It not wise to pile words upon words in an attempt to reduce the magnitude of evil to a size we understand. Nor should anyone engage in religious rhetoric that pretends to know the mind of God and pronounce verdicts of divine punishment in an ungodly fashion that only rip apart the human family and make a mockery of the God whom the gospel of Luke names Emmanuel, God is With Us. We have to let go of all attempts to explain, and instead confront the undeniable reality of that evil exists on earth and that people do unspeakable and even unimaginable evil deeds. In my own life as a pastor, I have confronted many times terrible tragedy befalling innocent people including this one we are in now. As many of you know, my own father was tortured by his Japanese captors for nearly every day of his 42 months of captivity in the Philippines during the second world war.
Good people die tragically and evil people live beyond all moral deserving.
If I were to believe that God protects some, then I must believe that God abandons others. This is not what I believe is the heart of the Christian faith, for to believe in this way makes God a puny god more akin to monster that a gracious, loving God who forgives sins without regard to persons and whom I trust for my salvation. I have let go of the God, who protects me from danger, so that I may embrace the God who is with us at the center of existence where we live and often suffer. This God came to us in the flesh in Jesus Christ, gave himself in suffering love and even now abides with us at the center of life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor imprisoned for his attempts to remove the evil of Nazism, sat in his prison cell writing letters to family and friends.