Why Me?

Part II

WHY ME, LORD? WHY MINE?

"Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him….I would lay my case before him." Job 23:2,3

[Second in a series of four sermons on evil and human suffering]

On Thursday a Navy chaplain and a Navy officer brought the worst news possible to Ronald and Sandra Francis at their home in the small town of Woodleaf, North Carolina. Their 19-year-old daughter, Lakeina

Monique, was among the 17 seamen killed in an explosion on the destroyer Cole in the country of Yemen in the Red Sea, an explosion officials believe was an act of terrorism. Most of the victims were in their twenties, and three, like Lakeina, were teenagers barely starting out in life.

There are many kinds of evil. Some of it is directly linked to man's inhumanity to man, as in the case of the explosion on the Cole - heartless and wicked. We know there is evil in the world and innocent people suffer for it. Sometimes whole societies suffer - who cannot think of whole societies suffering now in the Middle East, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Jew or Arab. This is part of the evil which human beings inflict on each other. Perhaps the worst in recent times in terms of sheer numbers were the massacres in Rwanda in central Africa. Then there was the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

But there is also evil which seems utterly capricious - tornadoes which tear through human communities, earthquakes which rock cities, huge tidal waves burying whole villages in Bangladesh. These are natural evils, forces which destroy but not on purpose, yet they are part of a world which is not perfect.

And there is also evil which is hybrid, containing both human error and malevolence or negligence and haphazard fate. Babies born with the AIDS virus, or families infected by bad drinking water or from having been raised near a chemical dump, or innocent people who suffer from negligence in nursing homes. The list can go on and on.

A year ago I was asked to do the funeral in Astoria of a 29-year-old man named Glen Frazier who had drowned in a swift moving river. He had gone out in a rowboat without a life jacket, too confident perhaps of his strength and swimming ability. The grief by the family and friends who packed the funeral home last year was palpable. Yesterday I met with them again, in Washington Square Park to dedicate a park bench with Glen's name on it.

Remembering the grief of last year, I was glad that this gathering was upbeat and joyful. Something positive and life-affirming was done by this family and their friends.

Last week we began a four-part series on Job, a book written some 2500 years ago. Job asks "Why me, Lord? Why mine?" He does this, as we said last week, believing always in God and in God's power, and that is exactly why he asks the questions so strongly. If this book has no other value, it is surely that such questions are not off-limits to people of faith.

Sometimes people of faith say something like, "we cannot understand why, we just have to accept." This is the standard position, for instance, of Islam - it's God's will whatever happens and you have to accept. Job refutes this idea. As we said last week, Job does the exact opposite: he drags God into court. He will have his say loud and clear. He is a Dissident. He objects to the way God is running the universe. "Oh, that I knew where I might find him….I would lay my case before him."

We should say Job is not alone in the Bible. There are the psalms. There are many kinds of psalms - adoration, thanksgiving, praise, petition for success, etc. But the single largest category is the psalm of Lament. We read one today: Psalm 22 which begins, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" We remember that these were the words spoken also by Jesus, on the cross. Some psalms of lament have a positive, hopeful ending, such as psalm 22. But others just put the complaint out there with no "redeeming feature", such as psalm 88. It is very important that these are in the Bible.

It is often said that when Jesus quoted the first verse of psalm 22 - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he had in mind also the psalm's triumphant ending of faith: "I will praise thee in the midst of the assembly…" But we don't know that for sure. I think it is better to let the quote stay as it is and let Christ's cry of rejection seep into our own soul, especially if we have felt the world's injustice. Then Christ truly becomes one with us and we with Him.

The book of Hebrews (2:8) says, "Because he suffered he is able to help those who are being tested." Some early Christians denied that Christ really suffered, they said he only seemed to. And in the Muslim world it is believed God would never allow a prophet to suffer, so Jesus, one of six great prophets in Islam, didn't die on the cross. Someone else died in his place, they say. But here, I believe, Muslims and Christians who deny that Christ suffered miss an invaluable aid to their own unjust suffering and are left with only the meager gruel of stoicism in a fatalistic universe.

In the 1964 World's Fair here in Flushing the exhibit by the Vatican was centered around one piece of art: Michaelangelo's Pieta. The lines to see this great work were enormous. But it wasn't just that it was Michaelangelo. It was that it was the pieta, the suffering of Christ, for it has "connected" in a real way with millions of people for ages for reasons far beyond art.

Protestants have emphasized the empty cross of Christ's resurrection and the power of it, for many good reasons. But by doing so we have perhaps missed the "suffering with us" message of the Catholic crucifix.

Last week we began with all the terrible things which happened to Job in swift succession, and they all happened to a man of strong faith, devout, God-fearing as we say. Job's reaction is "the Lord gives and the Lord takes away." Still holding on to his faith, he is confronted by his wife. All other members of the family have perished. She says to him: "will you not now curse God and die?"

The Job scholar Samuel Terrien, who taught at Union Seminary (with Ruth Muilenburg's father-in-law in the Old Testament department) said that the one mercy which might have helped but which was denied Job was that in all his troubles he didn't become a widower!

Now come three friends to comfort Job. They are Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. These friends do one thing right - they don't try to say anything in the face of these terrible tragedies which have befallen Job. They wept aloud when they saw him and rent their garments, but then for seven days they just sat with him. It is true that the best thing we can do for people is often to be there. It is a ministry of presence.

But it is quickly clear that with friends like these Job doesn't need enemies. Their intentions may be good, but their words only spur Job on to greater anger.

The friends believe that all suffering is the consequence of sin, only the guilty suffer. Eliphaz says to Job: "what innocent man has ever perished? Where have you seen the upright destroyed?" Bildad is even tougher: "your sons sinned against God, so he left them to be the victims of their own iniquity." Zophar says in effect that even though you say you are spotless, if God could speak he would tell you that you do sin. "Know," he says, "God exacts from you less than your sin deserves. Can you fathom the mystery of God….he surely knows which men are false and when he sees iniquity does he not take note of it?" (11:11)

Job's friends were operating out of the standard explanation for evil at the time, an explanation which was rooted in the Bible going back to Deuteronomy. Do good and you will live well in the land, do evil and you will not. This basic injunction had been a source of inspiration for generations, and it also had root in fact - there are "payoffs", so to speak, for many for doing the right thing and there is punishment for doing the wrong.

But people had begun to notice it doesn't always work this way. The wicked sometimes do quite well and the good sometimes suffer and suffer terribly. In fact, it seemed that when God sees iniquity - the wicked flourishing - he doesn't take note of it.

At the time of Jesus people still believed this basic framework - Goodness equals Prosperity, Badness equals Suffering. Remember when the disciples asked Jesus about a blind man, "who sinned," they said, "this man or his parents that he was born blind." Pointedly, Jesus did not buy the premise of their question.

Listen to Job's complaint against God:

"Perish the day when I was born and the night which said, 'A man is conceived'! May that day turn to darkness. May God above not look for it, nor light of dawn shine on it. May blackness sully it, and murk and gloom cloud smother that day swift darkness eclipse the sun. etc.." He wishes he had not been born. "Why was I not still-born, why did I not die when I came out of the womb?" We should not underestimate the awe-ful power of these words in the Bible.

Job directs his anger directly at God: "I will not hold my peace; I will speak out in the distress of my mind and complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I the monster of the deep, am I the sea-serpent, that thou settests a watch over me?"

And again: "I am sickened of life (how often we have all heard people say that!) I will give free rein to my griefs, I will speak out in bitterness of soul. I will say to God 'do not condemn me, but tell me the ground of thy complaint against me…..Thy hands gave me shape and made me; and dost thou at once turn and destroy me? And again: "God has left me at the mercy of malefactors and cast me into the clutches of wicked men. I was at ease, but he set upon me and mauled me…He set me up as a target." (16:12) There it is, in a very modern phrase: God set him up.

Virginia Woolf once said, "I read the Book of Job the other night and God doesn't come out very well at all." Read that way, it is truly refreshing as well as enormously helpful that this book is in the Bible.

I want to leave it here today. No happy ending. That's the right way this core of the Book of Job should be read.

Next Sunday I want to talk about how the Church has confronted the problem of evil - a "majority report" and a "minority report" - our own "friends" advice, you might say, and why some answers often given today can contain important truths, as Job's friend's did, but also be less than helpful, and how one Christian teacher of mine years ago found in the midst of his own tragedy new insight from the Cross.