Friday, March 18, 2011

It's easy to be a critic--too easy

There is certainly a lot of room for criticism in our world. I am unhappy that civil marriage is not a civil right for same sex couples. I am unhappy with our country’s policies on trade and immigration. I am unhappy that “enemy combatants” are still being held at Guantanamo.
It would be easy to devote more of my time and energy to criticism. Part of the reason I don’t, is that it’s just too easy.
The 2004 tsunami killed more than 250,000 people in Indonesia alone. In responding to that tragedy, I asked where God was during that disaster. I then devoted several paragraphs to criticizing what I saw as the wrong answers, e.g. God punishing the wicked. But I devoted most of the time to my own answers to the difficult question of why do bad things happen to good people.
I can easily spend more than half of a sermon criticizing the answers of others . What’s difficult is coming up with answers that satisfy me. I have to discipline myself to focus more on my own answers instead of simply criticizing the answers of others.
We are living in a very uncivil and critical time. I think what we need is not more inspired criticism, emotionally satisfying though that may be. What we need are inspired answers, answers to the difficult questions that we are forced to answer by the circumstances of our times.
To paraphrase my colleague Earl Holt, what I am called to do when I deliver a sermon is to pose the questions that life asks of all of us, to answer them the best I can, and to encourage you to do the same. It doesn’t matter if our answers differ. What matters is that we do our best to answer the questions.

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