| |
|
|
| |
||
| 4 September 2005 (Non-lectionary) God and KatrinaA Sermon by John C. Bush, Interim Pastor
|
||
This week once again we find ourselves asking that old, familiar and inevitable question: why? |
Is there no end to the news of destruction, death, depravity, neglect and incompetence coming from the Gulf Coast this week? Whole communities wiped out; New Orleans decimated, and turning in upon itself in a kind of urban warfare with which many American cities, including this one, are all too familiar. We have been transfixed by the horror of destruction, of destitute and dying people, the fearful and the hopeless – but at the same time, some remarkable stories of courage and an outpouring of generosity. This week once again we find ourselves asking that old, familiar and inevitable question: why? At least one televangelist has already rushed to judgment with the pronouncement that God is punishing The Big Easy for its notoriously sinful ways. As I have contemplated this sermon I must confess the inadequacy of any attempt to explain God’s role is calamities like this one, but I must absolutely reject that explanation flat out: that preacher’s God is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, revealed to us in scripture and who came among us “full of grace and truth.” One way of phrasing our question of why might go something like this: “If God could make any possible kind of world, then why do we have this kind of world rather than some other?” No single sermon can address all the issues that raises, and it may well be that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation in face of our serious questions, but that does not mean that God is either vindictive rather than loving, or that God is weak rather than strong, or that God is absent from us rather than present with us in all the circumstances of our lives. |
|
God doesn’t make something out of nothingness; God brings order out of chaos. |
Let’s look at the question of God’s power seen within a biblical context. On the one hand, it seems true that God can do anything God chooses. The sovereignty of God is an essential principle of our Reformed theology, and I embrace it with my whole heart, mind and soul. But it is also true that there are some things even the Sovereign God cannot do. God cannot be self-contradictory; God’s power is limited by God’s perfection. In other words, God is not free to not be God. As the Prophet Isaiah puts it, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God is the absolute other -- the one we confess in the Creed as “God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” If God is creator of all things, we might ask, “What kind of creation is consistent with the nature and character of that God?” We can find a clue or two in the creation story of Genesis 1. Now, Genesis 1 is not a scientific or historic explanation for how things came to be. It is, indeed, a story, and I think the “creationists” are completely off base trying to make it into something it isn’t. In this story we see right off that God does not begin to create by starting from scratch. The story begins with a watery chaos, devoid of form and content, without law or order, and God comes face to face with that bleak, disorderly darkness. The wind of his breath blew across it – and in Hebrew those words for wind, breath and spirit are the same word. And so the Spirit of God comes up against the most uncompromising chaos you can imagine and uses them as the building-blocks for a new creation. Again, the Prophet Isaiah (45:18): “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, but he formed it to be inhabited!” In the Genesis story we begin to encounter just what our world would be like without God’s sovereign, creative intervention. God doesn’t make something out of nothingness; God brings order out of chaos. God superimposes beauty, purpose, design and order by sorting out the chaos and confusion. And here we come upon a truly startling biblical insight into the nature of creation: it isn’t finished! There is always the possibility that the chaos and void may reassert itself. And we human beings, created by God to be care-takers of his garden and thus to be co-creators with God, have the power to lay waste to God’s good creation by fouling its air, polluting its waterways, denuding its forests, and warming its atmosphere with our pollutants. All with consequences about which we have no clue. The Prophet Jeremiah depicts a situation in his lifetime in which creation begins to relapse into chaos. God responds to renew the creation and continue to bring it to fulfillment and completion, but to do this within constraints of the freedom granted to us as God’s children. |
|
Don’t conclude, however, that the unfinished nature of our universe means that God has consigned us to living with unrelenting tragedy, grief or punishment. |
This is how I understand the concept of evolution: that over millennia – millions, maybe billions of years – God continues this drive toward wholeness, toward purpose, toward order. A drive which ultimately will not collapse into meaninglessness but which will culminate in beauty and goodness upon the earth. St. John of the Revelation describes it as “a new heaven and a new earth … the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… . See,” he says, “the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them as their God; and they will be[God’s] peoples, and God will be with them; [God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” It is the culmination of the vision Paul, expresses in his Letter to the Romans: “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” [8:19] The world we live in is unfinished, in much the way each of us is unfinished. Lurking within the laws and processes of our universe there is still a void, a chaos, which breaks into our world and reminds us just how finite we are. How vulnerable. And, most importantly, how interdependent. If you haven’t discovered this truth yet, you will: Life is hazardous to your health. You are not going to get out of it alive. But that doesn’t mean it is over, or that it is hopeless. In the end, the way to cope with the uncertainty is to be prepared for difficult times – times like these – but also to be committed to our partnership with God in confronting the chaos as God brings the “new creation” to completion. Don’t conclude, however, that the unfinished nature of our universe means that God has consigned us to living with unrelenting tragedy, grief or punishment. Where there is suffering and pain, God always chooses to be with us, beside us. The suffering of his own son is evidence of this. And the Apostle Paul paints a clear picture of the tragic dimension of life that haunts the whole creation. He compares that pain with the birth-pangs of a pregnant woman birthing a child of hope. Struggling to “be set free … to obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” |
|
“The fact that we can rely on the stability of this order means that, whether we are aware of it or not, we are relying on God’s faithfulness.” |
So, why do we have this kind of world rather than some other – one without pain or tragedy? Because bringing order out of chaos, and maintaining an orderly existence requires that reliable laws be operable within God’s good creation. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be good. These orderly patterns provide structure for our days. We are enriched, nourished and fed by them as soil, moisture, temperature, sun, moon, season, plant, nutrients and wind combine with labor, planning and mechanical ingenuity and scientific research to produce our food and fiber. But there are times when the barriers constraining the chaos are breeched, and those same natural phenomena come crashing through our defenses and confront us with their naked power. The good news is that there is a structural integrity to this world which is the core, the heart of its possibility for fulfillment. Within this orderly interdependence, the elements interact predictably and for the common good. God does not send a deadly hurricane to destroy a city or a region. God does will an ordered structure of existence for us out of which comes the values and potentialities of life, the excitement of creativity and sometime the experience of adverse circumstances. Theologian Emil Brunner calls this “the constancy of nature.” It embraces the fundamental laws of the universe, from the force of gravity to the predictability of medicine; from the laws of mathematics to the reliability of the laws of physics and chemistry upon which research can be based and conclusions reached. Again, in the words of Brunner, “The fact that we can rely on the stability of this order means that, whether we are aware of it or not, we are relying on God’s faithfulness." |
|
Humankind is meant to cooperate with God’s task to fulfill and bring order to the world, even though we ourselves are broken and disordered. |
Thus, what we experience as natural evil arises out of the basic nature of the ordered creation. In the disasters of nature we are not to conclude that God bids us ill or brings these things upon us as punishment or for behavior modification. Nor are we to conclude that the forces of evil have taken charge of God’s good creation. We must recognize, however, that the same patterns of the universe which ordinarily support our lives and make the world work for us also have within them the possibility of harm. Created together in glory and hope, humankind and the natural world belong together, in tragedy and in salvation, until the old heaven and the old earth are no more, and the new is born. Humankind is meant to cooperate with God’s task to fulfill and bring order to the world, even though we ourselves are broken and disordered. The powerful imagery of redemption is shot through with references to the natural order. Humanity is freed, and the natural order is renewed. Just as paradise lost signifies the mystery of life, so paradise reclaimed signifies the mystery of being, the forces of salvation and victory overcoming decay and death for all God’s creation. Our life and our salvation cannot be separated from the life and renewal of the whole earth. As the seeds of war, violence and prejudice are alive within us, so the forces of destruction and fearsome awe are present in the natural order. As we cannot fully understand or explain those awful forces within ourselves, so are we dismayed by the violence of wind and water. |
|
God responds to our pain by being beside us, and by sending us to be beside others who suffer. |
We are confounded and puzzled by the evil and pain around us, whatever their origin. While the sudden terror of driving, swirling wind and water raises our questions dramatically, the questions are those common to the problem of suffering in the world wherever we encounter it. And God responds to our suffering by suffering with us, as together we seek to bring order out of chaos, healing out of pain. God responds to our perplexity, not by resolving all of our questions and doubts, but by walking with us on the journey and giving us the gift of God’s own self in the quest for order, wholeness and redemption. God responds to our pain by being beside us, and by sending us to be beside others who suffer. And so, indeed, there is an end to the news of desolation, death and depravity. There is another story emerging – a story of new life lived in community, where the face of God is seen in the faces of those who come in compassionate concern. The hand of God is felt in the hands of those who come to rescue and to help bring order out of chaos. The power of God is known in many forms – all of them representing foes of destruction and disorder. None of them more readily available than when God’s people gather in faith to receive the body and blood of Christ, and then to go out to be the Body of Christ alive and at work in the world, seeking the ways of justice, peace, reconciliation and compassion. [Copyright 2005,John C. Bush] NOW TO THE RULER OF ALL WORLDS, UNDYING, INVISIBLE, THE ONLY WISE GOD, BE HONOR AND GLORY FOREVER AND EVER. AMEN. |
|
The Covenant Network2515 Fillmore St - San Francisco - CA - 94115 |
 |
|
|
|
|