I am sometimes amazed by the confluence of events in life. I am currently reading Tokens of Trust by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is something of a primer in Christian faith, a brief theological and pastoral discussion of the basic creeds of the Christian Church. It is subtitled, “An Introduction to Christian Belief.” I am finding some helpful ideas to ponder. One of Williams’ rich phrases is “responsibility for God’s believability.” Williams says that the Bible offers no argument for the existence of God, only stories of people moved by God’s Spirit. He argues that at our best people of faith take responsibility for God’s believability. It reminds me of a sentence in The United Methodist Book of Discipline: “The people of God, who are the church made visible in the world, must convince the world of the reality of the gospel or leave it unconvinced.” This is an enormous task and an extreme adventure.

Williams also addresses the difficult issue of suffering. How is it possible for there to be a good God when the world is full of pain and suffering? If the action of God is at the heart of everything, every object, every process, what does that imply about suffering and disaster, about cancers and tsunamis? We need to be clear from the start that we are not going to have an answer to this that allows us to sit back and stop worrying, as if we could say, in response to a tsunami or a landslip, “That’s all perfectly straightforward and no one need have any doubts or misgivings.” If we got to such a stage, we should have become desensitized to the awful immediacy of pain and grief. We should be valuing human lives and human welfare less than we should. There’s something about the very anguish of the questioning that illustrates just how seriously we have learned to take human pain – and that seriousness is the best witness to the difference that faith makes…. No one’s suffering is insignificant…. If God makes a world that is really different from him, a world of interaction and interconnection, this means a world that is capable of change. Different processes flow together, mesh together and make things happen. This is a world in which any event has what is practically an unmeasurable range of causes, factors that have made it fall out this way rather than that…. Would a world with a perpetual safety net really be a world at all, a place with its own integrity and regularity? (39, 41) The questions Williams is addressing are complex and have been with theologians and philosophers for a long time. His responses are not definitive, if any response to such questions can be so characterized, but I found him thought-provoking.

So while I am reading this book, I receive an e-mail from someone sharing some of the deep challenges they have been facing. In this person’s family there has been illness, untimely death, a child struggling, and the person wonders about faith, about the point of all this pain. I did not quote Rowan Williams, but I did respond with some thoughts of my own.

In my own faith, I have come to a place where I don’t believe that everything that happens happens because it is a part of a grand plan from God. I believe that God’s creativity helped make the world the place it is, but that there is genuine freedom in that world and so things happen, and some of these are deeply painful. There is death, and sometimes it is untimely and so hurts even more. There is disease and causes of it are complex. I believe God’s Spirit is a part of the causal mix in the world, but it does not override all other causes. I believe God’s Spirit works better when people are open to that Spirit through love and prayer, but sometimes love and prayer can’t overcome other forces in the world – at least in the short run. So people suffer and people die untimely deaths. And sometimes even my faith asks me, “why?” and sometimes in faith I scream (well, not literally) at God in anger and frustration and pain. But for me, my faith also asks “Given the way the world is, what kind of people does the world need?” I think the world needs people who are kind and gentle, people who are loving and compassionate, people who can be hopeful and generous. I think the world needs people who can be patient and persistent in these qualities. And for me, God, as I know God in Jesus, is that Presence, that Spirit, that helps me be that kind of person, even when I have a hard time doing that. And for me, it is as I pray and worship that I feel more connected to that Presence, and that I also feel some sense that this same God is with me in my hurt and pain and suffering.

And as I finished sending this e-mail off, I was also aware that my oldest daughter is having surgery on Tuesday – surgery related to the broken hip she suffered at age 11. She is having part of the bone from her good leg removed, so her legs are closer to the same length. At some point, she will need a hip replacement, probably in her thirties. Frustrating and painful things happen in life – personally and socially (war, famine, injustice, oppression) and sometimes I feel like crying, screaming, shouting – and that’s o.k. But more than anything, I want to be one of those people who take responsibility for God's believability in the midst of a hurting world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David