Sermon Archive
Christian Aid Week
Sermon preached by John Armes at Matins on 12 May 2002 (Sunday After Ascension)
Does belief in God make it easier or harder to resolve the problem of human suffering? For me it makes it harder. For without a belief in God the problem is comparatively simple - suffering just is. Put it down to chance, natural processes or human cruelty, suffering just happens and it is up to us to alleviate it and overcome it through our compassion and ingenuity.
But introduce an all-powerful and loving God into the equation and we have problems. For doesn't the sheer scale of suffering stand as an accusation either against God, or against our own gullibility in believing that this God is worth our love and devotion?
Michael Taylor, a former Director of Christian Aid, in his book Poverty and Christianity tells how this issue threatens his own belief. In his travels he constantly came face to face with poverty and evil. Massacres in Rwanda, famine in the Horn of Africa showed him that for the vast majority of human beings suffering is normal. In Western Europe we find this hard to grasp because our wealth and health cushion us. For Michael Taylor this caused a kind of theological trauma - how can this be reconciled with the Christian view of God?
Taylor recognises that there have been many attempts to explain suffering and evil, to engage in what is called theodicy. But he concludes that all these attempts are lacking in one way or another. Indeed, he goes further and suggests that theodicy itself is very much a Western 'developed world' preoccupation. Those for whom suffering is normal seem less inclined to agonise and theorise about evil. The primary task of theology, they say, is to get rid of evil. To explain evil may even be seen as a way of justifying the status quo ? 'the rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate'. In other words, if there is a reason for suffering we have less need to do something about it.
The picture of God that emerges from the theologians of the so-called developing world is of a being who is in solidarity with the poor, who is on their side. The crucial question is 'How is the world with all its suffering to be changed for the better?' not, 'How is all the suffering of the world to be understood?'
Taylor explains that his work with aid and development has disturbed his faith in another way. How is it that Christianity, for all its claim to alter history for the better, to redeem humanity, seems to have failed abjectly to make an impact? Christianity has occupied a position of huge power and influence, yet even in the 20th Century it failed to change the world for the better. This was not for lack of effort or goodwill, but somehow reality defeats the best of intentions and makes Christian hopes of beginning the process of building the Kingdom of God here on earth seem flimsy and delusory.
We may put this down to the power of human sinfulness, or faulty notions about development and progress. But it remains true to say that as yet the redemption of the human race does not appear to have happened. We cannot even resolve the inequities that mean that two-thirds of the world live in poverty.
Taylor, of course, goes into all this at much greater depth than I can attempt here. But he does invite us to explore into the nature of the God whom we worship. He invites us to place ourselves within a story of faith that is not so much about a God-given paradise which is lost through human sin, as about a long, painful process through which we travel with God as we learn together how to make a paradise out of chaos. This implies a God who is less than all-knowing. But it respects the goodness of God whilst recognising that he does not compel our love and loyalty. God, the Christ-like God, learns with us, and is absolutely committed to the process. No cost is too great for him to bear.
But Michael Taylor recognises that this view has its inadequacies too. Whilst we wait interminably for God to win through, what about the millions who, in the meantime, suffer and are trampled by the powerful? This, I suppose, is why it remains important to us to conceive of a paradise that can contain all who have lived - 'when,' as our Ephesians reading puts it, 'the times will have reached their fulfilment to bring all things in heaven and earth together under one head, even Christ.' This paradise, therefore, will not ultimately be of the world we know, yet we can know it nevertheless within our world if we are prepared to commit ourselves to building real 'communities of justice and love, sustainability and peace.'
Perhaps you would expect the former Director of Christian Aid to say these things. Christian Aid, like all aid agencies, is committed to being in solidarity with the poor and there is much to be learned from their experience. This solidarity, if the above description of God is right, is solidarity also with God.
This is an appropriate message for the beginning of Christian Aid week. We cannot solve the problem of suffering, but we can make a difference to it. The world has not been redeemed by Christianity, or any other religion, but it can lead us to be part of a process of redemption.
In part, this redemption may seem like sticking a bandage on the wound of poverty. But we know that it is more than this, for development work is about empowering people to determine their own future - to be liberating. But we know also that if justice is really to come our solidarity with God and with the powerless must take us a further step, namely, to find ways of confronting and overcoming the inequities of a system that protects the vested interests of the powerful (us included). We can describe this in terms of trade, the theme for this year?s Christian Aid Week, or the crushing effects of international debt, or cultural imperialism or environmental crisis. But whatever our way in, the aim must be the same, to do something about it - to make a decision to confront injustice, to find a way of sharing with the poor in their struggle and being prepared to pay the price.
If these are worthy thoughts for the start of Christian Aid week they are also in tune with the Sunday After the Ascension. For the Ascension tells us not that Christ has gone away to some distant and cloudy realm but that he has become more powerfully present to us within history and at every time and place. This is a God participating in solidarity with us, within a world where suffering and evil are commonplace. And, what is more, this God becomes known to us not just through the churchy and religious means of bible, liturgy and sacrament, but also through the earthy and mundane.
Indeed, if the cross is to mean anything it is that this God identifies with us, shares with us in our suffering and bears with us the blows of evil. Such a God is surely to be identified in particular with the victim, the weak, the poor. The Ascended King wears the rags of poverty and knows the pangs of hunger.
So, this Christian Aid Week let's be hopeful. Hopeful that our risen, ascended Lord has not given up on us, will never give up. Hopeful because, within the countless stories Christian Aid and others can tell, the world is full of people for whom suffering is normal yet find within that promise and possibility.
Hope does not spring up in us because we see change happening. Rather it is hope that makes change happen. Hope, in other words, and this is Michael Taylor again, is creative. He tells of meeting a Christian pastor in the Horn of Africa, in a village where all the surrounding hills had been denuded of trees - soil and crops too had gone. It was a wasteland. But rather than retreating into a private message of forgiveness of sins and the world to come, this pastor had set up a tree nursery where 50 to 100 saplings were growing. His plan? Little by little to plant the trees, and cover the hills once again with goodness.
'Transformation,' says Taylor, 'is the child of hope.' It makes the hills green and it believes that all things can be made new.? This is the transformation we are invited to share - and in sharing to allow our hope to infect and inspire others.
Please read Michael Taylor himself in Poverty and Christianity, Reflections at the Interfaith Between Faith and Experience, SCM Press, 2000. He says it far better than I.
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