The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

There was the Boston bombing, and the explosion at the Waco fertiliser plant, and the earthquake in China and the collapsed factory in Bangladesh, and the ongoing horror of the conflict in Syria and the sheer quantity of human misery in the refugee camps – and all this was part of just one week’s News and sometimes I wonder if I might not be a little happier if I just stopped listening to the Today programme before leaving the Vicarage each morning.
‘Mourning and crying and pain will be no more,’ – says our reading from the book of Revelation – a reading often used at funerals – especially funerals where the circumstances of death are a particular cause of grief. But why, we frequently ask, do we live in a world where such things happen, where there is so much mourning and crying and pain? How can we go on believing in God when such things happen? And some of you have asked, why can we not have more sermons about challenges like the challenge of suffering?
So here is a sermon on that subject, but before I try to preach it, I have to issue a health warning – I would be very surprised if you were to feel any better at the end of this sermon; you will not go away feeling – ‘The Vicar really cracked that one’. Of course, like all preachers, I have had to read books about the problem of evil and suffering – and some of them are very clever, well argued books of theology. And yet by the end I still feel unsatisfied, I still wish there was something else that could be said.
And I think this problem is significant for all of us even if we haven’t read lots of books of theology. We will never, I suspect, hear a sermon or read a book which gives us a sense that our faith is now invulnerable to the problem of evil and suffering. We will go on asking how a good God can create or allow a world in which such suffering is possible. We will ask why he doesn’t intervene to stop it.  We will wonder how we can go on believing in God in the face of such mourning and crying and pain. So rather than trying to preach a sermon which is bound to fail, I want to suggest that there can be no answer to the problem of evil. Our desire for such an answer, though understandable, may in fact be misguided.
So to begin, it’s worth asking who is this desired answer to the problem of evil meant to be for? It is not obvious that such an answer would be of much help to the Syrian refugee or the wounded victim of a terrorist attack or a mother whose child has disappeared. They need a different kind of help. Of course in certain circumstances someone who has, for example, just been told that they have three months to live will say, ‘Why me?’ And that is an understandable reaction to shock. But behind such a question is the implication that something unfair has happened. I don’t deserve it. But could anyone deserve such a diagnosis? The world patently doesn’t work like that. In fact how could there possibly be a world in which suffering was finely calibrated as a punishment for bad behaviour? You get a cold for telling a small lie, but you get cancer because .. well because of what? So, ‘Why me?’ is a natural emotional response but it’s not a question that can have or ought to have an answer.
Of course we would like to have something to say in reaction to someone’s suffering. And yet it is usually the case that a confident, well explained answer doesn’t help. ‘God wanted another star in heaven’, doesn’t help a bereaved parent, nor does more sophisticated reassurance. Perhaps these answers are all in their way designed to help us feel better, rather than the person we are trying to help. And yet what we have to accept is that there is no answer which can somehow shelter us from the fact of  someone else’s suffering.
And yet in the privacy of our own thoughts – the tragedies in the daily round up of ‘news’ can leave us contemplating the world with something like despair. This is where we want answers for ourselves and not for someone else. And yet curiously some people seem to want such answers more desperately than others. You can never predict who is going to lose their faith because of the problem of evil. Some people who have terrible experiences go on believing. Others who lead quite fortunate, comfortable lives, nevertheless find they cannot go on believing. And it is not the case by any means that faith in the face of tragedy is an irrational clinging to a safety blanket.  Nor is the abandonment of faith necessarily an act of heroic rationalism.
And if we do try to produce some answers to the problem of suffering what hidden effect might they have? Such answers often try to show that things are not as bad as they seem; or they claim a knowledge of God which is more than a human being can possibly know. And sometimes the answer simply makes God out to be like a supremely sympathetic human being, telling us that he knows just how we feel. But being told by someone that they know just how we feel is never an answer to despair. Perhaps in the end all answers to the problem of evil may in fact be a way of avoiding forms of mourning and crying and pain to which there is as far as we can see no healing in this life. So perhaps we should be honest when challenged by someone who asks us how we can believe in God in the face of this world’s tragedies; we should say that we have no answer and anyway answers don’t help. The question is the wrong one. The questions should be: how humanely can I face tragedy and not despair? And how is it possible to come through tragedy and hold on to my humanity however wounded it may have become? How do I show love to the one who suffers in all their difference? How do I show love and not run away? How do I show love and not try to impose explanations or the perspectives of my own feelings? How do I listen to your pain and the pain of those I shall never know either in the past or the present?
And as Rowan Williams has suggested there is here a struggle to love and know the other person, which is just a little like our struggle to love and know God. In the end God is only to be known by a contemplative listening which does not seek to make God like me, or to reduce God to a doctrine or an explanation. And it may be that in struggling to listen to my suffering neighbour I come closer to God and in struggling to listen to God I will come closer to my suffering neighbour. 
A large element of this sermon was prompted by Rowan Williams’ essay, ‘Redeeming sorrows: Marilyn McCord Adams and the defeat of evil’ found in ‘Wrestling with Angels; published in 2007