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My name is Ellen Babinski. I'm Professor of Church History and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs here at Austin Seminary. As a part of my introductory remarks, I tell you a story. A central peasant woman, central European peasant woman, discovered her only horse was missing.

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Her neighbors said, What a terrible calamity. Your son cannot plow your fields without a horse. The woman responded, Who knows whether it is a terrible thing or not. Two days later the horse returned, accompanied by a second horse.

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The neighbors rejoiced. What a blessing! they exclaimed. Now you have two horses! Again the peasant answered, Who knows whether it is a blessing or not? A few weeks later her son was riding the new horse and it threw him, breaking his leg and crippling him.

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The neighbors were quick to offer sympathy. What a terrible thing. Your son will always walk with a limp. And she replied, who knows if it is a terrible thing.

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Not long afterwards, the king's men came through conscripting men for service in a bloody war. When they came to the son and saw his limp, they did not take him. And the story The story goes on and on.

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Professor Long has carefully, passionately, and eloquently guided us along the difficult and treacherous path of thinking about innocent suffering. Yesterday morning, he mapped out the challenges before us, never flinching or backing down into simplicity. Yesterday afternoon, he invited us to think alongside of those who have gone before us, lifting us to stand on their shoulders. For this morning, he has promised to shine a light into the darkness before us as we move along the gospel way.

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Thomas Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, we welcome you. And we eagerly await what you have to say to us today. Well, the time has come.

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The Sabbath is here. What do we say? What do we say? I think I need to begin this morning with probably what I don't need to begin with with you, and that is a word of homiletical humility.

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My mentor in preaching, at least one of them, the great Lutheran homiletician, Edmund Steimley, said that the image of a good sermon is not a package with a ribbon all tied neatly in a bow, that the image of a good sermon, the rings on the surface of a lake where a swimmer has dived down in deep water. And I am in deep water and so are you I am over my head and I know it I Think it is no mere coincidence. I was going to say this anyway But I think it's no mere coincidence that I have been sharing the program this week with theologians of the church's song because I think a sermon begins in prose and if it's a good sermon it moves into poetry And if it's a gospel sermon, it leads to congregational song.

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And if there is going to be a resolution to the issues that we have been talking about, it will not be found in the prose or even in the poetry. It will be finally found in the congregational song. That is what I think it means in the book of Revelation when John, in the Spirit on the Lord's day, Wearing the bloody baptismal robes of Christians immersed in history when the Beast has been allowed to make war on the Saints and to kill them Moves in the spirit up into eternal time which in John is over historical time and peers into the eternal reaches and he probably said though it's not recorded in the text

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I would like an answer to the theodicy problem. And the angel did not point him to a theologian or a book of doctrine, but to a choir, singing the hallelujah chorus. The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever. If there's a resolution to this, it's in our song.

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Do I understand that? No, but I'm singing my way into it. One of my good friends who was a United Church of Christ pastor went to a conference like this one one time, a clergy conference, and at the opening worship service, he happened to find himself seated next to his old theology professor, Richard H. Niebuhr.

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That night, the preacher was experimenting with an experimental sermon, and what he was doing was he was preaching a paragraph or two, and then the congregation would sing the stanza of a hymn. He'd preach another couple of paragraphs. They'd sing stanza two, and so on. And evidently, it was going very badly.

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My friend leaned over to Niebuhr and said, God, this is awful. This reminds me of something you said in class one day. Neighbor said, what are you talking about? He said, oh, you remember, we were reading J.S.

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Whale's book, Christian Doctrine, and you said that Whale was a bad theologian because every time he encountered a problem he couldn't solve, he quoted a hymn. Neighbor said, I was wrong. I was brash and young. I was wrong.

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The older I get, the more I know there are some theological problems that can only be resolved in hymns. Second thing I want to do is to knock aside two dead ends in terms of what we might say on Sunday morning about this problem. The first of these is to attempt to get out onto the logical ground of which the problem has been posed.

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Back in 1955, an absolutely brilliant philosopher by the name of J.L. Mackie wrote an incredibly influential essay called Evil and Omnipotence. And what he did was to pose our immovable and impossible chess game, there is a God and so on. and then refine the terms to make them more precise and then demonstrated absolutely conclusively that you cannot believe in a God of love who has power in a world of innocent suffering.

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The Christian faith, as I believe it, Mackie demonstrated, is implausible. But then In 1974, an equally brilliant Christian philosopher by the name of Alvin Plantinga got out onto the logical chessboard and exposed the flaw in Mackie's thinking. Christian faith may be true, may be false, but Plantinga demonstrated it is not illogical.

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Now, I don't want to go down that road because I think I am grateful to planning it for that, but I think it is cold homiletics and pastoral care. I do not want to stand at the open grave of a child and say, Behold, I tell you a mystery. The Christian faith is not logically implausible. I've got a gospel bigger than that.

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the second thing that I don't want to do the second cul-de-sac is to point out what I am tempted to do and that is the hubris that is built into the theodicy problem from the very beginning not to make too fine a point of it but the way the theodicy problem is always posed there is an assumption that is never articulated namely that God is simply a projection of us the theodicy problem as it arranged is basically this if I were God And I had power and I was as loving and just as I am There would not be evil in the world That's exactly the mistake that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the others make in their popular atheistic books these days and the Marxist Catholic Terry Eagleton absolutely nailed Dawkins in a review of his books in the London Review of Books when he said Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, some supersized chap.

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He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously. which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore is, nor is he a principle, an entity, an existent. In one sense of the word, it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.

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He is rather the condition or possibility of existence. and Some said the same thing go out onto the back pastures of your imagination Go out to the farthest fence and lean over it as far as you can and God is still beyond your imagining God is that which no greater can be imagined. That's what Calvin said at his best. It's what Barth said at his best God is not simply us projected large

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There is a ground here on which all of us stand. What I want to do is to get in the pulpit and preach the gospel to the way people are asking the questions. And so, here we go. I want to fasten our attention for a moment on a powerful but neglected moment in the gospel story.

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Luke tells it best, it's Easter. The women have gone to the tomb. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, other women, they have spices with them. They get to the tomb and the stone is already rolled away.

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The tomb is empty. Suddenly two men in dazzling white garments. They bow their heads in fear and awe and then comes the announcement, He's not here, he's risen. And they race to the place

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where the eleven and the others are gathered. And we have what I would argue is the first Christian sermon in the history of the world, preached by Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women as they announce the resurrection. And it is received as an idle tale. Right there, I would submit, is not simply a collision of genders.

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It is not simply a collision of narratives. It is a collision of epistemologies, the Easter epistemology and what Dostoevsky calls the Euclidean epistemology Euclidean epistemology is when people are dead they stay dead the Easter epistemology is the whole cosmos has changed and there we are on Sunday morning and what we are going to do when we preach is to look at the questions the Euclideans bring through the light of the Easter epistemology.

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And it's going to require then a shifting, not simply of solutions, but a shifting of a way of viewing the world. If you've been to Atlanta and spent much time there, you know probably that one of the great watering holes in the city of Atlanta is Manuel's Tavern. Manuel's Tavern was started a number of years ago by a Lebanese immigrant, a large, garrulous, friendly politically liberal guy named Manuel Malouf who is also a passionate Lebanese Christian One of the people in the old days who frequented Manuel's Tavern was Thomas J.J.

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Altizer Thomas J.J. Altizer got his 15 minutes of fame in the 1960s when he framed the death of God theology and Time Magazine asked the question on the cover is God dead Altizer said, as an ontological being, Yes. One afternoon, Altizer and some students were having a picture at Manuel's Tavern.

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Manuel saw him. He is washing glasses at the counter. He wiped off his hands, and in that big Lebanese voice, he said, Hey, Altizer! Everybody got quiet. Altizer looked.

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What's all this crap about God being dead? I talked to him this morning in Mass. He's fine. He's fine.

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It's a collision of epistemologies. I experienced it myself recently when I had a little run-in with the law. What happened was I had finished gassing up my car, and I needed to go across four lanes to get into the left-hand lane so that I could turn left at the light. I thought I could get through.

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And no sooner had I darted across the first three lanes than the traffic in the fourth lane stopped. And so I had the nose of my car in one lane, the tail of my car in the other. Looked in my rearview mirror, there was a police car. He gave me a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic.

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When you're a young man, you get a ticket for speeding in a convertible. When you're my age, you get a ticket for being in the way. I was just going to pay it, but I decided to look up the law. And when I looked up the law, I realized that the language of the law was a little ambiguous and that I could make a case that I had not impeded the flow of traffic.

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I'm a university professor. I went to the law school. I did the LexisNexis. I got case law, precedence.

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I had a folder two inches thick. My wife said, you're nuts, pay the ticket, you're-- no, no, I did not. Impede the flow of traffic. I want my day in court.

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My day in court came. The judge came in and called my name. I stood up. Approach the bar, please.

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I approached the bar and she said, The officer who arrested you is no longer employed by the county. There is no one here to bear witness against you. You are free to go. And something in me said, You can't just dismiss my case like this.

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I got a folder here that says... I'd rather be right than free. And on Easter morning, women who were already free encountered men who wanted to be right. and epistemologies collided.

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Now, if we look then at this problem and all of the questions that we have posed, not according to the epistemology that it's brought with, but according to the light of Easter, everything shifts. We're able to speak to the question, but out of a knowledge and sight that we did not have, would not have had, had not the women proclaimed the gospel to us. and fortunately I think we have in the Gospels themselves a sermon on our issue framed out of the epistemology of Easter it is found in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew you might not have seen it this way but I'd like to try to persuade you he put before them another parable the kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field but while everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away so when the plants came up and bore grain then the weeds appeared as well and the slaves of the householder came and said to him Master did you not sow good seed in your field where then did these weeds come from he answered an enemy has done this the slave said to him then do you want us to go out and gather them

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But he replied, no. For in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest. And at harvest time, I will tell the reapers, collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

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Then, of course, there is an eschatological interpretation of this parable in which the Son of Man will send the angels. They will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire where there will be and gnashing of teeth then the righteous will shine like the Sun in the kingdom of their father let everyone with ears listen now a flat-footed interpretation of that parable does as most flat-footed interpretations of Scripture are want to do lift it out of its context and out of its circumstances and to reify it as some eternal precious promised Word of God and if you do it becomes I would say demonic.

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Because what it basically says, if you lift it up out of the circumstances, is this world has got weeds, this world has got wheat, leave it alone. Let the angels handle it. They're selling drugs across the street from the middle school. Well, weed's wheat, you know, leave it alone.

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Next-door neighbor every Monday morning has purple bruises on her face. We can hear her scream over the weekend when her husband is at home. Well, weeds and wheat. Just leave it alone.

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That's not the gospel. That's not Matthew. Ethical quietism is not the gospel. Set it back down into its consequences, into its context,

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and this parable comes I am persuaded out of a powerful conversation going on in Matthew's church when as a frightened and new congregation they have discovered that they are set down into a world of good and evil and they themselves are a mixture of good and evil and they have some questions and the first question is God did you do this Did you cause this? Now, I would say that the first thing that this story authorizes is what theologians call a theodicy of protest. Notice what this does.

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It empowers the language of all sufferers in our congregation to stand up like Job, saying, Maybe boldness will save me, and to put a finger in the face of God and say, Did you cause this? This is an endorsement for Harold Kushner's outrage. This is an underscoring of Psalm 77, You weary me, God. I cannot even speak.

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I am so grief-stricken. What bothers me most is you don't have any power, and you're not doing anything about it. A professor at Luther Seminary in Minnesota, it may have been Paul, I'm not sure, was asked by a student in class one time, Do you think it's all right to have a praise band in worship? And the professor replied, Yes.

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As long as you have a lament band also. In August Wilson's play, Ma Rainey, some African-American jazz musicians are in a recording studio in Chicago in the '30s. They're going to record a record with a legendary blues singer, Ma Rainey, but it soon becomes apparent that what they are doing is an emblem, symbol, and microcosm of the world of African-Americans in the '30s. They're in a white-owned studio about to do an African-American thing.

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Waiting on the great musician, they just kill time with conversation. One of them, a man named Cutler, starts telling a story about a minister he knows. The minister is from Tallahassee. His name is Reverend Gates.

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His sister in Atlanta has cancer, and he has caught the train from Tallahassee to Atlanta to visit his sister. The train stops along the way at the little way station in Sigsbee, Georgia to take on water. While it is stopped, Reverend Gates gets off the train to check the schedule in the station. When he's in the station, he realizes he needs to use the bathroom.

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He goes to the men's room and there is a sign, whites only. The facilities for African-Americans are outhouses in the back of the station. So he goes, and while he is out there, the train leaves the station.

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And there he is in Sigsbee, Georgia. He sees across the tracks a group of white young men, Tufts, who are eyeing him menacingly. Not wanting any trouble, he just starts walking up the tracks toward Atlanta, but they follow him. One of them fires a gun.

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He stops. What you doing, boy? I'm a minister. I'm going to Atlanta to visit my sister, who is ill.

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He shows them his Bible. He shows them his cross. Can you dance, boy? they say.

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Wouldn't it be right to dance with a Bible? They take his Bible, they take his cross and start firing at his feet and making him dance. And Cutler says, Can you believe they did that? Can you believe they did that to a man of God?

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One of the other musicians, Levy, says, What I want to know is if he's a man of God, then where the hell was God when all this was going on? Why wasn't God looking out for him? Why didn't God strike down them crackers with some of this lightning that you talked to me about? Cutler says, Levy, you're going to burn in hell.

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Levy says, what do I care about burning in hell? You talk like a fool burning in hell. Why didn't God strike them crackers down? Tell me that.

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That's the question. Don't come telling me this burning in hell stuff. He's a man of God. Why didn't God strike them crackers down?

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I'll tell you why. I'll tell you the truth. It's sitting out there plain as day because he's a white man's God. I would say that the first thing this story does is to authorize the language of protest.

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God, did you do this? Is this who you are? And the good news that comes out of this story is no. No.

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And that is the first word that needs to come out of our mouths. God, did you do this evil thing? Did you kill my son? Did you cause the deaths from the tsunami?

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No, we are shining the light of the resurrection all the way back through history to the creation, and we are coming out with the same insight that you find in Colossians. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation, for in Him all things in heaven and on earth were created visible and invisible. Thrones, dominions, rulers, powers, all things have been created through Him. and for him.

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Did you cause this God? No. Years ago when I was teaching at Columbia Seminary I had a student who graduated and she was called to a small Presbyterian church. She made it her goal since the church was small to visit the entire roll the first six months that she was there.

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At the end of six months she'd almost done it. She visited everybody but one family. They hadn't been in a couple of years. The elders said

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Leave them alone. They aren't coming back. But she'd set a goal, so she went one afternoon. Only the wife was at home.

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They poured cups of coffee. They sat at the kitchen table, and they chatted. They chatted about this, they chatted about that, and then they chatted about it. Two years before, the wife had been vacuuming in the back bedroom while their infant son played in the den.

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She hadn't checked on him in a while. so she snapped off the vacuum cleaner she went into the den he wasn't there she followed his trail across the den across the patio to the swimming pool where she found him our friends at church were very kind she said they told us it was God's will the young minister put her coffee cup down on the table should she touch that or not she decided to touch it your friends 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 is that what you're saying you blame me for this is that what you're saying no no I'm not blaming you I'm I'm just not blaming God either God's heart broke when yours did but it was clear this conversation was over And on the way back to the church, that young minister was kicking herself.

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I should have not touched it. But when she got back, there was a message waiting on her. And when she called, the wife said, I don't know where this is going, but my husband and I want you to come out and talk to us about this. For two years, we have thought God was angry at us, and now we wonder if it was not the other way around.

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Did you do this, God? No. Well, then where did evil come from? Interesting response in this story.

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An enemy has done this. An enemy has done this. Now, I don't know how far your light of Christ shines on this one. Mine

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shines only a little way as far as I can see it in the middle of our experience we are up against evil that is more than just the sum of the evil in you added to the evil in me there is a power to it did God create it no didn't God manufacture it for soul making no no no where did it come from we don't know Augustine thought maybe that the myth of Adam and Eve could help him understand see a little farther I don't know but I just know that it is good news that it is an enemy this is no friend of God this is an enemy at every funeral there are two preachers there is you And there is capital D Death, who is this enemy. Capital D Death never misses a funeral and always preaches the same sermon.

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Goddamn every one of you. I win every time. There's the evidence. I break all loving relationships.

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I destroy all community. And it is our duty and our delight to shake our fist in the face of what is our enemy and the enemy of God oh death where is your victory oh death where is your sting it is an enemy well then second question can we fix it Do you want us to weed out the weeds?

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Can we fix this? Now some commentaries say, There is in Palestine a certain kind of weed that when it grows, it looks exactly like the wheat, and you can't tell the difference. As David Wallace Foster says in some other place, That is so stupid it drools. There may be such a plant in Palestine, but this story gets going because they can tell the difference.

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They look out at the field and they see the mixture that is out there. Did you do it? No. Can we fix it?

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One of my favorite headlines in the Atlanta Journal a number of years ago, right after 9/11, was Bush Vows to Rid World of Evildoers. Now why can't we weed it out? Two reasons. Shine the light of the resurrection on it, and that is not the way God exercises power in the world.

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We now must redefine power as some of our theologians taught us yesterday. We want God to rend the heavens and come down and destroy evil instantaneously. But when you look at it through the light of the resurrection, that is not how God exercises power. A bruised reed, he will not break.

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A dimly burning wick, he will not quench. In the Gospel of Mark, it is sometimes said that there are no resurrection appearances. That's not true. when you get to the end of the Gospel of Mark the angel tells the women go tell his disciples he will meet them in Galilee do not be afraid and the last line of the original manuscript is they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid but then the reader starts thinking go tell his disciples he'll see you in Galilee who are his disciples James John the reader

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He'll see you in Galilee. Where's Galilee? North of Jerusalem. Chapter 1, verse 14.

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Jesus came into Galilee. The time is now, the kingdom at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. In other words, you didn't understand this gospel the first time you read it.

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Go back and read it again now that you've been to the resurrection. And once you've been to the resurrection, every story of Jesus is a post-resurrection experience. And what we experience in the Gospel of Mark, when we see it through post-resurrection eyes, is a Jesus who does not overpower evil even as He is vanquishing it. When He heals, He groans, as if He is straining against rusty nut.

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He could do no good work there because of their unbelief. It's almost as if He's sometimes overmatched. the syrophoenician woman I am persuaded grabs his wrist and helps him muscle over the openness of the gospel to Gentiles you get a sense of this tug of war of of a God who is gentle and weak even as this God is vanquishing evil.

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It is not God's way. The second thing we see about why we can't weed things out when we shine the light of the resurrection on this is not that we can't tell the difference between weeds and wheat, but that Christ is in the middle of this field transforming that which was evil into that which generates good. Here is a thing that happened. In 1952, the summer of 1952, when I was almost six years old, my mother, who was in her 20s, got together with several other young mothers in our church, and they all took their children, me and my Sunday school playmates, to a swimming pool.

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Now, in 1952, going to a swimming pool was a big thing. There were no backyard pools, no neighborhood pool clubs. We went to the pool at the old Naval Air Force Base in Atlanta. I don't remember much about it except a kind of vision of a huge pool with hundreds of children playing.

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It was a great day. About two weeks later, one of the children, Joan, got symptoms that seemed like the flu. And then they moved to her legs, which became weak. And within a month, she was in an iron lung.

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She had polio. 1952 was the height of the polio epidemic. Right at that moment in a lab in Pittsburgh, Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine, but it wasn't available until 1955. Just three more years.

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But there was Joan. Some of you are too young to remember iron lungs. You've never seen a playmate in an iron lung. Thank God that you never have.

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She finally got strong enough in her lungs to get out of the iron lung, but her legs have remained twisted all through her life. She's 62 years old now, and I have walked on my strong legs every day of my 62 years. She has not walked on hers since she was six years old. There's a pair of crutches.

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She drags herself across the land. And if she were to come into this room right now, the level of grace would be elevated greatly. She's the kind of person who lights up a room with joy. She's a college professor and an artist.

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And I have been strong all my life where she has been weak, and yet she has a quality of virtue and joy and faith and hope that I can only aspire to. Now, what do I think about that? Do I think God gave her polio? No! A thousand times, no.

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Did you cause this? No! Do I think God placed it in her life for soul-making? No! A thousand times, no! Do I think her soul has been formed by this? Yes.

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And if I had a magic wand now and could unwind her life and mine and weed out things, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't know where to begin. I wouldn't know what to take away. Do you want us to try to fix it, God? It's not the way of God in the world.

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Last question. Then will it always be this way? No. There is coming a day when righteousness will shine like the sun.

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I promise you. Now, at the end of this parable, especially the interpretation, there is fire. It is the fire of judgment. And most of us progressive pastors shy away from the fire of judgment.

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Leave that to the eyeball-rolling fundamentalists. But the fire in this story is very good news. There is in Dachau, Germany, a museum. It is a museum of the Holocaust.

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The museum is on the grounds of the old concentration camp. In the Museum of the Holocaust, there is a photograph that is so powerful that everybody who sees it, secular or religious, prays. It is a photograph of a mother and her little girl being marched to the gas chamber at Auschwitz. There's not a damn thing that the mother can do to stop this.

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And so she commits the only act of love she has left. She walks behind her daughter, puts her hands over her little girl's eyes, so she will not have to see where she is going and everybody who sees that picture prays something like this oh God do not let that be the last word do not let whatever that Beast is in us and history tell the full story of these people or any of us I am promising you said Jesus that is not the last word standing at the end of time is the just judge who is the risen Christ and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became an inquisitor and before he became Pope was a progressive young theologian in the Catholic Church and he wrote an essay in which he said there is a lot of talk in the New Testament about fire

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The fire is Jesus Christ. The fire burns the stubble and impurities away from human life and refines it in justice and hope. Theologian Miroslav Wolf says, I am a Croatian. Do not tell a Croatian in the middle of that conflict

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that he must turn the other cheek unless you can also say evil will be destroyed because if God is going to do nothing about evil then he must take things into his own hands his wife has been raped his children have been killed do not ask him to turn the other cheek unless there is justice at the end and maturity in the faith maturity in the faith is to be able to say Lord whatever there is in me that participates in the reign of death burn baby burn Make me whole o refining fire of Christ I Trust myself to your powerful and consuming love What is often not known about Charles de Gaulle is that he was not only a famous war hero and a head of state, he and his wife Anne were the parents of a Down syndrome child. The child was Anne, the wife was Yvonne.

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Every day, regardless of what was going on in the affairs of state, De Gaulle would come and he and Yvonne would play with this child. And then they would put her to bed, and Yvonne would say every night, Oh, Charles, why couldn't she have been like the others? I have prayed so often that she could have been like the others. Anne died when she was 11.

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They had a private Catholic graveside mass. When the mass was over, Charles left the grave, but Yvonne could not pull herself away in her grief. And so Charles went back and touched her elbow. Come, Yvonne, did you not hear the gospel?

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She's now like the others. She's now like the others.