Why Do Bad Things Happen?
Luke 13:1-9
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
Cathedral of Hope – Oklahoma City
11 March 2007

Well I had this sermon title picked out as part of our Lenten worship series long before we planned this celebration of my ordination. I chose to leave the title because I thought it was just too funny to have a sermon entitled “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” on a Sunday in which we talked about my entering ministry. I’ve long said that youth ministry is largely about self-deprecatory humour, and this allows me to employ some of that as a pastor.

This year for Lent we have been exploring some key questions of faith, like “What does the cross mean for us?” and “What is sin?” Today’s lectionary texts brought up the problem of evil and suffering. In the Gospel, Jesus talks about what were two recent events for his listeners – Pilate had killed some Galileans and a tower had fallen on some people.

As often happens in such situations, people wonder why tragedy occurs. For instance, after the tsunami I received lots of questions from people struggling to understand. In this particular instance, those around Jesus seem to be suggesting that suffering is a result of human wickedness.

Jesus disagrees with this idea. It is still a common mistake for people to think that because someone has suffered then there must be some sin or wickedness in their life that they are being judged for. However, Jesus rejected this idea, and it is rejected throughout scripture. In fact, the Book of Job belabors arguing the point that suffering is not a sign of sin.

Instead Jesus claims that everyone is on the same footing when it comes to such suffering. Human violence and random occurrences can strike anyone anywhere. Such suffering does not have a purpose or explanation, it just is.

Sorry to be such a bummer on a celebratory day. However, the truth is that these two topics are connected, because as a pastor I intersect with people during the times in their lives when questions such as this are important to them.

I hadn’t been at Rolling Hills very long when we got a call one Sunday afternoon. A few of us were still there for a meeting, and it is odd that anyone answered the phone anyway, since the office wasn’t open. The phone call came from Mary Jane Haley. The message was that her daughter in Oklahoma had died.

I left the meeting and headed over the Mary Jane’s house. Mary Jane was a widow in her late eighties whose husband had been a pastor. She lived with her daughter Mary Ann and had another daughter in Oklahoma with her family. Mary Jane was an old traditionalist. It was clear that she didn’t know what to make of the young minister with new ideas, though I was beginning to win her over. She once said, with a wicked little grin, that she enjoyed going out to lunch with a young man.

When I got to Mary Jane’s house she was deeply troubled. I sat her down and asked what had happened. She had received a call from one of her grandchildren who told her that her daughter had died. They asked Mary Jane to get ahold of Mary Ann and for Mary Ann to call when she got home so they could give her the rest of the information. Mary Jane was confused, not knowing what had happened. I sat with her while we waited for Mary Ann, who soon arrived.

Mary Ann went in to call the family to find out what had happened to her sister. When she got of the phone, she told us. As I held Mary Jane’s hand, she received the news that her daughter had been murdered by the man who had been living with the granddaughter, a man who had been a part of their family for years and was the father of Mary Jane’s great-grandchildren. Needless to say, that experience bonded me and Mary Jane.

Well, there are many ministry stories dealing with personal pain and suffering and the deep questions it raises. In fact, it is one reason I’m in active ministry.

When, after graduate school, I was trying to decide whether to take an academic position or pursue my calling as a minister in a full-time parish position, I had wrestled with the topic for months. When one day while I was in the office of Tim Youmans, the youth minister at First Baptist Shawnee, a couple came in to tell us that their daughter wouldn’t be able to go on the ski trip with us because she had been diagnosed with an eating disorder. As we were talking to them, I thought back. In the previous few weeks one of our girls had been raped and another had had both of her parents arrested for sexually abusing their nieces. In that moment I had an epiphany. Though I loved teaching and felt I made a contribution to people’s lives, in ministry I would have a greater impact on people’s needs.

On March 16 ten years ago I was ordained by the church I had grown up in, the First Baptist Church of Miami, OK. I was a fourth generation member of that church. These were people who had seen me grow up and had affirmed my calling from the earliest age. I was always interested in the religious and the spiritual. As a kid I even enjoyed church business meetings. I was what I affectionately call a “church geek.”

I value the blessings that that congregation gave me, though there are elements of my upbringing within that church that I seriously take issue with now. Overall, however, those people did the best by me that they knew how to do. It really does take a village and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

From the age of five I had felt called to ministry. My mother possesses a drawing I made in first grade of what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was me preaching at a pulpit and my mother sitting on the first pew listening and smiling.

The Rev. Dr. Jerry Field allowed me to preach my first sermon in August of 1988 when I was only fourteen years old. And then he repeatedly asked me to preach. I remember distinctly the most difficult of those early sermons. He asked me to preach for the first time on a Sunday morning on January 20, 1991. This was for a congregation that was routinely over 500. That day ended up being the Sunday after the first Gulf War began.

Seventeen years ago today, on March 11, 1990 First Baptist licensed me to the ministry. It is a step before ordination, when a church recognizes that one is exploring a calling to ministry. It was a great day for me at sixteen years old. I felt it was a great personal accomplishment, setting me on the course of the future I had longed dreamed about.

Then exactly one week later on Sunday, March 18, my father died of his first and only heart attack at the age of forty-one. The conjunction of those two days is forever seared in my memory. For me ministry and suffering have always been intimately connected.

So I preach and teach in a way that I hope will help people deal with the issues of their lives – practical, intellectual, and emotional. I try to organize church business such that the needs of the world are addressed by a vigorous church. I get frustrated when my job seems all about business instead of caring or I have such a long list of things to do that I can’t spend quality time with people.

Because I know how we need church in our lives. In the moments of my suffering I was thankful for the teaching of my Sunday school teachers and the glorious music of our worship services and the loving arms of family friends who would hold me while I cried if I needed that.

In my academic years I deeply explored the topic of evil and suffering. But I always knew that it wasn’t simply an intellectual problem. More importantly it was an experiential problem – real people whose faith was tested by the circumstances of their lives.

What answer did I come to? None. I don’t think there is an answer. I don’t think there is a reason that bad things happen. I think they just do as a fact of the universe.

What role for God then? God cannot provide an escape from our suffering, but I know what God can do.

When Dad died we were in Springfield, Missouri at my aunt and uncle’s on Spring Break. My grandfather drove up and brought us home. When we arrived, our house was filled by the members of my parents’ Sunday school class who had received the news when they got to church. They had been sitting outside our house waiting for us to arrive. Knowing that we would be flooded with condolence calls, they jumped in and cleaned the house. I watched a millionaire wash our windows. They prepared food and got everything ready for us.

They were church for us that day in a way I will never forget. And because the church is the Body of Christ, God incarnate in the world, that’s what God did for us that day.

In the late 90’s I had decided to pursue academia instead of full-time ministry. At the time I was an active church member at Fist Shawnee, coordinating the college ministry among other duties. My home church ordained me because they knew that even if I was teaching, I was still a minister. I think they also knew that God would draw me back into full-time ministry, because they had sensed that calling in me since I was a kid.

God appeared to me in January 2000 in a dramatic way that precipitated my return to parish ministry. Tim Youmans had been at First Shawnee just a few months. We had become good friends. He and Karen had been a blast of fresh air into my life and my religious life. I was becoming disenchanted with church before Tim and bored of my roles leading the college ministry, serving as a deacon, and being on the task force that oversaw the creation of our ministries center, which kept bogging down. But Tim and Karen had rejuvenated me. And I think I helped Tim in a lot of ways. He too needed a friend of like mind while trying to navigate his return to Oklahoma baptist life.

Tim asked me to go as a sponsor on the January youth retreat which was on the weekend of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. I agreed to go, with some reluctance. I had never felt any interest at all in youth ministry. Once, in college, our youth minister back in Miami asked me to do youth stuff and I told him "I'm not good at that. I didn't understand teenagers when I was one, and I definitely don't now.”
There was a party at my house the Friday night we were leaving. My friends laughed about me going on a youth retreat. One of my friends drove me over to the church where we were gathering to get on the bus to go. I sat up front with Tim and Jan Tipton and David James, both were already good friends. We had long been on the same sides of lots of church issues.

When we got going, Tim introduced me to the bus of youth. Though I had been in the church for six years and had been prominent in church leadership roles, I did not know many of the teenagers or them me.

Will Sims was a sophomore and not a member of FBC. He was a Methodist who, along with a bunch of non-FBC, non-baptist kids, came with their friends to our youth group. When Tim introduced me as "Deacon Scott," Will somehow misheard and misunderstood (we still don't know how) and thought my name was "Stevie Deacs." Needless to say, that nickname stuck and there are a group of twentysomethings out there who still call me “Stevie Deacs” or "Deacs" for short.

Little did I know that that nickname was just the beginning. Will wanted to talk to me and ask me questions. Being a philosopher, sometimes people are curious what philosophy is and what you know. He pulled me into conversations with him and the other sophomore guys. Over the course of the weekend we talked and played. They fell in love with Capture the Flag the way I taught it to them.
That weekend I saw in Tim's ministry a youth ministry I had never seen or experienced. He was singing secular songs. He was singing religious songs that were edgy and profound at the same time. He played a video of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The topics we dealt with were radical issues -- racism, economic prejudice, homosexuality. Wow! Could youth ministry really do this?

And those teenagers drew me in. They asked me questions. Frank questions. Serious questions. Silly questions. Deep questions.

And it didn't stop. After that weekend they wanted me to start coming on Wednesday nights. Tim recruited me to lead a series that February on the philosophy of religion, and they packed the room to hear these discussions of the problem of evil, religious pluralism, and the nature of God. Finally they talked me into coming every Wednesday. Then they wanted me to come to their guys' cell group on Sunday nights. So, I joined that. We'd meet for dinner at the Little's house and Rocky Wade would lead the devotional. Then we'd go upstairs and play pool and ping pong and watch Jackass together. But that wasn't enough. They wanted me to teach their Sunday school class, so eventually I resigned as director of the college ministry and became the 9th & 10th grade teacher. Within four months I had a completely different set of roles to fill at church.

Not just these guys, but all the youth, asked me questions. I had early on decided that I would always answer honestly and directly and wouldn't simplify the complex things. They asked about the bible and prayer and theological issues. But they also asked about drugs and drinking and sex and dating and every range of real life topics. And they weren't asking theory. They wanted to know what I had done and what I hadn't. What my views were. And, as promised, I answered even when it wasn't flattering to me to tell the truth.

What happened? They opened up to me. They shared about their struggles with drugs and alcohol. They shared about the sex they were having. They wanted to talk about loneliness. They talked about troubles with their parents. They talked about all the everyday ethical choices they faced. And in those moments I ministered to them and they ministered to me.

God called me back into ministry. God, in this appearance, was named Tim Youmans, Will Sims, Matt Little, Tyler Holland, Adam Shepherd, Aaron Vogel, Jan Tipton, David James, Carrie Dyer, Andrea Collum, Molly McMurry, Allison Cobb, and a list too long to name them all.

In fact it’s a list that reaches back through professors, Sunday school teachers, music ministers, pastors, my parents, and into my forebearers who built the churches I was raised in. My task is simply to do for others what has been done for me.

The church, as the Body of Christ, is God incarnate in this world. It is we who are called to live in such a way that we bring healing and reconciliation to the world.

And that’s probably why I could never give up on this strange, quixotic exercise we call church. It’s why I could never really give up on playing a huge part in the ministry of the church. Because I think the church is our only hope.