Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Existential Faith amid the Tragic Sense of Life

Luke 15

March 30, 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Our ringing gospel of love divine all loves excelling, in the parable and figure of the Prodigal Son, a parable that in some ways needs no interpretation for the story renders its own, yet comes toward us in the midst of sorrow, of loss, of pain, of worry.  It is heartening to have this Lukan love story, a little light for the way forward, especially since we are in such distress, just now.  And you have known trouble.  Trouble leads to faith. 

A few years ago, it was in Lent, a particular story came around to haunt the season, the story of Joan Humphrey. She grew up on a farm in Kansas. She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey. The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops. Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade. She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High School. She also was an officer in her school’s chapter of ‘Future Homemakers of America’. She graduated second in her class. A class of 48. Here is the caption under her yearbook picture: “keen sense, common sense, no room for nonsense”. *

Joan then attended Wheaton College, because her pastor was a graduate. Later on, she entered law school at Northwestern University. Her classmates there teased her about her slow prairie speech. They also envied her lack of stress over exams. In law school she met a boy named Michael. They worked summer jobs on behalf of the poor: disability benefits, evictions, food stamps.

Joan and Michael were married in 1975. He wore a white suit. She wore daisies in her hair, and a white Moroccan caftan.

Joan and Michael then began to raise their own family of four daughters. Every morning, he brewed coffee. He pre-heated her cup with boiling water, filled it with coffee, and carried it to the bed where together they could talk about the day to come.

Joan’s life had two paradigms, professional woman and devoted mother. She cooked dinner every night. She established a daycare center in the courthouse where she worked. She packed lunches for four daughters, making sure to use Tropicana orange juice to limit the girls’ sugar intake.  We remember her during Women’s History Month right now.

The newspaper quoted Joan as saying, “I wanted my family to be a family that shared their food, and the mom could cook like my mom could cook.” Joan’s temperament and industry brought her, over some years, to the federal bench. She became a judge in the US District Court in Chicago. It was the culmination of a fine career, a position that had eluded her on other occasions. But, after a few years, one of her rulings angered white supremacists. One of these was convicted of plotting to have her killed. They did not succeed. Yet two years later, Joan’s husband Michael and her mother, both on crutches, were murdered. They were both shot in the head and chest with .22 caliber bullets.

The season of Lent, and its completion in the cross, every year, brings us to the precipice of a most disturbing question. At some point, we grow up or wake up enough to ask the question that Joan’s daughter Meg asked her that week. “Mom, why is the world so evil?” And Holy Week—with its fleeting laud and honor, its temple conflict, its night of betrayal, its day of trial, its hour of tragedy, and its subsequent, lasting silence—brings us right to this matter of evil. Why? Why Mom? Why is the world so shot through with evil—sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness?

After 300 of his students died in a plane crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, Chancellor Melvin Eggers of Syracuse University brought the question, via a newspaper interview, to his religious leadership at Hendrick’s Chapel. I will never forget his interview, the pain of it, the grief in it, the troubled angst of it, which never left him over the few remaining years of his life. It broke his big heart.

After 3000 died on 9/11, 2001, that next Friday, 9/14/01, hundreds of people filled our sanctuaries, without invitation or liturgical preparation. Here they were, truly hunting for the language and heart with which to assess the same question. What in the world is wrong with this world?

After 300,000 were lost in December on the day after Christmas, 2004, out of a numbed and fogged stupor, there gradually emerged a serious question, a question about bearing, perspective, and, ultimately, about faith. What kind of world is this? Who is the God who has breathed life into such a place? “Mom, why is the world so evil?”

After the market collapsed in 2008, and graduates for the following years worked three jobs each, while carrying student loans, the question, sometimes uttered, but often silent behind the eyes and tears, and the more bitter for that, was the same: What is wrong with this world?

In 2020, corona virus caught us up again in the depth of the meaning of Lent.  Think back five years. January 11, first death in China; February 5, a cruise ship, Diamond Princess, quarantined in Japan; February 23, Italian cases go from 5 to 150; February 29, the first US death, in Seattle ; March 15, the CDC warns against gatherings of more than 50; March 26, The United States officially became the country hardest hit by the pandemic , with at least 81,321 confirmed infections and more than 1,000 deaths; March 30, this week, five years ago, 265 million Americans told to stay home.  In COVID, more than 7 million deaths worldwide, more than 1 million in this country, and more than 3 dozen in this Marsh Chapel community of faith.

And our question, the Lenten one: what is wrong with this world? We have been here before. The same reckoning can arrive in quieter times, in a far more quotidian fashion. You alone, you in social distance, you with some quiet on your hands, might ponder the quotidian sense of tragedy, that upon which our 2025 Lenten interlocutor, Miguel de Unamuno, meditated day and night, day and night.  Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida…

In our time, people of conscience are truly alive, suddenly and earnestly alive, to this question, which is, again, the whole content of Lent, leading to the cross. It is a question that, in the main, is a matter of grief, trouble, and loss. Which is, of course, the whole content of the church’s experience and memory in Lent. It is a matter of deep, abiding grief to face the gone-wrongness in life. And, while we have tried, in our churches, to feed the hunger in this question, to slake the thirst in this question, to provide compelling responses to this question, to a great degree, across the land, and over long time, we have failed. And…failure is the whole content of Lent. It is a grief to this preacher that our pulpits, nation wide, have thus far failed to meet the grief and loss and especially fear that pervade our time like a mist in London along Aldersgate Street, like an invisible unholy ghost, just on the edge of our awareness. And in this season, we shall need to evoke Martin Neimoller, the Barmen Declaration, and Karl Barth.

We are living in a time that is like a morning when dawn just will not come. Unlike Unamuno, we have not been able robustly and preparedly and piercingly to remember, to call to mind our biblical, Christian, tragic sense of life, when most we have needed it.

To hear Job on the ash heap: “What is my crime?”; and Second Isaiah: “A man of sorrow, acquainted with grief”; and Jeremiah’s lamentations; and the tears of David, and “all flesh is grass”; to evoke Ecclesiastes, and “all the rivers run to the sea”; “the race is not always to the swift….but time and chance happen to them all”; and the affliction of Paul, “persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed”; and truest of all Jesus himself, “if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me”. But it did not.  And: ELI ELI LAMA SABACTHANI.

You cannot read all of a commentary on Job the night of 9/11. It has to be read ahead. You cannot do all of a seminary course on Jeremiah the night after Tsunami. It has to be read ahead. You cannot absorb all that Paul says in Galatians, the afternoon of Lockerbie. It has to be read earlier. In wrestling we used to make weight, trying to lose 5 pounds in two hours by jogging in sweat suits through the school showers. It doesn’t work. Bodily life, Christian life, does not easily allow such last minute maneuvers. It takes a lifetime of Lenten preparations.

This morning, we try again, as we move quietly or not so quietly through Lent: Jesus meets us today along this very road of tragedy in life: of evil, grief, loss, estrangement, and failure. His church lives still as a community that knows in its bones how to face evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. H R Niebuhr warned his generation to suspect the false sense that somehow a “God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”. Oddly, it is the starkness of the cross, the coarseness of Jesus’ death, the tremendous sense of loss and failure and grief of Lent that is your best gift in and to a frightened world, and to a paralyzed and petrified America, to a frightfully anxious, rightly worried, America, 2025. His cross truly names the tragedy of evil. His cross permanently enfolds that tragedy in the larger goodness in life and the lasting goodness in God. His cross radiates a thin measure of hope, that there is life beyond brokenness, even beyond virulence. There is life beyond corona virus.  That there is even life beyond the predatory mendacity and cruelty of Donald Trump and his Republican party.

People of faith. Remember your baptism and confirmation. The world is largely good (good not perfect), the good handiwork in a mysterious divine goodness that passes all understanding and endures forever.

Yet, the world is just not right, but somehow off track, wrongheaded, with something ‘loose’ rattling around inside it—the shadow of sin, the specter of evil, the sorrow of death. Older theologians wrote of the fallenness of creation

We have to face both and to pray for deliverance from the latter to the former. So we teach our children to say: Deliver us from evil. Robert McAfee Brown said so memorably (how I miss his voice): “Friends, this is God’s world, but it is a crummy world, and we have to live with both realities”.

To the daughter Meg’s question “Why?” I have no full, final answer for you. But the good news is that you have an answer for me. It is the Luke 15, the Prodical Son answer. And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken. You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.

You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. You carry yourselves in belief.

You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person Who defines the passion.

You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come at the end of forty days and then of seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Lent, and not the other way around.

Oh, we want to be clear, now: the resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word. That is why Unamuno called his philosophy Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida, ‘the tragic sense…of LIFE. Life has the last word.

Maybe that is why Joan Humphrey—her married name, Joan Humphrey Lefkow—she like Dorothy Gale of the Kansas farm, she like Billy Graham of Wheaton College, she like Ernest Fremont Tittle of Northwestern University, she like your own mother in kitchen and coffee and packed lunch, answered her daughter Meg’s question (sursum corda!) in faithful witness (hear the Gospel!) to tragedy and goodness and hope.

I confess that I read her statement some years ago, weeping profusely, in the middle of an utterly boring Nashville denominational board meeting, and was for several moments unsure of where I was, or whether these few sentences were read from the printed page as human comments, or were resounding in the mind and heart as divine utterance. Which is this voice? Human or Divine? You be the judge.

Joan says to her daughter, as the Gospel says to us: Honey…I am so sad…It is a human tragedy…Honey, most people are good, most people would not think of doing this…Remember the sermon years ago at the Episcopal Church in Evanston, where you girls sang in the choir and I made sandwiches for the homeless once a month…The priest said, ‘Some things are just broken…they’re broken…just broken…They’re broken and you go on from there…Don’t think you can repair them but get up and go on from there…But whoever did this (killed my husband and mother), I want to look them in the eye and say…How could you?…How could you do that to me and my family?”

*New York Times, 3/10/05