Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 16, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

On December 26, 2004, just off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, far below the surface, the earth moved. A huge earthquake shook the ground. The massive wave of energy the quake released moved the ocean deeps, creating a huge wave, a tsunami of almost unimaginable force. The mighty ocean deep did not it’s own appointed limits keep as the old Navy hymn says it does. The huge wave crashed ashore first in Sumatra, then in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and other nations as far away as the east coast of Africa. In what seems like no time at all, a huge number of lives-something over 150,000 at last count-were snuffed out. Tens of thousands of them were children. Tens of thousands of other children suddenly became orphans. A million or more people lost their homes. Entire towns were wiped off the face of the earth. The physical and institutional infrastructures on which the lives of the people depended were destroyed. We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve all felt the horror. We have all grieved as we saw the orphaned children and the weeping parents. It is a disaster of almost unimaginable magnitude.

It has been compared to the earthquake, fire, and tsunami that ravaged Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. That disaster, in which over then 100,000 people died, played a major role in the loss of faith by much of the educated class of Europe during the Enlightenment, Voltaire among them. The current disaster in Asia is causing many people of many different religions to question their faith today. They, and we, are asking: How could it happen? How could a loving God do such a thing? Or, if God didn’t exactly do it, then how could a loving God allow it to happen? These are legitimate questions, and they deserve a serious, thoughtful, faithful answer. I don’t claim to have the answer, but I want to share some thoughts on the subject with you in hopes that they may be helpful to you as you grapple with the meaning of this massive tragedy.

Now, I don’t want by this next remark to minimize the scope of the tsunami disaster, but I do think it is important to put it in perspective, a perspective of which all of us, I fear, live our lives blissfully unaware. Every day in this world something like 29,000 children die as a result of avoidable diseases and malnutrition. That’s the total death toll from the tsunami surpassed every five days. This appalling fact gets virtually no coverage in our mass media. We see no pictures of those little coffins, no pictures of those weeping mothers. We hear no calls to increase our charitable giving. Our government makes no public pledges of massive amounts of money to address that tragedy. So maybe what I’m doing here is not putting the tsunami disaster in perspective but putting this sermon in perspective. Suffering isn’t something new. It isn’t something that comes only from huge natural disasters. Far more suffering in this world results from the unjust social, political, and economic systems of which we in the wealthier countries are the beneficiaries than results from natural disaster. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Tikkun Community, an interfaith peace and justice organization rooted in Judaism, says: Maybe rather than ask where is God we should ask where is humanity. Still, sudden massive disasters like the recent tsunami do heighten our awareness of the theological issues that human suffering raises; so I will go ahead and tackle those issues this morning in the context of the tsunami.

Let me begin by asking what I think is a key question here. Why would a natural disaster like this cause people of faith to lose their faith in God, or at least to question it? The answer has to lie, I think, in the nature of their faith. Most of the questions that are being asked, and many of the answers that are being given, are grounded in a particular conception of God and, more particularly, of the relationship between God and creation, a conception that I believe to be fundamentally flawed. We hear explanations from Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others that say that the disaster is the result of God’s anger. Just what it is that God is supposed to be angry about varies from religion to religion and from commentator to commentator. A recent article in the Everett Herald quoted a fundamentalist Christian as saying that the disaster was God’s punishment for supposed persecution of Christians in the affected countries. It noted a belief in certain Hindu circles that the disaster was God’s reaction to the arrest in India of a certain Hindu religious leader. One Southern Baptist spokesman that I heard on television tried to tie the disaster to God’s generalized anger about human sin-not the sin of those who died or who now suffer but sin generally. We hear other causal explanations as well. We also hear that the disaster isn’t a result of God’s anger but rather that God causes such disasters precisely to test our faith, the Job explanation if you will. This belief is apparently particularly wide-spread in certain Muslim circles.

All of these explanations assume one fact. They assume that God-however God may be understood by these different commentators-caused the disaster, that the deaths of over 150,000 people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that the destruction of homes, businesses, medical clinics, schools, and other needful and beneficial public institutions was the work and will of God. That assumption is, in turn, based upon a belief that God actively directs events-all events-here on earth. This type of faith says: If it happened it must be God’s doing or God’s will, a part of God’s plan for the world. That assumption is, to me, simply unacceptable. It makes a monster out of God because it has God punishing people for things they did not do or using the deaths and suffering of some as an occasion for others to prove their faith. It turns the God I know as a God of love and compassion into a vicious God who cares nothing for the death and suffering of innocent people, and I do not and cannot believe in such a God. To start to get at the nature of God that I think is at work here let me tell you as story.

In 1977 or 1978, I was in Baltimore, Maryland, interviewing and testing for, of all things, a job as an intelligence analyst with the highly secretive National Security Agency. The Agency put a bunch of us who were looking for work up in a hotel in downtown Baltimore, and I shared a room with another young man who was Mormon. On the Baltimore local TV news one evening we saw a story about the murder of a young child in a Baltimore suburb. A man in clerical dress, apparently a Christian priest, was shown in the newscast saying that the child had been killed because God wanted her to come home to heaven to be with God. My Mormon roommate immediately said: "No. God did not do that. God desires a full and complete life for every one of God’s children." Now, I have many profound disagreements with Mormon theology, but my Mormon roommate in Baltimore all those years ago got it exactly right. God does not desire and does not cause the deaths of innocent people. God desires abundant life for all people. Nonetheless, things happen that are not only not the will of God but that are directly contrary to God’s will for the world and its people. This disaster is one of those things. God did not cause it. God did not desire it. It was the result of natural processes and the laws of physics. It was contrary to God’s will. It was not God’s doing.

God didn’t do it, but then God didn’t prevent it, either. Why not? Well, that takes us back to that question about how God relates to creation. It seems undeniable that God does not intervene in the world to prevent bad things from happening. Bad things happen all the time. We humans slaughter each other with joyful abandon. Loved ones die far too young of disease or in accidents. Natural disasters occur all over the world. None of us is safe from them. Children starve and die of preventable disease because humanity doesn’t care, or doesn’t care enough. God does not prevent these things from happening even to the most faithful of us. I can’t tell you why not. I just know it’s true.

So, if God doesn’t cause disaster and death but doesn’t prevent them either, how does God relate to those things? Where is God when disaster, disease, or other calamity strike? I don’t know how a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist would answer that question; but I can answer it as a Christian in a way that works for me and that, I think, reflects the most central and most profound truths of our faith. I can answer the question of where God is in times of trouble because at the heart of our faith stands not a promise that no harm will befall innocent people but a cross. At the heart of our faith stands a symbol of cruelty, pain, and death; and it is precisely that symbol that gives us strength, hope, and peace.

We believe, as St. Paul put it, in Jesus Christ and him crucified. For us, Jesus Christ was, and is, Immanuel, God with us, God incarnate, the Word of God made flesh. In Him, God emptied Godself of divinity and came to us as one of us. And what happened? The world-we-crucified Him. We tortured Him and hung him on a cross to die an agonizing death though he was the only truly innocent human. Now, Mel Gibson, Anselm of Canterbury, and most of popular American Christianity to the contrary notwithstanding, Jesus didn’t come to die. It could have been different, but it wasn’t. God didn’t cause the disaster, but God didn’t prevent the disaster from happening. That’s not how God relates to the world.

So, how does God relate to the world? Where is God when calamity strikes? The Christian answers: Look to the cross of Jesus. Our God does not rule from a throne in power and glory. Our God rules from a cross in love and therefore in weakness. God enters into our pain, our loss, our death. God holds us through it all. God loves us through it all. Though we die God saves us through it all.

So, where was God when the tsunami hit? I believe that there is only one truly Christian answer to that question. Where was God when the tsunami hit? On the beach. With the victims. God is always with the victims. God was there suffering with them. God was there dying with them. God was there welcoming them home. God is there with the surviving victims, holding them in the arms of grace. Unseen, perhaps completely unperceived, but there nonetheless.

As Christians we know that. We know it because at the heart of our faith stands the cross of Jesus Christ, in whom and through whom God became the victim, in whom and through whom God demonstrated God’s unshakable solidarity with us and with all people when we face our crosses. God didn’t cause or desire Jesus’ death on a cross, but God was there through it all. God didn’t cause or desire the South Asia tsunami, but God was and is there through it all. God does not cause or desire the hardships, suffering, and losses that we all experience simply because we are human; but God is there with us through it all, holding us in the arms of grace.

And more than that. Our crosses in the Protestant tradition are empty. I appreciate the spirituality of the Catholic crucifix. That spirituality is what I’ve been preaching for the last twenty minutes; but our crosses are empty. They are empty because, while at the heart of our faith stands a cross, we are also people of Resurrection faith. God was on the cross with Jesus, but then God raised Jesus from the dead, giving Him and us new, transformed life. And that kind of resurrection isn’t just once for all. God is at work in the world bringing new life out of death and disaster again and again. God has done it in my life, and I know that God has done it and is doing it in some of yours. God can bring new life out of this disaster too. I don’t know all the ways in which God will do that; and some people-some Moslem extremist rebels, for example-are already trying to prevent that new life by inserting partisan, selfish political agendas into the relief effort.

God will bring new life out of the disaster anyway, and God’s call to us in this time and in our place is to be part of that new life. We do it by praying for the victims and by giving to the relief efforts; but God calls us to do more than that. In the wake of this disaster God is calling us to raised consciousness about the chronic suffering in the world and the social structures that perpetuate it. God is calling us to a new commitment to alleviating not only the suffering of the tsunami victims but of the victims of evil human systems everywhere in the world, systems that cause and perpetuate famine, disease, war, and genocide. Why is there no outrage among us about what’s happening in Sudan? Why do we grieve tsunami victims in Thailand but say nothing about the rampant sexual exploitation of children in that country and elsewhere around the world? God suffers with the victims, but God also calls us to suffer with the victims, to have compassion for them which means to suffer with them. And to work without ceasing to ease their suffering. God doesn’t cause these evils to raise our consciousness, but they can and should be occasions for raised consciousness, for new life, nonetheless.

There are lots of ways to do it. One simple one is to see to it that our giving to international relief agencies like Mercy Corps, Physicians Without Borders, Church World Service, Care, UNICEF, and the United Church of Christ’s international relief fund do not end when the tsunami and its aftermath fade from the headlines. Another really easy one for those of us with computers is to remember to click on thehungersite.com and the other sites linked from that one every day. That certainly isn’t all we’re called to do, but it is at least a start. God was and is with the victims. God is always with the victims, and God is always working to bring new life out of death. Let us be there too. Amen.