More questions this week than answers. Why should this week be any different from any other week?

I don’t think I have to list the questions for you. We all heard the same news stories this week. And we don’t have to go far in any of our lives to find a pool of pain . .  . and the questions that go along with it . . .

The questions I have heard this week from the media and from other folks, boil down to ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?” And, the flip side: “Why do good things happened to bad people?”

The topic the Living the Questions study is dealing with this month is titled “Evil, Suffering and a God of Love.”

The main question being, of course, is ‘Where is God and how is God involved in evil in our world?’

The book of Job – a story by the way which struggles with the same questions. The story of Job is probably the oldest story in the bible. Job is not a Hebrew name and most scholars agree that Job, like the stories of creation and Noah’s flood, predated the Hebrew people and was a wisdom story . . . it was the way an ancient people tried to make sense out of those same questions. “Where does evil come from and how is God involved?” And “why do bad things happen to good people?” There is no real answer to those questions in the book of Job. Lots of questions, though.

Our gospel text offers more questions, as well. Not just the question about divorce that are presented to Jesus to test him, but the blessing of the children raises it’s own questions. So many we can’t deal with all of them in one sermon.

Let me try to wrestle the image of Jesus with the children from the sappy religious art in which it has been trapped and open it up for a closer look.

I imagine all kinds of people were coming to Jesus most of the time. I get that feeling from the texts . . . the crowds pressing in --  five thousand needing to be fed – women tugging at the hem of his robe -- his need to get away from them at times, exhausted. So great was the need, the pain, the suffering, the hungers of many. I think the disciples saw all that and may have felt a need to protect him, to perform some triage, of sorts. They couldn’t really ‘screen’ his calls, but they could sort out the important from the unimportant.

Women were bringing their children to Jesus. Yes, women. For men in that day generally could not be bothered with child care. Children were not important enough for men to waste their time or energy on. Even talking to one was seen as a way to waste away a man’s mind.

That attitude may have arisen as a form of self-protection. For it is easier to lose something that has little value in the first place. And chances are the overwhelming majority of the children brought to Jesus would never live to the ripe old age of thirteen.

In that day and time life expectancy was much shorter than in our day and the mortality rate for children would be shocking by our standards. It was low for everyone, but then, as now, the poorer a family was, the less likely it was that a child would make it to maturity. Hunger takes a toll. Poverty is deadly. Remember, too, that these children were important to the women. Not just because they loved them, and I don’t doubt they did, But an adult child was the only financial security a woman had in her old age. In infancy the child was dependent upon the mother, in time the role would be reversed.

Little wonder then, that when women heard stories of Jesus’ healing and the miracles he had been able to do, that they came bringing their children.  The blind were seeing, the lame walking, the ears of the deaf were open and even a child presumed dead was brought back to life . . . no, we should not be surprised. But you see, it is not as Sunday School sweet as it sounds on the surface.

I would like you to imagine not the healthy, blonde, blue-eyed children all neatly decked out in their Sabbath-best. I would like you to imagine poor desperate mothers carrying their emaciated and sickly children, I would like you to see swollen bellies and visible ribs and the shadow of death lurking in their eyes and the panic and desperation of their mothers.

If you need any help with that,  frame the whole thing in our day and time. Imagine children whose parents have died of Aids fending for themselves in Africa and India and Asia. Instead of mothers, imagine ten and eleven year old children who are caring for infant and toddler siblings or cousins or in some cases simply a neighbor child, who is infected with that dread disease. Imagine village after village, droves of children being brought to Jesus. Coming for help, hope, comfort, and care.  

For then the questions come flooding back: Why? Why do these things happen and where is God in all this? How can a good and loving God allow this to happen?

So many questions in our world today. Questions that come from such a dessert in our heart that they leave our lips dry and cracking and a  sandy lump in our throat and for which there are no easy answers.

The same questions then as now. The ancient questions of where is God in all this and how can a loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? How can God allow these children to be infected with a disease because of something their parents did?

We want to know why because we would like to have some control over the situation. Marcus Borg says we long to domesticate reality. And I think he’s right. He says reality is far more wild than we can imagine or grasp. And we don’t like that.

We want to know ‘why’ because something in us tells us that if we have an answer, if we could only know ‘why’ then somehow it won’t hurt as much as it does.

Which is, of course, illusion.

Harold Kushner once wrote a book which many people kept insisting was titled. “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People”

It amused him, and later confounded him. For the title of the book was actually, “WHEN Bad Things Happened to Good People.”

For Kushner, it mattered greatly which question one asked. For ‘why’ leads to a never ending merry-go-round.

When my eldest daughter went to college, she commented on what she called the constant “blame-fests” on campus and in the world. “Anything that happens, the first thing everyone wants to do is figure out who to blame and then we are all absolved of any responsibility.”

That may be another reason we ask ‘why.’

I spent much of the week hearing folks, many of them other ministers, some of them news commentators, seeking answers to some of these questions. I have heard, as you have, many platitudes, all of them having the dull thud of a metal slug. Most answers to the why question simply don’t satisty. Don’t work.

I actually had intended to quote some of the things I have heard, but I would only be repeating the same things you have heard, as well.

And I might trigger, at least in our heads, some of the same arguments.It’s an easy discussion to enter into to, but very difficult to exit. When we can only speculate; discussions tend to be lengthy.

 I suspect that some of what may be going on is a form of denial. So gut wrenching is the suffering in the world that it is easier to deal within our heads than with our guts. And so we escape to philosophical arguments . .. as if we are working a cross word puzzle or solving a soduko.

But life is not a puzzle to be solved.

Nor is God. The Holy One won’t be defined by us, or put in a box by us.

For me the most profound lesson from the Amish was not in any of the reported answers to the questions of WHY this happened. It was in their response WHEN this dreadful thing occurred.

For in their forgiveness, in their compassion for the man who had taken those young lives and his family and in their gentleness and simplicity and faith rooted in the non-violence of Jesus was the world given an opportunity to see Christianity at its best.

There will be many sermons preached today. None, including this one, will ever come as close to expressing the heart of the Christian faith as the one lived out by the Amish community this week.

One of the Amish men said something that did actually articulate their actions: “We don’t know why this happened. We do believe that God is here and that all things can work for good for those that love the Lord.” The media kept asking ‘why?’ The Amish were dealing with ‘when.’

Frederick Buechner, in writing about the problem of evil has said, that “Christianity . . . ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscure – not even this—but that God can turn it to good.”

Here life is. Here tragedy is. Beyond our control. And here also is a God of love. And here we are:  we can choose to respond out of love and forgiveness and compassion, or we seek revenge and be filled with hate. Which only makes things worse.  

The Amish have, I believe, invited the rest of us to be forgiving and compassionate and seek healing where we can in the world.

It is the serenity prayer, isn’t it? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

So where to we begin?

If we begin with the things we cannot change, we can begin by embracing the questions, by moving toward the pain and by being open to transformation. Our culture longs for simple answers and quick fixes. Maturity is found in being able to struggle with the deeper questions, and in not finding easy answers.

Simone Weil said, ‘It is grace that forms the void inside of us and it is grace alone that can fill the void.’

Richard Rohr has said, “Grace leads us to the state of emptiness, to that momentary sense of meaninglessness in which we ask, ‘What is it all for?’ It should be our primary work to help people when they are being led into the darkness and the void.

We can tell those in pain that this is not forever; there is a light and you will see it. This isn’t all there is. Trust it. Don’t try to rush through it. We can’t leap over our grief work. Nor can we skip over our despair work. We have to feel it. Historic cultures saw it as the time of incubation, transformation and necessary hibernation. It becomes sacred space, and yet this is the very space we avoid. When we avoid darkness, we avoid tension, spiritual creativity and finally transformation.”

God is in the questions.

And for the things we can change, let us turn again to our gospel text:

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kin-dom of heaven belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kin-dom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

The children were a concern for Jesus. And are a concern for us. There are things we can work to change.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” We were reminded at the Amos gathering on Monday night that there are no issues that don’t profoundly impact the children. Poverty, homelessness, employment, education, immigration and health care. We forget that many those in poverty are children, many of those who are homeless are children, and many of those without health care are children.

For all the talk about family values in recent history, it seems clear to me that not all families are valued.

I think we need to be as moved by the thirty thousand children who die each and every day because of poverty in our world, and I think we should be as concerned with the hundreds of thousands of children who have been left without parents because of HIV/Aids as we were moved by the deaths in that Amish school room.

I’m going to borrow from a nun, Sister Christine Vladimiroff who pointed out:

“Unlike other species, human children are completely dependent on the adults of the family and community that surround them. Children learn how to love because they are loved. They learn trust because significant adults do not abandon them.

They learn language because they hear it spoken around them and it is spoken to them.

They walk because we give them our hands and they wrap their chubby little fingers around them and hold tightly during the first few steps. They emerge as unique human beings mediated through the social interactions in family and in community. We also know the tragic outcomes of children who grow up in a world that is hostile and uncaring. We reap the resulting hate and violence in our communities.”

The same day of the tragedy in Pennsylvania, many of us attended the Amos Public meeting, and I saw a connection. I saw about two thousand people of faith come together because they want to see their government focus on the things their faith tells them is important. They were gathered because they believe that together they can use the power of their numbers to move this city, this state, and this country toward peace and justice.

How can we fashion a world in which people can live together in peace? What can we change so that every child has enough food to grow strong, enough education to open the mind to a world of wonder, and enough love to fill the soul with the capacity to bond with others? We who hear this gospel must become engaged in the political, economic, and social debates of our times.

If we really want to make a difference this is the place to ask the WHY question. WHY are so many children dying each day? Why is HIV/Aids increasing among women and children in our country, too? Why don’t we have health care for all citizens? Why is it that families working full time jobs are still living below the poverty line? Why aren’t children a priority?

Economic and political systems can be oppressive or liberating. Foreign policy legislation can enable equitable sharing of resources or cause famine to go on unaddressed. Society’s attitudes and behaviors can open our frontiers to immigrants, providing them new opportunities for life, or society can further marginalize them and increase their isolation and poverty.

Our actions are how we embrace the world and bless it as Jesus did the children who surrounded him.

This childlike quality is what Jesus says makes a person eligible for the kin-dom. It is not the innocence of an untested childhood that we need to recover; it is the capacity to live in the world  confident that what we need and will need come as a gift from God. It is the very thing that the Amish demonstrated for us this week: there is nothing too big, to frightening, too overwhelming for us to face – because God will help us face it.

It is the power to stake our lives on the promise that God has made – nothing else is of value. There is no room for discussion about being the greatest if you know at the level of your soul that all you have comes as blessing from God’s hand. Your very existence is gift and blessing.

The kin-dom demands this radical dependence that Jesus describes in the image of a child in today’s scripture.

This is a dependence that makes us open to receive from others, to learn new ways, to change what we value, and to receive all as gift. We are challenged to accept God’s kin-dom like a child, and learn the ways of that kin-dom, embarking on a process, a developmental journey, much  as a child learns to become an adult.

It takes a life-time to learn the gospel’s upside-down logic.

It takes a lifetime of practicing forgiveness, grace and love.

What is at stake is the kin-dom.