Time and Chance

"For no one can anticipate the time of disaster."

-Ecclesiastes 9: 12

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
          a time to be born, and a time to die;
          a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
          a time to kill, and a time to heal;
          a time to break down, and a time to build up;
          a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
          a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
          a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
          a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
          a time to seek, and a time to lose;
          a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
          a time to tear, and a time to sew;
          a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
          a time to love, and a time to hate;
          a time for war, and time for peace.

Koheleth wrote in what is known as the "wisdom tradition."

In the Bible, wisdom is personified as feminine; the name given to her, "Sophia," means "wisdom." This has led some feminist theologians to see wisdom as the Bible’s feminine counterpart of the male god "Yahweh," offering some much-needed balance to the patriarchal worldview which the Bible mostly represents.

In the Hebrew Bible, the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job are part of the wisdom tradition, as are some of the Apocryphal books such as the Wisdom of Solomon. Some of the Psalms also fit within this tradition. In its conventional seam, it is known as "proverbial wisdom," and we can easily recognize it: "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." But there is a much deeper and more profound seam buried in the wisdom tradition, and that is the seam into which Ecclesiastes fits.

However, it is the book of Job which raises most pressingly the question of "theodicy," or the vindication of God’ goodness in the face of the existence of evil. One of the questions which I attempted to respond to during last week’s Question Box Sermon was this one: "When we pray to God--is it the same God who sent the tsunami to kill all those people?"

It is the perennial question of how a good and gracious God could allow all of the evil in the world to exist. If God is all powerful, omniscient, benevolent, we ask, how could the same God allow such terrible things to happen? What kind of a God would this be?

In the Book of Job, as James Carroll makes clear in his column ["The Road Back"], the answer is "that there is no answer." It is all a mystery. Instead of an answer, the author of Job produced some of the most beautiful poetry ever written:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
          "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
          "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
             Tell me, if you have understanding.
             Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
             Or who stretched the line upon it?
             On what were its bases sunk,
             or who laid its cornerstone
             when the morning stars sang together
             and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

          "Or who shut in the sea with doors
             when it burst out from the womb?--
             when I made the clouds its garment,
             and thick darkness its swaddling band,
             and prescribed bounds for it,
             and set bars and doors,
             and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
             and here shall your proud waves be stoped’?

"Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
          or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
          or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?

"Have you entered the storehouses of the snow,
          or have you seen the storehouses of the hail?
          . . .What is the way to the place where the light is distributed
          or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?

The problem is, folks, that we cannot have it both ways. We cannot have a totally good God and also account for the existence of evil and suffering. Either God is all powerful and omniscient, and thus responsible for all that is, the good and the bad, or else God is not. Either God answers our prayers, or he does not. Either God is in control of everything, or he is not.

It was this dilemma which caused Rabbi Harold Kushner to write his bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner, you may remember, wrote the book in response to the death of his teenage son from the terrible disease known as "progeria," "a rare congenital disorder of childhood, characterized by rapid onset of the physical changes typical of old age, usually resulting in death before age 20."

Kushner struggled to understand how a just and loving God, what a poet has called "this good God," could allow such a terrible thing to happen. He struggled to understand why his prayers on behalf of his little boy had not been answered. For a while he lost his faith in God altogether, unable to believe in a God who would kill children, as he said, "for whatever exalted reason" there might be.

But like Job, he ultimately rejected the counsel that it was "God’s will" or that it was part of God’s plan. Gradually, and with the help of the Book of Job, Kushner regained his faith in God. But it was not the same God he had previously believed in. He could no longer believe in a God who was all-powerful. He no longer believed in a God who could literally answer our prayers, or prevent disease, or intervene in natural events like the recent tsunami.

Instead, he opted for a God who, not unlike us, is constrained and even powerless. Instead of a God who causes suffering, he opted for a God who, though powerless to prevent it, joins with us in our suffering. He opted for a compassionate God. In a famous passage, he wrote of his reponse to a bumper sticker saying "My God is not dead: sorry about yours": "My God is not cruel: sorry about yours."

Gradually, he began to see that his son’s life, tragic and foreshortened though it may have seemed at first glance, and was in fact, was nevertheless not without meaning. Kushner found the strength and courage to begin his own recovery in the memory of his young son’s courage and acceptance in the face of his fatal disease. He found meaning and joy from the fact that his son had lived at all, and graced his life.

And, perhaps most importantly, he found that his son’s death had made him a more compassionate person, able to more readily feel with other people in the midst of their trials and tribulations. He discovered that he had joined what Helen Keller once called "the company of those who have known sorrow," and it had made him a better man, and a better rabbi. He made the decision to use his own pain and sorrow and grief to help others who were suffering similarly.

His story is reminiscent of one that is told of the compassionate Buddha. A grieving young woman, Gisa Gotami, went to the Buddha after losing her child to ask him for some medicine to cure him. She was in despair, and inconsolable and could not believe that her beloved child was dead. She felt she could not go on living. The Buddha, knowing that he could not bring her child back to life, asked her to go and get some mustard seed from a home which had never been touched by suffering and death, and when she had to return to him with the mustard seed.

Of course, she never did find such a home. Every single house she visited had known suffering and death. But she discovered she was not alone, after all. Instead of a cure for her son, she found a calling, which was to offer comfort to those who had suffered as she had suffered. In "the company of those who have known sorrow," she discovered a way out of her own debilitating grief and despair.

One of the questions I did not have time to answer last week had to do with why it is that we feel compelled to respond to a great natural disaster like the tsunami, but we ignore the equally devastating genocide in the Sudan. All I can say is what T. S. Eliot once wrote about a mystical experience: "Mankind cannot bear too much reality."

I do not know why some disasters elicit more of a response from us. Perhaps it is because we can more readily identify with a natural disaster, recognizing that it could happen to any of us at any time, but that genocide raises more complicated and troubling questions about universal human nature which are easier ignored than confronted. Perhaps it is because we find it easier to blame the victims of genocide than of a tidal wave. Perhaps it is because we find it harder to identify with the victims of genocide, believing wrongly that it could never happen to us. I don’t know the answer. It is part of that great mystery of which I have already spoken.

The miracle is that some people do respond. The miracle is that there is such a thing as compassion, and that some people act compassionately, and we must be grateful for that even though we might wish with all our hearts for more.

It is ironic and tragic, is it not, that it takes something like the tsunami to raise us out of our lethargy and complacency? It is ironic and tragic that it takes a natural disaster like this one to bring people together, as it has brought together the people of Sri Lanka who have been engaged in a bloody civil war for over twenty years! If only we were able to sustain this sense of our common humanity, what might the world look like? How different if we recognized every day of our lives that "there but for the grace of God go I." How different might our lives in this world be if we could only sustain and nurture the sense of fellow-feeling that such an event creates. Then might there truly be some redemption in this terrible event.

In this winter time "pregnant with the colossus of hope [David Rankin]," we must continue to pray that that fellow-feeling might be more than momentary and fleeting, recognizing that ultimately it is we who must answer that prayer for God. That is my new year’s wish for all of us.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like a fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock