001, my wife called from downstairs to tell me that another school shooting had occurred.
A television show recently told the story of a young man in Chicago who had in desperation broken into the intensive care unit where his child was being kept alive by machines. He waved a gun to keep people away and pulled out the plugs. He held his son until he died. The child had swallowed a balloon and almost choked to death. His brain had been deprived of oxygen for a long time. He had no hope of ever being more than a vegetable. Doctors agreed that the infant would never be conscious again. The court refused permission to take away the technology that kept him breathing. The father out of love for the child and in desperation took extreme measures to relieve the suffering of all involved. Fortunately, a grand jury had the good sense not to indict him.
Seldom does a day pass but that we read newspaper accounts of people being killed or maimed by drunken drivers. A trial took place in Kentucky in which an intoxicated man ran into a bus and killed 27 people. Hardly a more heart-wrenching sight can be imagined than a mother full of agony and anger telling how her teenage daughter's life was taken in a crash caused by a driver stupid enough to drive a car while poisoned with alcohol. I can no longer laugh at impersonations of drunks with slurred speech. The list can be made as long as we want it to be. We have not mentioned the thousands of children at this moment dying of hunger, the homeless who roam the streets, the victims of cancer and AIDS and a hundred other diseases. There are the lonely, the despairing, the unloved, the unwanted, the mentally ill, all the rest of those who suffer from the manifold ills to which this frail flesh of ours is heir.
A few years ago one of the books that stayed high on the best-seller list for a long time was Rabbi Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That idea touches something deep in all of us. For who is there who has not at some time wondered about and agonized over the fact that bad things happen to good people? By good people we do not mean perfect people. There are none. We have in mind folks who by and large try to do the right thing, people who would not deliberately do anything cruel or harmful to other people. They have done much good in their lives. Suddenly the evil days come upon them. They are solid citizens whose hearts are usually in the right place and whose deeds testify to a kind of basic integrity. Why do such bad things happen to people like that?
By bad things we mean those terrible afflictions of body and spirit that make life miserable. Accidents, disease, and violent crime come upon us without our consent. Disease strikes randomly without warning. Babies are born with congenital defects. Things can be going well, when an accident suddenly maims and mangles us for life. On November 30, 1988, I began to have chest pains about 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night. I spent eight days in Strong Memorial Hospital and came out with a fresh sense of the frailty and mortality of human flesh. On May 13, 1997, my wife noticed symptoms that suggested that I might be having a stroke. I was and spent two weeks in the hospital. Fortunately, I have fully recovered from both events and am in splendid health. But who knows what might happen to me or to you within the next 24 hours?
We need not multiply examples. The fact and the mystery of suffering are all around us. Says Job in the midst of his misery, "I am not at ease; nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes" (Job 1:26). Says the Psalmist, "I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God" (Psalm 69:3). These ancient cries are as modern as the computer on which I write these words. No fact of life raises more difficult problems for our Christian faith. How can so much pain and injustice exist in a world created by a God who is supposed to be perfectly good and all-powerful? In the classroom, we call it the problem of evil. We look to the Scriptures and to the great thinkers of the Church, past and present, for insight and understanding.1
I have struggled with this problem as long as I can remember. Yet my own life has been almost uninterruptedly good. My question most often is, "Lord, why have so many good things happened to me, when others have known such tragedy?" Oh, I have had my own heartache and struggle. On one occasion years ago life seemed dark and hopeless. I can recall a few hours in deep despair when I came to know in my own heart how people could get desperate enough to take their own lives. That episode of hopelessness pales, however, in the face of all the good years and all the success and happiness I have known.
Nevertheless, as a preacher and theologian, it is the problem of evil and suffering that has concerned me over the years. I do not wish to immerse you in the endless debates of the theologians and philosophers who have wrestled with Job's predicament. There is no simple answer or set of propositions that applies to all the miseries and injustices that plague the world. In the Bible many different things are said about suffering. Nowhere is there a systematic analysis of its sources or meaning. Life is complicated and multidimensional. Many things are true about our lives and our distress. What applies to some circumstances is not pertinent to others. Neither the Scriptures nor human reason gives us a satisfactory solution to all our questions.
I offer a few considerations that have been helpful in my own struggles. Let us proceed by looking at the world God has created and at our place in the world. In the first place, much of the suffering in the world is caused by what people do to each other. God has given us the power of choice. We bring a lot of misery on ourselves by our foolishness, our carelessness, and our selfishness. Murders, cruelty, crime, and all sorts of meanness and injustice are committed by people out of fear, hate, and greed. Drunken drivers who kill and maim are abusing their freedom, however much they may be suffering from a disease. We hurt ourselves, and people hurt each other by their acts, attitudes, and choices. We all, in varying degrees, dishonor the freedom which God has given us.
All this does not necessarily mean that a person could have done otherwise than he or she did at a given moment. Some people may be addicted to their bad habits and act out of compulsions over which they have little or no control. What we decide expresses what we are. If we develop an evil character, we will do evil deeds. Nevertheless, if we choose to do what hurts others, we are responsible, since we did it. We cannot hold God directly responsible for the misery which we cause by our own actions.
In the second place, the very nature of reality makes it inevitable that accidents, diseases, and destruction will sometimes occur. Look at it this way. Atoms, molecules, stones, trees, animals, and people all have parts arranged in a certain way that make them what they are. If this organization is disturbed, destruction occurs. This means everything is vulnerable, fragile, and subject to disruption. This is closely related to the fact that we live in an interdependent, law-abiding world. Things interact with good and bad effects. They may interfere with each other. Destruction may result. Accidents happen. Things collide, get broken, fall apart, blow up, erode, rust, and rot. If we are talking about living organisms, disorganization among their parts causes pain and eventually death. Suffering is a disturbance of healthy functioning in the body or mind of a living being. Human bodies get sick and die. They are mangled and destroyed by stones, bullets, storms, earthquakes, and other devastations too numerous to list. It may be that any real world worth living in will be like this. It is hard to conceive of free, interacting beings that are not vulnerable. We are flesh. We bleed, hurt, suffer, and die.
It would appear that there cannot be a world in which good things can happen without the possibility of bad things happening. We cannot have one without the other. The very principles and processes that produce pleasure and happiness when they work properly produce misery when things go wrong. Let me illustrate. The digestive system is constructed to give us satisfaction when we eat good food. It follows that we can get a stomach ache if something upsets normal functioning.
Moreover, the more good that is possible, the more suffering is possible. Worms and cats cannot experience the heights of happiness that people can. Neither can they know the depths of misery we do. The fact that human beings can experience meaning and purpose that give us happiness means that we can also experience despair and hopelessness that make life awful. The same capacities that make human enjoyment possible make possible human suffering. We cannot have one without the other.
Finally, notice that complicated things are easy to break down. Consider the human brain. The complexity of this system of cells and connections is mind-boggling. It is this intricate arrangement of tissue that makes possible thought, love, choice, and all that makes human life distinctive. Yet this same complexity makes it very vulnerable. So much more can go wrong with a brain than with a mountain.
Note then:
1. The very same processes that make possible health and happiness when things go right lead to suffering when things go wrong. We cannot have good without the possibility of evil.
2. The more complex an organism is,
a. the more good it can experience,
b. the greater evil it can suffer, and
c. the more can go wrong.
It does not seem possible to escape these facts and connections in our world. They may apply to any world that God might create.
What is the conclusion of the matter? Some bad things happen because people make them happen to themselves and each other. Some bad things happen because it is in the very nature of our world that they can occur. We might save ourselves from a lot of grief if we simply accepted the fact that people and things are the immediate causes of misery. Hence, it is not true that God directly causes particular instances of suffering. God does not make specific evil things happen for some reason. If we ask whether God wills this or that instance of suffering in an immediate way, the answer must be "No." Some passages of Scripture teach otherwise, of course. I do not believe we ought to see things this way today. God is ultimately responsible for the possibility of bad things happening, since God made the world. But God does not cause each instance of suffering for a particular purpose.
Rather when accident, disease, and violence bring great pain and misery to us, I believe that God's heart is broken like ours. God feels our pain and suffers our agony with us. Only if this is so can I believe that God is truly full of love and compassion. Yet in our sorrow God and we can make the best of it from now on to bring new life and enjoyment out of the broken pieces.
God uses every event, good and bad, as an opportunity to work in us and through us and in all things to bring the greatest possible happiness, joy, and love into being. In that fact we can trust. So believing we can try to attune our lives to that saving purpose, knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Yes, in one sense, Uncle Volney died all alone. In another sense, he was surrounded by the love of God and by the love of his family. Around him was the tender compassion of all those who wished more than anything else they could be with him to hold his body and to comfort his spirit when his life was slipping away. Uncle Volney suffered, but he did not suffer alone. In that realization there is comfort and hope.
____________
1. The preceding paragraphs were originally published in The Many Faces Of Evil, CSS Publishing Co., Lima, Ohio, 1997, pp. 21-23. Used by permission.
