John 9:1-41
March 9, 2008
First Congregational (UCC), Waterville
Rev. Dr. David E. Anderman

Events and observations of our world can drive us to ask questions that push us in the direction of questioning God, questioning the nature of God, and even questioning the existence of God.

Bart Ehrman is a scholar of religion at the University of North Carolina, sometimes described as a theologian, who recently published a book about losing his faith, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question. I heard an interview with him on NPR's Fresh Air program a few weeks ago. By the way, he was baptized in a Congregational church, was raised Episcopalian, and attended Moody Bible Institute, a bastion of evangelical Christianity. But in spite of his extensive background and grounding in the Christian church, he lost his faith.

“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering? The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me begin to think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith. This book tries to explore some aspects of the problem, especially as they are reflected in the Bible, whose authors too grappled with the pain and misery in the world.”

“The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don't “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn't the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.” [quotes from NPR website]

I too wrestled with issues of faith and suffering when I was young. I have a real existential and experiential identification with the Biblical stories involving someone who is blind, because my father was blind from the time I was five years old. My wrestling was with why God allowed someone I looked up to to suffer with a handicap. And it affected me also: My father couldn't play sports with me or take me hunting or fishing – all things my classmates did with their fathers. The specific question I wrestled with was: If God answers the prayers of faithful people, and lots of apparently faithful people prayed for my father's blindness to be healed, how come he was still blind? I heard other people whisper the question – and I also heard their whispered suspicions that my father, a minister, didn't have enough faith for God to heal him.

When I was old enough to begin to think for myself about the nature of God, I was more inclined to question some of the descriptions of God than to question my father's faith. I didn't think my father's faith was the issue. I thought, in the naïve way of the young, that the issue was these people had some wrong ideas about God. I still think that, but I can offer much more sophisticated reasons now than I could as a child, basing my reasons in the scriptures and in my reading of our theological traditions.

Like Ehrman, I wrestled with serious faith issues at a young age. Ehrman's questions centered on the problem of suffering; mine were on why my father was blind. Unlike Ehrman, this wrestling strengthened my faith rather than causing me to lose it. I don't pretend to have all the answers that Ehrman is looking for, but I do still use the Christian faith to orient my life and understand my place in the world.

Theology is not just an academic exercise. It is a careful reflection on faith and an examination of and wrestling with questions that come to people who are both faithful and thoughtful.

We can see this kind of wrestling in our gospel lesson.

Who sinned – this man or his parents? That's the question his disciples have for Jesus. Who sinned? A child is born with a birth defect or a genetic illness. Who sinned? Thousands are killed in an earthquake or tsunami. Who sinned? A hurricane kills some and disrupts life for hundreds of thousands. Who sinned? Children die of diseases caused by impure water. Who sinned? Picture a young Middle Eastern girl sitting by the street, having lost a leg. Who sinned? You get the idea.

Why do all these people suffer? Why does God allow it?

The common answer was, and often still is, that someone must have sinned. That's the disciples' assumption. It was then commonly believed that most illnesses and physical conditions were caused by sin. Someone sinned badly to cause such a severe punishment. Who are we to blame? “Who sinned?” the disciples ask. And we ask why do people have to suffer?

You'd think Jesus would be pleased with their question. By their question, the disciples are connecting everyday life with their faith. In many surveys of laypeople today, that's one of the main things they want a preacher to do. We don't want our faith to be compartmentalized and walled off from our everyday life. We like this connection the disciples make. We want to know 'why?'.

“'Why' questions are easy to ask but difficult to answer (if they can be answered at all),” says Kristin Saldine of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She continues, “This is especially true when human suffering is involved. I remember a class I took in seminary called, 'Suffering, Loss, and Spiritual Growth.' We nicknamed it 'the five Ds' because we spent the entire semester dealing with death, disease, depression, divorce, and disaster. I remember the professor, Roy Fairchild, spoke about how there comes a time in all our lives when we can no longer keep asking the 'why' question, because asking why is no longer doing us any good. If we get stuck in the why we begin to perish. There comes a point of spiritual surrender when we say, 'OK, God, if I can't know why, then at least help me figure out what's next.' That, Roy said, is where spiritual growth begins to happen – when we move out of the 'why' and into the 'what now.'”

We, like the disciples, can get stuck in the quicksand of why questions. Who sinned? Who's to blame for this terrible mess? In my father's case, it was the whispered questions about who had inadequate faith – different question but still a blame game.

But Jesus doesn't want to go there with the disciples. Jesus said, “Nice try, but wrong question.” Jesus focuses on the 'What now?'. Jesus doesn't get involved in the blame game. He cut off the blame game by saying “neither this man nor his parents sinned.”

We see suffering all around us. We can't stay with the 'why' questions. So what do we do? What did Jesus say and do? His response to the disciples continues: “We must work the works of him who sent me.” And he got to work healing the blind man.

A short answer to the 'What now' question: Get to work enabling God's glory and light and love to shine forth in darkness.

When my father went blind, he had some of the best medical doctors and eye specialists in the country. They were all working on a why question.

Why did he go blind? They never got to an answer; even now my father doesn't know the cause of his blindness. My family had no choice but to deal with the 'what now' questions, and that's what we did.

Do we look for definitive answers to the spiritual 'why' questions before we act on faith? Or do we deal with the 'what now' questions, getting to work healing and ministering in Jesus' name?

Maybe the blind man of the gospel lesson can lead us.
Amen