Pasadena Presbyterian Church
Sermon Text
Sunday, January 20, 2008

"The Silence of God"
Preached by Dr. Mark Smutny

Scripture Readings:

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry. 2 He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. 3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD. 4 Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods. 5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be more than can be counted. 6 Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. 7 Then I said, "Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. 8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart." 9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. 10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation. 11 Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever. 
                                                                            -Psalm 40:1-11

It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him. 26 The inscription of the charge against him read, "The King of the Jews." 27 And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. 28 29 Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!" 31 In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. 32 Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe." Those who were crucified with him also taunted him. 33 When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 34 At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"   
                                                                                - Mark 15:25-34

There are people who are gifted with the kind of faith that never wavers and apparently is always strong.  They have a kind of assurance in the nearness of God in their lives that is always steady regardless of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  For such people, God is never detached, but always personal, immediate and intimate.  I admire such people.  I marvel at them. I even wish it could be the same for me—but that’s not the way it is.  Although I think of my faith as deep and believe that God is present in my life, even when I do not or cannot perceive God’s presence, I do contend periodically with what I perceive as the silence of God—the absence of God.

A few Sundays ago during the first session of the class “Great Themes of the Bible” currently underway, a member of the class raised a very important issue while we were discussing the theme, “The Presence of God.”  The class member raised the question of what I thought about the news that had been released last summer about Mother Theresa’s crisis of faith.  We’d been discussing the notion imbedded throughout the scriptural witness that God is engaged with humanity, God does not abandon humanity even when we are disobedient, even when we wander, suffer or are dying. God is present, providing direction, comfort, healing, and life.  The scriptural witness is clear.  The God of the Bible is present, personal, and profoundly engaged in human life.  From the story of creation, through the captivity and release of the Hebrews, through the prophets, through the person of Jesus, God is present—God Immanuel—God is with us.

So what did I think about Mother Theresa, this woman who has been held up for decades as a global beacon of Christian faith and charity, what did I think of her own struggle with the silence of God?  In 1979, Mother Theresa went to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the world’s most notable expression of gratitude for a life filled with purpose.  In her acceptance speech she said, “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,’” since in dying on a cross, God had made himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one.”  “Jesus’ hunger,” she said, is “what you and I must find” and alleviate.  She said “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere—“Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile we receive.”[1] 

Yet three months earlier in 1979, in a letter to her spiritual confidant, The Reverend Michael van der Peet, that was only made public in August of last year, she wrote in a very different, weary tone, of an absent, silent Christ, “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she told Van der Peet. “But as for me, the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear—the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak—I want you to pray for me.”

These two statements, one very public, typical of the woman the world thought it knew, whose faith and deep connection to God were the wellsprings of remarkable deeds of compassion and self-sacrifice; the other intensely private, disclosing the broken humanity and arid soul of one whose God had gone silent.  What did I think of the dissonance between Mother Theresa’s outward demeanor of such deep faithfulness that she inspired millions, maybe billions by her example, and the inner tortured soul of a woman whose God had gone silent?

My first vivid experience with the silence of God occurred over thirty years ago while enrolled in a semester-abroad program in Oxford, England.  While overseas I received word from my parents that my favorite uncle, Keith, had died after a two-year, horrendous struggle with emphysema where every day was a struggle for breath.  His death was not unexpected.  As we sometimes say, it was a blessing.  Yet cut off from family by an ocean, it was hard to grieve alone.  Then two weeks later, my mother called again and broke the news that Keith’s son, Terry, had died at the age of thirty-four.  A small, inoperable cyst at the base of his brain, the size of a fingernail, had been his undoing.  He left behind two daughters, seven and four, and a wife, Joyce.  Terry had been six-four, a brilliant engineer, a gentle giant, a compassionate soul, and a man of faith. 

Separated from loved ones by thousands of miles, I heard my mother’s breaking voice tell me that Terry was dead—two deaths in two weeks—one of them utterly undecipherable.  The compounding of grief upon grief hit me hard.  I hung up and ran outside to find a church where I could hurl my intense grief and anger against a God who would permit this tragedy to happen. How could this be the will of God?  How could God be a God of love and permit this to happen?  I came to the door of an Anglican church and pounded on it.  The door was locked, the church empty.  No one answered.  There was only silence.  Even God was silent, or so I thought.  I yelled at and cursed the God who seemed so distant, so silent, so absent.  I quarreled with God for months until I was able to believe again.  A few years later, I was ordained a minister of Word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church. 

Along the way, I read a sermon by William Sloan Coffin called “My Son Beat Me to the Grave”[2] delivered to Riverside Church in New York City ten days after his son was killed in a horrible car accident in Boston.  In the sermon the anguished father discusses his reaction to this terrible experience, saying that people who frequently try to comfort him with the Christian cliché, “It is the will of God.”  “The hell it is,” Coffin thundered.  “When my boy was killed, God was the first who cried.”

 He went on to say in his raw, powerful sermon, “For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels.  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex died; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”

For me, somehow the affirmation of God’s presence, God’s breaking heart in the midst of suffering, even in the face of God’s apparent silence, was of comfort—and I fixed my destiny to it.  As Coffin said, “The reality of grief is the absence of God — ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  The reality of grief is the solitude of pain, the feeling that your heart is in pieces, your mind's a blank.  That's why immediately after such a tragedy people must come to your rescue, people who only want to hold your hand, not to quote anybody or even say anything, people who simply bring food and flowers — the basics of beauty and life.”  They mediate the presence of God even when you can’t tell God is present until you can believe again.

So what do I think about Mother Theresa’s spiritual crisis and her experience of the silence of God?  First, I identify with her.  It’s very clear from her writings that her crisis of faith is directly related to her daily encounter with unimaginable suffering.  I cannot imagine anyone not struggling with the dissonance between a God of love and the realties of systemic suffering in the holocausts of our world, legion as they are.  I identify with her and I honor her.

I honor her because she demonstrated such courage to go on living, to go on loving, to treat each poor and dying soul with exquisite care even when God seemed silent to her.  She acted as though she believed, even when she didn’t believe.

The second response is that I identify with Jesus because he truly knows what it is like to be human.  After all, it is he that utters the words at his last “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  His worst moment was the utter silence of God, the God who would not act; the God who was not there, the God who could have uttered a single word of comfort to our dying Savior, but did not.  The only voice at the end was his own screaming, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” an unanswered question at the sky.

I identify with Jesus. I side with him.  I figure that if every believer has to wrestle with the silence of God, even those who insist they never do or never will, the best ally we could possibly have is Jesus who himself suffered in the face of the silence of God.  Jesus received no answer on the cross.  And at times, neither do we: when grief is deep, when suffering and evil are unimaginable, when the skies are silent and no answer seems forthcoming.

Yet, the silence of God is broken in Jesus, himself. Christ speaks not from some safe haven, immune from human suffering, but from the very heart of it.  He engages it.  He immerses himself in it.  He endures all that we endure until his very last moment when he howls to the heavens the protest cry of billions, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It is the very forsakenness of Christ on the cross that reveals how God is present.  God is present in suffering, struggling along with the despised and rejected people of the world, those whose lot in life is to be ignored, overlooked, and humiliated.  It is God who is protesting; protesting the pain, the grief, the suffering—there is no acquiescence to evil, but only a resolve to work again and again on behalf of the suffering with determination, courage, and even joy.

My friends, I have come to believe that the divide between believers and non-believers is not as stark or real as many think.  Even, or perhaps especially, the most truly religious people today have their dark night of the soul.  And there are many skeptics who harbor gnawing doubts about the validity of their skepticism. 

I have come to believe that Jesus’ agonizing cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is maybe the most important verse in the Bible and certainly the most decisive moment in Jesus’ life.  Our faith teaches that God in Jesus of Nazareth shared the most racking pain and anguishing suffering that human beings can know, including death itself, then he also must have felt abandoned by God.  He must have felt, in his own way, that he lost his faith.  How can God feel abandoned by God?  Just because it doesn’t make perfect sense doesn’t mean it’s not true.  In the mystery of how God became fully present, fully human, God also wrestled with the silence of God.