God Isn’t, Can’t or Won’t: The Question of Suffering

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
May 7th, 2023

I stood in my kitchen on Friday with a friend of mine. Aracelly is a good woman who left Guatemala more than 30 years ago with nothing but her 3 year old son. She worked in a factory, learned how to speak English, became a US citizen, got married and today lives quite comfortably with her husband having had 4 more children and now some grandchildren. And on Friday, she was telling me how grateful she is for everything she has.

Then she reminded me that none of it mattered, that she’d willingly give it all up if only she could have her son back. That little 3 year old, some years later, died in a car accident. There in my kitchen she cried, as she’s done in my kitchen so many times. And she posed the question that she poses again and again, especially in the springtime, around the anniversary of his death.

Every time she says “Why, Peggy? What have I done? Why did I deserve this?” Her friends and her priest have given her answers like “God tests those he loves most” and “This is how God proves to others who really loves him.” Somehow it’s her job now to bear witness to her unwavering faith. Many spiritual traditions advise the benefits of suffering. It forms character, it opens us to intimacy with God, it sets “good” in clear relief, all the more appreciated for the contrast.

If those answers worked for her, she wouldn’t spend so much time asking those questions year after year, nor would the millions of other people when drowning in their own pain. “Why? Why did this happen?” We grasp for meaning when the world feels most cruel. We search for the only ground we think we might find. “Why?”

Suffering is religion’s Achilles Heel. This is particularly true for monotheistic traditions that posit a single powerful, knowing and even controlling god. God with a capital G. God as Designer. Director. It’s lovely and safe and is a very popular understanding for billions of people. But, that vision and image of God has trouble holding up to the realities of human pain.

Suffering is inescapable. No one lives without grief. In the course of a week, most people don’t talk about it, but there is no person you have met, no one any of us encounters who hasn’t experienced real pain. We’ve lost children and parents and siblings and friends and lovers to death, to addiction, to dementia, and possibly to violence. Grief is an ongoing part of the human experience.

While much of that is common, there’s also uncommon suffering. Children in Ukraine are being taken from their families to be brought to Russia for adoption. Uyghurs in China have been pushed into forced labor camps to punish them for being Muslim. The list goes on and on. Sudan. Ethiopia. Palestine. Iran. These are the modern hot-spots, but there will be a different list in a year because life on this planet is difficult.

I took a course in graduate school on the Holocaust, the uncommon suffering that is most present in my own family. That course was my first introduction to the depths of human depravity and a serious challenge to my faith. It was also the beginning of my quest to understand, to answer the “Why” that inevitably is asked when grief is unexpected. The question that haunted me then and still lives with me, especially as we see similar patterns here to those 15 years in Europe, the question I asked was: Is God all powerful and therefore evil, or is God powerless and therefore useless?

John Roth in his reflection on the Holocaust wrote, “Where was God? Off trimming the divine nails? We want to know the source of this evil, and if God was on-duty when it happened. We want to know who has hell to pay for the evil we see around us. After all, does not Hell seem superfluous?”

How can we believe in a powerful god? If god is good and powerful, why is there suffering? That is, if god could prevent suffering but doesn’t, can god be said to be good? On the other hand, if god is good, but cannot prevent suffering, can it be said that god is powerful?

The religions of the world, humans through history have been asking these things in their own contexts and they’ve left us breadcrumbs to follow, hoping one day we’ll find answers that can hold up in times of trouble.

Distilling all that wisdom down, we can see a few patterns. For instance, a very common response the world-round is the “consolation of a promise”, the notion that there’s something better coming, either in this life, or in another life, or in the after-life. We suffer now, but it’ll be OK in the end with “end” being a flexible term. In Hebrew scripture we are promised a future peace and told that “one day the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion will lie down together, and the child will lead them all.” Hindus believe in Karma, in an ultimate system of justice where balance will be found, where we all get what we deserve, but this promise will be made real in our next life. The Qur’an tells us that Allah will give good provision,

that God is indulgent in the after-life. So, in the future, in another life, or after death- at some time we will find peace and/or justice, even as it seems elusive now.

This consolation of a promise is the carrot held out in front of us. Karl Marx called it an opiate, a drug that lulls and distracts us. He suggested that we awaken and claim a more immediate response. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, when confronted with similar promises of a world not-yet, told us that justice delayed is justice denied.

This same promise of consolation comes in sayings like “God has a plan” or “everything happens for a reason”. It sooths us into feeling like things aren’t random, that there’s a purpose and that ultimately, we’re being taken care of, that all will be made right. It feels good to believe the suffering will be justified, although I suspect the good-feelings are often for those who have not been violated. It’s more a remedy for onlookers. I don’t know anyone whose suffering was alleviated by such platitudes.

This consolation of a promise feels like a denial of authentic suffering. A pat on the head and a “don’t worry, it’ll be alright”. That’s not who we are.

This sermon is part of a series called This We Believe. For the last two years, I’ve been teasing out UU theology. The challenge for today isn’t to tell you what all the other religious traditions believe about suffering, but about what we believe. What does Unitarian Universalism have to offer to people in times of tremendous pain?

We don’t deny the depths and reality of suffering. Those promises, those carrots, are necessary only after creating a worldview in which there is external force in charge. In other words, I was asking the wrong question. I was asking about power. Who’s responsible? What solid, stable worldview can give suffering meaning?

But, the precarious pathway of human life challenges the idea that god is both good and powerful, leading many believers to doubt or even to see faith disintegrate when that worldview cannot hold up under the weight of real pain. As UUs, we do not have a mythology to which we have committed ourselves so strongly that we have to continually alter reality in order for it to make sense. We have not indoctrinated a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful god, so we do not have to struggle with that image while confronting, for instance, the massacre of children in their classroom. We don’t have to ask if god knew in advance or if god chose not to stop it and we do not have to justify god’s actions in the face of it with empty platitudes like “everything happens for a reason”. No grieving mother will ever have to hear that here.

After struggling for 2 years with writing that paper for that graduate class, (yes, 2 years – it was late) I realized I was asking the wrong question. Power isn’t at the Center. Love is. Love is the highest attribute. I was wrestling with questions of power, as is everyone asking “Why?” and wondering who’s in charge, wondering what we could have done – what prayers we were missing, what actions we didn’t take.

Immediately after the massacre at Sandy Hook, conservative talking heads claimed it happened because Connecticut had fought so hard for marriage equality. The slaughtering of their children was their punishment.

Our theology doesn’t require that we appease an angry god. We don’t think humans are sinners or that god has put us in slippery places and awaits our fall, who keeps us from the pit of hell only by his good grace. We never look into the face of pain and wonder what they did to deserve it.

Unitarian Universalists are free to be shocked when confronted with true suffering. Without an omnificent deity controlling our every breath, we don’t have to be afraid of our own horror and we don’t have to alter our faith in order to make room for reality. Our search for truth includes an embrace of unanswered questions and a confrontation with the depths of human suffering.

For most Unitarian Universalists, hope is not external. Hope does not come from the ancient god of Moses or Jesus or Muhammad. Hope comes from us, from the reality we are creating, the world we are dreaming and building together. Hope comes from this room, from this community. Hope comes from Now and Here. Hope comes from We Who Put Love At The Center of Everything.

Congregational membership, covenanted relationships, are rooted in love. This love sees the Other clearly and entirely. Love isn’t blind; it sees EVERYTHING. Love means we can see each other as whole people, with our potential for kindness and cruelty. It’s a full acceptance of who someone is now, coupled with a profound willingness to help them become more, to help us all become more- to live like we are more.

We are here in the name and in the service of Love.

The question isn’t about whether or not god is powerful. The question is about whether or not we can summon Love, live into Love, act with the open heart of Love so well that we become powerful.

There is no cure to grief. When Aracelly cries, I hold her hand. When George Floyd died, we took to the streets. We are not the source of Love, but we are her magnifiers.

I’m not going to reduce our woes to a need for more love. I know it’s not that simple. And I’m certainly

not going to suggest that if there were more UU congregations we’d be free from violence. But I am going to suggest that when we face into human suffering, it’s the strength of our shared faith, grounded in our covenanted relationships, held by Love, that will bind us when everything else feels like it might fall apart. If there’s hope, I believe it will be found in the radical, counter-cultural, witness of congregations like ours, of people who are willing to name the suffering without dismissing it with platitudes or over-simplifying it because the rabbit hole is too deep or justifying it with an absentee god. If there’s hope, it’s because we are willing to participate in the experiment of being human, moving us forward into the unknown. Awake and afraid, but not alone.