Sermon

AFTER THE TSUNAMI

Sermon preached at St Peter & St Paul on Epiphany I 2005 by Rev'd Patrick O'Ferrall, Curate of Godalming

Where is God in all this? That is the question that many people of different faiths have been asking and struggling with since Boxing Day. Why should so many people suddenly die over such a wide area.

Last Sunday the headline on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph quoted the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying: “This has made me question God’s existence.” In fact this headline was an attempt by the headline writer to summarize what the Archbishop had written on an inside page in a way that would attract readers’ attention. No doubt he thought it would make good copy. But in fact this was a misrepresentation of what Dr Rowan Williams had written and something that anyone who read the article would see for themselves. A Lambeth Palace spokesman insisted that the Archbishop had merely hypothesised that it would be wrong for Christians not to question what God was up to.

So why the tsunami? Where was God in all this? A number of religious leaders have gone public with their views; and what I want to do today is to look at some of the issues involved and the views that have been expressed about them. But let me make it clear at the outset that there are no easy answers and if the Archbishop can’t give them you should not expect a humble curate to do so either. Of course one of the basic problems when we discuss the nature of God is that we are stretched to the limits of our human language, thought and imagination, and beyond to describe a being beyond our full comprehension.

Be that as it may, perhaps the first issue to explore is the age-old dilemma which goes back to the book of Job - if God is all-powerful then why does he let such disasters occur?

Rowan Williams addressed this question as follows: “The traditional answer will only get us so far. God we are told is not a puppet-master in regard to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to work in an environment where we can live lives of productive work and consistent understanding, the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. Effects follow causes in a way we can chart and so can make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be? How many deaths will be acceptable?

Personally I wonder if someone could explain all this and why it made sense would our belief in god be stronger? How would we think if it seemed that God deliberately planned such an event?”

Some of you may perhaps remember the tragedy that took place at Aberfan in 1966 when a mudslide engulfed a school with many resulting fatalities. The then Archbishop of Wales said at the time: “I can only dare to speak about this because I once lost a child. I have nothing to say today that will make sense of this horror today. All I know is that the words in my Bible about God’s promise to be alongside us have never lost their meaning for me. And now we have to work in God’s name for the future.” He was speaking from the experience of losing one child. But he was able to speak about a much greater tragedy because of that experience and not because he had a better way of making sense of it.

It is interesting to compare this view with the Hindu attitude: the Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies wrote: “To blame God is infantile. It is about accepting personal responsibility and the truth that you are not the centre of the universe. You should not be thinking you are in charge. We are not going to stop this kind of thing happening and it is not important to try. We must try to realize our own perfection rather than trying to make the world perfect – that’s not going to happen. We have chosen to enter a realm where suffering exists. We are doomed to suffering and death. This does not reflect on our relationship with God.”

The Muslim view as expressed by the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain is more fatalistic; Iqbal Sacranie said, “This is the will of God Almighty. It is this aspect that is beyond us. Allah knows best. None of us is going to live for an indefinite period. Death always takes place but what form it takes is always beyond us. People of faith need to have a very firm belief in God Almighty.”

Now in the distant past natural disasters were interpreted as God’s punishment of sinners, but in more recent times this view has been repudiated. The Lisbon disaster in 1765 when 60,000 people died led Voltaire to ask the question “Why Lisbon and not some other city?” To ask also “Why were the young, the frail and the saintly among the victims?” Even the most dogmatic supporters of the old view found it difficult to answer these questions. For it blames the victims for their fate which is morally unacceptable. How on earth could the Holocaust be considered in this light or the very many children killed by the tsunami.

Now let’s look for a moment at a Jewish point of view. Dr Jonathan Sacks the Chief Rabbi quotes the 12th century sage Moses Maimonides: “Natural disasters”, he wrote, “have no explanation other than God, by placing us in a physical world, set life within the parameters of the physical.” Planets are formed, tectonic plates shift, earthquakes occur, and sometimes innocent people die. To wish it otherwise is in essence to wish that we were not physical beings at all. Then we would never know pleasure, desire, achievement, freedom, virtue, creativity, vulnerability, and love. Jonathan Sacks states that Judaism is an attempt not to ask why but rather: “What should I do? What can I do to help?” I don’t think we can begin to ask why. The message is that we all belong together. We must put our efforts into saving life. We believe that God needs our help to help those who suffer.

The Bishop of Shrewsbury had two things to say in response to the question “Where is God in all this?” Firstly that God is the crucified one, the one who is in the midst of the pain not separate from it. Secondly God is to be found in the hands of those who are helping to bury the dead, to bring clean water to the living, to administer medicine to the ill, and counsel those in darkness.

So I think that we are being encouraged to concentrate not so much on where is God in all this, but to remember that God himself is there suffering with the afflicted – and our role is to be one of engagement with the survivors in whatever practical way that we can. We are urged to give generously to the aid effort and support proposals for debt relief – to let the survivors feel aware that we grieve with them at their losses of loved one’s homes and livelihoods. Certainly the response in this country has been outstanding. For example the retiring collection at our United Service last Sunday raised nearly £2,900 and it is significant that the British Government has felt obliged to match the generosity of the general public.

Rowan Williams emphasizes the importance of faith when he says: “The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again – not because it comforts or explains but because people cannot deny what has been shown or given to them. They have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift: they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God’s mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.”

As Christians we see the value of each individual life as infinitely precious and this why tragedy on this vast scale is so uniquely harrowing. Each life is unique and its loss a tragedy. Stalin is quoted as saying that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. He should know because he was responsible for millions of deaths– perhaps the only way he could live with this was to think of them as mere statistics. But we cannot ever see such things in that light. All we can say is that for us a million deaths is a million individual tragedies.

So the reaction of faith is, as I said, passionate engagement to help the survivors.

In all the horror there have been some remarkable stories of rescue – the aid workers have worked tirelessly under desperate conditions. Perhaps one of the most hopeful aspects of the disaster is the possibility of reconciliation between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government and their joint participation in the peaceful reconstruction of their country. The world has shrunk as we recognize as our neighbours all those who suffered in those countries around the Indian Ocean and we do this without regard to their religion or nationality. There is hope too in the way countries are working together to bring relief and individuals are offering skills that are relevant to the needs of the stricken countries. Let us hope that it will also prove to be a wake–up call to the richer nations to take some drastic action to redress the dire poverty that afflicts so many people around the world.

These hopes arise out of the disaster. They do not diminish or explain it. It is a salutary reminder that life is a gift and a precarious one at that. May God give us the strength and courage to face the uncertainties of life and to continue to have faith in Him.