Tsunami Sermon

  I paraphrase one wag – “Human evil is easy to explain.  It’s earthquakes that threaten to break the faith.”

Scripture agonizes over God’s presence in nature. The psalmist knows God through nature; and yet John understand God as not in the world. It’s easy to find God in a sunset, in the thrill of being at the top of a mountain; in a blooming flower. Surely God is God because he did create all that is, and it is amazing.

Some see God in the aftermath of such disaster. Maybe he wanted the revolutionaries in Aceh to submit to the Indonesian military; or he was tired of the civil war in Sri Lanka, thinking – you petty humans, if you really want destruction, let me tell you what I can do. No religion was safe from his wrath - Hindu Mystics, Thai brothels, mosques, teak framed temples and churches, nunneries and beach huts, all broken before the surging, indiscriminate waves.

Disasters aren’t new to Christians. On Nov. 1, 1755, 60,000 perished, from a quake, the tsunami and the fires after a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. Voltaire, the French humanist writer, savaged the prevailing theology of perfect worlds, smashing through the myth that the universe is carefully calibrated, that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that this is the best of all possible worlds. How could good be found in the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"?

After the quake, Europe changed; Portugal became a dictatorship; the Jesuits fell from power; the wrath of God inflamed the Methodists and New England puritans. That the world was perfect was torn down; that humanity could do, must do, better became its renewed rallying cry.

Was the world ever perfect? Jerusalem's walls had come tumbling down before; tsunamis have come and gone; every year, it seems, hundreds of thousands die in Bangladesh due to flooding.

Evil in humanity, is fairly easy to explain. But natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity.

On thing is true – that we are in the world; we’re part of the natural world, and our own evil and the destruction of the world, should bother us no differently. One theologian remarked: “it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained.”

But what is not true is that the world, as it is, is in perfect accord with His existence. He does not preside over every leaf falling; every earthquake or waterfall or volcanic ash; not everything is held perfectly together.

Rather, to suffer, die, or sin, lacks meaning at all. What we do say is that we’ve lived in the shadow of an ancient catastrophe, and that this world is broken. But our time is not true time, and that our world is bound to powers that are foreign to God.

Saying “God wins,” should not reveal and easy optimism; Jesus defeated death; but he will also come again in the future, and transform all things.  Yet, for us now, we carry on the battle between good and evil, light and dark, freedom and slavery, true knowledge and deception, faith and fear.   We ask, what will we do to keep people alive? 

When we contemplate the savage immensity of suffering – the entire rim of the Indian Ocean with rotting children’s bodies, we don’t need to make trite and banal statements about God being a great counselor or God’s good judgment or His mystery.

It is enough simply to hate evil and death and suffering and waste and idiocy, to know that our love, our sharing, our generosity, our charity is what we have to sustain ourselves against our fate, or our chance, the random evil that continually threatens us.

Our faith can survive such disasters. What we can do, is help one another, and continue looking in the distance, knowing that while creation is in agony, in our hands we have the tools to do a little, open a small breathing space, light a candle, hold a hand, or carry a dead body lovingly to its grave, the same way our Savior's body was carried into the tomb. 

It is in that silence we find ourselves, that tomb, caring for the dead, unaware about what God has in store for us tomorrow.

Comments

[Samuel]

Father Wilkins

Thank You for this post.

[bck]

"Our faith can survive such disasters. What we can do, is help one another, and continue looking in the distance, knowing that while creation is in agony, in our hands we have the tools to do a little, open a small breathing space, light a candle, hold a hand, or carry a dead body lovingly to its grave, the same way our Savior's body was carried into the tomb."

Thank you for this.

[Lee]

I fail to see why one would blame Divinity for an occurrence which is the natural law of the planet. The planet must act in accordance with its own nature. There is no malevolent force causing an earthquake.

[John Wilkins]

Lee, it might not be good theology, but people do it anyway.

Its kind of like, when you get sick, you think you did something wrong.

The problem is not with the natural Law of the planet. The problem is reconciling how God can allow so much utter misery and suffering if he loves us.

[a weary Christian]

This is precisely the problem: why / how can an all loving all powerful God allow susch pain? Or, if God is truly involved in this world with us then what is he doing? Have faith is meaningless when millions suffer. God, either be God or give up the game. Holy words without holy action are just holey.