Spiritual Hiccups - Call Me "Bitter"

Early today a devastating earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand.  When a horrific earthquake struck Haiti just over a year ago, televangelist Pat Robertson made headlines for blaming the quake on voodoo and deals with the devil that the Haitian people made during a slave rebellion centuries ago.  Today I saw a post on Twitter wondering how such logic would work with this latest quake, noting that it occurred in a city named, of all things, Christchurch, where the quake heavily damaged the city's wonderful cathedral.

Pat Robertson's foolishness strikes me as obvious, but still I think many of us struggle to understand how and where God is in the midst of such events.  Robertson's thought process may be extreme and even absurd, but his desire to find order and sense in the midst of such chaos is fairly normal.  We would like to think that the world is more orderly, that we can keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, that when we do what we are supposed to, things will work out well for us.  But the world keeps reminding us that this is not necessarily so.

When Naomi returns to Bethlehem with her daughter-in-law Ruth, the people recognize her after her many years absence and say, “Is this Naomi?” But she responds, “Call me no longer Naomi, call me Mara, (literally "Bitter") for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me."  Naomi has lost her sons and  has no grandsons in a world where such widows were in jeopardy of quickly becoming destitute.  She has good reason for her name change.  She has good reason to think God and the world are against her.

People of faith often think that faith gives them insight into why bad things happen, and they sometimes think that faith is suppose to protect them from such bad things.  There are certainly passages of Scripture that would support such a view, but on the whole, the Bible knows there is much suffering and tragedy that cannot easily be explained, and that people of faith are far from immune.  The story of Ruth does not hide from the reality of this, but it does still speak hope, insisting that God can bend to worst tragedy toward the good.

I think that biblical faith realizes that there is much we cannot understand and know, that any attempt to systematically explain all suffering and tragedy will, in the end, founder in much the way Pat Robertson's overly simplistic theology does.  But biblical faith does not simply shrug at tragedy.  Biblical faith has no trouble being "bitter," in calling God to task.  And I've long loved a quote from a letter the great preacher Carlyle Marney wrote to his friend and colleague John Claypool when Claypool's daughter was dying of leukemia.  After admitting that he did not know who to make sense of such suffering he added, "I fall back on the idea that our God has a lot to give an account for."
(John Claypool, "Life is a Gift" in A Chorus of Witnesses: Model sermons for today's preacher, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B Eerdmans, 1994) p. 125)

But if our faith at times calls us to shake our fists at God, it also calls us to embrace the power of resurrection, the certainty that God can turn the worst evil, the worst tragedy toward the good.  I'm not talking about pie in the sky by and by.  I'm talking about acknowledging the reality of tragedy while hoping that, somehow, this is not it.  Faith is about hoping and therefore working for the as yet new thing God will draw out of tragedy.  Faith is willing to embrace the name "Bitter," yet hope and trust and live in the certainty that this name is not permanent. 

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