Why Did This Happen to Me?

A Sermon for Proper 5, Year B
Preached at the St Columba and All Hallows, East York

Sunday, 8 February 2009,
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

One of the first questions that have been submitted for the planned Lent Series seemed to be a little outside the theme of that study. Nonetheless, it is an important question, indeed an age-old question, a question that comes to everyone at some point. However, it is a question that is better dealt with in a homily than in a study series, partly because more people come to Church on Sunday than come to a study series, and partly because this is a question that touches on a person’s faith as a question about worship or history, important as it might be, does not. What is this question? Let me quote you the question exactly as it appears on the file card I received:

Why did this happen to me? (e.g., accident, accidental death, severe illness)—where is God in this?

It is a good thing that the questions are anonymous, for it means that I can teat the question as a general inquiry, rather than the cry of help of someone in distress, and that the treatment can be more abstract, and one can say things that under other circumstances might be less helpful. Or, more bluntly, one doesn’t have to tread quite so carefully.
You will note that I spoke of “treating” the question rather than “answering” the question. For there has never been a simple answer to this question. Not even the Bible offers us a complete answer, even though the question comes up again and again in its pages. In treating this matter, first, I shall make some observations about the question itself; then look at an assumption it seems to contain, and then by dealing with that assumption think about the problem. There will not be enough time to deal with this today. Indeed, it may well be necessary to spread this topic out over the next weeks, and through Lent.
So we begin by examining the question itself, and notice at one that there are two questions here. The first one is fairly simple: Why did this happen to me? Such a question assumes that that things happen for a reason. The moment you say that all sorts of questions come up: do things happen freely? or is everything happening according to a set plan? How does my free will exist with God’s providence? Does the belief that God directs the world to a certain end mean that he controls all events like a puppeteer? If I set off down that road we will never come to an end. Perhaps, though, all we need to say now is that each one of us needs to ponder these questions now: don’t wait for something bad to happen before you start thinking, or you will end up in a worse mess. And don’t just think, read: for thousands of years people have studied these questions and come up with suggestions, and you don’t need to start again from scratch. More importantly, read what wise Christians have said about the problem. I would recommend two books in particular: The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis and The Third Peacock by Robert Farrar Capon (don’t let the title put you off: it is about God and the Problem of Evil). Right now I don’t know where my copies are. If you can’t find these books in your library, go to the Anglican Book Centre and pester them to order them for you.
We will just flag that point lest it distract us. I will assume in the rest of these homilies that in the mystery of this world. events happen because things act according to their natures — rocks fall down, storms rise, men and women are free. I do not know how this all works together under God’s will to come to good; I only trust that it does.
So back to the question. When someone asks “Why did this happen to me?” there is another assumption: either that whatever happened, which for convenience’ sake I’ll call the disaster, has some cause, possibly hidden, in the behaviour of the person it struck or that it was simply undeserved. This is why the classic formulation of the problem is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” and the usual way we all express it is “Why me?” or “What did I do wrong?” here again we could get thrown off track by the question of how far any of us are really good or innocent. This is problematic, to say the least, but it is something each one of us should consider. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “use every man according to his deserts and who’d escape a whipping?” It doesn’t solve the problem, though, since bad things do seem happen to apparently good people.
Back to the main question. How often do we hear someone ask Why me? of their good forthune in life? I have a feeling that while this doesn’t solve the problem, it is good to ask from time to time what one did to deserve the good things of life —or even life itself. And we will come up with the answer, Nothing. I did nothing to deserve the good in my life. I did not chose to be born in Canada in the twentieth century to hardworking and successful parents, and so get a head start in life. I did no more to deserve this than I have done to deserve some bad things that have happened. And right there we cut down the assumption that things happen to us as rewards and penalties. That is a very easy and convenient assumption, and some people have got through life without ever questioning it; and it is clearly written in some places in the Bible but it has the slight disadvantage that it does not seem to be true. Our Lord Jesus teaches the truth in Matthew 5 45, when he commands his disciples to love their enemies, so that they can be like their heavenly Father

for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust

and more bluntly, in Luke 6

for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.

These words cannot be true if there is a regular one-for-one correspondence between our behaviour and the good and bad things that happen to us.
The things that happen to us result from a complex of causes. When we try to examine these causes we find ourselves facing mysteries: many disasters are the result of freedom misused: that is the only real answer when an innocent bystander is gunned down on the street, or war devastates your country; while some famines are caused by natural processes, some are the deliberate result of the choices of human beings in positions of political or economic power. So too are caused violence against and abuse of spouses or children or employees. The blunt answer is that these things happen because human beings choose to do them and the innocent are often hurt. Often their choice is the result of someone else’s choice, as when those who have themselves been abused act out abusively in life. Some people are led to believe that love means control, or that others are here to gratify our desires: some of the most revolting things that happen stem from this. Other disasters —such as accidents on the road or elsewhere might be said to be a step removed from choice, but too often they are the result of someone’s carelessness, in driving, or in failing to keep brakes in good repair, or a myriad of other human acts. Others, such as sickness are harder to understand, and we will come back to this point in a later sermon.
I have to stop here. We have seen, I hope, that the answer to the question, Why did this happen to me? is complex and difficult to answer. If we examine a particular disaster that befalls a particular person, we might come up with suggestions, though that is not very helpful, as Job’s friends found out when they tried to explain his disasters. We will find our way further into the mystery when we turn to the other part of the question, Where is God in this?

Note: This sermon was very kindly received by the parishioners, who made some very interesting comments, including one I always hesitate to make, Why shouldn't this happen to me?