IS GOD A SADIST?
A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy
at the Unitarian Universalist of the Emerald Coast, Valparaiso, FL
The original version of this sermon was delivered just after Ivan devastated Pensacola but the title had been announced six weeks earlier. I make no claim to prophecy. It was just a coincidence. I chose the topic because it is a question thinking men and women have asked for millennia. Rabbi Kushner paraphrased it thusly: “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”
The question is being asked by many Florida today as yet another major hurricane moves into the Gulf of Mexico but the question is as old as the human intellect. Some of the most ancient documents available to us tell the story of Job, the most righteous among men who suffered all manner of misfortune nevertheless. The version most of us know comes from the Scriptures of the people, Israel, writings which were later incorporated into the scriptures of the Christian Church. But the story and even the form of that book of Job is much older, perhaps a thousand years older. A similar book called, the Babylonian Theodicy
has "an unnamed sufferer and his friend speak alternately in a cycle of twenty-seven speeches. The sufferer protests his misery, describing the injustice of the world and the unfairness of the gods. His friend attempts to defend the rationality of the world and urges his friend to seek the mercy of the gods. In contrast to Job, however, ‘The Babylonian Theodicy’ ends without any appearance of the deity or narrative resolution." (New Oxford Annotated Bible © 2001)
Like many books in the Bible the Book of Job is a mishmash, a work that has been edited and reedited over centuries. It may have reached its present form as early as 699 before the common era or it may have reached it’s present form only in the fourth century BCE. It has a special place in my heart because during the week before my wedding, than 51 years and four months ago, I was completing an overdue seminary paper on the book of Job. I was trying to reconstruct what the original author intended by removing the layers of pious commentary added much later. If one does that – removes the excrescencies - the conclusion of the book of Job is this – I paraphrase - "It is foolish to try to understand the purposes and motives of the creator and sustainer of the universe. A pious life is no guarantee of good life." Jesus of Nazareth said it even more succinctly: "the rain falls on the just and the unjust."
We know that don’t we! One need only look at the destruction wreaked by Ivan to understand that. Unitarians and Jews and Southern Baptists were wiped out in about the same proportion. Unitarians and Jews and Southern Baptists were spared in about the same proportion. Even if you accept the notion of a God who is the " creator and sustainer of the universe" – which I do not –– it makes no sense whatsoever to expect him, her, or it to favor those who are believers over those who are unbelievers or even those who follow one ethical code over those who follow another.
"He maketh the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust." That was a radical idea in 33 AD as it was in Job’s time and as it is today but let me suggest an even more radical idea. Namely this: It is foolish to believe that there is a "creator and sustainer of the universe." It is foolish to conceive of the universe in anthropomorphic terms. Let me revise that, it is childish to conceive of the universe in anthropomorphic terms like “creator” and “sustainer.”
Nine days ago Gerry and I attended a Sabbath service that a Jewish friend of ours had in his home. In the course of discussion following he pointed out that the name that the descendents of Jacob took – Israel – comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to struggle.” The story of how Jacob got the name Israel is told in the book of Genesis chapter 32, verses 22-33. Let me read it in the New International Version:
That night Jacob got up and took his wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till day break. When the man saw that he could not overpower [Jacob], he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched .... Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied. “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will not longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with man and have overcome: Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replies, “why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, [meaning face of God] saying “It is because I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared.”
Now if you take the bible literally – you probably are in the wrong place this morning – but the story is central to the Jewish way of being religious. Unlike the descendents of Essau, Jacob’s brother, who submit to the will of God, the descendents of Jacob have always struggled with God. One of my favorite songs from Fiddler on the Roof is “If I were a rich man” at the end of which Tevia asks God, “would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” From Job to Tevia, Jews have struggled with God. Muslims have submitted. And Christians? Christians have tried to “Justify the ways of God to man.” I believe the phrase was Milton’s from the beginning of Paradise Lost. Christians have, at least since Paul tried to “Justify the ways of God to man.” And they tend to use the same arguments that Job’s supposed friends used – and they don’t work. Despite the authors of the “Left Behind” novels and now movie – there is no “vast eternal plan.” Planning is a characteristic of human beings. The Universe isn’t planned. It just is.
It is childish to try to "Justify the ways of God to man." if by God you mean “The Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. We can usefully try to understand how the Universe is put together – to tease out the hidden links between cause and effect – today we have a powerful tool to do that – it’s called the scientific method. That method in three hundred years has given us an understanding of the "how" of the Universe that exceeds the understanding of Job ten thousand if not a billion fold.
It is my belief that nothing can answer the question “why do bad things happen to good people We might eventually know why Ivan came ashore near Pensacola and why Katrina came ashore near New Orleans. Maybe Meteorologists can be more precise in predicting landfall, but that will not the answer to the "why me?" and that’s the question so many are asking today. They are the center of their universe and they can’t abide the possibility that the universe is indifferent to individuals and perhaps even species. They can’t get used to the idea that the Universe doesn’t give a damn.
One cruel response to that question, “Why me?” is, "Why not you? What makes you special?" I would not make that reply to someone who has lost everything or even something significant to them. I could only say your house happened to be in the path of an embedded tornado or your house happened to be in the path of a storm surge. There is no answer to why in anthropomorphic terms. "The Universe makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust." That’s just the way it is.
Few of us human beings can give up the notion of some kind of ruling force that is responsive to petition. Few of us human beings can give up theism: the notion that somehow by prayer or ritual or good works or belief one can influence events. Few can give up the notion of an all powerful God who can be bribed or appeased.
I am one of them. That doesn’t make me superior or brilliant. It’s just what I believe on the basis of long inexperience. I am a non-theist.
Now, there are as many kinds of non theists as there are kinds of theists. My kind of non theism, I call humanism. My focus is first and foremost on human beings. "The proper study of mankind is man" said Alexander Pope 250 years ago. I believe that. I stand in awe of the models of the creation and structure of the universe over time that physicists and astronomers paint, but the nature of a newborn child or a centenarian is of more interest to me than the origin of Species or of Galaxies. Collections of atoms are of less interest to me than collections of people. How we humans respond during and after a hurricane is more important to me than why hurricanes develop and move. The "proper study of mankind" is a never ending and delightful task.
One of the things I have learned in my study of men and women and children is that we seem to be ethical creatures. By that I do not mean we all behave well but that in every culture there is a set of standards to which individuals who belong to that culture are expected to adhere.
Many view their own set of values as somehow universal and attempt to impose them on others. Historically there were few such universals But some universals are emerging as human kind becomes – thanks to instant global intercommunication – more nearly one comminity. Universal ethical plrinciples seem to be emerging. Thomas Jefferson tried to enunciate some of them as they evolved within the English speaking world and Lafayette and others later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen at the beginning of the French Revolution. Those principles were were first given expression on a global scale in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose first article begins “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The values incorporated in that document reflect the growing humanization of man - and my retention of gender specific language is not accidental. Think about it. I repeat. "The values incorporated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflect the growing humanization of man." Even the Vatican has acknowledged that the "feminine values" need to be more honored in their church and in society as a whole.
I can offer you no great hope that we will be spared another devastating hurricane. Those matters are beyond human influence. It is good, painful but good, to be reminded of that fact occasionally. But I can offer you hope that in your lifetime, if you but look beyond the headlines, you will see a growing expansion of the "community of concern" as more and more cultures acknowledge their common human heritage and future on this planet.
We all exist within a framework of possibilities; for some the framework is like a prison cell. For others the framework is like a great network of highways but none of us is all powerful, all knowing or all beneficent. And there is no God in charge of things who is "all powerful, all knowing, all
beneficent." To believe so is to think like a child and we are not children.
Is God a Sadist? Of course not. Sadism is an all too common human trait. Is God all loving? Of course not. That is an all too rare human aspiration. There is no answer to Job’s question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" There is no answer that is within the framework of a childish view of the universe but if we undertake to understand our fellow human beings, we may find an answer. Non Theistic thinkers like Gautama Siddartha, the Buddha and his followers offer many suggestions. As Shirley Jackson Denham reminds us, "Even to question truly [meaning honestly] , is an answer."
I believe that the universe is not inimical to the realization of the human aspiration to a peaceful global community: a future world were retaliation wilol be as unthinkable as cannibalism is today.
Universalist Poet Edwin Markham said it well over a century ago. Please turn to number 312 in your hymnals. I’ll give you a few moments to read than ask you, if you agree with Markham as I do, join me in his stirring, secular humanist affirmation.
Here on the common human way
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To mould and make New Edens.
Ours the task sublime
To build eternity in time.
We need no other stones to build
The temple of the unfulfilled –
No other ivory for the doors –
No other marble for the floors –
No other cedar for the beam and dome
Of our imortal dream.