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   The hymn which we have just sung (“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”) has a story attached to it. In fact, it came to be written as the result of an uncanny experience of its author, William Cowper.

Cowper was prone to fits of depression, and on once occasion he became so depressed that he decided to end it all. He haled a cab and asked the driver to take him to the River Thames, where he intended to drown himself.

As luck (or grace) would have it, there was a pea-soup fog in London that night, and the driver got hopelessly lost. After he had driven around aimlessly for a considerable period of time, Cowper, in frustration, told him to stop the cab and let him out, intending to make his way to the Thames on foot.

What was his amazement when he discovered that the driver had brought him back to his very own doorstep! This extraordinary occurrence put all thoughts of suicide out of his mind and led him instead to write our hymn.

The Book of Job, from which our first reading is taken, is the classic tale of unmerited suffering. Last month I attended the funeral of a young woman whose mother I know. Just two years ago the mother had lost her husband, who had been given the wrong medication. Now she was losing her daughter and would be obliged to look after her three young orphaned grandchildren.

When I went to console her before the funeral, she said bitterly, “I think God hates me.” This is what Job was tempted to believe, and what his wife evidently did believe, when she counseled her husband, “Curse God, and die” (Job 2:9).

Today we are observing the fourth anniversary of the greatest man-made catastophe in American history, just as the country seeks to recover from a terrible natural disaster. Why do these things happen? Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? That was Job’s question, and not long ago a rabbi wrote a best seller entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

A whole branch of theology, called theodicy, was been developed to try to explain God’s mysterious ways. This attempt has been called, ironically, “unscrewing the inscrutable.” I don’t blame people for asking, “Why has this happened to me?” But rather than searching for an explanation, I think our energy would be better directed to finding a response.

One of Luther’s favorite words was trotzdem: “nevertheless” or “in spite of everything.” Life goes on, and it is easier to carry on if we believe, in spite of everything, that God loves us, rather than that God hates us. Some of us have more misfortune in our lives than others, but we must all face that ultimate personal catastrophe, our own death.

The loss of immortality in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) may provide an explanation for why we have to die, but, in the experience of dying, the words of the Orthodox funeral liturgy may be of comfort:

All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

September 11, 2005

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