“Not in the Earthquake”
13 March 2011
Homily Delivered the First Sunday in Lent Year A
10:00 a.m. Liturgy of the Word
Congregation of the Good Shepherd
Beijing, China
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11; Psalm 32
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7)
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
At the Ash Wednesday Service earlier this week, Mother Jemma read in her prayers part of a poem she had written. It expressed the sense of mortality she was acutely feeling as we began Lent in the wake of the terrible earthquake in her homeland: dust of the rubble, ashes of ruins, “remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” Then we heard on Friday afternoon of yet another, more terrible earthquake in Japan—as Christchurch still buries its dead. Then we began to learn of the horrors of the fires and the tsunami. Yesterday afternoon, just after large aftershocks hit the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station, a major mechanical explosion ripped apart the building housing the number one reactor, seriously injuring four workers who had been feverishly working to get the reactor under control. In what may be the most serious nuclear power crisis since the Chernobyl disaster, authorities are telling people in the locality to stay indoors and wear face masks. As of 10 o’clock last night, Kyodo news service was reporting that in the Minamisanriku, a town of 17,000 in Miyagi prefecture, 9,500 people remain missing or unaccounted for.
I was reminded of a line from the Book of Common Prayer’s Great Litany, which people in my tradition often chant at the beginning of this penitential season: “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, Good Lord, deliver us.” (TEC BCP, p. 149) The videos of bridges with traffic being washed away in the raging waters, and the photos of large areas ravished and flooded, with a passenger train strewn across it like some naughty child’s toy, and the realization that the first devastations took place during the work day and rush hour, recalled another line from the litany, “…from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.”
Such horror is enough to make you wonder, if you have faith, or if you are naturally optimistic. It certainly doesn’t weaken the native pessimism that some of us seem to have, or the belief of some that the world is totally random and meaningless. It was after the All Saint’s Day earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 that the Enlightenment lost confidence in a world guided by any kind of friendly providence. Voltaire and Rousseau both reacted by suggesting that in light of the disaster if God were good, he could not be almighty, and if he were almighty, he could not be good. This is the classic problem of theodicy, how we explain the justice and goodness of God in the face of irrational and random horror.
Today’s Reading from Genesis is a story that seeks to answer the question “Why do we have to die,” a question we tend to ask when disaster strikes. The story puts this into larger questions as well, “Why, if God made the world, is there evil and misdoing here? Does the bad we see in the world mean that God made it bad, and that God is part bad?” The story is often misread. It is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman, and the details are rich with meaning for each and every one of us.
The story introduces evil into the world through a talking snake, the most clever of all animals. That detail alone should tell us that we are dealing with a folk story here. The snake convinces Every Man and Every Woman to eat the one fruit—of all the wonderful fruit available to them—the one fruit forbidden them by God, It thus gives us the answer to these hard questions: “We don’t know why, and perhaps cannot know why, there is evil and death in the world. It’s a mystery! But one thing is sure—the evil we do and the evil we see do not come from God.”
The Book of Job makes the same point. It tells the story of a man who is “perfect in all his ways,” yet who suffers horror. His friends, ever willing to defend the justice of God, urge Job to confess and repent of whatever hidden sin he has committed that God is so obviously punishing him for. Most of the book’s 40 some chapters outline the argument. But Job just can’t agree that what has happened has any semblance of fairness. He won’t lie to get God off the hook. Yet he does not “curse God and die,” as suggested by his wife. He continues the argument, drags out the discussion. Finally, when God at long last engages him directly, and speaks to him from “out of the whirlwind,” the revelation of the difference of their perspectives is so overwhelming that all Job can do is put on dust and ashes, repent himself, and bless the name of the Lord. In so doing, he is not granting his friends’ arguments. He is simply mourning the hard, hard, facts of our human condition, and expressing his hope and trust for its ultimate resolution by a reliable but mysterious God.
Many stories in the Gospels make the same point. Stories of Jesus healing the sick tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t intend horror and disappointment for his creatures. One of the key difficulties in theodicy is finding the appropriate connection between God’s ultimate good purposes and intention and what we experience in our actual lives.
Jesus was asked about people who suffer horrible things. Once, a man born blind was pointed out to him: “Was it his parents sin or his that caused this?” “Neither,” he said.
Another time people came to him and said, “Did you hear that the Romans massacred those countrymen of yours who were worshipping in the Temple? Their own blood was mixed with that of the animals they were sacrificing! What did they do that was so bad that God punished them this way?” “They did nothing any worse than anyone else,” he replies, and continues, “What about those people who died in the Tower of Siloam when it collapsed? They were no worse than anyone else.” “The lesson we should take here,” says Jesus, “is not that they were particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke 13:1-5).
Jesus knew well that sometimes bad things happen to good people and that in this world the evil often prosper. His death of the cross is the ultimate example of the righteous suffering unjustly. But he trusted in God and the goodness of God nonetheless. That’s why in Gethsemane, he asks if it is possible to have the cup pass from him. But immediately he adds, “Your will, not mine, be done.” It is this very openness to God that gets us out of the way, and helps bring the kingdom closer.
That is the point of today’s Gospel reading. Where we, Every Man and Every Woman, defect from God's purpose and sin, Jesus Christ in the desert, though completely one of us, overthrows the tempter’s power. And this through complete openness to his Father.
We often lose sight of this basic point in the story of the Fall of Humankind because of the historicized way many of us have come to read these stories, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in today’s reading in Paul. But even there, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned” not “so that they all sin.” In his classic phrasing of the doctrine of original sin, St. Augustine pushed it further by suggesting that this sin in our origins was a moral contamination transmitted through the very act that generates children, sex, which he associated with the symbol of eating the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story.
In the Book of Genesis, however, there is no hint of such a demonization of human sexuality. Genesis sees sexuality as part of God’s good creation, and seeks to counter its divinization in the fertility cults so abundant in the ancient near East.
This story in Genesis does not teach that sexual sin corrupted our first parents and transmitted this to us all. Instead, it tells a story where figures representing each one of us go astray. And go astray we do. Elsewhere Genesis teaches that the human heart, for whatever reasons, has a mysterious tendency to go astray and desire evil. In the story of the Flood, we hear, “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humankind was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5) Later Judaism develops the idea in this verse into the doctrine of the Yetser hara‘ “the inclination to evil,” the rabbis’ doctrine similar to Augustine’s Original Sin, but without blaming some human ancestor for one’s failings or disparaging sex and the body.
The greatest proof of the truth of the teaching of a “Fall of Humankind,” therefore, is not to be found in the archaeological or fossil record. It is to be found by looking in the mirror.
So much for how Genesis explains moral evil that comes from human choice. What about natural horror, “nature red in tooth and claw,” or the great economies of waste and suffering seen in natural selection in the evolution of species?
Genesis hints that there is a lack of perfect conformity to God’s intention even in the natural world as God created it (without benefit, as it were, of a historical “Fall of Man”). In the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1, for instance, not all the commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in what immediately happens as a result, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew. Charles Foster writes:
“‘Let light be,’ commands God; ‘Light be,” comes back the report. This is not ham-fisted editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were doing. ‘Grass grass,’ God tells the earth. But the earth does not. It ‘puts forth’ grass. The created order is slightly disobedient from the start.” Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation, only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly (The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp. 132-33).
The Priestly author only hints at this lack of conformity of the created world with God’s intentions. He knows that God’s declaration that creation is good, when in the face of recalcitrant nature, presents us with mystery. But the idea ties in with Augustine’s doctrine of what evil is. For Augustine, evil is not a positive thing, but rather the absence of good. And if God is all good, then the very act of creating something that is not-God implies that there will be gaps in the goodness of the created world. That is how he accounts for the natural evil in the world.
Yesterday while we were walking in Chaoyang Park and talking about Japan, Elena told me another folk story, this one from Japan, that she had learned as a children’s librarian:
Ojiisan was a simple man living long, long ago on a mountaintop near the sea. His name means "grandfather." One day when his family was preparing to go to a festival celebrating the rice harvest, he refused to go. He sensed something was very wrong so he and his grandson stayed behind. As he watched from a distance all the villagers celebrating the festival below near the ocean, he felt the earth rumble beneath the soles of his feet. Ojiisan, who had felt hundreds of earthquakes in his time, knew this one was different than most. He had learned from his grandfather that after some earthquakes, terrible surges of the ocean could draw up the water near the beach and then crash back again, destroying everything and everyone not one high ground. As he watched, he saw the ocean begin to recede quickly and leave the bottom exposed. To his horror, he saw the villagers at the celebration rushing toward the beach to watch instead of running away from it to save themselves. He called, but no one could hear. So he ran to his own precious fields, full of ripe rice, and set them on fire. The villagers, seeing the fire and smoke, left the amazingly bare ocean bottom and began to rush up the mountain to try to put out the fire. The grandson tried to get them to put out the fire before it destroyed the entire wealth of the family, but the grandfather stopped him because there were still villagers below who had not seen the smoke and come. They too soon noticed and ran up the mountain, just as the tsunami hit the lower ground and carried away everything there. By sacrificing his own farm and livelihood, Ojiisan had saved all the villagers. To this day, a temple built by the villagers stands on that mountainside overlooking the dangerous sea, honoring Ojiisan and his sacrifice. [adapted from Tsunami! by Kimiko Kajikawa]
In this story, Ojiisan does not get distracted by the horror he is seeing. He is not dissuaded by the cost of what he must do. He sees what he needs to do, and does it, even when his grandson thinks he is crazy and pleads with him to stop. By not getting distracted, and simply doing the next thing put in front of him that he needs to do, the next right thing, Ojiisan saves his village and becomes worthy of a shrine in his honor. In his sacrifice of his rice fields, he is like Christ, who sacrificed himself to become for us beacon to lead us from our misdoings, our struggling against God's ultimate purposes, from again and again doing what we know is wrong.
William Pike, writing on the Haiti earthquake two years ago, said that he had been reminded of the story of Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19, where God spoke to Elijah not out of an earthquake, whirlwind, or fire, but out of the whispering of the still breeze. Pike remembers the words used in the passage—“The Lord was not in the earthquake.”
God indeed is not in the earthquake, is not in the horror, not in the fire, nor the flood. God is not in our misdoings and our failure to do the right thing. All these show us how far the world is from God's ultimate intention, not God in action. Rather, God is in the efforts of people trying to do the right thing. God is in those who help the victims of such things.
May we all this week continue in our prayers and searching to find repentant hearts. But let us also pray for, and help by contributing fiscal resources, the recovery and rescue efforts in Japan and New Zealand.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
Intercessions for Victims of the Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami
and Christchurch Earthquake
O merciful Father, you taught us in your holy Word that you do not willingly afflict or grieve the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve: Look with pity upon the sorrows of their children in Japan and New Zealand afflicted by natural disasters, for whom our prayers are offered. Remember them, O Lord, in mercy, nourish their souls with patience, comfort them with a sense of your goodness, lift up your countenance upon them, and give them peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Receive in mercy the souls of those who have died. Bring them forth, we pray, in your good time fully alive and themselves, but like the stars shining in the heavens.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Give comfort and peace to the dying, Lord. Save and preserve, Lord, those whose lives and health are still in danger.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Ease the pain of the injured. Heal and strengthen the hurt and the ill.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Give courage and skill to those seeking to manage the damaged nuclear reactors that their efforts may be successful and worse harm avoided.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Give strong resolve to and strengthen government and military officials, community leaders, aid workers, care givers, neighbors, and donors that assistance will come quickly, efficiently, and in adequate amounts, and that recovery efforts proceed successfully.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Bless and comfort those who have lost loved ones and colleagues. Help them to not lose hope or a sense of purpose.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Bless especially children who have been orphaned, the elderly who have lost their grown children, and families that have lost their breadwinners. Give them adequate replacement caregivers and support.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Help those who have lost their homes or their means of livelihood.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Help communities rebuild, especially schools, hospitals, and enterprises that provide livelihoods.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Bless all who look on at horror to simply trust in you and not ask why such disasters happen but rather ask what human need they can fulfill when facing one.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Father, your Son Jesus died for us in shame and pain, but was not deflected from his mission. Help us to follow him bravely in the Way of the Cross. Help us to be your hands of mercy and
love to those who suffer. Give us faith, merciful Lord, that glorious resurrection can follow deadly suffering, and that in your good intention for creation, all shall be well,
and all manner of thing can be turned to good.
O God, make speed to save us.
R. O Lord, make haste to help us
Knowing our weakness, and reminded by these frightening signs that we are but grass and the flower thereof, that we are mere dust and unto dust shall return, all this we ask for your tender mercies’ sake.
Amen
