Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Sermon Reflection || Year C: Seventh Sunday After Epiphany

Welcome back to another sermon reflection. This one didn’t even start out as a sermon, but I realized it had potential after the response from a friend. Let’s talk about it.

Sermon—December February 24th || Year C: Seventh Sunday After Epiphany

Sermon Text

Video

Reflection

For years now, I have had questions about the problem of evil. The question basically goes, “If God is Love and God is omnipotent, then why do bad things happen to good people?” Of course, I’m not alone in asking this question. You’ve probably had similar thoughts yourself, but this question goes back thousands of years. All throughout the Bible in the psalms, prophets, and wisdom literature, people asked this question.

And, unfortunately, there is not much of an answer. Some passages focus on the power of God as if to say, “You are in good hands. It will all work out.” Other passages suggest that the “glory to come” is not worthy to be compared to present suffering.

Due to some opportunities I’ve had in my life here recently, I know that I may be asked this question soon, so I figured I needed to work out an answer for myself just in case. I knew that I couldn’t give a definitive answer, but I felt that I needed to be able to say something. This sermon/ article, both of which can be accessed above, is my attempt at that.

Creative Process

What do you do in the car? Do you listen to the radio? Do you have a binder of CDs? Does your car have bluetooth or an aux chord? Maybe you listen to music or a podcast or news program. You might be a Fox person, or you might listen to NPR. You could listen to sermons from your favorite speakers and thinkers, or you might listen to podcasts on murder mysteries or DND.

When I drive, if I’m not talking on the phone (handsfree most of the time), most of my time is spent in thought. I plan sermons and articles. I think through things I’m dealing with. Sometimes I sing to myself without anything playing on the radio. My mom always told us that boredom was a choice, so we learned to entertain ourselves.

One of the ways I entertain myself in the car is engaging in mock debates with myself. I’ll pose questions, argue both sides, and try to reach reasonable conclusions. I also do this when I’m on walks, taking a shower, or while laying down at night.

This is how I approached the problem of evil.

Over the course of several days during the last week, I kept poking and prodding to find new ways to state my thoughts and frustrations with this subject.

At one point, my opponent asked the question, “Well, if you were God, what would you do?”

That led to me delivering a version of the following, the rest of which can be found in the link above or by listening to my talk.

God needs to become human for a few years to see how bad we’ve got it. If God really is Love, if God really is compassionate, if God really does care, then he would take on flesh, walk a few miles in our shoes, and see what it means to be human.

He would learn what it feels like to lose a best friend. He would feel the pain of losing his father and have to become the man of the house. He would have to feel rejection, hunger, pain, and death.

Then I think he would get it.

Once I said all this, I realized I had articulated something that had been brewing for awhile, but it was the next part that made everything click for me:

Once God really gets going, I bet he’d last three, four years tops.

..,

And why would this happen?

Because humans don’t want evil and suffering to end.

It was this line that struck me as the key to a lot of this. It was the thing missing from the “free will defense” that I had been looking for.

After I ran through this idea that humans don’t want suffering to end for a day or so, I knew I needed to get it into an article, and as I was writing the article, I realized that the lectionary passage for this previous Sunday had something to add to the discussion.

God’s kindness and mercy towards evil and ungrateful men forces us to reframe the question. The question isn’t “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “Why do bad things happen at all?” We can ask this question because we now know what God is like through Jesus.

After writing the article, I sent the “secret draft link,” to my friend Corri, who writes on Substack as well, and she wrote back, “Ok that’s a really good one.” That gave me the confidence to turn what had started out as just an article into my sermon post for the week and the template for my sermon on Sunday.

I do want to make one clarification about the sermon posts: I don’t memorize the script or read the sermon from a manuscript or teleprompter. Instead, I preach through the sermon, and as I preach through it in my head, I create a slideshow, and then I preach off the slides on Sunday.

This may seem like doubling up on the work, but to me it helps clarify my thought process and helps make the sermon flow better. I also don’t feel married to the post I make days earlier, so I don’t mind departing from it here and there.

I’ll see you the next time I feel compelled to make a blog post outlining the creative process of a sermon!