Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 13, 2003

[The following is a transcript, more or less word for word, of a sermon I gave without a text on Sunday, July 13, 2003. The occasion for this sermon was the sudden and tragic death at age 55 of a member of our church family, Ken Simon together with other events mentioned in the sermon. I had planned on preaching something else that day but chose instead to deliver these impromptu remarks on the relationship of the faith to the trials and tragedies that inevitably come our way as part of our mortal, earthly life.]

I, and we, are currently dealing with three things that raise for me, and for us, the profoundest mystery that we deal with as humans, the mystery of life and death. Not only do we grieve the loss in the Simon family that we have all suffered, but our friend, our brother, Larry Vlasuk, is in the hospital struggling to recover from the effects of a stroke that has affected his left side. He struggles not only in body but in spirit as he seeks to come to terms with that loss of function that may or may not return. This month also marks the one year anniversary of the death of my wife Francie. It has been a difficult month for me.

Sometimes, when we are faced with these kinds of losses, whether they are the death of a loved one, whether they are a loss of some of our own abilities, the loss of a part of who we have been so that we are faced with learning how to be all over again, we want to ask why. I have heard people in these situations say "What did I do that this happened to me?" And if there is one thing that I want you to know, to take from the faith that we share, it is that things don’t work that way. We don’t do anything to deserve these kinds of losses. We will experience losses in our lives, and we will come ourselves to the end of our lives, no matter how good we are, no matter how strong our faith is, no matter how hard we pray. It is part of the human condition. It is what is means to be mortal, and God created us all mortal. That is to say: God is God, and we are not. And so I think perhaps the most profound disservice that the Christian faith has done is to spread the idea that somehow when bad things happen it is a punishment for sin, and that if we are sufficiently sinless we won’t die. It’s not true. It’s simply not true.

And so we want to ask: If the faith, if our faith, if our prayers, if our efforts to lead good lives, don’t stop bad things from happening to us and even worse to our loved ones, what good are they? Why not give it all up? Well, for me the answer is that because as difficult as living with that kind of loss is, I can’t imagine doing it without faith. The moment that my wife died, I immediately wished that I had my robe and stole at home with me, because I wanted more than anything else to wrap myself in the symbols of the faith. All I had was this cross I’m wearing, a gift from my wife. So I put it on. It helped.

The faith does not make hard things easy, but it does make hard things possible. It makes hard things possible because what the faith is about is not God keeping bad things from happening to us. It is about our knowing and trusting that when those bad things happen, God does not leave us alone. God hurts with us, God grieves with us, and God holds us in our pain, in our grief. God lifts us up and gets us through. And that knowledge in faith that God never leaves us, never, no matter what, enables us to face the losses that come our way and even our own deaths with at least some sense of peace and of hope because we know, as Paul says at Romans 8:38, that not even death will separate us from the love God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That is what the faith is about.

There are so many of our brothers and sisters who have been led astray by false teachers and a false doctrine that says "Believe hard enough, pray hard enough, live by the right rules, and these things won’t happen." It’s not true. And we need to spread the word that it’s not true because so often when bad things do happen people who understand the faith that way lose their faith. Then it’s not there to hold them and support them and lift them up. And that’s a tragedy. And so I want all of you to know that the love of God never fails us, even though it does not stop bad things from happening and even though we are mortal. It doesn’t fail us, because we are always wrapped in the arms of God’s love, in this life and beyond this life. That’s the Good News. Thanks be to God.