"When Bad Things Happen to Bad People"
A Sunday Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
June 1, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "And God said to Noah, 'I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth." (Genesis 6:13)

Several years ago, a beautiful baby girl was born. The name her young parents chose for her was Valerie. At the time, they couldn't possibly have known what her birth ultimately would portend.

As it was, one day, when she was roughly six months old, Valerie got sick. Her parents only later discovered that Valerie's body temperature that day had risen to dangerously high levels. As it turned out, their precious little baby girl had suffered profound, irreversible brain damage, leaving her severely handicapped, both physically and cognitively. She would never speak, the doctors told the distraught parents, and would require constant 24-hour care.

Then late one night, just shy of her 18th birthday, after a series of stokes and grand mal seizures, Valerie lay in a hospital room surrounded by her grieving, heart-broken parents, and heaved her last breath.

Days later, with her extended family gathered around, a Jewish cantor (her mother was Jewish) sang the solemn Mourner's Kaddish at her gravesite, the traditional tribute to God for the gift of life.

But many of us there that day no doubt were thinking not so much about tribute, but about how a supposedly just and all-powerful God could allow so many terrible things to befall so many good decent people, like this innocent beautiful child.

This common, challenging question, otherwise termed "theodicy," has perplexed religious believers since time immemorial. It is one of the most difficult challenges to faith: how to come to terms with the terrible tragedy of innocent suffering.

But theodicy is not the subject of today's reading from Genesis - quite the contrary. For in the tale of Noah and the flood, the innocent are saved, the righteous redeemed. It is only the guilty and the wicked who are punished. If anything, this ancient story witnesses to the triumph of God's justice over chaos and immorality! Why, then, does the story leave us feeling so uncomfortable, so unsettled?

On the whole, we try to mute the overall significance and power of the flood. We make it into a children's story, with cute animals and benign meanings. Yet if we actually take a clear, hard look at the story and its imagery, of countless people drowning due to God's decree, we are left dumbfounded and not a little put off.

According to Genesis, however, these are not innocent victims trapped in a natural disaster. Rather, we are told that the entire civilization is corrupt and violent. Only Noah and his family are decent people. This is a truly evil culture, an entire nation of sadistic murderers, the Khmer Rouge or the SS of its day.

"So what is the ethical response to the defeat of evil?" asks Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman, pointedly. "Is it not right to feel joy, or at least relief, that the Nazis lost the war? That Slobodan Milosovic was defeated? That those who commit atrocities are punished?"

She goes on to cite the Midrash which says that when the Red Sea closed and swallowed up the pursuing Egyptians, the angels in heaven cheered. God, in response, rebukes them, saying, "How can you cheer when my creatures are dying?"

"But," Litman then argues, "God does not reprove the Hebrews who are dancing and singing with exuberance at their deliverance. After all," she offers, "people are not angels."

She then points out that our discomfort with this story just may have less to do with the story itself, than with what she refers to as "our modern response to it."

"The Torah," she says, referring to Noah and the flood, "relates a fearful epic of evil, punishment, and salvation. By ignoring the most chilling part of the story, we have trivialized and discounted the Torah's moral message."

For while the unjust suffering of the innocent still evokes outrage and pain in most of us, she says, and we wish and hope that the good are rewarded, we actually have become, she says, "uncomfortable with the reverse."

"We know that human evil is complex," she explains, "sometimes as much a sickness as a sin. We are often unwilling to grapple with human cruelty and wrongdoing, to expect justice against those who harm others, because that justice is often very difficult to define. Even God's justice, as in the mighty flood, makes us nervous."

"Contemplating the destruction of an entire civilization is disturbing," she concludes, then adds, "and so it should be."

"Sometimes the beauty of Torah is that it makes us uncomfortable. It forces us to face what our contemporary secular society allows us to avoid."

What is the response of the faithful to evil? When faced squarely, just what do we do with a biblical story that portrays God as one exacting justice? Does this merely portray an older, outdated version of God, representative of the "vengeful" God of the Old Testament, or does it say something important and true about who God is and how God responds to evil?

In the end, our biblical faith does not shield us from having to face tough questions. For biblical faith is, if anything, soberly realistic about life.

So when bad things happen to "bad" people, what does your faith say to you?

Amen.