God and Suffering

         When I was in a student in Europe, I took a midnight train from Paris to Zurich.  I was too cheap to pay for a sleeping car, so I ended up talking all night with a man named Yacov.  Yacov described himself as a secular Jew.  He grew up in Israel, where he was educated in the Jewish faith.  

However, when he saw a documentary on the Holocaust in middle school, he became an atheist.  He said to himself, “There is no such thing as God or the chosen people, or else this would not have happened.”

Yacov is not alone.  How can a good God allow so much suffering?  The Jewish prophet Habakkuk had the same question.  A few centuries before Jesus, the Greek philosopher Epicurus was wrestling with the problem of thinking of a good and strong God in a broken and bruised world.  A few centuries after Jesus, St. Augustine was still asking the same question.  He had some different answers, but he was still kicking the same can along the same street.  

How can a loving God allow so much suffering?  This question never goes away.   Everyone seems to ask this at one time or another.  Without a doubt, this is the single most common theological question voiced in movies.  “Why, God?  How could God let this happen?”

----  Let’s make this personal.  At the end of each row, you'll find some cards and pens. Take a minute and write down on the card one instance of serious suffering.  It can be global or hyper local.  You can make it as personal or impersonal as you want.  I’m not going to ask you to show it to anyone.

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Now, hold those up.  Hold up your example of suffering.  Raise your hand high.  This is why we are talking about this.  These cards are why we have to talk about this.  We know suffering.  We need some answers for why there are all these cards in the air and why there is so much suffering in the world.

Let me give a few disclaimers before we really get started here. 

1.  The Bible does not give a complete answer to this question.   The Bible is more focused on how to overcome suffering rather than focusing on why there is suffering in the first place.

2.  There is no way that I can give a complete answer today.  You and I both will probably leave here feeling a little unsatisfied with the answers we talk about today.  However, I hope that I can at least make this issue more manageable for us.

When we face the problem of suffering in the world, it can be overwhelming.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, murders, poverty, starvation, cancer.  It all piles up, causing us to wonder how a loving God could allow so much suffering.  Sometimes, the mountain of pain gets bigger and bigger, and we get smaller and smaller, until we can’t see anything else but the pain.  One thing I hope to do today is to shrink that mountain so that we can move past it.  

Denominations: What Happened & What Now?

There are almost 7,000 languages currently spoken on earth.

  We started with one.  Then came the tower of Babel - when God confused our languages and sent us running to the ends of the earth, scattered into the small groups of people who could understand each other and get along together.

There are some 33,800 different Christian denominations around the world.

  We started with one.  Then came a host of historical events, which sent us running to the ends of the earth, scattered into the small groups of people who could understand each other and get along together.

What happened?  I feel like Rodney King, after the Los Angeles race riots, “People, I just want to say, can we all just get along?  Can we all just get along?”

  Apparently not.  No, we can’t just all get along.  

Today, we’re talking about denominations (교단) - all 33,800 of them, and we’re going to do this with a few different basic questions.

• What happened?  
• Why?  
• What now?  

What Happened?  The History.

 1. The Early Breaks -  The first major breaks within the Church - kind of like denominations - happened in the 5th century.  Both splits were about one issue: How is Jesus both divine and human?   In 431 the Assyrian Church of the East, centered in ancient Iraq, split away because they insisted on the separation and clear distinction of Jesus’ divine and human natures.  20 years later, the Oriental Orthodox Church, split away for the exact opposite reason.   

Interestingly, in 1984, the Pope and the Syriac Patriarch issued a joint statement about these divisions: “The confusions and schisms that ... arose only because of differences in terminology and culture and in the various formulae ... express the same matter.  Accordingly, we find today no real basis for the sad divisions and schisms that ... arose between us ...”

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