The Lutheran Hour
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"The “Why” of Suffering"
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Text: John 9:1-3
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Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! The words of resurrection tell all who will listen that Christ has conquered. The living Lord tells all who will hear, the day will come when all of our questions will be answered; when all of our suffering will be over.
There was a pattern, but I didn’t catch it–not at first. About two years ago I told the story of Rudy, Arlene, and Caroline Krein. Rudy and Arlene were a young couple whose child, Caroline, had been born with spina bifida. Because of some medical mistakes, she was, according to those who examined her, both blind and deaf. Going against the advice of physicians, Rudy and Arlene had taken their baby home, and cared for her for more than 25 years. In spite of what the experts said, by the time Caroline died, Rudy and Arlene had heard her say three words: Mamma, Dadda, and Jesus. It was all I ever heard her say, but it was enough. After I told that story, for weeks people came to me and said, “Pastor, thank you for sharing Caroline’s story.” Surprised, I asked, “Did you know the Kreins?” The reply was, “No, but I’ve known others who, like that young couple, continued to show the power of God’s love, even when faced with ongoing problems.”
A year later I told another true story. This was the account of a mother, a wife, who had received a heart transplant from a young man. His death gave her another chance at living. I related how she had become increasingly grateful to the family of that young man who, in the face of a terrible tragedy, had still managed to perform a most Christian and charitable act. Once again I repeatedly heard, “Thank you, Pastor, for telling that story.” Surprised at the reaction, I asked, “Did you know her? Did you know the donor family?” “Oh, no,” came the reply, “but we have seen people who have done the same kind of thing; who reacted the same way when burdened by a great loss.”
Then last November, regular listeners to The Lutheran Hour heard the story of Rich and Bunny Cohrs. Rich was one of my co-workers at The Lutheran Hour. Bunny was his helpmeet. They had planned to go with me on the trip of a lifetime, a pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine. Their plans were interrupted by Bunny’s battle with cancer. Rich ended up taking the trip alone. He said, “I am going to old Jerusalem to see the places where Jesus walked; Bunny is in the New Jerusalem, seeing her Savior face-to-face.” The story of how Rich reacted to his loss, and the support that he was given by his pastor, parish, and staff, touched more than a few. “Thank Pastor Klaus for telling the story of Rich and Bunny.” That was what our staff in The Lutheran Hour Response Center heard. When the messages came in, I asked, “Did all these people know Rich and Bunny?” They replied, “No, we don’t think hardly any of them did.”
Three different years, three different stories detailing three different tragedies. Although it took me a while to see the pattern, you no doubt have already spotted the common thread. These were Christian stories of regular people who, by the Spirit’s power, had, in the most difficult of circumstances, reflected the love of the Savior to those around them. They hit home because you, my friends, have also sacrificed and suffered, hurt and endured.
Pain is part of life, isn’t it? Since that is so, allow me to say, if this Lord’s Day you do not know Jesus as your Redeemer; if you have ever wondered whether there is truth in the Christian religion, I would encourage you to look first and foremost at Holy Scripture. Then, having read in God’s inspired Word what Jesus has done to save sinners, take a look at how the Lord lives in the stories of witnesses like these, whose faith has been heated and made purer in the forge of adversity; whose love of the Savior has been hammered out and been made stronger on the anvil of hard times. It is true that Jesus Christ is our Savior, whose life, suffering, death, and resurrection gives believers eternal life. But it is also true that Jesus is our Brother, Defender, Counselor, and Friend who strengthens, supports, and sustains us, come what may, as we live each and every day.
But there was another thread which ran through these accounts; a thread which was taken from the comments of people who spent some serious time struggling to understand why particular pains and horrible hurts had come to these people they loved. They wanted to know, “Why has the Lord allowed this anguish and agony, this pain and these problems? Why didn’t God stop them before they arrived? Why hasn’t God removed them now that they’re here? Why, if God won’t take away these hurts, doesn’t He take the time to explain?” The sad, soulful scream of the unanswered “why” became for many of those people, even as it has become for some of you, a spiritual wall between you and God; a barrier you haven’t been able to climb over or go around.
It’s hard to understand why God would do what He seems to be doing. You know that as a parent or grandparent, you love your children. When your little ones are sick or injured, you would do almost anything to make them better, to take away their hurt. You would, if you could, take their illness and pain into your own body. You would, if you were able, give your own life to save theirs. Without question or hesitation, you would do whatever was necessary to make them better. You would do this because you love them. The difficulty and frustration is, although you have the love and desire to help, you don’t have the power to make the wish a reality. But the omnipotent, all-loving Triune God isn’t supposed to have our limitations or our shortcomings.
That is why, when we see ongoing suffering and terrible pain descend upon someone we love, we quickly come to some strange and often wrong conclusions. Some of us end up thinking that God doesn’t care; others begin to believe that the Lord is helpless; while others think that their stern heavenly Father, upset about some deep and dark transgression, has sent down some Divine punishment. This last theory, the one about God punishing sinners, was the one the disciples settled on 2,000 years ago, when they and the Savior came upon a man who had been blind since birth.
Looking at this unfortunate, they asked, “Jesus, tell us who sinned, this man or his parents.” The disciples believed that God was Divinely disturbed about some sin that this man or his parents had committed many years before. Now I must tell you, that conclusion is not entirely without support in the Bible. The Word of God says that when this world was created, God had made it good. Indeed, the Lord had made the universe perfect. The great tragedy of history is that humankind, exercising free will, rejected God’s rule and embraced Satan’s sinful suggestions. Because of sin, none of us is innocent. Because of sin, the world is filled with sadness. Because of sin, our lives are filled with suffering.
The disciples were aware of these truths, as well as a great many Old Testament examples where nations, families, and individuals were punished because of something they had done wrong. The idea of an individual receiving a certain punishment for a certain sin, made sense to them, even as it makes sense to us. Oh, don’t think it doesn’t. It does. Our court system is based on that kind of thinking. If you commit “Crime A,” the guilty party is supposed to receive “Punishment B.” We may not like it; we may not agree with it; but we can’t argue that such a system is unfair.
But we don’t understand why good people, comparatively innocent people, people that we know and love, seem to be punished for the sins of someone else. A power-mad ruler seizes a position of authority, and his people are left homeless, or starving, or imprisoned. Senior citizens have the money they have set aside for retirement snatched away because a corporation is headed up by a greedy and unscrupulous executive. We have heard the screams, and seen the bone rattling shaking of babies who were born addicts, because their pregnant mothers had used cocaine or heroin. We have seen children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Throughout their lives, these little ones will have problems with learning, memory, attention, problem solving, and behavior because their expectant mothers drank alcohol. We have seen a faithful spouse infected with AIDS because of an adulterous mate. We have seen the pictures of happy families whose joy was shattered by a reckless and irresponsible drunken driver. That seems unfair.
Especially in those situations, we want to know, “Why does God allow this to happen? Why do sufferings come? Doesn’t God care?” Before I go any further in this message, let me give you this solid Scriptural assurance: God cares; the Savior cares; the Holy Spirit cares. Read the Gospel story of Jesus’ life. Believe Him when He says, “Greater love has no one than this, than that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Jesus has proven His love, just how much He cares, by giving His life for us. He showed how much He cared during every moment that He walked among us. He showed how much He cared by resisting the temptations which cause us to stumble. He showed how much He cared when He kept the laws we have broken. He showed how much He cared when He, on Calvary’s cross, died the death that our sins demanded. He showed how much He cared by suffering the greatest injustice recorded in human history. “He, the innocent Son of God, took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, (He) was stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that has brought us peace was upon Him, and by his wounds we are healed” (excerpts from Isaiah 53:3-5).
Would you give your life for your children? Jesus has done that and more. Jesus has given His life for those who rejected Him; who didn’t love Him; who lied about Him and hated Him; whose sins nailed Him to a cross. No, my friends, if your life has hurt or horror, it is not because Jesus doesn’t care. Nor do your pains and problems remain because Jesus is helpless or impotent. He who could still a storm with a word; who could feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes; who could summon a friend back from death, is more than the Master of whatever difficulties you may have. Jesus will take care of His followers’ problems, either at the time of the resurrection or before.
Still, that doesn’t answer your question: “Why do sorrows and sufferings, pains and problems come?” Jesus gives us a clue to that most important question in His reply to the disciples. He told them, “Neither this (blind) man, nor his parents sinned. This has happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” “And exactly what does that mean,” you demand to know. In simple terms, I’ll tell you. If you are having difficulties; if you are carrying a cross; if you are worried, afraid, depressed, despondent, troubled, or terrified; if you are feeling alone, lost, unloved and lonely; if you are unsure of tomorrow and saddened by today; no matter what hurt has touched your life, it has come because God is giving you a chance.
To which I can almost hear you reply, “A chance for what?”
I can’t tell you. I can only tell you that God is giving you a chance. To those of you who cannot this day, call Jesus, “your Savior and your Lord,” God is giving you a chance to be turned to Him. God has allowed this cross to come so that you might know He is calling you to faith, so that you might be saved, He sent His Son into this world. Sadly, up to this point in time, you have acted as if you can get through life and into heaven by your own power. Your difficulty may well be God’s way of giving you a chance to be saved. If that is so, He has shown you just how much you need Him. Please call us at Lutheran Hour Ministries. We would like to introduce you to your Savior; the Savior who will take your cares; the Savior who cares for you.
But there are many of you who are already saved. You know the Lord Jesus Christ. Sometime in your past, the Holy Spirit called you by the Gospel. By God’s grace you have been allowed to say, “Jesus is my Savior and Lord.” Why do you “have a cross to carry”? It is because God is also giving you a chance. If you yourself are suffering, or are in some heartrending situation, God may be giving you a chance to show to those who are watching, the power of His love in your life. When Paul had a thorn in the flesh, the Lord told Him that His Divine strength would be shown most clearly when it would be silhouetted against Paul’s weaknesses. God may be giving you a chance to witness to someone who right now is lost. At the beginning of this message, I briefly retold three different stories of Christians who had very privately carried a cross. Those private stories have now touched millions. On a smaller or similar scale, God may be giving you a chance to show someone the Savior’s story of salvation.
And it is entirely possible that this day, some of our listeners find themselves forced to stand by, seemingly helpless, as they watch the suffering of someone they love. You, too, want to know, “Why?” The answer: “Because God is giving you a chance.” God has entrusted to you a chance to love somebody in a very special way; to perform some very special acts of Christian kindness; to practice in a unique and tangible way, what you believe. St. Paul said it far better than I: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). St. Paul was saying: “God is giving you a chance to share the love you have received from Jesus.” Believers and unbelievers, sufferers and spectators, know this: your loving God, your saving God, is giving you a chance to be brought closer to Him.
I would like to finish today’s message with a poem and a brief explanation. The poem reads: “All the way my Savior leads me; what have I to ask beside? Can I doubt His tender mercy, Who through life has been my guide? Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort, here by faith in Him to dwell? For I know what’e’er befall me; Jesus doeth all things well.” That poem was written by a lady who lost her sight at the age of six weeks. A doctor made a mistake and took away her vision. What a cross to carry. Why did God allow it to happen? The woman–a Christian woman who was given the ability to memorize great sections of the Bible, who wrote over 8,000 songs of praise to the Lord–explained why: “Blindness,” she said, “is the best thing that could have happened to me. How in the world could I have ever lived such a helpful life had I not been blind?” She knew, as you should know, God had given her a chance. He is, in Jesus, doing the same for you. Amen.
LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions & Answers) for March 6, 2005
Topic: The Making of a New Hymnal (Part 1)ANNOUNCER: It’s time now for Lutheran Hour questions and answers. I’m Mark Eischer. Maybe you’ve heard this expression, when a group wants to make sure that it’s consistent in its communication, somebody will get up in a meeting and say, “We all need to be singing out of the same hymnbook.” Well, that’s certainly good advice, and it brings us to our question for today – “How does one go about putting this hymnbook together?” With me here in the studio is Dr. Paul Grime, who is the executive director of the Commission on Worship for The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and for several years now, he and his committees have been working on putting together a new hymnal for the Lutheran church. How long does it take to actually produce a hymnal from start to finish?
GRIME: The answer to that depends on the time that’s given, because one can do it quickly if you need to, but the process we have followed as we began this, already six years ago, was to give ourselves plenty of time. And so it has been for six years that we have been working non-stop in terms of committee meetings and editing, and researching, developing the work that was all pulled together for our hymnal.
ANNOUNCER: So, if you tried to put all of these people together in a room, would it be tens, hundreds, thousands of people?
GRIME: Those directly working, you’d probably have at least 50 that worked during the course of these six years on a regular basis. You then have dozens of others who have been involved in various aspects of helping. We’ve had hundreds of pastors, for example, who have taken part in some testing of resources-trying some of the revisions to the lectionary or looking at some new liturgy settings or hymns.
ANNOUNCER: Could you talk a little about the work that they are bringing forward from previous generations?
GRIME: A hymnal is never completely new, and so to call it a new hymnal is almost the wrong way to say it, because much of what you find in a hymnal is passed on from previous generations. In fact, the majority of what you find in any hymnal is something that you would find in a previous hymnal. And what that demonstrates is the great wisdom of the church, in a sense. Sometimes I like to compare it to a slow moving glacier. A glacier moves along almost inperceptively, and as it does, there are all kinds of things going on underneath, you don’t even quite notice. We take what we’ve received, we carry that along, pass it on, but then we also pick up new things that have been developed, and God continues to work through composers and poets in our own age, and we don’t want to ignore those gifts that He gives us, either.
ANNOUNCER: How does this care and consideration that we see in this hymnal process reflect our church’s concern for preserving the Gospel?
GRIME: That’s paramount to the work that we’ve been doing, and from the start the committees have all, to a person, had that concern at heart. That what we pass on for the next generation, is that which is faithful to the proclamation of the Gospel, as it is given to us in Holy Scripture and in the Lutheran Confessions. So we’ve taken great care in looking at what we’ve received to make sure that, indeed, it does pass the test, so to speak.
ANNOUNCER: Some would say that a hymnal seems like kind of a quaint thing, you know, to want to put everything together in a book, when we’ve got the internet, and we’ve got overhead projectors and Power Points, and we could just plug all of this stuff in that we get off from other sources. Why a hymnal?
GRIME: I love that question. Books are not dead. Many people have been predicting that books are going the way of the dinosaur before long. But you go to Borders or Barnes & Noble, and you see plenty of people buying books all over the place. A hymnal is, I think, a unique resource in that it’s not just something that we’re going to sing from on Sunday morning. But it is something that becomes a treasury. In some ways, a hymnal is as valuable for the ability to thumb through it and to see what’s there, and to be surprised and say, “Oh, look at this” as it is to say, “Now we turn to hymn 392 to sing the closing hymn.” A hymnal has the ability with its rich resources to be a devotion for the person day after day. Another feature: if you’re going to simply pick all the hymns from the hymnal, and not provide the hymnal to the people, just chose the things that you’re going to use for the service. Put it on the screen or in your bulletin. In a sense, people end up not seeing what else is there that didn’t get chosen, and sometimes a lot can be said by that, and a lot can be learned from that.
ANNOUNCER: We’ve been talking with Dr. Paul Grime, executive director of the Commission on Worship for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Dr. Grime, thanks for being with us.
GRIME: Thank you very much.