Sermons

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God in the Dark
October 5, 2003
Associate Pastor Steve Lympus
5th in a series on “Tough Issues for Faith”
Luke 8:22-37
Psalm 139:7-12

In a way, it’s easy to hear the familiar story about Jesus calming the storm on the sea, and wonder why the disciples were so worried. It’s not like they hadn’t seen Jesus do miracles before; they had seen Jesus cast out countless demons, cured fevers, paralysis, leprosy and blindness, and even raised the dead back to life. The disciples must have known that Jesus was powerful enough.

Imagine how you would have reacted if you were there in the boat that night – would you have remembered all that Jesus had done, and trusted that He would see you through this storm? Or would the crisis of the moment blind you to all that you had seen Jesus so powerfully do?

I imagine myself there in the boat. On my best day, I think there’s a chance I might have remembered all that Jesus had done. I might have realized that Jesus had already demonstrated His power over evil and the forces of this world and He would be able to get us out of this mess. I just might have been so trusting.

But even at my best, I bet I would have been just as upset as the disciples – upset because Jesus was asleep! The disciples were in peril, the storm was about to overtake them, and Jesus wasn’t doing anything about it. He didn’t even seem to be aware of the storm. He wasn’t even conscious. It was almost a prayer the disciples prayed in desperation and fear as they woke Jesus up. “Jesus, wake up – where have you been? Don’t you care that we’re about to die here?”

Today, around the world, millions will pray this same prayer to God, in some form or another.

“God, there is a violent war waging outside…why won’t you stop it?”

“God, kids are bringing weapons to school now…will you wake up and notice?”

“God, AIDS is spreading like wildfire…can’t you do something?”

Gerald Sittser is a theology professor at Whitworth College. In 1991 as his family traveled home from a Native American pow-wow near Spokane, a drunk driver hit his van. The collision killed his mother, wife, and daughter (leaving Gerald and his three other children). Three generations lost in one moment. He later wrote that in the terrible days that followed the collision, “It would almost seem better if God did not exist at all. Having no God may be preferable to having a weak or a cruel God.” In the wake of this tragedy, God seemed absent, uncaring, and, just like three of Gerald Sittser’s family members, God seemed to be dead.

This is the problem of evil: Evil and calamity exist all around us, and yet we believe as Christians that a good God exists and is powerful. So…are we wrong about God’s goodness or power?

• Is God powerful but not good enough to use His power to stop evil?
• Or is God good but not powerful enough to stop evil?
• …or does God simply not care?
• Is God asleep, while we face evil here in His absence?

I have a disclaimer to make about this sermon today: I’m not going to solve this problem of evil. Theologians have wrestled with the problem of evil for centuries, and we will all leave today unsatisfied by any answer I attempt today. But I will do my best to wrestle with the questions, and to tell you what I know we can be confident of.

The first thing that I am confident of is that evil is present in the world. Many people over the centuries have denied the existence of evil, especially in the century prior to the last one. In the late 1800s, when the American Civil War was becoming American history, the dawning of the 20th century brought with it promises of a new, modern world free from war, strife, mass suffering, and even disease.

But for those who predicted that evil might be eradicated in the coming new world, the 20th century proved to be a massive disappointment:

• 2 World Wars before the middle of the century
• Jewish Holocaust
• weapons on a whole new scale and the threat of nuclear holocaust
• new, more complex diseases like AIDS
• ethnic cleansing
• sophisticated bio-terrorism
• environmental threat
• economic collapse

…the list goes on and on. The 20th century brought an unprecedented amount of violence, and disappointment.

For me, as a kid, it wasn’t hard to see the evil in the world around me. I grew up in Northwest Montana and my father was the county prosecutor. He visited every murder scene in our very large county. When I was old enough, as a Middle Schooler, and happened to be hanging around the house on a Saturday afternoon when he’d get the sheriff’s call, I’d go with him sometimes to the crime scenes.

I would stand out of the way and survey the spectacle of a homicide scene as sheriff’s deputies and investigators scurried around collecting evidence, taking photographs, talking to witnesses and consoling family members, and trying to piece together what happened that ended in someone being murdered. I learned on those Saturday afternoons that human life was vulnerable…not just to disease and decay, or random accidents, or the natural forces of nature, but all human life was vulnerable to violent and persistent evil.

It isn’t hard for any of us to see evil in the world around us… yesterday a woman walked into a restaurant in Northern Israel with a bomb strapped to her. The explosion killed 19 Israelis and Palestinians. On Friday in Kent, in a suburban subdivision, a 7-year-old girl was found critically wounded in a house near the slain bodies of her parents.

We could try to pretend that evil doesn’t exist, that the notion is something humans have created to cope with insecurities. But this is not the picture that the Bible gives us. In Scripture’s narrative, the good Creation is followed immediately by the evil fall of humankind.

Where does evil come from? The Bible does not explain everything about the source of evil; no complete explanation is given in Scripture for where evil originally came from. But we know that evil did not come from God, because all that He created was good.

And even though the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we want to know about evil, the Bible does not deny evil or pretend it is gone. Evil stays near the center of the Bible’s story: God saves the Israelites from the evil oppression of the Egyptians, the nation of Israel is ruled for centuries by some good kings and many evil kings, the prophets cry out against evil in Israel and evil allied against Israel.

And throughout the Biblical story there is a personal evil, an intelligent evil force not equal to God in power, but working against God and God’s people. He is given a few names in the Bible: Satan and the Devil being most common – and his agents are known in Scripture as demons.

When I think of demons and the Devil, three different images come to mind:

The first image comes from the El Diablo Coffee Company across the street from the church. Spanish for “the devil,” El Diablo’s decor sports red devils with pointy horns, tails and pitchforks dancing around drinking lattes and Americanos. They’re cute, silly little demons, and about as harmless looking as Halloween costumes.

The second image comes from Frank Peretti’s novels I read as a kid. Peretti’s demons were sinister black monsters, a cross between a cruel bird with razor-sharp talons and a reptile with thick leathery-black skin. Existing in an invisible realm all around us, they whisper in our ears, enter into our thought-life and stand behind every incarnation of evil, orchestrating it all. Human choice didn’t have much to do with it.

The third image is of a drug dealer. I think of a shady character not as silly and innocuous as the devil-in-the-red-suit, but not as obvious as Frank Peretti’s monsters. The drug-dealer image is somewhere in between, and yet far more sinister and evil than either the silly El Diablo devils or the Frank Peretti nightmare. The drug dealer shows up now and then in your neighborhood, makes friends, sells some drugs, recruits others to sell and then he’s gone. You don’t see him for very long…you might never see him again.

But his influence remains. The drugs stick around, addicts can’t stop, the sellers are at work for him now, and meanwhile the drug dealer himself is off to the next neighborhood before anybody notices. I think Satan and his demons operate most like the drug dealer. Humans by themselves are capable of vast evil, and we don’t always need demons around to accomplish evil for us. The Devil may instigate evil, but evil can fester in neighborhood gossip, in family systems, oppressive governments and cultural establishments, in even whole economies.

If you know the movie “The Usual Suspects,” you’ll remember the clincher-line near the end: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.” Satan is real and active, but Satan is subtle. He is not as powerful as God – the Devil is not everywhere present or all-knowing. But the Devil is at work, and we all encounter his influence. And if Satan can convince us that he and evil aren’t actually real, or that he is behind every instance of evil and we as humans are not to blame in the least…then either way, the Devil has done his work for the day.

What will God do in the face of this personal evil? Jesus faced Satan and his demons many times. He faced them that day when he stepped out of the boat and met the demon-possessed man in Garasene, a man who was so tormented by demonic possession that they had to bind him in shackles and chains. This man was the town monster, really, living in the town graveyard. He might as well have been dead like the buried corpses around him.

The demons tormenting the man knew right away who Jesus was; they recognized Him from a distance. “What do I have to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” It seems like they were taunting Jesus, but the demons knew that Jesus could destroy them on the spot, sending them “into the abyss.” And they convince Jesus to send them into a herd of pigs grazing nearby. With Jesus’ permission they leave the man and enter the herd of pigs, the pigs rush down a cliff into the water and drown; the demons are destroyed.

Jesus faces evil in the same way He faces the storm…with calm serenity, and with power. Jesus can relax when danger is near, even sleep, because He knows Who is in ultimate control. Jesus never acts surprised by the evil He encounters. God is never surprised by evil. Surely from the beginning of time, God saw that evil would come, and the Fall, and the Crucifixion…God in Christ, dying on the Cross, looking powerless in the face of evil…God must have seen it all from the beginning.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp, said that this is “the decisive difference between Christianity and all other religions”:

That we would look for God’s power in this world and find that the only way out of our trouble is for Jesus to give up His power, to become weak and suffer, to die…for that is the real power, in the end. God dying for us; that is our only real help (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).

The Christian hope when it comes to the problem of evil is not based on what we can “figure out” about God – the answer is not in a system we can devise to make sense of evil. Our hope is based on belief, belief that God came to be with us in Jesus and then died in our place so that we can live.

The Christian hope when it comes to the problem of evil is based on belief that God is at work, bringing good out of a world tortured by evil and suffering. It is a belief in the Resurrection…God raising Jesus back to life after death. God’s victory over death, sin, and Satan was secure when Jesus rose from the grave.

And look at the end of the story! At the end of Scripture’s narrative, Satan is defeated forever, evil will cease to be, suffering will end…we know the outcome, we know that God wins this long war against evil.

I think of D-Day during WWII. June 6, 1944…the Allied Troops crossed the English Channel in force and invaded Hitler’s Europe on the shores of Normandy. The Allied victory was decisive, Hitler’s eventual defeat was secure. But the war was not soon over.

VE-Day, “Victory in Europe,” was not until May 8, 1945, when Germany officially surrendered. Almost one year after the decisive invasion at Normandy, the war was officially over. The victory was complete.

But there was that year in between, from D-Day to VE-Day, from the invasion to victory...one year of battles, one year of many casualties on both sides. As Christians, we live in that in-between time. We live knowing the outcome of God’s war against evil and Satan; the war is decided, the future is God’s – but the battles and skirmishes continue. We live in that time between victory declared over an empty grave, and victory realized in the final defeat of evil and death.

When we face evil, there is a time to pray, like the disciples prayed, for God to deliver us. When we face evil, there is a time to act – to take our stand and do what we can to combat evil in the world. And when we face evil and danger, there is a time to follow Jesus’ lead and simply sleep. Jesus sleeps calmly in the boat while the storm rages around him; He knows His Father is in control. When he wakes, Jesus calms the storms on the sea, and when they reach land, Jesus calms the storms in the soul of the demon-possessed man.

We are all in the midst of a Spiritual battle. But we can follow the calmness of Jesus as we enter into evil situations; to pray and to act, and in everything to resign ourselves to trusting Jesus, to rest in God and to sleep soundly, knowing that He is at work.

But what about the times when God feels absent? When God seems silent? So God will triumph over every evil one day in the future, but where is God in the meantime?

Elie Wiesel is a Jewish man who survived three Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz, where he was deported as a 15-year-old boy. In his memoir called Night, Wiesel tells the story of the day two men and a young boy were hanged at his camp. The entire camp stood in formation watching the executions.

The two men died right away, but the young boy didn’t weigh very much, and so he didn’t die for over half-an-hour. As Wiesel looked into the eyes of the boy, another prisoner standing in line behind Wiesel asked, “Where is God now?” Wiesel remembers that another voice, coming from somewhere inside of himself answered and said, “Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows….”

Did the voice mean that God was dead? Or did the voice mean something else…did the words “Here He is” mean that God was present there, present even in this evil moment of suffering…and that God is present everywhere people suffer.

The voice that Elie Wiesel heard sounds like the voice that we hear in Psalm 139, which we read today:

“Your hand is on me always, God, when I’m in the light, when I’m in the dark, you are there. Darkness isn’t even dark to you, night does not scare you away.”

God is God in the light and God is still God in the dark… The darkness does not make God dark, the darkness does not make God inactive or afraid, the darkness does not paralyze God.

Where is God in the face of evil? He is hanging with the young boy on the gallows of a Nazi concentration camp, suffering and enduring evil because those He loves are enduring it.

Where was God on the day Jesus died on the Cross? Even Jesus cried out to God that day, “My God, My God…why have you forsaken me?” But God was there, in Jesus, dying on the Cross. Evil seemed to win that day. Evil seems to win sometimes during our days, too.

But the Cross was not the end for Jesus, and it’s not the end for us either. Where is Jesus now? He is risen! We say it during the bright celebrations on Easter morning…we can say it also in the dark and troubled times. He is risen! He is alive and well, and He is here among us.

There are many questions I still ask about the existence of evil. I can’t answer all these questions. But I can offer you these 3 assurances about God and evil:

First, evil does not come from God – God did not create evil, evil is not His doing (Isaiah 5.20-23, James 1.12).

Second, God will overcome evil. And in the process of overcoming evil, God is doing something beautiful...its source is Christ suffering on the Cross and His triumph over the grave, but what God is ultimately doing is more redemptive and amazing than we can even imagine. This assurance doesn’t make the evil good, but it affirms that God is doing good in evil’s wake.

Third, God is present in the midst of evil. He’s not just coming in the end to rescue us; God is present here now. He may be silent at times, but God is not dead or absent…God suffers and endures evil with us, and He will not leave us alone in our fears. Jesus is present here with us, in a world still tormented by evil.