“GOD HAS NO TRASHCANS”

John 6: 1 – 13 (NRSV)

July 26, 2009/Fifth in a series of sermons, “Your Questions Please”

Focus: No part of our lives gets lost with Jesus.

PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION

            Will you pray with me? O gracious God, amid the sadness, loss and pain we know in life, please speak to everyone this morning. May your Word, as it is read and declared be like a mighty light, shining ever more brightly on our minds, hearts and wills.

THE QUESTION OF ALL QUESTIONS

            When you began submitting your questions to me for this summer’s sermon series, I started looking for one question in particular. It is, what I would call, the question of all questions. Some form of this question is what I am asked more than any other. My friend who submitted the question for today realized the popularity of what is on his mind as he wrote, “You may have already received my question from someone else, but here it is. Since I was 11-years-old and lost my father I have struggled with the age old question, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ As arrogant as this may sound, during our lives do we all somehow participate with Jesus in God’s redemptive process?”

            My friend asked two good questions. I have an answer for each one. The first: why do bad things happen to good people? I will borrow Billy Graham’s famous answer when he addressed a service for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombings.

            If you recall a huge truck bomb exploded on the morning of April 19, 1995 in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. One-hundred-sixty-eight people died, including a number of young children who had just started their day in the nursery. Billy Graham, the great evangelist, was asked to speak several days later at a city-wide memorial service. Dr. Graham walked to the podium and repeated to the audience the questions everyone had been asking him. “Why did this happen? Why would God have allowed it to happen?” Then there was a long pause before Billy Graham said three words, “I don’t know.”

            But Billy Graham didn’t stop there. He said, “I don’t know the answer to the ‘why’ of pain. But I do know this: When pain comes, because there is a God in heaven who loves us, we do not have to walk through any dark valley alone.”[1] I can’t add a word to Billy Graham’s answer to the why question.

            The second question my friend asked is: [D]uring our lives do we all somehow participate with Jesus in God’s redemptive process?”  I’d like offer an answer by turning to John 6: 1 – 13.  This second question raises not the why question but the “what” question. What is God doing with my suffering? Is there any meaning to my pain and suffering? Let’s go to a large, grassy field a stone’s throw away from the Lake of Galilee and see what Jesus does with the bread fragments of banquet.

A BREAD BANQUET

            Apart from the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the account of feeding of 5,000 men is the only miracle that appears in four gospels. There was something about what happened that afternoon that seared itself in the mind of the early church.

            Let’s put you in that large crowd that day. You and your family weree up before dawn to start walking to the field where Rabbi Jesus was going to spend the day teaching. Stories of His healing powers are filling the conversations in your village. You have never heard Him preach before, but your brother and several cousins have. Jesus is a spell-binding teacher. Large crowds listen to Him in perfect silence. He can tell a joke that splits the sides of everyone one minute and then He can put the small, sharp knife of truth right between those same sides.

            You and your family want to get good seats so you get up in the middle of the night and go. By the time Jesus appears, there are perhaps 5,000 men and another 15,000 children and women. You ate a small breakfast of bread and another small lunch of more bread, figs, and some water but now it’s late and your stomach starts growling as Jesus finishes speaking.

            You are sitting close enough to see Jesus and His followers talking together. Jesus wants to feed everyone but how could that ever happen? They are a few miles from Bethsaida, Philip’s hometown, and there’s not enough money here or enough bread in town to feed this crowd. One of the disciples brings a small child about the age of your youngest to Jesus. You can see that the boy hasn’t eaten his small lunch of five, dinner-sized barley rolls and a few sardines. Who’s that for—Jesus? When you look back on that moment the next day you smile at the memory. No one could have ever imagined how much Jesus could do with so little.

            Jesus takes the small lunch into His hands. He instructed His disciples to have everyone sit down in circles of 20 or 40. Still holding the barley loaves and fish, Jesus gave thanks for God’s gifts found in a boy’s uneaten lunch. Then He started breaking the bread and fish. Your eyes never left His hands. The food, which should have disappeared in 30 seconds, didn’t. He kept breaking it and handing it to His followers and it never seemed to end. Soon, you hear the happy sounds of a feast. Everyone—all 20,000 were eating, telling stories and laughing.

            An hour or so later, when everyone was stuffed, Jesus commanded the disciples to go and collect the fragments of broken bread so that nothing would be wasted and nothing would be lost. 

BARLEY PIECES

            In an article written for Weavings, a journal for Christian spirituality, Flora Slosson Wuellner makes an interesting observation about this one detail found only in John’s account of this miracle. She writes, “Though all four Gospels tell this story, it is only in John’s account that it was Jesus himself who directed them to gather the bread fragments so that nothing would be lost. There is always a special reason for pointedly emphasized details in Scripture . . . The meaning of the carefully gleaned fragments of bread is made clear much later in the chapter when Jesus refers to himself as the Living Bread sent into the world by God to draw to himself all those who thirst, hunger, and hurt . . . ‘this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.’ (John 6:39)”

Flora Slosson Wuellner then asks, “Are we those bread fragments, poignantly referred to as ‘broken pieces’ in the other Gospels? What better symbol for our throw-away abandoned people; our broken, fragmented humanity; our own individual shattered dreams, trust; all the shards of lives which have never been realized or fulfilled in wholeness. ‘. . . so that nothing will be lost,’ Jesus said . . . All his life he embraced the poor, the insignificant, the commonplace, the hurts and the gifts of the humble that we so easily ignore or brush aside. In this detail . . . we see vast significance—the passion of Christ the Shepherd to whom each sheep, no matter how confused, stubborn, soiled, lost, is precious.”[2]

PIECES OF PAIN

            As you sit and hold the pieces of pain from your past, it’s natural and easy to think that those parts of you are just trash to be discarded. They are hard to hold, hard to face. You might feel, as you hold your loss or your failure, the terrible pain you felt at the first. Wouldn’t it be better just to find a way, somehow, to get rid of all those broken pieces? You spend your life looking for the nearest trashcan to dump it. But what if God has no trashcans? What if, instead of dumping your painful pieces, Jesus wants to hold them and redeem them? The hands of Jesus, breaking bread to feed 20,000, would later have Roman nails driven into them. Those nail-marked hands hold your pain too.  

            Some years ago, I had a spiritual director named Peter Ruedegair. Peter died not long ago in a car accident. Peter was wise and Peter could hammer me when I needed it. One day we were talking about some of the suffering of my past and present. Peter said, “You know, if God didn’t spare His Son from suffering, what makes you think He will spare you from suffering?”

            As he meditated on the suffering Jesus experienced throughout His life and on the cross, Thomas Howard points out, “Jesus tells his followers that they will drink the cup of which he drank and be baptized with the baptism with which he was to be baptized (he was speaking of his suffering in Jerusalem). Where, suddenly, is the theology that teaches that because the Savior did it all, we thereby are reduced to the status of bystanders? This is what the saints speak of when they speak of suffering. The Divine Mercy, like alchemy, transforms the leaden burden into precious substance.”[3]

THY WILL NOT MINE

            A friend of mine who lives in another part of country, a young man I will call Theo, has recently faced an addiction in his life. Theo is in his mid-twenties and married for a few years. In the early days of his sobriety, he found himself asking over and over again, why. Why was he given this terrible burden to carry? Why does he have to go through all the work of recovery? I had no answers for him. A couple of weeks ago, Theo said that he is in a different place today. He has no answers for how he got his addiction. He accepts that he has it now. Now days, Theo starts his days by praying, “God, may your will be done in my life today.”

He has told me that his life has gotten lighter since he began this practice. Theo’s days go more smoothly when he prays and places his life, his addiction and his pain into God’s hands. For God has promised that all things, all things, are to be gathered into the nail-scarred hands of Jesus.

            When Floss Wuellner was a little girl she used to sit and watch her grandfather work at his desk with a pot of glue and a large box filled with small broken porcelain pieces. In the early 1900’s her grandfather traveled to India as a part of traveling missions board. When in India, he saw the Taj Mahal and was overcome by its radiance and beauty. There, he bought a little porcelain replica about a foot high to bring home to his family. The crate was overturned many times during a storm at sea, and when he unpacked his treasure he found only hundreds of broken pieces.

            Many people would have simply thrown it all away as a lost cause. But Floss’s grandfather carefully gathered up each tiny fragment, and when he had time amid the business of his duties as a pastor and teacher, he would sit at his table and with infinite care select and glue the tiny pieces together. It took him about thirty years to turn his fragments into a shinning whole. As a little girl, Floss would study the miniature Taj Mahal from all angles. Not a chip was missing. She writes, “The restoration of what loving hands can bring from broken fragments still shines in my heart.”[4]

            Amen.

“Your Questions Please” Study Guide: July 26, 2009

Question: Why do bad things happen to good people? During our lives do we all somehow participate in God’s redemptive process?      

Key Biblical Passages:

God intention to “redeem” our suffering

• “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn, with many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And he gave them right standing with himself, and he promised them his glory.” (Romans 8: 28 – 30)
• “And this is his plan: At the right time he will bring together everything under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and earth.” (Ephesians 1: 10)

Thoughts on Faith and Suffering:

“From the Old Testament we can gain much insight into what it ‘feels like’ to be God. But the New Testament records what happened when God learned what it feels like to be a human being. Whatever we feel, God felt. Instinctively, we want a God who not only knows about pain but shares in it; we want a God who is affected by our own pain. As the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer scribbled on a note in a Nazi prison camp, ‘Only the Suffering God can help.’ Because of Jesus, we have such a God. [The book of] Hebrews reports that God can now sympathize with our weaknesses. The very word expresses how it was done: ‘sympathy’ comes from two Greek words, sym pathos, meaning ‘suffer with.’ Would it be too much to say that, because of Jesus, God understands our feelings of disappointment with him? How else can we interpret Jesus’ tears, or his cry from the cross? ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”  

Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God

Resources:

• Books
1. A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. Lewis suffered the death of his wife, Joy, and wrote this small book from the raw pain of his loss.
2. When Faith Is Not Enough by Kelly James Clark. The author doesn’t flinch from the hard questions doubt raises about our faith in God.
3. Disappointment With God by Philip Yancey. I always appreciate Yancey’s willingness to honestly face the difficult issues of our faith with humility and trust in God.