Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Homily by Fr. R Christopher Heying
Shortly after landing in Dallas in the summer of 2004 I called my
first cousins’ grandmother, Mary Essie Morrow, better known to her family as
MaMa, and said, “MaMa, this is Chris.”
She immediately responded, “I know who you are: I recognized your
voice.” I immediately thought to myself,
“That is remarkable.”
You see MaMa, born in August of 1899 was 104. My heart was warmed and the thought formed in my mind: “That’s like God, is it not? I know who you are: I recognized your voice.”
For those who may have just now begun to worry that in calling me as your priest, you weren’t thinking about such longevity, there’s no need to worry: I am adopted and don’t share those genes! My time on this earth may not be as it was for MaMa or for Job, “old and full of days” (Job 42.17).
But then neither has it been for some of MaMa’s direct descendants. In 2001, I returned from New York to bury my cousin Kristin who died of melanoma at the age of 43. And in January of 2005, with MaMa very much alive and alert at 105, I returned from Virginia to preach my first cousin’s son’s funeral. George William, at just sixteen and with an undiagnosed heart problem, fell down the stairs and died.
The hardest sermon I have preached to date. An “innocent” farm boy who loved his goats and his chickens and had significant learning disabilities and speech issues, having been born with an umbilical cord around his neck, and none could hold back tears as we watched George William, as his body was put into the hearse for his final ride, receive his Eagle Scout Award, earned days before his death.
MaMa, his great grandmother, went on to live two months shy of her 108th birthday (with sisters who lived to be 103 and 109). Yet George William dies at 16, not so old, not so full of days.
Your life no doubt has been touched by tragedy, by hope cut short for no reason, at least no reason that you can understand.
This Thursday at Jake’s in Danville, questions of this kind were raised during “Theology on Tap,” a program led by my new friend, Father Ben, at Epiphany Church. Each Thursday 20- and 30-somethings gather to ask theological questions as they drink beer. The specific topic Thursday was the age-old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” is a question we all face.
And when we are honest, we really can’t answer it adequately.
All talk of human freedom, cosmic evil, divinely appointed “times” yield little or no solace to us when it is our friend or our family member, our beloved son or daughter, the one we love who suffers and dies. Cancer, wreck, terrorist, tornado, hurricane, drought and famine. None can be explained, by theologian or philosopher, to our personal satisfaction.
And if “good theology” fails to satisfy our questions, “bad theology” compounds the evil, further assaults our already hurting soul.
This played out this week in the pro-life candidate’s poorly worded response to a question about his position, a response that, whatever the candidate meant to say, suggested that evil acts against women are God’s will. Whatever we can say about the intrinsic value of human life, from conception to death, we cannot say that God is responsible for evil.
When a tragic car accident takes the lives of five teenagers after prom, it is not at all helpful to suggest that such was God’s will or that it was “their appointed time.”
Nor is it helpful to suggest cavalierly that “stuff happens,” whatever our actual wording may be.
Job’s friends were sure that what was happening to Job was because Job had done something wrong. Their “theology” was bad, their “answer” wrong, serving only to inflict further suffering upon the long-suffering, righteous Job.
Job doesn’t understand why these bad things are happening to him, but he knows full well he doesn’t deserve them and he won’t repent of something he has not done.
But he does want to know why. And he wrestles with the question. More importantly, he wrestles with God, from whom he demands an answer.
In his agony, in the throes of despair, he clings to God. Even when he doesn’t understand, he stays connected to God. If there are any answers, they will only be found in God and he refuses to let go of God . . . or to let God go.
Rather than the objective philosophizing or theologizing of his friends, Job’s response is far more personal, direct, connected. We might rightly call this connection that Job has with the God he does not understand prayer.
Prayer.
Job takes his whys, his anger, his hurt and pain, his growing despair and casts them upon God in prayer.
And as the story unfolds we discover that Job’s worldview (and ours) is limited and finite, myopic, blind as Bartimaeus. The world is larger than we thought, grander than we knew. For all the tragedy and all the death we experience, the world is more alive than we can imagine.
Job reminds us that while we may never know all the answers we seek, but we can know the living God:
I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another" (19:25-27).
God does not cause the evil and the suffering we experience. And we may never understand these painful experiences, we may not come to satisfactory answers about “why bad things happen to good people,” but we can believe and we can know that we are never, ever alone in them, but God is here, here with us in all that we experience and God will never, abandon us.
Living with our questions, we can stay connected to God through prayer.
Living with our questions and whatever sorrows we may experience, we can hear God say to each and every one of us:
“I know who you are. I recognized your voice.”