GRATITUDE IN ADVERSITY John M. Buchanan
Habakkuk 3:16-19 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
November 22, 1981 Columbus, Ohio

The closing episode in the television movie, Titanic, left me wishing I could
argue with it a bit, It is the morning after the disaster; many of the life boats
have been picited up at sea. Ona rescue ship a group of survivors is sitting on
deck, wrapped in blankets, stunned, eyes glazed with shock, incomprehension. Most.
are women - most are now widows, their husbands having gone down with the Titanic.
Also on deck is a well-meaning woman from New York who has come on the rescue missjon
for the noblest of motives. She cares deeply and wants to help. But the way she ©
goes about dispensing coffee and dougnnuts and encouragement reveals that she has yo
comprehension either of the enormity of the tragedy. Mostly, the survivors, huddled
in their blankets, ignore her. Finally, she says something like..."Come now,ladies,
You must accept it. It was the Good Lord's will." And the woman to whom she is exr
tending hot coffee and platitudes, still staring vacantly, says simply..."No coffee
and doughnuts. And no Good Lord either. God died when the Titanic went down."

It is, of course, the oldest and perhaps the most fundamental issue. The well-r
meaning woman expressed what seems, over the years, to be the majority opinion. God,
the Creator, is in control. Whatever happens, He causes to happen. The only respons
sible thing to do is accept what comes with courage. Her devastated adversary, on.
the other hand, gives voice to the minority opinion. If God visits this on people
He is supposed to love, what kind of God is He, what kind of love are we discussing?
Skepticism about religion cones from the intuitive knowledge that a God responsible
for evil isn't much of a God, And deep, personal pain results when individuals per~
sist in torturing themselves with the proposition that God is responsible for the
particular suffering they are experiencing.

It is the oldest and most fundamental issue. The Bible does not treat it
Lightly or superficially. In fact, the Bible is very human on this one, very honest
and very strong. The text for today is from the book of the Prophet Habakkuk. You
can spend a lifetime in church and never hear a sermon from Habakkuk. And that's
unfortunate because it is a remarkably candid piece of literature. Written by an
Israelite prophet at the time when the power of ancient Babylon was at its height,
the book expresses the fear and despair God's people were experiencing as they sur-
veyed their future prospects. Things didn't look good at all,

The prophet presents the ancient dilemma, "Why is there evil and injustice and
suffering in the world? Why, particularly, does God's special nation - always seem
to be in trouble?"

"QO Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and thou wilt not hear?"

The prophet tries to convince himself that God has raised up the Babylonians to
punish Israel for past sins, a favorite prophetic theme. But this prophet is just
human enough to have the words stick in his throat..."Lord, how can you stand these
evil men? Your eyes are too holy to look at evil...So why are you silent while they
destroy people who are more righteous than they...2"

And then, dramatically, in the final one-third of the book, a radical change
in direction. Habakkuk does not come down on the side of logical fatalism. He does
not lay the blame on God and propose stoic resignation. That's the answer to evil
and suffering proposed by nearly all the religions of the world: Islam, Buddhism,
Shintoism-Karma Fate, Determinism, "What will be will be", "You must accept the

a fo x

Good Lord's will." Habakkuk, on the contrary, leans in a distinctly different direc-
tion and in a radical new freedom ends his work in a magnificent Psalm -

"Even though the fig trees have no fruit

And no grapes grow on the vine,

Even though the olive crop fails

and the fields produce no grain,

Even though the sheep all die

and the cattle stalls are empty,

I will still be joyful and glad,

Because the Lord my God is my savior."

Sometimes the Bible presents the issue poignantly: "How long, O Lord?" the
Psalmists ask. Sometimes it is angry: "Why are the wicked men prosperous? Why do
dishonest men succeed?" Jeremiah demanded, and followed up with his own sense of
justice, "Lord...you see how I love you,..Drag these evil men away Like sheep to be
butchered." And sometimes it is presented in all its complexity and human ambiguity
as in Job.

The contemporary statements of the ancient issue command attention: The Holocaust,
and the numbing reality "After Auschwitz"; the philosophical wrestling with a world jn -
which that could happen. Elie Wiesel reflected on Rosh Hashanah in an extermination
camp:

“What are you, my God, compared to this afflicted crowd...What
does your greatness mean, Lord of the universe, in the face of
all this weakness?"

American playwrite Archibald MacLeish framed it memorably in JB, a contemporary
retelling of the Old Testament story of Job. Two broken down actors working as circus
vendors, fall into the roles of God and Satan...In the prologue one says:

"T heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
If God is God He is not good..."

The story itself begins on Thanksgiving Day, as JB, Sarah and their five healthy,
marvelous children, sit down to dinner. The children are irreverent, raucous, full
of life and joy. Sarah wants them to be grateful but soon proves to herself that
gratitude is very difficult precisely because they have so much. She and JB talk
about the fact that things are so good. JB says:

"Never since I learned to tell

My shadow from my shirt, not once,
Not for a watch tick, have I doubted
God was on my side, was good to me.
People called it luck - it wasn't...
Tt isn't luck." (p.35).

Reinhold Niehbuhr wrote in his journal once that he had difficulty with Thanks-
giving because it always bordered on self-congratulation, or at least complimenting
God for His wisdom in blessing us. And that is what is hammered out in Habakkuk and
in Job and JB,

The final and most important setting for the issue, after all is personal. It
is not academic, It is not a philosophic dilemma when evil happens in life - to one's
family, friends, nation. The great Christian mystic, Howard Thurman, observed: "Weeds
do not have to be cultivated, vegetables do. Those things in life which make for

a

disintegration seem ever alert, taking advantage of every situation to turn it to
their account." (Interpreter's Bible, Vol, 6, p.981). We are personally acquainted
with the existential reality of tragedy and suffering: from the time it rained on

the day of our first grade picnic and we wondered how a God of mercy could allow such
heartless cruelty, to the shock of reading the alumni magazine and discovering that a
friend, father of two, loving, happy, successful, is gone, dead. It is our earliest -
and latest crisis. :

Intellectually it is a question of the relation of God's providence to human
freedom: of God's love to human suffering. It is, of course, a question ultimately
of God's existence in relationship to a world in which tragedy happens.

What do we believe? What does the faith say?

We do not believe that God causes evil, We do not believe that God plans human
suffering. We do not believe He is the orchestrator of famine, flood and plane crash,
The woman on the deck of the rescue ship was wrong, that is to say. God did not
sink the Titanic.

We do believe that the justice God built into creation allows cause and effect
to result in suffering sometimes. If you are irresponsible about what you eat, drink,
smoke and swallow, you will get sick and it will be your fault - not God's. If you
put enough garbage in the rivers and smog in the atmosphere, the ice caps melt, the
water rises and everybody dies - not by God's will but human arrogance and stupidity,

We believe that God's love is revealed, not in the security of twenty-four hour~
a-day protection, Nationwide specializes in that. We believe that God's love is |.
expressed in His gift of freedom. We believe that freedom is the hallmark of love,
If you ever loved anybody, you know that existentially. To love someone is to will
them freedom. To love someone is to grant the opposite of ownership, control. .
Marriages based on power and control aren't very happy affairs. Relationships based
on freedom have the possibility of ecstacy, fulfillment, growth. When parent sendg
child on an errand, across the street, for the first time, love is moving toward
freedom. It would be safer not to expose the child to the risk of crossing the
street. In fact, sometimes it seems that love prescribes protecting, insulating,
but that always tallies up to control and is not love at all. Love watches freedom
grow and sometimes love even has to pull away the secure foundations to allow an
individual to be free. And sometimes this love-freedom sequence turns out badly.
Because sometimes the child on his first errand falls down and skins a knee. And
sometimes the adolescent drives the family car into a wall. And sometimes the right
conditions converge and a tornado swoops out of the sky, or the cells, unaccountably,
begin to multiply and spread. a

It was Paul Tillich who taught that God has given nature its freedom as He hag
given us our freedom. Freedouw means risk. Risk means that accidents will happen.
In the context of the whole creation love produces ripe fruit, bushels of grain and
also the possibility of a hurricane. George arthur Buttrick observed that "God
in lowly love respects the freedom which he has given." (God, Pain and Evil, p,110).

We believe in the relationship between love and freedom and therefore the
possibility of tragedy. Our faith is big enough to include the human response to
tragedy when it happend. We are mistaken when we identify despair, grief, anger,
with weak faith or no faith. The Bible, unlike modern devotional magazines, is full
of those emotions. Christianity can include the anger human beings feel when

a

someone close dies. We are learning the necessity of owning and expressing anger as
part of the grief process. Good doctors know now that people feel numbness, despaiy,
depression and then anger at the death of a loved one. We know now that somewhere .
in the grief process people are probably going to get angry: with the hospital, the
physicians, the nurses for allowing it to happen. And ministers know that a part of
that anger, often unexpressed because it shocks us, is reserved for God. Well, it ‘
shouldn't shock us. It's not only healthy psychologically to get it out, it is, I
suppose, honest theologically. God's love can handle our anger. In fact, it invites
it. Our prayers, of course, are polite, civilized, victorian. Our guts may be
churning with fear, rage, or hurt, but our prayers sound like very poor junior

high school poetry. A friend of mine recommends yelling our prayers when we feel

like it. There is plenty of precedent for it. He does it himself, he says. He

tells a very funny story about walking up and down the aisle of his church yelling

out his feelings of anger to God and euddenky realized that there was a woman sitting
in the back pew, quietly meditating, I don't know whether that part is true, but [—
know that the God who loves us like our own mother and father - who gives us freedam 7
can handle our deepest feelings. "There is something authentic and dignified about
standing one's ground with God," Howard Thurman suggested. (Op.cit., p.986).

The Bible prescribes gratitude for good things. God may not have singled you
out for health, well-being, success. I can't believe, frankly, that He did without
believing the reverse. But He did create the system in which it can - and does -
happen. And He built the impetus toward well-being, and His loving will is for
health and peace. If you have them, be grateful for them, Be grateful for them and
you will enjoy them even more.

But the acid test, Biblically, comes when the cupboard is bare, sickness
interrupts, when death strikes, when goodness slips through your fingers. The acid
test, in the Bible, is when all you have is God.

It is then that a new, deeper, more profound faith begins to emerge. That's
how Job's story concludes, He never gets answers to his questions about injustice,
evil and suffering. What he gets is God - and it is sufficient.

The promise is God's presence - God's grace and power and love. The promise
is a love that will not let us go; love from which nothing in life can separate us.
Archibald MacLeish, in JB, provided an unforgetable metaphor: Mr. Zuss, the God
character, is scolding Nickles who plays Satan:

"Isn't there anything you understand? Always! Always from the ashes,
It's from the ash heap God is seen Every saint and martyr knew that."
(p. 50, Scene II).

We who have stood at the foot of a cross have known that at a level too pro~-
found for words, We have heard the cry: "My God, why have you forsaken me" and we
have known that somehow God was involved in that dying. And so with Pilgrims in
Massachusetts: and pilgrims unknown across the centuries let us thank our God for
harvest and home, for life and breath and food and drink, Let us be grateful for
what we have. But essentially, at the heart of it all, may there be the simplest and
purest and most beautiful thanksgiving: a gratitude to God for His love and presence
and promise of faithfulness. Or as someone said 2,500 years ago....

"Even though the fig trees have no fruit I will still be joyful and glad,
And no grapes ~row on the vine, Because the Lord my God is my savior.”
Amen.