Hilton Head Island, SC – January 3, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 3:1-8; Ecclesiastes 3:16-22; Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men. – Lamentations 3:31-32 (RSV)
Does God Give Us Grief?
The prophet Jeremiah had a grim life. He lived in Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. That was when the kingdom of Judah was rapidly disintegrating. It was conquered by the Babylonians in 587 BCE, and Jeremiah was there to witness the collapse.
Jeremiah often delivered what came to be called “jeremiads.” A jeremiad is an unrelenting criticism of someone or something. Jeremiah’s jeremiads were directed mainly against the last of the kings of Judah, none of whom lasted very long on the throne. The Jewish monarchs were not thrilled to hear themselves denunciated by their constant critic. The kings and the temple priests got so steamed at Jeremiah that they had him beaten and locked up in stocks. They hung a heavy ox yoke around his neck, and later imprisoned him, where he languished for a long time.
With that as background, it is little wonder that Jeremiah fired off blistering jeremiads against his enemies and adversaries. He certainly had legions of them. We can read about this in the prophecy which bears Jeremiah’s name. The prophecy is followed by another book Jeremiah also wrote, called Lamentations. In it the prophet further elucidated the sorrows he and his fellow citizens felt in the defeat they experienced at the hands of their foreign enemies.
Reciting verse after verse and chapter after chapter of the woes which befell him and the other subjects of Judah, Jeremiah made an interesting observation. Referring to all the calamities which had inundated them, Jeremiah said, “For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men” (my italics).
So which is it: Does God cause us grief, or does God not willingly afflict or grieve us? Are our troubles in life the result of our own doing or the doings of others, or are they clearly punishments or adversities which God thrusts upon us, and only God can explain them?
Psalm 3 is identified at is beginning as “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.” The first verse opens, “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of me, there is no help for him in God.”
To his credit, David did not say that God was responsible for the revolt against him by his son Absalom and by those who supported Absalom. But David did feel beleaguered by enemies. However, he also trusted that God would support him through the crisis, however long it might last and whatever might be its ultimate outcome.
Not so with Jeremiah. He seemed to be convinced those who opposed him and treated him so badly did so at the direction of God Himself. “Though he cause grief” clearly implies that God creates adversity and hardship in our lives. And the question is this: Does He? Does He really?
Tradition declares that it was Solomon, son of David, who wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes. The opening verse says, “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” In Hebrew, the word for “Preacher” is Koheleth, and in the Hebrew Bible the book is not called “Ecclesiastes,” as it is in English, but rather Koheleth.” Whoever Koheleth was, and whenever he wrote his darkly “tell-it-like-it-is” book, he almost certainly was not Solomon.
In one of his darker moments, of which he had multitudes, Koheleth said, “I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts” (3:18). Is that a cheerful thought, or what? The dog catches and eats the rabbit, the wolf catches and eats the dog, the bear catches and eats the wolf, and the man either does or does not catch and eat the rabbit or the bear, but presumably, we would hope, never the dog nor the wolf. But, because God causes grief (according to Jeremiah, who was not quite as pessimistic as Koheleth), all will be eaters, and some will be eaten. Or so we may infer from what the Preacher says.
Because of an exceedingly mild winter, and the collision of masses of cool air encountering masses of warm, moist air, there were many tornados during the week surrounding Christmas in the Midwest, Texas, and the land along the Gulf Coast. Many people were killed, many more scores were injured, and hundreds if not thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. On top of that, there is major flooding going on throughout the Midwest and South. Did God cause all that grief? Is it God Himself who directly determines the weather? Is some grief God-created and others otherwise-created? And in any case, after the tornados the weather turned cold, and it snowed. Thus the victims had to deal with no heat in their devastated homes, plus the snow, plus the cold. When it pains, it pours.
A high school and college friend regularly sends me articles from The New York Times. Her last dispatch was a story from the Sunday magazine about flocks of birds, with a comparison to the flocks of refugees moving out of the Middle East toward Turkey and beyond into Europe. The writer, Helen Macdonald, was with a group of birdwatchers in northeastern Hungary who witnessed a flock of a hundred thousand Eurasian cranes that came from Russia and northern Europe, to spend a few weeks in the Hungarian cornfields after they had been harvested. She told of similar migrations in Nebraska, where half a million sandhill cranes gather before continuing north on their migration. I have seen sandhills by the thousands in Wisconsin as they headed south. Snow geese come in white waves into Quebec, thousands of starlings swarm through Britain at certain times of the year. Some species of birds migrate together in enormous numbers.
The story had photographs of the huge bursts of birds. They look like splashes of paint thrown in an ethereal pattern against the sky, hundreds of thousands of them in very close formation, moving in billowing waves against the evening or morning sky. The Danes call these formations sort sol: black sun. The writer noted that the shape of an immense flock can change almost instantly. Their reaction time can be a tenth of a second, as suddenly the mammoth movement alters itself into yet another phantasmagoric apparition in the air. Every bird strives to be in the middle of the formation, not at its edge, because at the outer edge predators might swoop in suddenly to pluck them out of the dark, undulant mass. Is it God who moves the predators to attack, or is it their nature to do it on their own?
As she began with the refugees, Helen Macdonald ended with them. “Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or moving geese, to view it as a singular entity.”
Is it God who creates the compulsion in the birds to flock together in such enormous numbers? Is it God who created the conditions in Syria and Nigeria and other places which impel millions of people to leave their homes and everything familiar to them in order to find safety and security somewhere up there or out there or over there?
Lois and I have a close friend whose husband died a few months ago. Because of that, she will be selling the home they bought only a year or so ago and will move elsewhere. While all this was happening, she was diagnosed with cancer. Because of her decision to move, she was packing up some of her many books, and in so doing fractured a bone in her back. Her son, who has been living on the other side of the country for a few years will be moving back east to live either with her or close to her, and that will be a major test for both of them. Was God involved in her husband’s death or her cancer or her anticipated move or her fractured back or he son’s return?
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” So said Claudius, king of Denmark, in Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet. Claudius should know; he caused far more than his share of sorrows for everyone around him, especially for his stepson, Hamlet.
When sorrows do descend upon us, often it is hard to determine their origin. Was it we ourselves who brought grief upon ourselves, was it others who caused it, was it chance or misfortune, or was it God?
Jeremiah couldn’t decide. In one long statement, he waffled, as we might too well waffle. “For the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men.” How do we respond to grief when it comes? It may depend on how well or badly we were doing going into the grief, or how quickly or slowly we come out of it. If grief comes, it cannot be talked or thought into oblivion; it must be dealt with in some way or another. Our frame of mind might lead us to decide whether or not God is the cause of our troubles. But it is very hard to imagine that God ever causes anyone to experience any kind of affliction or sorrow.
We were down in Mexico a couple of weeks ago. At the resort where we were staying, there were scads of bicycles which could be checked out and ridden. We had done that every day we were there. This particular day I chose a bike whose seat was as low as it could go. Releasing the lever which determined the seat height, I raised it up almost as high as it could go, and then I tightened the lever as best I could. Then we went off for a ride along the many bike paths and sidewalks running throughout the beautiful and expansive property.
Coming around a corner, my bicycle seat suddenly collapsed down into the cylinder in which it was supposed to be tightly fastened. All I could get out of my mouth were the words, “The seat….” With that my hands involuntarily gripped the brakes hard for something to hang on to, and with that, I stopped instantly and went head over heels over the handlebars. It happened so quickly I didn’t even realize what, exactly, was happening. As I pitched toward the pavement, I remember thinking to myself, “I’m going to fall on my head, and my hands aren’t even out to break my fall,” and then I fell with my forehead hitting flat against the pavement, and indeed there were no hands out to break the fall. It was like a watermelon hitting concrete.
If the truth is told, I could have been killed right there and then. Or I could have gotten a severe concussion, or at least been knocked unconscious. None of that happened. I lay on my back, looking up into the azure Caribbean sky. And then there was Lois, anxiously asking if I was all right. I think I have never been “all right,” but I seemed to be okay, given the fact that this happened at all. I felt my forehead, and there was blood, and blood was on my nose and knees and one shin. Within seconds, it seemed, there were several employees of the resort tending to me, plus four young Italian men with really fancy bikes who came along right after my cycling gymnastics. They also wanted to know if they could help. The main man of the resort employees had a nametag which read “Jesus.” That struck me as hilarious.
When he was about twelve or thirteen, my son was hit by a car when he was riding his bike in Sea Pines. The collision flipped him over the hood of the car, and he landed head first against the windshield. It left a large hole a in the windshield (he has a large oval-shaped head, like his father), but there wasn’t even a scratch on Andrew. He was rushed to the hospital. A thorough examination indicated that despite the impact of his head putting a hole in the driver’s windshield, Andrew was none the worse for wear. From that episode and my own recent escapade, I concluded that Miller boys must have very hard heads. You, on the other hand, may have concluded that about this particular Miller boy long before this.
Both of those bike accidents were the fault of the bikers. Both the bikers came out of their severe head-knocks presumably as fit as they were beforehand. In pondering that, I am certain God had nothing whatsoever to do with the grief caused by the accidents. It was the two bicyclists who were the problem, not the creator of the bicyclists. If I had tightened that lever more firmly, the seat never would have collapsed. But what can I say: I have always been mechanically inept. And both son and father were extremely fortunate to have come through their mishaps permanently unscathed. For that fact there is no explanation; there is only praise to God, from whom all blessings flow.
Bad things happen to all of us. It is inevitable. Sometimes they are the result of our own mistakes or folly, sometimes others cause them, and sometimes life itself, quite apart from any causation, explains why we may be forced to grieve. But it is my firm conviction that God never gives us grief, not ever.
Therefore God does not punish us to give us grief, either. God does not punish us at all, ever. Punishment may come our way, and we may bring it on ourselves, others may punish us, or simply because we live we may feel we are being punished without ever knowing why. But God does not penalize us for anything, even if we might clearly deserve the penalty.
The Bible is filled with countless examples of bad things happening. Whoever was writing about these things often attributed the grief to the punishment of God. It is a natural assumption, and in fact it may mitigate the grief, but in my judgment, it is wrong. God created us to be free, and therefore we are free to reap good or evil from what we or others or life itself may do to us.
I think Jeremiah was one of the greatest of the prophets. Nobody spoke truth to power more powerfully than he. But when he said that God gives us grief, he was wrong, at least so I believe. However, in that very same statement he backpedaled a bit, correctly deciding that God does not willingly afflict or grieve any of us. To your final conclusion on this matter I agree, Jeremiah; I agree.
Besides, in the end everything always works out for the best, because in the end, God --- and only God --- is there in the end. Therefore it can’t end up any better than that. Hallelu-Jah; Praise God!