Sermon: Lent 3B

(NB: You can listen to the sermon by clicking here)

I was in my car when I first heard about the earthquake last March. And to be honest, the magnitude of the catastrophe didn’t register with me until much later. The CBC reporter simply announced the quake and the resultant tsunami as if he was reporting the hockey scores. 

It wasn’t until later that when I arrived home and I turned on the news and saw the pictures. The homes and businesses destroyed and the thousands of lives lost penetrated the noise that is usually the nightly news. 

And I had questions. Natural questions for any believer, after seeing or experiencing such devastation. I asked “Where is God in all this? How could God allow this to happen? If God is the creator of heaven and earth, if God put the stars in the sky and the earth on its axis, then why wouldn’t God prevent this from happening?”

Those are important questions. And they have led more people away from faith than any other. And it’s easy to see why. Suffering affects everyone. And when we are on the receiving end of life’s cruelty, we ask where God is, or why God didn’t stop this. Or we ask if God even cares. Or we may ultimately ask, if God is who we say God is, are we lying to ourselves? And those are - good if difficult - questions.

That’s why I have little patience for what some people call...(whole thing here)