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My name is Kristen Saldine. I'm the Assistant Professor of Homiletics here at Austin Seminary, one of three preachers and pastors and professors of homiletics here at Austin. For those of you who have just arrived to this 11 o'clock lecture, if you're an alum, a friend of the seminary, welcome home. And if you are a visitor for the first time, welcome to our home.

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You can look for people who have this name tag, this badge. And if you need to know what to do or where to go, look for this badge on anyone. Ask them. And if they don't know, they will find someone who does.

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We're here to welcome you. And to those of you in the overflow room at McMillan Hall, shout out to you. And we welcome you, and we gather you into our fellowship. The Thomas White Curry Lectures were established in 1952 by the Tom Curry Bible Class of Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas.

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The Tom Curry Bible Class has enjoyed particular longevity and continuity and is still going strong today. The community is known for excellence in teaching, meaningful fellowship, prayer, mission giving, and joyful Sunday morning singing. We offer them our gratitude as we celebrate the 57th year of the Curry Lectures, and we do so by welcoming Thomas G.

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Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. We know Tom. in many, many ways. We know Tom is a great preacher.

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Maybe you've been fortunate enough to hear him preach, or you've read his sermons, or you've seen him on a video or a DVD. We know Tom as a teacher. Some of you, many of you, first dipped your toe into the deep waters, the scary waters of proclamation through Tom's book, The Witness of Preaching, one of the classic introductory texts. But Tom has not only taught hundreds of students about preachers, about preaching, he has also mentored scores of preaching teachers.

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who now serve in seminaries around the world. We know Tom as a biblical scholar. He serves on the editorial council of the New Interpreters Bible. He's written commentaries on Matthew and Hebrews.

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He's a theologian, editor of Theology Today, and he's written extensively on preaching as a theological task. You know him through his many books and articles. publications, big and small, in areas of preaching, worship, testimony, literary criticism, and interpretation. And I know I am particularly grateful, as my students will tell you, about Tom's work on contemporary American funeral practices and the need to reclaim the Christian witness to the resurrection.

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We know Tom is a homiletician, someone who thinks critically about preaching in worship and in the world. He is the past president of the Academy of Homiletics. In 2006, he gave the Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching at Yale Divinity School, one of the most celebrated and prestigious lectures in the world of homiletics. In giving these lectures, Tom joined a distinguished company going all the way back to 1871,

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that includes the likes of Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, PT Forsyth, Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Paul Scheer, Reinhold Niemer, Leslie Newbigen, Gardner Taylor, William Sloan Coffin, Fred Craddock, James Ford, Barbara Brown Taylor, Richard Lisher. And now he joins the distinguished names who have offered the Curry Lecture. Tom cares deeply about the church. At Emory University, Tom is part of a new initiative in its graduate program in religion.

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It's called the Concentration in Religious Practices and Practical Theology. This is a cutting-edge approach in doctoral-level work that incorporates a focus on religious practices in doctoral training. You don't need to be someone studying practical theology, pastoral care, or preaching, or liturgics. Anyone in the field of religion at Emory can work in this area of practical study in the practices.

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And this initiative has placed Emory University at the center of a new, expanding understanding of the integrative nature of theological work in all its expressions and all its practices. So taken together, I'll bet that you know all of this, which is why you're here. So maybe it's my job to tell you a few things you may not know about him. I can think of three.

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His first job in high school, he delivered flowers. That was my first job, too. His major in college, chemistry. And finally, he loves the Atlanta Braves.

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Tom has chosen the topic of innocent suffering for this year's lectures. So we know him as a teacher, a preacher, an author, a scholar, a mentor, a guide, and a friend, but most of all, and best of all, as a witness. Please join me in welcoming Tom Long as our 2009 Curry lecturer. Thank you.

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I hadn't thought about that connection between being a Braves fan and innocent suffering, but it's an interesting... Thanks, Kristen. I am honored and thrilled. To be here about 15 years ago, I think it was, I had the privilege of being a part of the winter lectures, not the Currys, but one of the others.

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Since then, there's a new administration, the faculty has transitioned, a whole new crop of alums has grown up, and fortunately, memories have faded, and you have invited me back. And I'm glad to be here. As a part of our research project recently, I had the chance to revisit what I think is one of Walter Brueggemann's best of his many wonderful books, the one on the land, and in that book on the land, He makes a fascinating distinction between space and place.

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Space, he says, is a perfect postmodern metaphor for, I don't want to be entangled with you. I need my autonomy. I need my freedom. Give me my space.

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Place, however, is different. Place, he said, is a space where important things have happened. where promises have been made, where vows have been uttered, where demands have been issued, where forgiveness has been offered, where memories have been formed. I am really glad to be in this place, this building, this campus, where the Curry name, for example, how much they have meant to this school,

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to the Presbyterian Church, to the Church of Jesus Christ, it takes a place to remember that and celebrate it. And I am glad to be in this place. Thank you. There never was a finer morning seen than the first of November.

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The sun shone out in its full luster, the whole face of the sky. was perfectly serene and clear, and not the least signal of warning of that approaching event which has made this once flourishing, opulent, and populous city a scene of utmost horror and desolation. So begins the journal of a traveling merchant who had the misfortune of being in Lisbon, Portugal on the 1st of November, 1755, 40 in the morning, all hell broke loose, and the world seemed to be moving toward an apocalyptic ending. November the 1st was All Saints Day, and almost the entire population of Lisbon was in church that morning.

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In the middle of the 18th century, Lisbon, Portugal was one of Europe's most pious and religious cities. It was the center of sort of arch-conservative Roman Catholicism. Lisbon had about 250,000 residents and fully 25,000 of them, one out of 10, was either a priest or a monk or a nun. Historian Charles Boxer has said during that era in Portugal, including Lisbon, there were more priests per capita than in any other country in the world, with the possible exception of Tibet.

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But Lisbon's piety, and this is important, was in many ways a kind of holdover of medieval piety. Woven into the fabric of its devotion was a dark dread of the day of wrath, a sense of personal and social sinfulness, always impending on the judgment of God. And fueling this was the fact that for 200 years, Lisbon had been the headquarters of the Office of the Holy Inquisition. the dark and foreboding face of the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to rooting out heresy.

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Thousands had been burned at the stake, imprisoned, banished, or sentenced to galley slavery. It was not uncommon in those days to see in the streets of Lisbon a pilgrim band of penitents. who would be moving toward the street shouting, Penitencia! Penitencia! while they flogged themselves with whips and chains and wore crowns of thorns. By the way, the Methodist evangelist George Whitfield once spent a week in Lisbon and looked out of his hotel window and saw one of these penitential bands moving through the streets with blood streaming down their faces.

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He was appalled at this lugubrious site and wrote in his own journal, Oh happy England, oh happy Methodists. Lisbon wanted to be devout, but it also wanted to be pure, but it was never enough. Lisbon's God was a jealous God, and the prophecy of doom was ever in the air. As Nicholas Shrady has observed, For as long as anyone could remember, soothsayers and diviners, pamphleteers and prognosticators, clerics and ascetics had been preaching doom for the Portuguese capital.

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The signs and portents, they insisted, were varied if unmistakable, a rash of stillborn infants, a comet streaking across the heavens, the feverish dream of a cloistered nun, but they all pointed. to Lisbon's destruction at the hands of a wrathful God. What the prophets of doom could not agree on was how Lisbon was going to be destroyed. Some said by an earthquake.

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Some said, oh no, by fire. Some said, oh no, by wind. And others said, oh no, by flood. As it turns out, they were all much too modest.

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Lisbon's Day of Hell involved all four forces. About 9.30 in the morning on All Saints' Day, seismic plates shifted about 60 miles out in the north Atlantic at 9.30 in the morning, and a tremendous earthquake began moving toward the city. The churches of the city were packed at that point. It was All Saints Day, a holy day.

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And people were shoulder to shoulder in the churches, especially the Church of St. Vincent, which was the largest church in town, and the church of the patron saint of Lisbon. Every space was filled. People were in the apses and spilling down the stairs and into the piazza.

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It was about 940 when the earthquake hit the city just, they say, as the priest had intoned, Gaudiamus somne sin domino deum festum, let us all rejoice in the Lord on this festival day. No sooner had those words been uttered than the building began to shake violently. The twin bell towers swayed in the winds like reeds, their bells clanging while the candle stands fell to the floor.

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The stained glass exploded with shards and fragments of glass all over the terrified congregation. Priests fled in panic from the altar. Some people knelt in place and cried out, mercy, mercy, mercy. But most of them pushed and shoved their way out of the church and into the plaza to be greeted by thousands of others coming from other churches and buildings.

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And they got out there just in time for the second shock. Scientists say it was about a seven on the Richter scale, strong enough to topple every building almost in Lisbon on top of the crowds in the plaza, killing thousands, instantly leaving others bleeding and wounded. The dust that was stirred up turned the sky black. A strange wind began to howl through the city.

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You could hear all over the city cries of, Mercy! Dear God, mercy! But there was no mercy. Fires, many of them started by the fallen candles in the church, began to be fueled by the winds that blew through the city. And the city was not only rubble, but it was on fire. A third shock moved through the city, but by now there was very little to destroy.

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The city was ablaze. And with no recourse, the day's survivors moved to the only place they sensed intuitively was a place of safety down by the River Tagus, down at the harbor, and thousands gathered at the wharf. But like the beast rising out of the sea in the Book of Revelation, this evil thing was not done with the people of Lisbon, and it pursued them with a seemingly malevolent intelligence. As they stood there on the wharf,

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The reports say that suddenly all of the water was sucked out of the harbor mysteriously, exposing the bottom of the harbor, sweeping ships out to sea. As the crowd looked stunned at this last omen, they suddenly looked up and realized where the water had gone. a tsunami summoned up by the earthquake was moving in their direction and before they could even think or move it swept over them and obliterated thousands. Nobody knows for certain how many people died in Lisbon.

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Some say 15,000, some say 50,000, some say as many as 60,000. We just know that bodies floated in the harbor for weeks. Now, the seismic shock waves that destroyed Lisbon were soon followed by metaphorical shock waves that shook the intellectual foundations of Europe and the West and continue to shake us until this day. Philosopher Susan Nyman says, the 18th century used the word Lisbon like we use the word Auschwitz.

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It takes no more than the name of the place to mean the collapse of the most basic trust in the world. Now look, disasters had happened in Europe before. It had been through centuries of black death. There had been earthquakes before.

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Lisbon had had earthquakes before. But this earthquake in 1755 was different. And most of what made it different was that it happened right at the point that the medieval intellectual synthesis had begun to come apart, and a new set of assumptions about knowledge and reason and nature had begun to emerge, a time we call the Enlightenment.

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Now, there's a lot to say about that, but the most important thing to say about the Enlightenment in this regard is that the Enlightenment marked the disenchantment of the world. The enchanted world is a world where God or gods are woven into the fabric of everyday life.

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The enchanted world is a world where God can walk in the garden in the cool of the day. The disenchanted world is a world that is operated according to self-enclosed laws of nature. Now because we are people of faith, we have learned how to speak both languages. We speak enchanted and we speak disenchanted.

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For example, if it should rain this afternoon in my drought-stricken state of Georgia, what we will say is, Oh, Lord, we needed that rain. God has blessed us with rain. That's enchanted. But we will also turn on the Weather Channel, and we will know

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that what has caused the rain is that air with a certain level of humidity has met a certain temperature. And every time that happens, you get rain, and you won't get rain until it happens again. That's disenchantment. And with the Enlightenment, we begin to speak of the world as disenchanted, as God on the one hand and the world on the other, which raises the possibility of theistic understandings of things, or maybe the world without God.

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atheistic understandings of things. Now, at first, it seemed like Lisbon would change nothing, and people marched on with the same enchanted ways to describe things, especially the church. After all, Jesus himself had warned, there'll be wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes. And so people had their explanation in the enchanted way of what had happened that day in Lisbon.

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God had the whole world in his hands, and if Lisbon shook, then it was the hand of God that had shaken it. Roman Catholic priests preaching in Lisbon as it began to rebuild said that the earthquake was sent by the hand of God as a warning to repentance and in one swoop it had sent thousands of sinners to hell. Protestant preachers throughout Europe agreed it was the hand of God but it was the hand of God against Roman Catholicism. After all, the earthquake had not destroyed Geneva or Frankfurt.

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It had gotten Catholic Lisbon for its Romanist superstitions and popery. The news arrived in the New World on a ship in Boston and was carried into the Massachusetts colony, and a Puritan preacher preached a series of sermons on the Lisbon earthquake, warning that the same thing could happen to Massachusetts if they did not stop sinning. The Methodist hymn writer Charles Wesley wrote a hymn about Lisbon based on Revelation 16, that image of the seventh angel pouring out a bowl of wrath on the earth. Here's the first stanza.

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Woe to the men on earth who dwell nor dread the Almighty frown, when God doth all his wrath reveal and shower his judgments down. Sinners, expect those heaviest showers to meet your God prepare when, lo, the seventh angel pours his vial in the air. Now, some Christian philosophers supported this enchanted way of talking about things. For example, 40 years before the Lisbon earthquake, a brilliant logician, mathematician, and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had published a book called Theodicy.

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It was a word he made-up, meaning the justification of the goodness of God. And what Leibniz claimed was He knew there were things like earthquakes and plagues in the world. But look, this is the best of all possible worlds.

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Before the world was created, God, in God's imagination, imagined all of the possibilities for the world, an infinite number of possibilities, and then actualized the very best one for God's moral purposes, and it is this one. And it cannot have any changes. If Leibniz had worn those gray socks on July the 3rd, 1710, instead of the black socks, it wouldn't have been the same world. Now, look, you and I may think we could make some improvements.

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It would be a better world without Hitler. It would have been a better world without Alzheimer's. And Leibniz would have said, God knows better than you do. And this supposedly better world that you would have created is not in fact the world that would maximize the possibility for perfection and goodness.

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What are apparently evils to us are necessary for God. But Lisbon was a watershed. After Lisbon, such arguments for the moral character of a God who could allow, much less cause, a disaster like that began to lose traction, first with philosophers, then with theologians. Lisbon was one of those historical occasions, by virtue of its very size and complexity and emotional impact, was simply too much.

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for the prevailing systems of moral thought to be able to bear. It overwhelmed ethics. It overwhelmed theology. The people of Lisbon were

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at prayer. They were praising God when the merciful disaster befell them. It spared no one, rich or poor, pious or lapsed, good or bad. If an intelligence of any kind caused that terrible day, it was an intelligence whose bloodthirsty violence was random and promiscuous.

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At first, it was the iconoclastic philosophers of the Enlightenment who pushed these questions. Voltaire, for example, wrote Candide, partially about the Lisbon earthquake. And the main character, Candide, goes through the earthquake and is standing there, bloodied and dazed, and then says, as a poke against Leibniz, if this is the best of all possible worlds, I don't want to see the rest of them. as Theodore Adorno wrote the earthquake of Lisbon cured Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz well theology in toto eventually got cured of the theodicy of Leibniz 200 years before the earthquake the Heidelberg catechism composed in an enchanted time said this question 27 what do you understand by the Providence of God answer

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The almighty and ever-present power of God, whereby He still upholds, as if it were by His own hand, heaven and earth together with all creatures, and rules in such a way that leaves and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and unfruitful years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, everything else, come to us not by chance, but by His fatherly hand. But what happens to that theological worldview that all things come from his fatherly hand when Lisbon happens. No reasonable, thoughtful person could find that finally to be redemptive.

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In her book on evil in modern thought, Susan Nyman claims that Lisbon marks the birth of modernity. When the world began to grow up at last and to move away from theology and metaphysics towards science and human responsibility, And she finds that those thinkers in the 18th century who tried to scramble back and repair the older enchanted worldview were simply intellectually immature. She said, If one believes the world is ruled by a good and powerful father figure, it's natural to expect his order to be comprehensible and just.

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But you jettison that belief, she says, and whatever expectations remain are unresolved residues of childish fantasies. This intellectual shockwave was generated by Lisbon, and when noticed at all, are seen as birth pangs of a sadder but wiser era that has learned to live on its own. Here's why I'm bringing all this up. I believe many people in the pews of our churches today, people who have perhaps never even heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,

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are nevertheless shaped powerfully by the convulsion in thought that started that day I believe that what's what was originally the outrageous thought of some radical philosophers in the 18th century became the daring skepticism of the educated elite in the 19th century and now has become the common dilemma of Pew sitters in the 20th and 21st centuries including people in our churches, namely that faith is made more difficult, if not impossible, by what has come to be known as the theodicy problem. Now what happened in Europe and Lisbon, some have argued happened in this country in the Civil War. In her brilliant new book,

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the Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust, claims that the typical religious views of 19th century Americans about death and life, souls and bodies and heaven and eternal life, were simply not prepared for what they saw on the battlefields of the Civil War. 600,000 often dismembered bodies of young men lying in the fields of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Georgia and Mississippi. When you have an idealized and somewhat sentimental view, personalized view of death, and suddenly 600,000 dead in five years.

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At the end of the Civil War, the presbytery of South Carolina admitted the faith of many a Christian is shaken by the mysterious and unlooked-for course of divine providence one southern woman wrote in her diary she felt like a ship without a pilot or a compass there was no longer any God at the helm Joppin Faust says Civil War carnage transformed the mid-19th century's growing sense of religious doubt into a crisis of belief That propelled many Americans to redefine or reject their faith. It took two weeks for the...

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of Lisbon to reach most of Europe. Now, of course, there is a Lisbon every week on CNN. We see house fires that kill children in their sleep and tsunamis that take 200,000 lives. And the questions provoked by Lisbon three centuries ago are asked by almost every believer.

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Years ago, When I was a seminary student, I was serving as a field education part-time pastor, and my supervising pastor asked me one Sunday to lead the whole service from beginning to end. Nervously, I did, as a beginner ought to do. And when the service was over, we made it through it, I was standing at the door, greeting the congregation, and a woman came through and took my hand.

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Now, I knew this woman. to be in a stressful and unhappy marriage. She was bedeviled herself by mental and emotional problems. She was the mother of at least two physically and emotionally disabled children.

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Hers was a difficult life. She took my hand, she looked me in the eye, and she said, That was a great first hymn this morning. A bit wounded that she had said something about the first hymn rather than my sermon. I was also disconcerted because I couldn't remember what the first hymn was.

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But she was looking me in the eye with such intensity, she clearly wanted a response and so I made one. Yes, it's certainly one of my favorites, I lied. Suddenly her expression changed to anger and she threw my hand down. She said, I thought it was outrageous.

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and she walked off into the morning. As soon as I could, I made a beeline for a bulletin and found out that the first hymn that morning was, God will take care of you. Now, I think a good way to glimpse how Lisbon's legacy has taken shape in our people, in American Christianity, is to look at Bart Ehrman's new book, God's Problem-- how the Bible fails to answer our most important question, why we suffer.

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As you may know, this book is in part about how Ehrman himself, once a devout Christian, lost his faith because of theodicy. Now, I bring this book up not because I think it's theologically profound. I don't. I think it's actually fairly sophomoric.

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But I think it does express the theodicy problem in the sort of street-savvy, common-sense way that many of our people in congregations would express it today. Ehrman was born a Congregationalist, raised an Episcopalian, but in his high school days, he had a born-again experience, and he was converted to a brainy, logical, highly rationalistic form of fundamentalism. He went to Moody Bible Institute for college to nail down the loose tent pegs in this fundamentalist system. And then he went to Wheaton College for more reinforcement.

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But as he got more education, the ropes began to come loose. First, he found out that the texts of the Bible, which he had believed were God-breathed and infallible, were actually composed and edited by human beings. Out went the fundamentalist Bible. That caused him to change his views, but it didn't cause him to lose his faith.

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It was Lisbon. The crisis of suffering in the world. He writes, I realized I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved in the world, given the state of things.

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Many people who inhabit this planet have lives that are cesspools of misery and suffering, and I came to a point I simply could not believe as a good and kindly disposed ruler who's in charge of it. One of the things that's most helpful about Ehrman is that he poses this problem in precisely the way that people today pose it, as a series of theological assertions that they've been taught are true, but cannot logically be true all at the same time. There is a God, God is all-powerful, God is loving and good, and there's innocent suffering. I call this the impossible chess match, no moves are available.

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Logically, one of these assertions needs to be given up, but which one are you willing to give up? The existence of God, the goodness of God, the power of God, or the honest admission that there's innocent suffering? Ehrman has made his choice. He's willing to give up his God.

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But what is also valuable about Ehrman? is how touchingly, in all this, he exposes his need for pastoral care. He comes across like a tough-minded, brave, intellectual atheist, too smart, too honest, too committed to unvarnished truth, to be swayed by the naivetes of Christianity. But he's actually closer to the British novelist Julian Barnes, who begins his memoirs with this sentence, I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

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Erman misses. is God. At one point he says that part of the pain of being an unbeliever is there's nobody to thank. I've got a wonderful life, he said, and no one to thank.

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But even deeper than the wistfulness about thanksgiving, Ehrman is enraged at God for not being God. At one point in his book he's discussing the view advanced by a number of Christian theologians that the key to understanding the problem of suffering is found in the cross. Ehrman rejects this view. It's too soft.

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It sacrifices the sovereignty of God. It doesn't let God be God, which is a very hot objection for an atheist to make, don't you think? Also in the book, he said he went to a Christmas Eve service one time at the bidding of his wife, who is a believer. He didn't want to go, but he went with her.

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He was upset by the service, though, especially the congregational prayer, which involved a layperson standing up in the midst of the congregation and praying, You came into the darkness, O God, and made a difference. Come into the darkness again. This prayer, Erman says, brought him to tears, but not tears of joy, tears of frustration. Why doesn't God enter into the darkness again, he wonders.

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Where is the presence of God in pain and mystery? In other words, I don't believe in God, but oh, would you rend the heavens and come down, oh God. Erman is a more radicalized version of the people in our pews. The gospel of a good and loving God in control of the events of the world does not quite ring true to them But they keep going into the morgue Where the lifeless body of the late lamented God lies in state and they shout Are you still dead God?

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Please don't be dead God. I don't believe in you, but I do miss you Now pastors today have been well taught that we cannot explain suffering and evil. And we've been well taught that attempting to do so can do more harm than good.

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And so we're in a hospital room with a family who's just lost a child. We know that what we're supposed to do is to grieve with them, to stand with them, but to keep our mouths shut about what this all may mean. To offer any reason for what has happened is to trivialize it and trying to explain it away. And so we have what we call a ministry of presence.

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except for words of consolation and solidarity, no words at all, just compassionate presence. And I don't wish to challenge that as an approach to pastoral care in the time of grief, but I do wish to challenge the ministry of presence as an approach to the whole of our ministry regarding this question of evil and suffering, especially in our preaching ministry. Times of deep grief may not be teachable moments, agreed, but there are teachable moments. And for many Christians, the question of suffering, theirs and others, is not just a pastoral care matter.

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It's an intellectually troubling issue, one that they think about a great deal, but they do not have any resources to think through. They want to love God with their minds as well as their hearts, but they can't see their way clear. I'm not suggesting we've got a magic bullet, an answer somewhere to the problem of evil that will make this all plain. But we do have a long history of thinking it through theologically.

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Done faithfully, it's a form of prayer, and I think preachers owe congregations the benefits of this intellectual questing, this form of prayer which is faith, seeking, understanding. I had lunch about a year ago with a dear friend, an Episcopal priest, who among other topics of conversation, said to me, Tom, I don't understand Presbyterians. You guys are so cussedly into theology. You're always trying to get your doctrine right.

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You're always fighting and splitting over theology. We Episcopalians get all around that by relating to God through the Eucharist, through the liturgy. I recently got an e-mail from that same friend saying, Last year I told you I don't understand Presbyterians, but now I get it. The problem in my tradition is we're stuck praying this Victorian liturgy in ancient language that needs so much help before some of us can even say it.

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We recite traditional atonement theory every Sunday. We say the old creed. We say old prayers. But you Presbyterians, you come up with fresh stuff that describes the world people really live in, using the language that people really use.

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Well, I think my friend may be flattering Presbyterians and understating the power of the Episcopal tradition. But she is pointing to the first reason why I think we ought to preach on this issue, and that is to reconnect people to the language of the liturgy. If we're going to ask people to sing, praise to the Lord who o'er all things so wondrously reigneth, Shelters thee under his wings yea so gently sustaineth hast thou not seen how thy desires error have been granted in what he ordaineth You can't sing that anymore after Lisbon unless you know how to think about it The jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein in his powerful book after Auschwitz describes how catastrophic suffering in the holocaust among other things split jews from their own liturgy

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He said after Auschwitz, the God of nature, sorry, for those of us who lived through those terrible years, whether in safety or as victims, the Shoah conditions the way we encounter all things sacred and profane. We go into the synagogue on sacred seasons, yet once inside we're struck dumb by words we can no longer honestly utter. All we can offer is silence before the divine Rubenstein also points to the second reason why I want us to talk from the pulpit about this issue The inability to make sense of the actions of God and the will of God in a world of suffering Puts pressure on people of faith sometimes subtle sometimes not so subtle to abandon the biblical claim that God is a God of history

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in Favor of a God more mystical more spiritually unsullied By history if people in our day are saying I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious Maybe it's not just because they're individualistic narcissists But maybe they haven't been getting any good preaching and they don't have a meaningful way to speak and think about a God who acts in history But the main reason why I want us to preach on this issue is because the pastoral needs of our congregation cry out for more than we've been giving people. The theologian Lewis Smeads describes how he and his wife Doris, early in their marriage, were trying in vain to conceive a child. We spent a decade, he says, making love according to a schedule set by four different fertility clinics.

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in three different countries. And then finally, after one summer night's lark on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan with no thought but love, Doris became a medically certified pregnant woman. Six months along, doing fine, we thought. With God answering our prayers, it could be no other way but fine.

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Then suddenly one night she began losing amniotic fluid. I called her doctor. She's going into labor, he said. Get her to the hospital as fast as you can.

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And he added, I'm sorry, your baby's going to be badly malformed. How badly? Very. We fumbled, silent and bewildered into the car.

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I told her, we cried. We promised God and each other that we would love this child no matter how damaged she or he was. After Doris had been tucked in, I went to the waiting room to worry for a few hours. Suddenly, Doris's doctor broke in and exalted.

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Congratulations, Lou. You're the father of a perfect man child. I told Doris the news she was skeptical, but I went home and I danced like a delirious David before the Lord. The next day, just before noon, our pediatrician called.

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I better come right to the hospital. When I met him, he said that our miracle child was dead. Two mornings later, with a couple of friends at my side and our minister reading the ceremony, we buried the child in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. Doris never got to see the baby.

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A pious neighbor comforted me by reminding me that God was in control. I wanted to say to her, not this time. I had been intellectually excited by Calvin's tough-minded belief that all things, and he really meant all of them, including the ghastly and the horrible, happened when and how and where they happened, precisely as God decreed. On the day that our baby boy died, I knew I could never again believe that God had arranged for a tiny child to die before he had hardly begun to live, any more than I could believe that one day, one fine day, when God would make it all plain, we would praise God that it had happened.

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I don't want God to make it all plain. If God could show us there was a good and necessary reason for such a thing to have happened, it might not have been a bad thing after all and I cannot accommodate that thought I learned that I do not have the right stuff for such hardboiled theology I am no more able to believe that God micromanages the death of little children than I than I am able to believe that God was macromanaging Hitler's Holocaust with one morning's wrenching intuition I knew my portrait of God was going to have to be repainted how many of our people are repainting their portraits of God without the help of Christian theologians and thinkers who have walked this path before them.

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Now, I know there are some theologians who say we should not venture out onto this turf at all, that the whole question has been tainted by cramped philosophical categories, and theologians should politely excuse themselves from the conversation. I don't agree. This is the way they're asking the question. This is where we have to start in responding to the question.

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I'm with Christian philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams, who said, When people go through trauma, they have questions and they need help. Did God allow this? Why? Can God redeem this?

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Is there a way to go on? She says she discovered this most profoundly when she was a pastor of a church in California, right at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic rising. She said suddenly, spiritually desperate gays and lesbians, people who would have described themselves as church damaged by their experiences of rejection, nevertheless started coming back to church. Now in their 30s and 40s, they were facing death in themselves and their partners, and they came back to church with questions.

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What did the God they remembered from their childhood have to do with this epidemic? What did it have to do with their being gay or lesbian? Adam says, Sunday mornings, I looked out at the congregation. Their faces were gray-green from doses of AZT, and I could feel their question.

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It's now or never. We'll be dead in six weeks. For God's sake, think of a way to show us, despite this present ruin, that God loves us. Isn't there?

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Surely there must be a good word for us today from the Lord. That's the situation for all of us. We are looking into the faces of people who are dying every day. What does this mean?

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Is there a good word from the Lord? My first year in the parish, one beautiful spring day, as far as I can figure, right at the point that my congregation was singing Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of All Nature, a disaster happened in another church. It was a Baptist church in Ohio, and the boiler exploded during Sunday school. wiping out a Sunday school class and their teacher.

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The news was filled with that for the week. And the next Sunday, I was gathered with a group of my members at the church. We were talking about it. And I said, Oh my God, how do you explain that?

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I am so glad I am not the pastor of that church. One of my members looked at me and said, You are the pastor of that church. And so this afternoon, we'll begin to explore what the Christian tradition can help us say, what the gospel can help us say to help people find meaning in a world of suffering.