Job 37:14-24 Matthew 6:26-34

For three weeks I've been giving a series of sermons on suffering. Who among us has not had some suffering at some time? We are reminded of friends who have suffered. I have a friend whose brother had Lou Gehrig's disease and inch by inch his body in a sense turned to stone. Yet the man died well and his family somehow managed to not be bitter about it. We recently have seen George and Nick Clooney going to Africa to Darfur and returning with reports that they have discovered that over 300,000 persons there have been slaughtered in an act of genocide. We experience our own suffering. This time last year, I was in the hospital experiencing excruciating pain. So we wonder - WHY? I am sure you have and certainly I have. Does suffering shake your faith? Sometimes our faith is shaken by suffering. But then it gives us the opportunity to examine our faith. We can examine what is important and what we hold on to that is dear to us. It actually gives us the opportunity, should we take it, to strengthen our faith and to come out stronger in faith on the other side. So this morning we continue to address the suffering in the world.

Great minds and theologians have dealt with this problem throughout the centuries. They have come up with multiple solutions. The worst of course is atheism, the belief that there is no God and all suffering is just random acts that happen. I was reading this week about the atheist, Bertrand Russell. His writings were filled with despair. But why wouldn't they be filled with despair if there was no purpose to suffering, if there was no meaning to it, if it was taking you nowhere and guiding you to nothing? Where would morality be in this world if you believed there was no God? What would give you the idea that you could just do anything that you wanted to do? It would be all about me. I'll please myself and the heck with anybody else& if you believe that there is no God. I can remember one of my Seminary professors bringing in a can like this one. He said, “Consider this. If there was no God and everything was random and just by accident, how many times could I shake a can filled with metal parts (shook a can) and have it turn into a watch? It is not going to happen. It's still metal parts. I could do this a thousand times. Perhaps a million times and randomly speaking, these parts are not going to come together. So there must be an Intelligent Designer who has put this whole universe together. It is not possible to happen randomly. It is too complex. I think clearly that confronts atheism quite successfully.

The next theory proposed historically is called Deism. When I was running a Bible study group in my counseling office for local ministers, one of the ministers considered himself a Deist. Deists are persons that believe that God exists and He created everything, but then he just lays back and lets it all run itself and doesn't care what happens. We called this particular minister the old curmudgeon because that was what his view was - that God has forsaken the world and lets it run on its own. But do you know what? We have this whole book to refute that (holding the Bible for all to see). This entire book is the history of God intervening with human life. God is not sitting back and letting the world run itself. He moves with us. He responds to us. I have had prayers answered. Haven't you? I've been able to hear God's voice at times. I hope you have too. God interacts with human beings and the Bible records His major acts. God is not a distant uncaring God who just lets the world run. God is a God of response. We can talk to Him. We can interact with Him. We can see His handiwork in the world. We can pray for those who are sick and God listens to those prayers and ultimately heals persons who are sick and suffering.

The next theory is called Process Theology. In my lifetime, I've been kind of interested in that one. For a while it made sense to me. Process Theology is a theology that says that God Himself is limited and therefore can't do everything. It may make we humans feel better to think of God that way. But then if you really ponder it and you read God's message in the Bible, it comes out that that's not very satisfying at all. God is not limited. In fact, the Bible says that He is perfect and that all things are possible with Him. I think that is really a more comforting view of God when we consider suffering. Yes, I can turn my suffering over to God and He can do something with it.

My grandmother was a wonderful witness to me of her faith. She had many things going on in her life that created suffering. Late in life she would take a nap every afternoon. She said as she took her nap, she would just put her arms out and say, “God, I offer it all to you. Will you handle it because I am too weak to handle it myself?” And you know what? She lived to be 94 and lived very happily and very successfully no matter what the problems were that she faced. She went through the Great Depression, illness in her family, and multiple surgeries herself. But she knew that God could take care of her. To her, God was very real and alleviated her suffering.

The next theory that has been proposed is called Open Theism. Open Theism also limits God. It says that there is a God and God is concerned about us but God doesn't know the future. Well, again that is not what the Bible says. The Bible says God knows all things, that God knows the future. We might have trouble connecting free will with the concept that God knows what we are going to choose, but at the same time, it doesn't take away free will. His foreknowledge still leaves us free to choose. The example that comes to my mind is a person standing on top of a mountain observing two cars coming towards each other, one coming down the mountain and the other coming up the mountain. The person at the top of the mountain knows that one car will wreck into the other car and yet, he doesn't stop it. He allows it to happen even though He knows the future. He could send signals but they can be ignored. The future is that these two cars are going to wreck into each other. So God can be like that. He allows suffering. He allows evil. He knows the future. He knows the choices that we will make but He still doesn't take away free will. He sends signals  the whole Bible  but choices are made. We have the ability to choose the right thing, to choose to love God or not. If you think about this, there is some genius (the audacity to say that God is a genius. That's limiting Him.) But there is some genius in His method here because if He is a God of love, if He simply willed that we all loved Him without giving us free will and the ability to choose otherwise, the ability to not love, then the love would be meaningless. But love that is freely chosen, that is a conscious act of our mind becomes meaningful. So God allows free choice. That allows us to choose Him. That makes our love for Him far more meaningful than if we had no choice and if we were simply made to love God automatically. Does that make sense to you? I hope so. I'm not sure I'm as clear as I can be about this, but then greater minds than mine have grappled with these issues. I hope I am making this somewhat clear to you.

Corrie Ten Boom was the woman writer who was in a Nazi concentration camp. She saw her sister, her best friend, killed; her family annihilated by the Nazis. Yet, she never relinquished her joy. She never gave up hope. In one of her books, she wrote this. “God is like a weaver who is weaving a tapestry. We who are here see the knots and the tangles, but He sees the beauty of the whole tapestry.” I've often thought, “Yes, that is the way it is. In Paul's writing, he says we only now view things dimly as if we are seeing in a mirror. But the day will come when we are with Christ Jesus in Heaven, when we will see things clearly. We will be able to see the whole tapestry. We will be able to see how God turned evil and suffering into good and how He makes it serve His purposes. We will see how beautiful it all turns out, even though we may not feel that at a particular moment in history because we are in the middle of his weaving and don't see the whole tapestry.”

There was a teenage girl who one summer day was walking through a mall with her mother. She hated to do that because her mother's arms were badly scarred and gnarly looking. She was embarrassed. Like many teenagers, she wanted her parents to be perfect. Because it was a hot summer day, her mother chose not to cover her arms with a blouse with sleeves on it but wore a sleeveless blouse. The teen tried to run ahead of her mother or to hold way back and pretend she was looking at jewelry in a jewelry store window so she wouldn't be connected with her mother. Finally, when they got into the car to go home, the mother said, “What are you doing?” The teen confessed that she was embarrassed by her mother's imperfection, her mother's scarred arms. Her mother said, “You know, I want to tell you the story behind that. I have scarred arms because when you were six months old, our house caught on fire. I could have escaped from that fire and been spotless but I chose to return to your room, pick you up in my arms and carry you through the flames. You got through that fire unscathed. But my arms were badly burned.” That reframed the suffering for the teenage girl. From that moment on she was proud of the heroic action of her mother. From that moment on, she didn't mind how her mother's arms looked. They were a badge of courage a sign of her mother's love. Christendom, following Christ, gives us the ability to reframe suffering. It gives us the ability to see that it has purpose in God's creation, that it can better us, that it can make us closer to God. In fact, Paul writes about death. “Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting? Thanks be to God who has given us the victory over death.” There have been many times that I have read those words at a funeral and thought to myself, “If a person doesn't know Christianity, doesn't know the Bible, what are they thinking when I read those words, 'Oh death, where is your victory?'” They are thinking, “I've just been defeated by death. This death took away my partner, or took away my child, or took away someone that I've loved. There is no victory in that.” But because we're Christian, we know that death is the last great adventure of life. It's a time where we move from this world into the next, where we are rewarded for our belief. We are rewarded for repentance. We are rewarded for our acts of mercy. So for Christians, it can be a time of joy, a time of celebration, a time of release. The pagan world can't know that. Suffering for us is a means to an end. It is a way to eternal life  it completes Christ's suffering for the salvation of all human kind.

I started this sermon talking about how suffering can shake faith. I am a firm believer that faith that isn't shaken isn't mature, that all of us need to have our faith shaken at some time or another because then we can examine it. We can know what we can hold fast to and what we hold fast to is the Word of God, because in that is hope, in that is joy even in suffering.