- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: Luke 9:51-56

I want to introduce my topic today by telling you three disturbing stories. I believe these stories are representative of the kind of theological statements made by church people all the time.

Harold Kushner shares the first two stories in his book entitled When Bad Things Happen To Good People. He says:

"I was a young rabbi just starting out in my profession, when I was called on to try to help a family through an unexpected and almost unbearable tragedy. This middle-aged couple had one daughter, a bright nineteen-year-old girl who was in her freshman year at an out-of-state college. One morning at breakfast, they received a phone call from the university infirmary. 'We have some bad news for you. Your daughter collapsed while walking to class this morning. It seems a blood vessel burst in her brain. She died before we could do anything for her. We're terribly sorry.'

"Stunned, the parents asked a neighbor to come in to help them decide what steps to take next. The neighbor notified the synagogue, and I went over to see them that same day. I entered their home, feeling very inadequate, not knowing any words that could ease their pain. I anticipated anger, shock, grief, but I didn't expect to hear the first words they said to me: 'You know, Rabbi, we didn't fast last Yom Kippur.'" (p. 8)

In the second story, he says:

"The trouble started when Helen noticed herself getting tired after walking several blocks or standing in line. One night, coming home after dinner with friends, Helen stumbled over the threshold of the front door, sent a lamp crashing to the floor, and fell to the floor herself. The following morning, she made an appointment to see a doctor.

"The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. The doctor explained that it was a degenerative nerve disease, and that it would gradually get worse, maybe quickly, maybe gradually over many years. Eventually she would be confined to a wheelchair, and become more and more of an invalid until she died.

"The worst of Helen's fears had come true. She broke down and cried when she heard that. 'Why should this happen to me? I've tried to be a good person. I have a husband and young children who need me. I don't deserve this. Why should God make me suffer like this?'

"Her husband took her hand and tried to console her, 'You can't talk like that. God must have His reasons for doing this, and it's not for us to question Him. You have to believe that if He wants you to get better, you will get better, and if He doesn't there has to be some purpose to it.'" (p. 15)

My third story comes from my former pastor Don Harbuck. He says,

"A minister in my acquaintance was some years ago engaged in revival services in a rural community. Along with the pastor, he visited a family that had seriously neglected its church obligations. Pressing upon this family the claims of Christ and the importance of commitment to the way of righteousness, this zealous preacher predicted that tragedy would strike that home unless the family mended their ways. Perhaps death would claim a member of the family, he warned.

"Only two days later the twelve year old son of that home was struck and killed by a large truck while riding his bicycle on the nearby highway. That blow fell on those parents with sledge-hammer force. Both father and mother, acting in the light of a preacher's authoritarian pronouncements about God, said calmly, intensely, and irrevocably, 'As long as we live, we shall never again set foot in a church. Never again shall we pray to a God who could bring death to an innocent boy because of the neglect and indifference of his parents. No matter what happens, we will never worship such a god.'"

Do you think there is anything wrong with the statements these stories make about God? Perhaps not, I imagine that you have heard similar statements made many times. But I want to share with you that I have some serious problems with them. My problem with all of these stories, and countless others like them, is that God is given credit for something that, in my mind at least, is clearly evil. I have heard people say that God causes everything from car wrecks to the Holocaust.

When I was in high school, we had great fun with our parody of that 60s hit song "The Last Kiss." The song is about a couple out on a date when they have an automobile accident. The girl dies in her boyfriend's arms. He mourns her death singing: "Oh where, oh where, can my baby be, The Lord took her away from me, She's gone to heave so I got to be good, So I can see my baby when I leave this world."

We laughed uncontrollably when we changed the words by singing, "Where oh where can my baby be? The Lord's done smashed her against a tree!" It was hilarious then, but today many Christians say the same thing with a straight face!

My question for you today is, "Does God cause evil?" Most people will immediately answer, "No," but their daily observations about God seem to me to say, "Yes."

One of the most popular comments I hear people make in relation to God is, "God is in control." It is a statement that is intended to give comfort to people in difficult circumstances. We can trust God. God is in control.

However, I must admit that every time I hear that statement, my mind goes to obvious exceptions. I can't help but think of the tragic car wreck or even the Nazi war camps. For me, I don't like to make that statement, "God is in control" because I think there are many things that happen in our world that are clearly not under God's control. Surely sickness, disease, tragic deaths and the like are not directly caused by God. If they are, then God is causing evil.

This is not a new problem. Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this issue for all time. It is usually referred to as the "problem of evil." Clark Williamson, a Disciples seminary professor in Indianapolis, puts the philosophical analysis this way:

"The 'problem of evil' is a formal, logical problem arising from a clash of premises. The premises are something like this:

1) God as all-powerful can unilaterally direct the course of events;

2) God as all -loving cares about God's creatures;

3) God as all-knowing is certainly aware of evil;

4) yet there is evil.

"There seems to be no explanation for evil, since the world is made from absolutely nothing by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Nor does this same God exterminate evil, which an omnipotent God could do and an omnibenevolent God would do.

This logical problem is a dilemma the way out of which can only be found by denying one of the premises" (Way of Blessing, Clark Williamson, p. 150).

This whole issue came up for me again in Sunday School once when we were discussing one of several Biblical texts that seem to say that God endorsed or actually caused some events that most of us would deem evil. In our study of 1 Kings, we had quite a discussion about Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal. It was a dramatic scene in which God was proven to be the true God and Baal was not a god at all. But then Elijah calls upon the people to capture the 450 prophets of Baal and he, or they, proceed to kill them all.

Such slaughter of people who happen to worship the wrong god seemed shocking to modern sensibilities. And I asked, "Is this really the way God wants us to treat people who believe the wrong way? Is that the kind of attitude we should have toward people of other faiths?" In a discussion once about an interfaith prayer meeting as part of the National Day of Prayer, some people referred to this Mt. Carmel experience to prove that Christians should have nothing to do with non-Christians. If we take the text literally, we should kill them with the endorsement of God.

Even worse is the story from 2 Kings 1, where Elijah calls down fire from heaven to destroy two groups of fifty prophets of Baal. In this scene, God is the one to destroy the false prophets with fire.

In 2 Samuel 12, we find the story of Nathan's confrontation of King David about his relationship with Bathesheba. In verse 14, the Scripture records, " Nathan said to David, 'Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die." Did God cause the death of an innocent child because of the sin of its father?

In 2 Kings 2, we find this horrific story:

"(Elisha) went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, 'Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!' When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys." Did God cause 42 children to be mauled by a bear because they called a man "baldy?"

Should these unusual stories from the Old Testament be our theological model for the normative behavior of God?

In our text for today, James and John have just witnessed a Samaritan village that did not receive Jesus well. They were indignant at the rejection. I am sure they were calling upon their memory of these Old Testament stories when they asked Jesus, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"

The comic strip character Calvin demonstrated the same kind of attitude when the class bully Moe knocked him off the schoolyard swing. Calvin commented, "It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."

I find Jesus' response to James and John to be very instructive. The text says simply, "But (Jesus) turned and rebuked them." Jesus did not endorse the view of God as a being who was responsible for incinerating people out of the blue.

This is not to say that Jesus didn't talk about a final judgment. He had a lot to say about hell. There is no question that Jesus said God will ultimately judge us for our sins, but God's judgment comes after all chances for repentance have passed.

In John 9, Jesus and his disciples met a man who was blind from birth. The disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" It was the accepted view of the disciples that God would punish a child with blindness because of the sins of his parents! But Jesus refused to endorse that view of God. He said, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned." God doesn't do that!

I find great comfort in Jesus' responses in both these Biblical stories. Jesus was, at least, hesitant to go along with his disciples when they tried to say that God caused evil things to happen.

Now I must admit that I really have to struggle with some of these Old Testament passages that present what is to me an unseemly view of God. I continue to have a high view of Scripture which means I am not prone to just tear out those pages from the Bible. But I must admit that I just don't understand those difficult passages. When confronted with those difficulties, I have decided to just claim Jesus. Jesus clearly would have no part in calling down fire from heaven and no part in laying the blame for a man's blindness on the sins of his parents.

I don't pretend to have resolved the classical problem of evil. I am still wrestling with it. But I have come to some tentative conclusions that help me to keep the witness of the whole Bible in balance.

1) I refuse to accuse God of something for which a human would be locked up in prison or put into a lunatic's cell. I refuse to say that God causes the tragic deaths of people by car wrecks, AIDS, or other disease. Our sense of justice is rightly horrified when a mother drowns her five children in the bathtub. Let's not put God in the same kind of evil business and then try to make excuses for God.

2) I refuse to imply that God does evil in order to accomplish good. Most people defend these kind of statements by saying that God had an ultimately good purpose in doing evil. They say that God causes evil in order to bring about a higher good.

If a human tried to claim that motive in a court of law, he would never get away with it. Nobody seems to be convinced when Timothy McVeigh says those 160 deaths in the Murrow Building were collateral damage in a higher cause, but the same people will say that God caused the Holocaust to bring about a higher good. Why is the same principle not valid for humans? No! God's justice is better than ours, not worse.

3) I refuse to promote the view of a capricious God. Most people who make these disturbing claims for God also say that we just can't understand the ways of God. While I certainly acknowledge that there are many things I can't understand, I refuse to accept the view that God is undependable. Most people say that God punishes some people now and lets others off free until the final judgment. I don't want to believe that God is so capricious and fickle that one is rewarded while another is punished out of the blue, with no sense of consistency or faithfulness. Is God a capricious God or a faithful God? I chose consistent and faithful.

4) I refuse to paint a picture of God that does not lead others to freely love, serve and worship God. How could any sane person worship and love a God who would destroy an innocent child in punishment for the sins of his parents? You might fear such a God and submit to His sovereignty like a slave yields to the tyranny of a dictator. But this can hardly be called Christian reverence and love. Can we truly love, reverence, and worship a God who acts in this manner? Fear him, yes. Love him, no.

5) I believe God is against evil, not for it. It is never wrong to say that God stands with us and for us in the struggle against every form of suffering, sickness, pain, or sin. If we who are evil struggle to prevent suffering, tragedy, and calamity, is it not safe to conclude, as Jesus did, that God works to a much greater degree in the same direction?

Does God cause evil? My answer is, "No! God is at least as good as we are."