Transforming the Desert
AM Psalm 107:33-43, 108:1-6(7-13) • PM Psalm 33
2 Kings 19:21-36 • 1 Cor. 10:1-13 • Matt. 8:18-27
Today’s Morning Psalm, 107, is a song of Thanksgiving. Even as people go hungry or thirsty or get themselves into trouble for failing to heed God’s law, God is to be praised because “his steadfast love endures forever.” And don’t ask just anybody, says the psalmist. Ask those who have been “redeemed.”
Specifically, from verse 33 to 43, we learn that God creates “deserts” and “salty wastes” for those who have been wicked, but if they turn back to God, He turns around and provides water, lets people sow fruitful land, and keeps their cattle free from disease. God punishes “princes” who have oppressed the needy, and the needy in turn can raise families “like flocks.” The “upright” and the “wise” are advised to “give heed to these things,/ and consider the steadfast love of the LORD.”
Except we know it does not always appear that simple. Bad things happen to good people. Why is it that people still go hungry and thirsty, are still devastated by illness (not to mention the medical bills), and are oppressed by some of those afore-mentioned “princes” while others stand by helplessly. Or indifferently.
In When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner writes, “Virtually every meaningful conversation I have ever had with people on the subject of God and religion has either started with this question or gotten around to it before long” (10). He also writes that although his expectations for a small book from a small press were modest, it became a best-seller, aided in no small part by Christian clergy—even those who might take issue with his theology—who “gave sermons about it, handed it out at hospitals, and created the word of mouth that forced diffident booksellers to find room for it on their bookshelves” (x).
Kushner believes that though God loves us (with that “steadfast love” noted in Psalm 107), he is not powerful enough to prevent all evil. You won’t need an extensive bibliography to imagine that there are people who disagree with Kushner. You may disagree with him, too.
There is, of course, the problem of so-called “original sin” – Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, and we, so the argument goes, have been paying for it ever since. Droughts. Famines. Floods.
And then there’s Covid.
We all probably know friends and loved ones who have been taken from us, and all we can do is ask “why?” One of my heroes, Rachel Held Evans, turned away from her fundamentalist roots nurtured in Alabama and Dayton, Tennessee (site of the Scopes Monkey Trial), in favor of a more progressive, more compassionate Christianity. She freely admitted to still having questions and doubts. I would like to know what questions she had about Covid, but we will never know. She died on May 4, 2019 (a day before I was confirmed at St. Paul’s) from brain swelling after an induced coma to treat an allergic reaction to medication for infection. She left behind a husband and two children. She was thirty-seven.
Rabbi Kushner writes that when he asked the different groups who had lost friends and loved ones in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, they all said that they were able to cope through the strength of community (xi). Perhaps the question is not so much why do bad things happen to good people, as it is what do the rest of us do when we see good people falling victim to bad things?
I have seen on the net variations of the following: if I cannot brighten your day, I will sit with you in the dark. Would it hurt to spend more time sitting—with our friends, with loved ones, with people we don’t even know? How much power do we have, after all, to transform those deserts and salty wastes?
Work Cited:
Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. 20th Anniversary Ed. New York: Schocken Books (1981). 2001.
Written by James Gamble
James Gamble is a second-year student in Education for Ministry and is grateful to be able to meet with fellow students in the library at St. Paul’s on Tuesday nights.