God in the debris
Fourth Sunday of Epiphany (RCL Epiphany 3 readings)
Nehemiah 8.1-3,5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; Luke 4.14-21
You’re breathing, but you can’t move. You try to shift a leg or an arm, but you can’t. All is dark. You’re breathing, but your body seems heavy and no matter how you try, nothing will move. It’s dark, but there is a draught. Your breathing speeds up; still no movement, still no light. You try to squirm – unsuccessfully. You can feel the panic rising. You make an almighty effort. You’re fit to scream!
Suddenly you’re awake. Panting and perspiring. Free of the nightmare and glad of the dull shadow of the street lamp on the bedroom wall. The weight oppressed body; the profound darkness; figments of a deep sleep imagining. It’s a common nightmare, one way or another, this horrifying claustrophobia that can ensnare any of us in the dread small hours of the night.
Then comes to me the appalling thought that for God knows how many people in Haiti it was not a figment of the night terrors but reality. Three years ago the earthquake struck. We remember the terrible pictures. For every living body we saw on our TV screens pulled free from a cavern deep inside a mountain of rubble, how many more died alone, constricted in some hollow amongst the debris? How many lives ebbed to an end in pain and terror? Such suffering doesn’t bear thinking about. A nightmare indeed.
Where’s a loving God in this? asks the doubter. Sudden death; appallingly slow death; total destruction; hunger; chaos and despair—if there is a God, and God is all loving and all powerful, how could such horrors happen? If God is the Creator, then God has created this mess, or at the least created the forces that produced this mess. Either way makes no difference to the ultimately destructive and hurtful consequences. As Sydney Carter put it, ‘It’s God they
ought to crucify, instead of you and me ...’
We can’t avoid the force of the question. But the question seems to me to bring with it a strange idea of God. It uses the notion of cause and effect, and assumes that consequential reasoning must apply to God. It limits God in categories of our human thinking. Searching for cause and effect spurs science. This kind of thinking has brought all kinds of wonders to light. It is a simple and remarkable way of asking productive questions of our world and the life within it. But it can’t tell us anything about God.
Thinking it can tell us something about God leads to assertions like that made by a Televangelist in the days after the earthquake. It was the Reverend Pat Robertson I think who said the earthquake was the consequence of the Haitian people’s pact with the devil and should be seen as a likely blessing. The thought of lives whimpering away in a confined black-hole deep under the rubble as blessing is perverse. It cannot be that tens of thousands snuffed out, all that pain and despair, is the intention of God. It cannot be that the struggles of those striving to restore and heal justifies what went before.
One day, centuries ago now, a man well-known in his locality for his carpentry skills, stood up in his local place of worship and read from the prophet Isaiah:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good
news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives
and
recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim
the year of the Lord’s favour.’
Nothing usual in that, men who could read did so week by week. But there was a hush on that day—something new was in the air. And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he said to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And that word once said can never be rescinded.
In this Jesus, this man for others, God has answered the cry of despairing humanity. Not in bitterness, not in anger, not in retribution, but in presence and gracious loving kindness. This is good news, not the media catalogue of illustrated woe. This is the jubilee that cancels debts and frees the despairing. God is among us, really among us. Not a force of terrifying
destruction unleashed on a weak and unprepared people, but God as person amongst persons. Here is the evidence for all times and forever that God will not do without people what it is his plan to do with people. God is not abstract and alien force; God is human.
The anguished cry of humanity is answered by a God who comes amongst us as one of us. This is a God who works with people and through people, and who will bear the full consequences of working in that way, even if it is the tortured death of a cross. God loves us that much; and that much is to be the pattern of our lives. God trusts us to live it.
So if you ask me to point to God’s action in Haiti three years ago, I most certainly won’t cite devastation and despair. Instead I’ll point to the Haitian woman nursing a scared and pained orphan and promising to do so permanently. With nothing to offer but her care to a little child who was a total stranger to her. Or, I’ll point to the Haitian man organising water distribution because he had a tap that still worked. Nothing grand was being done, just a bit of neighbourly organisation and concern for the good of all. Or, I’ll point to the rescue worker squeezing himself through a grim dark passage, and hours later dragging so carefully behind him a young woman freed, after seven days of confinement, into the sunlight.
These are people making godly responses to the vagaries of life. Just as I don’t see the earthquake, or the other natural disasters that strike, as a direct action of God, neither do I see the world as a mishmash of complex forces that God leaves us to contend with. We are not abandoned to our own devices. God has rather entered into our experiences, to live with us and in us, in this ever changing and complex world. Ours is an understanding of God who is at one with us in all the potential for good and for hurt in existence. God provides the resources to make us responsible, that is able to respond – response-able, so that we are free to chose, free to love, free to care. Humanity is neither constrained by a world of absolute predictability, nor abandoned to total blood and claw randomness and the will to power.
So, yes, I will affirm with the psalmist the wonder of creation, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’(Ps 19.1) The beauties of this earth’s landscapes were created by the same changes, the same forces that produce devastation. Glacier, earthquake and volcano have shaped the very earth on which we stand. And those things didn’t stop way back when; all is still movement and change. From the perspective of one human life this globe appears still and fixed, but we know it isn’t. Just as each of us when we pause to consider know that we ourselves are constantly changing. The rose’s beauty, the carrot’s taste, finds their source in the decay that is the soil fertile for their growth. Change, movement, an alteration of states; these are the principles of a world of wondrous and awful possibilities. Much of the time we ignore them, or feel them benevolent. But sometimes they terrify.
How to cope? To be certain that these things are not the sign of God’s displeasure. Bring to mind the law of the Lord, says the Psalmist, it will revive your soul. It’s not so much a making sense of terrify experiences, as enabling words to make within us a well of security, to know in our heart of hearts that this world is never against us, that God is never against
us.
The little Jewish nation had been through so much. In fact it had almost been totally destroyed. Violence, torture, destruction, deportation. Everything had been thrown at them for generations. Now there are some returned to their blessed but blighted city. And one day as they start haltingly and uncertainly to dig over the rubble and rebuild their broken city, a crowd gathers and hears the Torah, the Law, read aloud to them. Here is the point that Judaism is created as a people of the scroll. Here is the character of their faith established—from now on the hearing of the scripture week by week will be the bedrock of their faith. And the reading of the text and the living of it interpretation are bound
together. Did you notice?
The people clamour to hear the word read openly. We are told just when it happened and who is present. We are told exactly where the reader stands and how long he reads for and how attentive the people are. We see Ezra open the scroll and the responsive bows and blessings of the people. And it isn’t just read, it is explained as it is read, and the people are called to respond to the reading—feast, and share your feast with those who can’t feast themselves. Don’t bemoan past failures. Rather receive the words with joy, and start living the truths they express by sharing your feast with others.
Like that day in the synagogue in Nazareth—that day when Jesus himself followed the tradition begun in Ezra’s public reading—the word is the action, real and present. ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And that word once said can never be rescinded. God’s reign is here, look, see! These are not promises of what will be, but words describing what is. Indwell them, let them live in your hearts and minds, let them steel your courage, and motivate your compassion. Learn them so that they may resource you, shape you, guard you, through good times and bad. Let them be your rock of certainty.
In the face of such suffering we claim no knowledge of a reason why, and certainly not a judgement of God against the poor people of Haiti, or anywhere else, who have suffered too much over too many years. But what we do claim is the certainty of God in the debris, burdened by grief, and spurring his people’s compassion.
Suddenly you’re awake. Panting and perspiring. Free of the nightmare and glad of the dull shadow of the street lamp on the bedroom wall. The weight oppressed body; the profound darkness; figments of a deep sleep imagining. It’s a common nightmare, one way or another, this horrifying claustrophobia that can ensnare any of us in the dread small hours of the night.
Then comes to me the appalling thought that for God knows how many people in Haiti it was not a figment of the night terrors but reality. Three years ago the earthquake struck. We remember the terrible pictures. For every living body we saw on our TV screens pulled free from a cavern deep inside a mountain of rubble, how many more died alone, constricted in some hollow amongst the debris? How many lives ebbed to an end in pain and terror? Such suffering doesn’t bear thinking about. A nightmare indeed.
Where’s a loving God in this? asks the doubter. Sudden death; appallingly slow death; total destruction; hunger; chaos and despair—if there is a God, and God is all loving and all powerful, how could such horrors happen? If God is the Creator, then God has created this mess, or at the least created the forces that produced this mess. Either way makes no difference to the ultimately destructive and hurtful consequences. As Sydney Carter put it, ‘It’s God they
ought to crucify, instead of you and me ...’
We can’t avoid the force of the question. But the question seems to me to bring with it a strange idea of God. It uses the notion of cause and effect, and assumes that consequential reasoning must apply to God. It limits God in categories of our human thinking. Searching for cause and effect spurs science. This kind of thinking has brought all kinds of wonders to light. It is a simple and remarkable way of asking productive questions of our world and the life within it. But it can’t tell us anything about God.
Thinking it can tell us something about God leads to assertions like that made by a Televangelist in the days after the earthquake. It was the Reverend Pat Robertson I think who said the earthquake was the consequence of the Haitian people’s pact with the devil and should be seen as a likely blessing. The thought of lives whimpering away in a confined black-hole deep under the rubble as blessing is perverse. It cannot be that tens of thousands snuffed out, all that pain and despair, is the intention of God. It cannot be that the struggles of those striving to restore and heal justifies what went before.
One day, centuries ago now, a man well-known in his locality for his carpentry skills, stood up in his local place of worship and read from the prophet Isaiah:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good
news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives
and
recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim
the year of the Lord’s favour.’
Nothing usual in that, men who could read did so week by week. But there was a hush on that day—something new was in the air. And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he said to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And that word once said can never be rescinded.
In this Jesus, this man for others, God has answered the cry of despairing humanity. Not in bitterness, not in anger, not in retribution, but in presence and gracious loving kindness. This is good news, not the media catalogue of illustrated woe. This is the jubilee that cancels debts and frees the despairing. God is among us, really among us. Not a force of terrifying
destruction unleashed on a weak and unprepared people, but God as person amongst persons. Here is the evidence for all times and forever that God will not do without people what it is his plan to do with people. God is not abstract and alien force; God is human.
The anguished cry of humanity is answered by a God who comes amongst us as one of us. This is a God who works with people and through people, and who will bear the full consequences of working in that way, even if it is the tortured death of a cross. God loves us that much; and that much is to be the pattern of our lives. God trusts us to live it.
So if you ask me to point to God’s action in Haiti three years ago, I most certainly won’t cite devastation and despair. Instead I’ll point to the Haitian woman nursing a scared and pained orphan and promising to do so permanently. With nothing to offer but her care to a little child who was a total stranger to her. Or, I’ll point to the Haitian man organising water distribution because he had a tap that still worked. Nothing grand was being done, just a bit of neighbourly organisation and concern for the good of all. Or, I’ll point to the rescue worker squeezing himself through a grim dark passage, and hours later dragging so carefully behind him a young woman freed, after seven days of confinement, into the sunlight.
These are people making godly responses to the vagaries of life. Just as I don’t see the earthquake, or the other natural disasters that strike, as a direct action of God, neither do I see the world as a mishmash of complex forces that God leaves us to contend with. We are not abandoned to our own devices. God has rather entered into our experiences, to live with us and in us, in this ever changing and complex world. Ours is an understanding of God who is at one with us in all the potential for good and for hurt in existence. God provides the resources to make us responsible, that is able to respond – response-able, so that we are free to chose, free to love, free to care. Humanity is neither constrained by a world of absolute predictability, nor abandoned to total blood and claw randomness and the will to power.
So, yes, I will affirm with the psalmist the wonder of creation, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’(Ps 19.1) The beauties of this earth’s landscapes were created by the same changes, the same forces that produce devastation. Glacier, earthquake and volcano have shaped the very earth on which we stand. And those things didn’t stop way back when; all is still movement and change. From the perspective of one human life this globe appears still and fixed, but we know it isn’t. Just as each of us when we pause to consider know that we ourselves are constantly changing. The rose’s beauty, the carrot’s taste, finds their source in the decay that is the soil fertile for their growth. Change, movement, an alteration of states; these are the principles of a world of wondrous and awful possibilities. Much of the time we ignore them, or feel them benevolent. But sometimes they terrify.
How to cope? To be certain that these things are not the sign of God’s displeasure. Bring to mind the law of the Lord, says the Psalmist, it will revive your soul. It’s not so much a making sense of terrify experiences, as enabling words to make within us a well of security, to know in our heart of hearts that this world is never against us, that God is never against
us.
The little Jewish nation had been through so much. In fact it had almost been totally destroyed. Violence, torture, destruction, deportation. Everything had been thrown at them for generations. Now there are some returned to their blessed but blighted city. And one day as they start haltingly and uncertainly to dig over the rubble and rebuild their broken city, a crowd gathers and hears the Torah, the Law, read aloud to them. Here is the point that Judaism is created as a people of the scroll. Here is the character of their faith established—from now on the hearing of the scripture week by week will be the bedrock of their faith. And the reading of the text and the living of it interpretation are bound
together. Did you notice?
The people clamour to hear the word read openly. We are told just when it happened and who is present. We are told exactly where the reader stands and how long he reads for and how attentive the people are. We see Ezra open the scroll and the responsive bows and blessings of the people. And it isn’t just read, it is explained as it is read, and the people are called to respond to the reading—feast, and share your feast with those who can’t feast themselves. Don’t bemoan past failures. Rather receive the words with joy, and start living the truths they express by sharing your feast with others.
Like that day in the synagogue in Nazareth—that day when Jesus himself followed the tradition begun in Ezra’s public reading—the word is the action, real and present. ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And that word once said can never be rescinded. God’s reign is here, look, see! These are not promises of what will be, but words describing what is. Indwell them, let them live in your hearts and minds, let them steel your courage, and motivate your compassion. Learn them so that they may resource you, shape you, guard you, through good times and bad. Let them be your rock of certainty.
In the face of such suffering we claim no knowledge of a reason why, and certainly not a judgement of God against the poor people of Haiti, or anywhere else, who have suffered too much over too many years. But what we do claim is the certainty of God in the debris, burdened by grief, and spurring his people’s compassion.