AWOL - Second Sermon In A Series On Suffering

“AWOL”
Sunday, October, 15, 2006
Psalm 22
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
The Rev. Dr. Christopher W. Keating
Woodlawn Chapel Presbyterian Church

Scripture Focus:
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?"
-- Psalm 22:1

"Oh, that I knew where I might find (God), that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments..." (Job 23:3-4)


Focus: In the face of God’s seeming absence, both Job and the Psalmist are called to a transforming moment of faith: waiting and believing that God shall come again.

Sermon:

A little girl was attending her first wedding. The entire event had her mesmerized. Her eyes intently focused on the details: the candles, the ushers, the flowers, the music. As the bride began walking down the aisle, the girl’s eyes practically popped right out of her head. “Momma!” she cried. “She’s beautiful, but why is sharing wearing all white?” Her mother smiled. “Why, honey, white is the color of happiness, and today is the happiest day of her life!” The little girl thought about this for a moment, but then said, “Then why is the groom wearing black?”
Some questions defy easy answers.

That certainly was the case when a young bride-to-be came to see me to plan her wedding. As she sat in my office, it became apparent that she really had little interest in meeting me. We kept talking about her wedding, the details of which had been primarily arranged by her mother. As we talked, it became very apparent that neither the bride nor the groom had any interest in faith. Finally, I asked her about their religious convictions, and she bluntly told me that she had left faith behind. “My father died when I was in high school,” she said. “Since then, God and me haven’t had much to say to each other. I’m pretty much here because my mother is paying for the wedding.”

It was an honest response. She could have made up something that sounded faintly religious (that happens a lot). She could have lied to me, but instead she told me the truth: when her father died, so did her faith. To this bright and beautiful young woman, God had gone AWOL…absent without leave, without reason, without justice.

For her, God was absent.

In essence, she felt God had failed her. The late theologian Lewis Smedes sums up her experience by saying: “What good does it do if God exists out there somewhere in the great beyond but isn’t down here when we need God the most?”1 In fact, when her questions went unanswered, she went looking for something else.

When the life of seminary would become hectic and confusing and I'd wonder what I was doing there, some afternoons I'd retreat to the massive Princeton University Chapel. Inside of this gothic cathedral, I'd look at the purple light streaming in through the stained glass windows. Sitting quietly in that place, I'd wonder..."Are you here, Lord?" Sometimes, I would feel God's presence in that magic, mysterious place. Other times, I'd think about the generations of Princeton students who had passed through those doors, bringing with them their questions of faith, their debates and arguments. Had they gone away empty, looking for something else? Where was God to be found?

It is an experience shared by so many. Where were you, O God, we shout, when that 21 year old took a bullet in Iraq? Or where were you when those innocent children died of malnutrition in Africa? How do you explain HIV? Cancer? Hunger? Extreme poverty? And, while we’re asking, just where were you when those babies were slaughtered in East Saint Louis? It is, says Gerald Mann, the question God hears the most. "Why do innocent people suffer?"

My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?

As I was wrestling with my sense of call to ministry in college, a friend would keep peppering me with questions. Why do you think you can be a minister? Why believe in God, anyway? What good does religion do? He kept trying to trap me into saying something that would expose me as not having a perfect faith or something. On and on he went, tossing out all sorts of questions. At first I was mad, but now I realize that what he was doing was being honest with me about his own struggles of faith, and his own sense that God was absent. His root question was really the same as the Psalmist’s, wonderfully paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
“God, God…my God! Why did you dump me miles from nowhere? Doubled up with pain, I cal to God all the day long. No answer. Nothing. I keep at it all night, tossing, and turning. And you! Are you indifferent, above it all, leaning back on the cushions of Israel’s praise? We know you were there for our parents: they cried for your help and you gave it; they trusted and lived a good life. And here I am, a nothing…everyone pokes fun at me; they make faces at me, they shake their heads: ‘Let’s see how God handles this one; since God likes him so much, let him help him!”

Those questions are not easily dismissed.

Nor should they be. In the book of Job, his friends have tried to help him through his suffering by tossing out easy answers and glib responses. Job’s friends have all tried to bring some measure of comfort to his misery by trying to fix what is wrong with him. They offer pious sounding religious sentiment, but fail to get at the real heart of this mystery of suffering. They offer lines that look as though they’ve been lifted from greeting cards. Simply put, these friends of Job’s are what Eugene Peterson calls “fixers,” people who are attracted to suffering the same way vultures are attracted to roadkill.2

Within the pages of scripture, however, what I hear is a word that takes suffering seriously. These questions are not easily dismissed. My young bride walked away from the church not because God was absent but perhaps because the church had not entered into her suffering. What would have happened if the church had been able to honor her questions, perhaps allowing her to stretch her faith so that it could see hope? What would have happened if we had accompanied this young woman on her journey of suffering so that she, too, could see what happens to both Job and the writer of Psalm 22.

Yes, pain and suffering happen, and it is real and deadly, and devastating. But something else happens, too. What I sense in both the book of Job and Psalm 22 is a persistent hope that does not reduce the mystery of God’s presence in suffering to easy answers. These are the cries of faith longing for answers, yes, but also longing for God. Where grief and pain caused the young bride to cut all connections to God, Job clings to faith. He pushes deeper. He rejects the easy answers and greeting card messages. Instead, he pushes back at God and allows his faith to grow.

Job dares to ask real questions and does not let go of God. In the midst of the suffering, the Psalmist’s understanding of who God is grows. This moment of suffering becomes a time of transformation because the Psalmist clings to the notion that God will respond. Rather than turning his back on God, Job offers his lament, and like the Psalmist discovers a moment of transformation that enlarges his faith. Both the Psalmist and Job plunge deeper into faith. Rather than moving on, they move deeper into the mystery of God’s presence, and dare to bring their complaints directly to God. They discover something: God is not absent. God is suffering with them.

As you might expect, I quickly lost contact with that young bride. Disillusioned, she gave up on the church, on God. She and her husband moved out of the area after their marriage, so I didn’t have much of a chance to keep up with them. What I wonder about, however, is this: how many people feel that same disappointment with God? How many of them have been so wounded by God’s absence that they have simply given up on faith altogether? Challenged by the suffering they have witnessed or experienced, they shrug their shoulders and move on to something different. The mystery of faith holds no delight for them. It has become some sort of a relic. Faith is reduced to some sort of performance ritual, and when God didn’t perform the way they expected, they simply moved on to a different venue.

But what would happen if we, as disciples of Christ, would change the prevailing conversation in our culture? What would happen if we stopped trying to hard to fix people’s suffering and instead listened to their stories? What would happen if instead of providing easy answers, would simply allow ourselves to accompany people in their suffering? What would happen if we allow them to hear not only words of false encouragement, but the words of God’s son, Jesus the Christ, who opened himself to the suffering of the world, baring his hands to the cross and its rough wooden beams, and who from that place himself cried out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

For Christ, it was a prayer that began in utter hopelessness, pain, and suffering; yet ended with the promise of resurrection. Shout hallelujah, give glory to God, for God has never let you down, never looked the other way, never wandered off to do his own thing; God has been right there, listening. Amen.

1 Lewis Smedes, “When God goes on leave of absence” www.cses.org/csec/sermon/smedes_4005.htm
2 Peterson, The Message, p. 840.
1 © 2006 Rev. Dr. Christopher W. Keating

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