The wind and waves obey
him?
St Mary’s, 18th
February 2001
Luke 8:22-25
Revelation 4
A few news stories from
the last two weeks:
AHMEDABAD, India, January 29, 2001 (ENS) - At least 25,000 people have died
and many thousands more are critically injured and missing as a result of an
earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale that shook western India on
Friday, India's 52nd Republic Day
ISLAMABAD, February 6, 2001--A major human tragedy is gripping Afghanistan. Two years of drought and
the continuing conflict are destroying the country's agricultural production
and social safety net. According to UN estimates, the drought is affecting some
12 million people (more than half of Afghanistan's population), 3-4 million of
them seriously. While most are not at immediate risk of becoming famine
victims, deaths from hunger are already being reported, and it is feared that
the numbers will rise in coming months.
NAIROBI, 13 February (IRIN) - The
United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) made an urgent appeal on Tuesday for
US $135 million for 2.9 million Sudanese affected by drought and civil war in
both government and rebel-held areas. Masood Hyder, WFP's Country
Representative in Sudan, said from Khartoum there was a "looming
crisis" which needed an urgent response. "We don't have time on our
hands,", Lindsey Davis, WFP Information Officer, told IRIN - "the
point is, if nothing is done now people are definitely going to be running out
of food by April."
SAN JOSE, Feb 14 (IPS) - The second
earthquake in a month to hit El Salvador has left at least 237 dead, and piled
further material losses on the enormous destruction wrought by the Jan 13 quake
that killed 872.
And this is a story from last
summer:
Wednesday 12 July 2000: Armed with
findings that HIV/AIDS infects six people under the age of 25 every minute,
UNICEF said today that if nations hope to defeat the disease they must commit
to the "largest mobilization of resources in their history" and
organize themselves as if they were fighting "a full-blown war of
liberation," with young people in the forefront.
Almost a third of all people with
HIV/AIDS are between the ages of 15 and 24 -- a total of some 10 million young
people;
· Every minute, six young people under the age
of 25 become infected with HIV;
· And in 1999 alone, an estimated 860,000
primary school children in sub-Saharan Africa lost their teachers to AIDS.
“Even
the wind and waves obey him.” I am glad
that I do not have to preach on this passage this morning in Gujarat or
Islamabad or in San Jose or in one of those African primary schools. Why don't the earthquakes obey him? Why don't infectious diseases like malaria
which is threatening to wipe out so many children obey him?
“You
are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour power, for you
created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” I think I would find it difficult to reflect
on this passage in Mozambique, last year devastated by flooding just as it is
beginning to get up on its feet again.
The
poet Tennyson wrote that “nature is red in tooth and claw.” And he seems to have got it right. Watch one episode of “Walking with
Dinosaurs” and you find yourself wondering why God allowed a world to exist
which seems so dependent on animals needing to kill each other and devour each
other to survive. There seems so much
savagery, too much chaos, built into the way creation functions. We can come to terms with our own
responsibility for the evil in the world - war, murder, injustice etc.- and
without doubt we as a race are desperately in need for God to rescue us, but
what about the evil of earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, disease,
tornadoes? Richard Dawkins, a professor
on a religious quest to convert us to atheism, looks at the world and
concludes, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” C.S. Lewis lost his wife to cancer
and found his faith severely tested. He
found himself asking, “Not that I am (I think) in danger of ceasing to believe
in God. The real danger is of coming to
believe such dreadful things about him.
The conclusion I dread is not “so there’s no God after all,” but “So
this is what God’s really like. Deceive
yourself no longer.”
I
believe that when we catch a glimpse of the cruelty of nature it can be the
biggest challenge to our faith.
Georgina Brooks is a Tearfund volunteer living in a mud hut in Sudan and
managing a feeding programme with Tearfund’s disaster response team. She says, "There's a picture that will
never leave me. The face of starving
child. Gaunt, listless, dying. We see it on TV but to see it in real life completely
silenced me." In the face of so
much suffering, the question is “What do you pray now?” (Show article Tear times page 24/25). And that is the question for all of us. Jesus calmed the waves, God created all
things, but when we see all things in chaos, and waves destroying people’s
lives what do we pray now? How do we
trust God the creator? How do we praise
him, saying Holy, Holy, Holy? How do we
understand his power?
I
believe I would be doing you a disservice if you walk out of our worship today
thinking that God is not in control of all things, that he does not sustain us
by his mighty power, that he not is worthy to receive all honour and glory and
praise, that the God we believe in is not the one who can act and control the
nature he has created. The biblical
vision is of a God who is in control, who is frightening in his power over all
things-not just our small planet but over the whole cosmos.
So what will help us to believe in the God who can control nature, however devastating its effects can be? I think we can be encouraged by the fact that God is portrayed in the Bible as an undomesticated being. We have a problem as Christians when we sometimes try and create God in our own image and come out with a picture of someone who is altogether nice and inoffensive-we stress his all embracing love, but sometimes his is also a terrifying power. God is untameable, he is wild, he is uncontained. Yes, he is full of compassion and love but he is also the one from whose throne comes lightning and peals of thunder. Our time is as nothing to him, our lives pass as in a brief second, but he sees every moment in detail. He bleeds and dies, but he is above and beyond. A recent song has tried to get a sense of how God looks at the world. The words say, "When there's all kinds of chaos, and everybody's walking lame, you don't even blink now do you, don't even look away?" For me, that talks about a side of God’s capacity to cope with the terrors of earth in a way that humanity cannot find the strength or perspective for.
But
when we look at the Bible, we also find that it acknowledges the problem from
the start and hints at the fact that the idea that God is a majestically
all-powerful creator needs more careful understanding than at first we might
suspect. Here we are going to dig a bit
deeper, so get your thinking caps on.
Look up Genesis 1. In Genesis
God creates with a word. But verse two
of chapter 1 seems to describe a kind of primeval chaos and wildness which God
had to overcome in order to create.
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth
was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind
from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, "Let there be light". The reference to the waters and the deep and the darkness suggest
to me a necessary but frightening component to the way the world is which
creation only partly deals with.
Turn
to Job 38. God describes to Job how he
created everything: "…who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out
from the womb... And prescribed bounds
for it, and set bars and doors, and said, "thus far shall you come, and no
farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped?" God is both the midwife and the prison
guardian of creation. I am sure that
when Jesus stood on the boat and rebuked the waves he had a sense of a struggle
in creation which is something that God has wrestled with from the
beginning. Now I can't explain how or
why this might be. All I can say is
that even while the Bible shows us that God is Lord of space and time and
creation, it also wrestles with reality, the reality of the wildness of nature
that leaves us reeling and it says that that is part of God's experience
too.
Just
as an aside, some of you may be able to fill me in on this and it is worth
exploring in more detail, but I have been told that some catastrophes in nature
can often be proved to have been a necessary process-forest fires can be very
useful in the regeneration of trees, so I'm told.
In
the face of natural disaster I'm also encouraged to believe in a God who has
not shirked from suffering himself-Jesus thirsted in the desert, he went
without food, he lived in simplicity, he knew the harshness of nature. And of course he shows us that there is
another side to God’s power, the ability to give that power up, to limit his
influence in taking on suffering. In
the days before his execution at the hands of the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
wrote these words, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the
cross. He is weak and powerless in the
world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and
helps us….The Bible directs us to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the
suffering God can help.”
I've
also remind myself that God's work is incomplete-Jesus did not calm every
storm, did not stop every earthquake like Superman. John, who wrote down this vision of the majesty and power of God,
did so at a time when Caesar appeared to triumph, when he was in exile, and when
he had seen all of his fellow apostles go to violent deaths. Yet he had his eyes fixed on God, on his
power, and on his promised future.
We
are still waiting for that day when as Paul writes, "creation will be
liberated from its bondage to decay."
In the meantime he describes the whole world as being in the pains of
labour, waiting for God's fulfilment to arrive. When that fulfilment comes there will be no more earthquakes, but
the mountains and the hills will rejoice.
There will be no more forest fires, but the trees will clap their
hands. When we see a picture of people
trapped in rubble, we ache for a better world.
But as Christians we believe we have a God who can bring it into
being. A God of absolute power who has
broken through death and suffering. The
resurrection has made a new world possible.
So
how do we live in a world where the wind and waves do not always seem to
obey? It is right that as Christians we
should have one eye fixed on the suffering of the world, and we should not
flinch from bearing in its pain in our hearts.
But hopelessness is not our final calling. Georgina Brook’s response to the suffering world is this. The article continues, "After six
months on the front line, prayer has become as natural as breathing. "I depend on God constantly because the
responsibility and loneliness is crushing." Prayer has become she says a gut instinct. "I couldn't tell you what to pray-and I
know I won't get answers to my questions-but I can say that Jesus won the
victory on the cross. Nothing I witness
jeopardises that. Our simple
responsibility is to pray God and cry out to him. The rest is his."
Tom
Wright, the Dean of Westminster, writes, "The Christian life is about the
rhythm of standing in the presence of the pain of the world, and kneeling in
the presence of the creator of the world." So our second eye is focused on Jesus-the Jesus who showed his
relationship to the all-powerful God by calming the wind and the waves. The Jesus whose father is the Almighty
midwife and guardian of creation, who lives within and above everything, and to
catch a glimpse of whose glory is to have all questions answered.
We
work, we live, we pray, we love, only if we can be those who join in with the
praise of heaven singing, "You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive
glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they
existed and were created."