This morning we continue our
sermon series entitled Questions from the Floor. This morning’s question is:
If God is all-loving and all-powerful, then why is there evil in the world?
As
the writer Frederick Buechner once pointed out, if we break down that question
into three statements—(1) God is all-loving; (2) God is all-powerful; and (3)
terrible things happen--then we can easily reconcile any two of those
statements with each other, but we have a very hard time reconciling all three
statements. Maybe God really is all-powerful but not all-loving, and that’s why
terrible things happen. Or surely God is all-loving, but maybe God isn’t
all-powerful, and that’s why terrible things happen, which is in essence the
conclusion of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things
Happen to Good People. But if we try
to hold onto the notion that God is all-loving and all-powerful, and we
acknowledge that terrible things happen, it’s difficult to reconcile all three
statements.
One
of my favorite preachers, Thomas G. Long, published a book a few years ago on
the Problem of Evil, and he used the Parable of the Weeds among the Wheat to
explore what Christians can say about evil in the world as well as what we
cannot yet say. I want to acknowledge at the
outset that my meditation this morning draws heavily from his insights.
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| Tom Long's book is an extended meditation on the Book of Job. The concluding chapter explores the Parable of the Weeds among the Wheat. |
The
first audience for the Gospel of Matthew may have well have been a young,
struggling Christian community in present-day Syria. They were trying to be and
do what Jesus had taught them to be and do, and the results were frankly, mixed
and discouraging. The culture around them was
morally conflicted, and the church itself was turning out to be not so pure.
Matthew’s community looked at a hopelessly conflicted world and church and
wondered, “What’s the use?” Evil and good are all mixed together, seemingly
intractably. How were they to understand this? How were they to understand the
trustworthiness of God in such an environment? (Thomas G. Long, What Shall
We Say?: Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s, 2011, p. 124).
The
Gospel writer Matthew took a parable from Jesus, this parable about the weeds
among the wheat, in an attempt to answer these questions. In the Parable the
servants go directly to the Master of the Estate and exclaim, “Master, did you
not sow good seed in your field?”
Thus,
the first thing we learn about the problem of evil is that we have every right
to go to God and ask for an explanation! Evil and suffering are wounds in
creation, and a deeply Christian response is to turn to God in pain and
protest. In the words of John Claypool, “There is more
honest faith in an act of questioning than in the act of silent submission, for
implicit in the very asking is the faith that some light can be given.” (John
R. Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, as quoted by Long, p. 127).
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| The late John Claypool, a Baptist preacher turned Episcopalian priest, whose book Tracks of a Fellow Struggler is a beautiful and poignant meditation on the grief he experienced when his young daughter died of leukemia. |
So,
the first thing we learn is that we have every right to make our protest to God
about the presence of evil in our world. In doing so, we refuse to legitimate
evil, and we appeal to the honor of God by asking that God do something about
it.
When
the servants went to the Master demanding to know what happened with the weeds
in the field, the Master replied, “An Enemy has done this.” It’s not the
worker’s fault. It’s not the landowner’s fault, either.
The
answer “An Enemy has done this” raises new questions, but it tells us that a
Christian theodicy insists that God is not the author of evil. It is NOT God’s
will that the innocent suffer, not even for some larger good.
Years
ago, a young woman graduated from Princeton Seminary and received a call to
serve a small church. Since the church was small, she vowed to visit everyone
in the membership within the first six months. Near the end of that time, she
had visited every family in the church except one. Some of the elders advised
her, “Oooh, be careful there. They haven’t been here in a couple of years, and
they probably aren’t coming back.”
But
the young pastor had made herself a promise, and one day she knocked on the
door of this couple’s house. Only the wife was home, but she invited the pastor
in for a cup of coffee. They sat around the kitchen table and chatted. They
talked about this, they talked about that, and then finally they talked about
IT. And IT was the fact that more than two years before the couple’s young son
had drowned in their backyard pool. “Our friends at church were very kind,” the
woman said. “They told us it was God’s will.”
The
pastor put her coffee cup down on the table. Should she touch that or not? She
decided to touch it. The pastor said, “Your friends at church meant well, but
they were wrong. It wasn’t God’s will. God doesn’t will the death of children.”
Surprisingly, the mother’s
jaw clenched, her face reddened, and she said in anger, “Well, then, who do you
blame? Are you blaming me? Are you blaming me for this? Is that what you’re
saying?”
“No,
no—I’m not blaming you, the pastor replied, now on the defensive. I’m not
blaming you, but I’m not blaming God, either. God was as grief-stricken by your
son’s death as you are.” But the woman’s face remained frozen in rage, and it
was clear that this conversation was over.
Driving
back to the church, the young pastor kept saying to herself, I shouldn’t have
touched it. Why did I go there?
But
when she got back to the church office, there was a message already waiting for
her on the answering machine. “I don’t know where this is going,” the trembling
recorded voice said, “but my husband and I want you to come out and talk to us
about this. For two years we’ve thought that God was angry at us, but now we
wonder if it’s not the other way around.” (story told by Long, pp. 131-132).
Despite
the obvious risk, the young pastor was right to affirm that it was NOT God’s
will that this child die. If not God, then how do we understand the words “An
Enemy Has Done This?” In Matthew’s Gospel, the enemy is the Devil.
As
Tom Long writes, "perhaps
the devil is best imagined not literally, as some demonic figure lurking
in the shadows, but as a symbol of a deep theological truth—namely,
that the evil we experience in history is more than the sum of its parts
and transcends logical explanation--the horror of the Holocaust, the genocide
in Rwanda, the massacre at My Lai—none of these forms of evil can
be fully accounted for by political, anthropological, or psychological explanations
. . .To
say that the enemy is the devil is not to revert to pre-scientific fairytale images
but to say through the ancient language of Scripture that evil has a cosmic,
trans-human reality. Evil is not just a failing; it is a force. (Long,
pp. 134-135).
With
the knowledge that an enemy has sowed the seeds of evil in the field, the
servants ask the Master, “Do you want us to gather the weeds?” In other words,
do you want us to fix it? The landowner’s response is swift, “No, for in
gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”
Tom
Long tells the story of a woman he grew up with in South Carolina in the early
1950s. She was stricken with polio as a child just a few years before Jonas
Salk perfected his vaccine. She is in her sixties now, her body still twisted
by the virus that attacked her in her childhood. She makes her way awkwardly on
crutches. But the moment she enters a room, the level of grace is elevated
greatly. She lights up with joy every place she touches. She is a college
professor and an artist, an accomplished human being with profound gifts. Now,
what about the evil she has endured?
Do
we think that God gave her polio?
No,
a thousand times no!
Did
God put polio in her life do give her a beautiful soul?
No,
a thousand times no!
Do
we think that her soul has been formed by this? Yes.
Tom
Long writes, "If
someone handed me a magic wand now and gave me the power to change
anything about her past, to pluck up the weeds from the wheat, I think
I would want to wave it and banish the polio, make it so she never suffered
from that disease. But to tell the truth, I really wouldn’t know where
the limits of my wisdom were. She is a beautiful and radiant human being,
and I wouldn’t know what to take away from the personal history that
brought her to this place. In short, I might want to fix it, but I lack the discernment
to do so. (Long, pp. 138-139).
If
the servants in the parable are not allowed to gather the weeds, then what is
the response to the problem of evil? Or to ask the deeper question, what is God
doing about the problem of evil?
What
the parable suggests about God is that God’s way in the world is not to go into
the field and immediately start whacking away with a machete.
Right
after this parable, Matthew includes two more short parables from Jesus. He tells a story about a
tiny mustard seed that eventually grows into a giant bush that provides shelter
for the birds. And he tells a story about a woman taking a little bit of
leaven, or yeast, and how it leavens the entire lump of dough. Together, these
two tiny parables suggest that God’s ways in the world are hidden, perhaps
sometimes frustratingly slow, but nonetheless effective and ultimately
victorious.
More
and more, I am convinced that God’s way in the world is the way of non-coercive,
persuasive love, persuading us to do the right thing in response to the evil we
encounter, as best we understand that right thing, to carry on our ministries
of compassion and caring as a witness to the final triumph over evil that God
is bringing about.
When
I was growing up in El Paso, Texas, our next-door neighbor Mrs. Vaughn, a first
grade teacher, would spend the late afternoons on her hands and knees in her
front yard, uprooting little tiny weeds, before they had a chance to get very
big. In El Paso, we didn’t just have dandelions, we also had these tough,
prickly desert weeds that were meant to discourage thirsty critters from taking
a bite, and they definitely discouraged me from ever touching those things with
my bare hands.
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| Sandbur, a notoriously prickly desert weed |
Mrs.
Vaughn would uproot the prickly weeds when they were no more than an inch high.
She would painstakingly go over her entire yard on her hands and knees,
painstakingly combing through the Bermuda grass with her hands, uprooting all
the infant weeds she could find. The whole process was so laborious that she
could never weed more than a tiny square section of her yard each day, but the
next afternoon she would be at it again.
Mrs.
Vaughn is now in her mid-90s. She lives with her son in San Antonio, Texas.
Through the years she did her best to nurture her husband through the deep
depression he could never shake, and she did what she could to support a
daughter-in-law who lived with breast cancer for over a decade before passing
away a few years ago.
In
deep faith, she patiently prays and waits as God’s own loving hands comb
through the grasses of her long life and ours, ultimately uprooting every cause
of evil and suffering, in anticipation of a great harvest and homecoming meal.
And
we will see that the fire fueled by the weeds is excellent, and the flour that
the wheat makes is excellent, and when the harvest finally comes, the owner of
the field will call us all together—farmhands, reapers, neighbors, and break
bread with us, bread that is the final distillation of that whole, messy field,
and we will all agree that it is like no other bread we have ever tasted
before, and that it is very, very good. (This imagery is suggested in a sermon
by Barbara Brown Taylor, “Learning to Live with the Weeds” in The Seeds of
Heaven, Louisville: Westminster/John
Knox Press, 1990, 2004, pp. 36-37).
May
our communion bread this morning be a foretaste of the good things to come.
All
glory and praise be to our God. Amen.
