Acts of God
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| Forrest Church |
A sermon delivered at All Souls Church Unitarian, New York, NY
The Rev. Dr. Forrest Church
(January 9, 2004)
In Sri Lanka and Malaysia, in Thailand, Indonesia and India, as the emotional
aftershocks begin to take their toll, comes the inevitable question, “Why?”
As put by one aid worker to a Roman Catholic bishop in the Sri Lankan city of
Batticcaloa—2,500 people died there, tens of thousands were left homeless—“How
can a loving God allow this to happen?” According to Wall Street Journal
reporters Karen Mazurkewich and Geoffrey Fowler, who recounted this conversation,
the Bishop stood mute. Finally, he admitted, “This disaster has shaken
my faith.” Many of his flock were pondering the same mystery. “Everyone
wants to know why did this happen to us, and at this level of magnitude,”
Bishop Swampilaii admitted to his questioner. “This was unimaginable.”
Natural and unnatural catastrophes alike turn all of us into theologians.
Not the kind of theologian who labors in the isolation of his study, reckoning
the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, but the kind who has
been slapped against the wall by reality, for whom anything but hardscrabble
truth is an unaffordable luxury. Religion is our human response to the dual
reality of being alive and knowing we must die. Knowing we must die, we
can’t help but question what life and death means. Whenever we choose
or are forced to pose such questions, we become theologians. We ask ultimate
questions. We challenge the nature of reality with the reality of our own experience.
Not all amateur theologians are believers. When the bottom falls out of the
world, when a mighty wave slaps the life out of everyone they love, leaving
them bereft and alone amidst the ruins, some believers challenge the nature
of reality with the reality of their own experience and lose their faith. “This
disaster has shaken my faith,” the bishop dared to confess. Of course
it has. Look for a loving God in the eye of a hurricane or riding the crest
of a Tsunami and, baring the most inhumane twists of logic imaginable, you will
look in vain.
In fact, if such a God exists, then God is a bastard. The traditional Western
God—the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim God, Lord of Heaven and Earth, all
knowing and all powerful, the Deus ex machina driving human history, treating
men and women as wanton boys treat flies—is either a bastard or a sturdy
figment of our theological imagination.
Whenever someone boasts to me they don’t believe in God, I ask them to
tell me a little about the God they don’t believe in, because I probably
don’t believe in him either. I simply can’t believe in any God who,
on the day after Christmas, would choose to rip the earth asunder, welling the
tide to life-crushing heights, and then, with his all seeing eye, watch it crash
down on more than a thousand beaches to claim more than 100 times that many
souls. Tens of thousands of orphans. As many heart-shattered widows, widowers
and parents combing snapshots for a last look at their loved ones. Most of them
poor to begin with, now impoverished beyond all measure. However insurance companies
may choose to define them, whatever Acts of God may be for actuarial purposes,
the one thing Acts of God surely are not is acts of God.
Orthodox and fundamentalist believers would disagree, of course. For them,
were we to strip the divine of ultimate responsibility for everything that happens,
God would not be God. For this very reason, earthquakes play a major role in
salvation history. Listed among the signs of the end times in the Book of Revelation,
throughout Christian history earthquakes and floods are cited time and again
as natural proof texts for the Second Coming of Christ. The Pentecostal movement
in American traces its beginnings to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (8.25
on the Richter Scale, leaving 700 dead and 250,000 homeless). One lucky local
evangelist predicted an imminent terrible sign of God’s judgment just
one week before it happened. Soon his mission house—called AZUSA (A to
Z or alpha to omega USA)—was overflowing with new converts speaking in
tongues and testifying to the glorious presence of the Holy Spirit. Alleluia,
indeed! No doubt some itinerant preacher is gaining converts in South East Asia
even as I speak, presenting manifest evidence of God’s wrath, calling
the survivors, themselves already victims, to repent their sins before it is
too late. Such logic, if brutal, is simple. If God did this, God must be angry.
If I lost my loved ones, then I must have done something wrong or they must
have done something wrong for God to punish us so severely.
We follow this logic almost instinctively when something terrible happens to
us. To find higher meaning in that which has destroyed all the meaning we have
come to know and trust, we ask the unanswerable question, “Why?”
“Why this, why me, why now?” We struggle to make sense of God’s
will. We attempt to comfort one another by drowning our ignorance in God’s
knowledge: “God knows best,” we parrot to one another. Or “God
has his reasons.” Or “It is all part of God’s divine plan.”
So understood, God’s will is a frightening and demeaning concept. Acts
of God become themselves ungodly acts. We abase our dignity at the altar of
an arbitrary, all-mighty and merciless magistrate. We place our trust in the
hands of one who has destroyed our trust. We submit our hearts to one who has
torn our hearts to pieces.
So why bother with God in the first place? Because God is the biggest imaginable
metaphor for meaning. To cultivate both awe and humility—the two cornerstones
of a mature spiritual life—we must not cap our search with some arbitrary
ceiling. Besides, theology is not science, it is poetry. The ancient Hebrews
recognized that “God” is not even God’s name. God is our
name for a power that is greater than all and yet present in each: the life
force; the Holy; Being itself. Simply because others’ theological imagination
may be mean and crimped doesn’t require us to suspend our own.
When our experience of reality renders traditional conceptions of God to be
blasphemous—All knowing, All mighty, All cruel—we amateur theologians
have two choices. Either we conclude that there is no God or we re-imagine the
divine to re-encompass our experience of what is truly holy.
There is nothing novel, and certainly nothing blasphemous, about re-imagining
or even renaming God. Responding to life-and-death questions, we have reinvented
and thereby rediscovered the Holy throughout the centuries.
Consider our ancestors, the searchers who came before us. Begin with cave dwellers—hunters
and gatherers—for whom the greatest imaginable powers were forces of nature.
“God” is manifest in fire, therefore, in lightening and in thunder,
perhaps even in the game they hunt for sustenance. When agriculture replaces
hunting and gathering, these Gods turn into Goddesses. Power now lies in reaping
and sowing, in the turning of the seasons. Fecundity determines survival, “God”
becomes “Goddess;” procreation, creation; birth, life.
Later, with the city-state, power comes wrapped in the robes of authority.
“God” is now Lord or King, protector, enforcer, and judge. A breakthrough
in this view of the divine nature comes with the Hebrews, who believe that their
God and King is the only God and King. Less an imperialistic than an ethical
development, this leads them to attribute their failures not to another stronger
God, but to their own shortcomings. With Jesus, God becomes Father (in fact,
Daddy, or “Abba”), a far more intimate authority figure.
In Western society, the God most unbelievers reject is the traditional Judeo-Christian
God: loving, just, demanding, capricious on occasion, sometimes cruel. Yet,
aided by the Copernican revolution, for many thoughtful people this God was
overthrown centuries ago. As has happened many times before, God was not therefore
dead; ”God” was re-imagined. When Copernicus displaced us from the
center of the universe, in re-imagining God one group of scientists and theologians
seized upon a metaphor better suited to their new worldview. Enter God the Watchmaker,
who created the world, set it ticking, and then withdrew to another corner of
the cosmos. This is the God of the Deists, a God icy and remote, still transcendent
but no longer personal.
Today, we witness a further revolution, one as profound as that initiated by
Copernicus and Galileo half a millennium ago. From quantum physics to cosmology,
scientific students of the creation have become masters of paradox. Post-modern
philosophers contemplate the dynamic relationship between how we say something
and what we mean. Political theorists speak of a global Empire whose emperor,
though virtual not factual, is no less powerful and real. And theologians entertain
notions of divinity no longer encumbered by static concepts such as omniscience
and omnipotence. Having moved from one transcendent God to another (first Lord
and Judge, then absentee landlord), we are beginning to encounter what might
best be called a reflexive God, co-creator with us in an unfolding, intricate
drama of hitherto unimaginable complexity. This God is not immutable, but ever
changing, reaching and growing, even as we change, reach and grow. Such a God
even grieves when we grieve, as we expand the compass of our empathy, ennobling
our suffering into a sacrament. No longer merely actors on God’s stage,
by this reading of creation history, we are participants in the scripting of
God’s drama.
The surest path to God (the Sacred or the Holy) is to follow not the logic
of our minds but the logic of our hearts. All of us suffer. We are broken and
in need of healing. We struggle to accept ourselves and forgive others. Aware
of our imperfections, we seek more perfect faith, hope, and justice. At our
best, we see our tears in one another’s eyes and rise together in answer
to the urgings of conscience. We discover the Holy—its healing and saving
power—by acting in harmony. Remember, God is simply our name for the highest
power we know. If we define God as love—as good a definition as any I
know—we discover God’s nature in our personal experience of love.
This may not mean God is actually love, but it certainly suggests that love
is divine.
Let me tell you a story. One day a group of seekers begins to climb a mountain.
Having been told that God lives at the top of it, they jettison their daily
cares and leave them in the valley below. Climbing into the clouds on a quest
for perfect wisdom, they follow the official signs that point to God: transcendent,
all knowing, all powerful.
Finally, they reach the mountaintop. From the mountain’s crest, they
can see farther than they have ever seen before. And the air is thin at the
top of the mountain. This promotes abstract and disembodied reflection on the
eternal verities, which are confounded and veiled by the grossness, busyness
and squalor of life below. There is only one problem. God is not there. It seems
that while they were climbing up the mountain in search of God, God was climbing
down the mountain into the valley. As earth-bound pilgrims dream to escape their
human lot, desiring transfiguration into something immortal and divine, God’s
hope is to embrace humanity, become incarnate in mortal flesh, share our grief
and pain, thus to escape the everlasting emptiness of eternity.
By this reading, when asked by an aid worker, “How can a loving God allow
this to happen,” the Bishop might reply, “Ah, my son, God is present
not in the destruction we see around us, but in the work of your hands and the
compassion of your heart. God is in your tears. God’s heart breaks when
your heart breaks. Despite all that has happened, my son, I have not lost my
faith, in part because of you.”
We are born into a great mystery. We die into a great mystery. In between—in
that little dash between the dates on our tombstone—what we know of God
we learn from love’s lessons. Love teaches us the difference between what
is holy and what is diabolical. When forty-five per cent of our countrymen and
women contribute to disaster relief to help people suffering half way round
the world, that is holy. When some true-believer blames the Tsunami on an American
Atomic bomb test under the Pacific waters or refuses to accept aid proffered
by Israel, that is diabolical. Through inner peace and outer harmony, the Holy
unites us. When we act in concert with our higher selves and embrace our neighbors,
we act in the presence of all that is divine. Conversely, the demonic divides
us against our higher selves and from our neighbor. Whatever is born of hatred
and division is not of God, but only that which truly saves, that which is born
of love and compassion. So understood, God is not all-knowing or all-powerful,
but all-loving and all-merciful. When love dwells in our hearts, God dwells
in our presence. God’s saving power manifests itself and grows through
our own healing work.
Does this answer the question “Why?” No, it doesn’t. Final
answers to ultimate questions lie far beyond the ken of human understanding.
We keep asking, of course. It’s the nature of our being, the nature of
our search. We keep climbing up to reach the stars even as God comes down to
share our tears, each to the other like a vanishing pot of gold at two ends
of a rainbow. The mystery is, by reaching for God—for a divine hand that
turns out not to be there—we may in fact be changed, even saved. And in
seeking us out, who knows? Perhaps God too is changed. Humbled. Spun into webs
of passion and stung with pain. Fully brought to life.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.
>>Liturgical Resources for
Reflection on the Indian Ocean Tsunami
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