Sighs of God

Romans 8:26-39

At first go-through, the words of this passage sound tame and sweet. Nothing can separate us from God. All things work for good. They sound like benign platitudes: It’s all okay, This happened for a reason, It’s all a part of God’s plan. Oftentimes, these well-meant words, are empty. A baby just died and that’s God’s plan? Yet another person has been diagnosed with cancer and we’re supposed to accept that “all things work for good”? A lot of things are down right awful and unacceptable.

For people of faith, the concept of theodicy is an important one. Theodicy is a relatively new term for me it’s a “seminary” word, so don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize it yet. It’s the word used to talk about God’s role and action in relation to suffering. It’s Greek: Theo: for God, dicy: meaning justice. God’s justice. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? How can God allow suffering? The question of whether or not God causes illness or disaster or healing and blessing are all issues of theodicy

Last summer, I worked as a chaplain in a hospital in Atlanta. I spoke to a very religious man one evening in the hospital lobby. He told me how his wife was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. To my efforts of sympathy he said “oh well, she had it coming.” He seemed like a loving, concerned husband. Why was he pleased with his wife’s suffering? He continued to explain that he and his wife worked as evangelists, they were traveling preachers and his wife had not been living up to her full potential. He had known this for quite some time, and this stroke was God’s way of giving his wife the wake-up call that she needed.

Unfortunately, when we try to figure out where God is in our sufferings, sometimes this is the answer that we get. God is trying to tell us something, trying to wake us or scare us or elicit some sort of desirable response out of us miserable creatures. We know that we are frequently deaf to God’s voice and we think God must be like an impatient two year old who suddenly has to throw something at our head to get our attention. Or God is the abusive partner who chooses to use physical violence to “get the point across.” Or God is a teacher who makes us go through trials to learn the hard way.

Friends, this is not a faithful portrayal of God. Sometimes, we’re just wrong. We can’t look at natural, national, and personal disasters and say “well, they had it coming.”

But what do we do with God? God has to be in this mess somewhere and if not causing it, then what is God doing? Are we just on our own, hugging our free will tightly to our chests?

In Romans 8, Paul tries to be comforting, but slips in a few places. Toward the end of the scripture, he quotes Psalm 44. In this passage, the Israelites lament that they are being killed like sheep for the slaughter for God’s sake. And Paul says, that even in these situations, we are not separated form God. The problem, though, is that Psalm 44 actually places God to blame. The Israelites aren’t just being killed because of God, instead, they are being killed BY God. God is handing them over to their enemies. God is wielding the sword against them. They aren’t worried about being too far away from God, instead, they are feeling too close to God and to God’s sword.

Paul’s message, is that even in the midst of all the terrible things we can imagine, God is with us. Indeed, in Jesus, we have Emmanuel: “God with us.” Nothing we can do, nothing that can happen, can put distance between us and God. No matter what, God is with us and will never leave us.

Paul also points to Jesus’ death as an example of the depth of the gifts that God will give us. This image is also mixed. Like the slaughter of the Israelites, Jesus’ death is also portrayed as God’s divine action. In some interpretations, God needs the death of Jesus to appease a blood sacrifice. In order for us to get to the resurrection, we need death first. But does that mean that God needed Jesus’ death for the sake of that death? It helps to remember that Jesus faced his death willingly. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but he didn’t see any alternative. Remember, too, that Jesus is also God. They are one and the same being. The cross is what happened to Jesus, when he lived his crazy, radical life, and the powers that be were threatened. The divine met humanity and humanity sentenced it to death.

On the cross, instead of an abusive God, we see God in the midst of suffering—deep down in the lowest point of history . .
As Christians, this is our big fat paradox: a loving God who allows the death of Christ.

A cruel God would have left Jesus on the cross, end of story. That would be the lesson, life is hard and in the end you die. But God doesn’t stop there, and the cross is not the point of the story. The point is 3 days later. The point is the resurrection, the eternal life and union with God. God watches that violence with us, and then works to redeem it in the resurrection. In death, we cannot be separated from God.

Theologian Paul Tillich writes that “Faith in divine Providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence . . . that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. . . that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted.” (The Shaking of the Foundations)

When we look at our lives, at the way things happen, we take the events, and sort them out into the patterns of our lives. We weave them until we have a story of what has happened and how we got here. If anything had been different, this current moment might not exist. And how you feel about the present, will shape how you interpret that path. The bumps may become necessarily, character building teaching moments. But if you’re in a rough place, then those times may still be the cause of your downfall.


If the holy spirit comes in and expresses sighs too deep for words, then God suffers with us. God sighs when we are distressed. God also wishes for a better world.
The other hospital story I’ll share today was that of a father and his two young adult children. The children had had to make the difficult decision of taking their unconscious father off of life support. I stood with them in the room, as the machines were turned off, and waited for a couple of hours, as their father breathed his last ragged breaths. We waited, in the holy space of near death, agonizing, terrible, devastating death. As this brother and sister said goodbye to their last living parent, the spirit of God was in that room. It was not the spirit of the angel of death or the grim reaper anxiously awaiting its prey. It was not that of a God who selfishly needed this man to come live in heaven. It was of God, who mourned with those children who would never again be hugged by their dad.

The same way, in Christ’s death, God was not pleased. God cried that day too. God was happy on Easter. But that does not make suffering pleasing. God does not delight in our suffering and death.

God is present in the tears and the sighs. When we are so helpless that our mouths cannot form a prayer, that is when the Holy Spirit prays for us. God shares our sorrow and gives us comfort.

The point of the resurrection, is that God turned suffering into a thing of beauty and wonder and amazement. God didn’t require a payment in blood, but God took the raw material of a bloody death, and gave us a living savior.

God doesn’t sit down and map out a messy pattern to our lives.
Instead, god has a lot of mess to sort out and weave into a pattern. Like a woman gathering her skirts to sit down to her weaving, weary and heavy, with the toil of the world and the sadness of her task. God pulls out our broken strands, smoothes them, and lovingly weaves them together into a magnificent tapestry. Without the blood and tears, the artwork would not be as beautiful.