Series: June 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Wisdom for Ordinary Time: When Life is Unfair…”
Wisdom for Ordinary Time: When Life is Unfair…
A series about wisdom inevitably leads us to big questions. A couple weeks ago I asked, “What is right?” Bethany asked, “How are we to show up in the world?” Today: How do we respond to life’s unfairness?
We know life is unfair. The famous book by Rabbi Kushner is titled When Bad Things Happen to Good People based on the presumption they do. Many a faith has been derailed by life’s unfairness. People think, “This can’t be. It’s not supposed to work out like this.” Even scripture at times sends the message that things work out for those who are good and love God.
There are other moments in the Bible when someone is found wrestling with the fact life is not working out according to plan. The wrong ones are thriving while the innocent suffer at the hands of the unjust. Listen, for example, to the first half of our reading from Psalm 73:
1 Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.
2 But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;
my steps had nearly slipped.
3 For I was envious of the arrogant;
I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4 For they have no pain;
their bodies are sound and sleek.
5 They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not plagued like other people.
6 Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them like a garment.
7 Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
8 They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
9 They set their mouths against heaven,
and their tongues range over the earth.
10 Therefore the people turn and praise them
and find no fault in them.
11 And they say, “How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?”
12 Such are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches (Psalm 73:1-12)
The wicked always seem to be at ease and what’s more they increase in riches. There is little more infuriating than watch unethical behavior rewarded. How do we respond? Hopefully, we first look in the mirror to make sure we are living in alignment with the way of Jesus. If we have strayed, we repent; we make amends, and we change our ways.
When we see others in their arrogance getting ahead, we should take the Psalmist’s lead and cry out. By doing so in the context of prayer, the psalmist reveals they have not given up on their faith.
The second half of Psalm 73 reveals a person emerging from their pain and anger, engaging in some painful self-reflection and ultimately taking a step toward, not away from, their faith. Listen…
21 When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
22 I was stupid and ignorant;
I was like a brute beast toward you.
23 Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me with honor.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
27 Indeed, those who are far from you will perish;
you put an end to those who are false to you.
28 But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
to tell of all your works (v. 21-28).
Rather than showing the answer is to give up on faith, this person whose prayer song we are reading thousands of years later says they will instead draw closer to God. The Psalm asks us to confront how we see God. Is God the one ordaining every moment, fair and unfair alike, and therefore the one we should blame and abandon when things go wrong or is God the one who accompanies and guides us through those times saying: “I am continually with you,”
there to comfort: “you hold my right hand,”
there to offer direction: “You guide me with your counsel”
there to encourage and promise: “afterward you will receive me with honor”
there to give energy: “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever”
there to be a safe place in the storm: “I have made the Lord God my refuge.”
Today’s wisdom is: When life pushes us down, don’t push God away, draw closer to God, that you might find your clarity, your strength, and your way forward. God is not the source of our injustice but a resource for how we deal with it. And if not God, because the injustice has started to feel personal, then think of faith as sticking to your values, or maybe Jesus is an easier figure to whom to relate. To keep the faith is not a blind trust that everything is going to be great, but rather that sticking with the way of Jesus is the best way to move forward. Jesus certainly could relate to the unfairness of this world, but he didn’t stray from the way of love, even when he felt abandoned by God. As Christians, Jesus’ experience of injustice and suffering is one way we connect with God.
Some say God gives us unfairness to test us, to make us stronger. Who knows why these things happen, but they do present us an opportunity. They are occasions for us to call out injustice and call for a better way. Biblical scholar Eric Elnes similarly talks of temptation as a gift because it gives us an opportunity to define and redefine who we are and what we are about.
Maybe it’s time to let go of asking why God allows such unfairness and simply learn to be more present to the unfairness, inviting God, our deeply held values, and the way of Jesus into it, through what the 23rd Psalm calls “the valley of the shadow of death.” That’s where we need faith the most, because there is value in us not avoiding it but walking right through it.
The great wisdoms of the world all know this. Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher talks about the promise in facing directly reality when it seems to be coming undone. In her acclaimed work aptly titled When Things Fall Apart—notice again it’s when not why—Chodron writes,
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.[1]
If she is right, then we can see brokenness not as some cosmic sign that God is against us or God is indifferent—and I know she wouldn’t talk about God, but we do as Christians. No, this is just how things are, and given that they are this way, how do we want to be and what do we need most to be that way. As Christians we want to be as Jesus would and we need our faith to do so. Chodron continues,
Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape -- all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.
Jesus didn’t numb the pain. Faith doesn’t erase our pain. Faith encourages us to face it and see if it can be employed in the project of some greater healing. Jesus took pain and unfairness and turned it into a sign of existential healing, the metaphor of salvation through the cross. Jesus exposed the cruelty of the powers to the entire world. To this day many of our religion where a cross which is a symbol of an unjust way of governing through fear and intimidation. We wear it to say, “This is not the way,” or rather, “Look what our Jesus did with their way.” Jesus took the way of harsh unfairness and turned it on its head in the form of gracious unfairness. Isn’t grace just unfairness in the other direction? Jesus holds together in his very body cruel unfairness and gracious unfairness and asks us to do the same. In the face of what’s wrong, he doesn’t stay quiet, but neither does he return fire. Jesus chose undeserved love in the face of undeserved hate.
We can always choose. The famed Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in his Man’s Search for Meaning once said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Not even the concentration camps could take Frankl’s agency from him in deciding how to respond to the worst of the world’s unfairness, pure evil.
Let the ache of life’s unfairness draw you into a deeper partnership with God that you not face these moments alone or with no direction. In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures… but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[2] Lewis seemed to believe that people have a tendency to grow complacent when things are going well, falling into the illusion that we can do, and have done, it all on our own. Coming off another graduation season, I am always struck by how often young speakers reveal they have fallen all to prey to the myth that their achievement, as impressive as it often is, is the result of their efforts and their efforts alone, with little acknowledgement of where they started in life or of who helped them along the way. We shouldn’t blame them; this is what our culture has taught them: relationship, dependence, help—this is weakness. No wonder we have turned from God. For Christians, however, where the world finds weakness, we find strength.
The Psalmist acknowledges initially turning from God, their faith, when life dealt a difficult hand:
21 When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
22 I was stupid and ignorant;
I was like a brute beast toward you.
Once you realize God isn’t doing this to you, you realize how foolish it is to take it out on the one who can help the most. This same psalmist ultimately comes to a trust in justice’s eventual victory, though as we said in a previous week, the timeline of that victory goes unstated, often unrealized in our own timeframes. The Psalmist ultimately concludes that in the face of all the world’s unfairness, “for me, it is good to be near God” (v. 28). Foolishness says there is no point to faith in the face of unfairness. Wisdom says faith is here to help you face it when you need it the most.
Amen.
[1] Pema Chodron,
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain