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God and the Tsunami - 2nd January 2005 What can we say about the disaster in South Asia? Was God sleeping? Why did God let that happen?... What follows are a few thoughts which may help us in trying to see the bigger picture: Sometimes when people ask the questions like “Why did God let that happen?”, that’s not the questions they actually want answering... Some vocal people take such opportunities to vent their own anger at their impotence, their “paradoxical atheism”: there is a danger that we alleviate our own shallow and empty despair by pouring scorn on somebody else’s system of belief. "It's a question of how you see God..." Much of how we view this disaster in South Asia depends on how we see God. The “gap-filling” God who ‘explains’ (or is blamed for) what we can’t understand is soon squeezed out as our knowledge increases. The “grand nanny” God who (should) shields us from everything is a selfish, inadequate construct. The “disinterested distant” God who wound up the universe and lets it tick away doesn’t square with the Scriptures or our own experience. The tsunami in South Asia was (in its purest form) a “natural” disaster. Earthquakes happen. Maybe human folly and failing exacerbated a situation (with inadequate housing, political systems which give poor people no choices etc.)
"Head-heavy and heart-lite..." In our world view we are head-heavy and heart-lite... we think that by understanding everything we can control it... Part of our call as Christians is to live the world, not just to know all the answers. ‘Why?’ may tell us the cause of something, ‘so what?’ tells us how we live with it. The question of Free Will is part of the equation. God doesn’t force us to love him, he invites us into a relationship of love . We don’t have an ‘arranged marriage’ with God, we have a love match... BUT with Free Will comes responsibility. We prefer to be self centred and want to be spoon fed, but God calls us to maturity in Christ. The scriptures talk about us as co-heirs with God (Rom 8.17); fellow-workers with God (1 Cor 3.9); householders with God (Eph 2.19); a holy priesthood (1 Pet 2.5) brothers and sisters of Jesus (Rom 8.29), we’re called to maturity in Christ....(1 Cor 14.20; Heb 6.1; Col 4.12 etc.!)
So if we ask “What does God want
of us?” we know the answer: “To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly
with you God” (Micah 6.8). Yet a tiny percentage of the world’s
population controls the vast majority of resources on this planet: global
warming is partly a result of our insistence on cheap air travel, huge
over-manufacturing and our unwillingness to do with less so that other may
do at all; terrorism is partly
"Are we doing our bit?" These are the responsibilities that go with Free Will... God has given us Free Will and works with us in the world, but are we really doing our bit? It’s not us who makes the sun rise, the seeds to germinate, the seasons to change, the life force to pulsate...
We do know: that God mourns over the untimely end to any life; that God wants us to have life to the full (Jn 10.10); we know that death is not unnatural, but part of our cycle of how things are: we know that resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith and hope - we know that there is more to life that just what we can see and touch and measure; we know that God too had to watch a Son die a slow and horrific death before his time at the hands of ignorant people who didn’t know the significance of what they were doing... But what can we do? "We can light a candle or curse the darkness..."
But maybe we need to look at our lifestyles, maybe we need to look at our faith... do we expect God to be the great nurse, making it all better for us when we hurt (physically or intellectually or emotionally)? Do we expect God to spoon feed us? Do we expect God to do things which are our responsibility? How will our prayers be changed if we realise that praying about this disaster will change us? How will the South Asia tsunami change my relationship with God? We can light a candle, or we can curse the darkness...
A Prayer
for Asia from Christian Aid
Picture Credits on this page: DigitalGlobe, Helmut Issels |
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For us the scale is worrying: but
we’re told that God rejoices over one found sheep... to God the loss of one
individual life is of significance - to the person concerned, to their
family and loved ones... Why should God intervene to prevent one situation
and not another?
because
of unequal living standards amongst people groups, because we don’t respect
each other, because we won’t listen, because we refuse to share or
compromise... We haven’t been very good at “acting justly, loving mercy or
walking humbly with our God”
It is impossible to “explain” the
disaster in South Asia... our theories reduce the suffering of others to
make us feel better... There is no perfect intellectual, moral explanation
of why disasters happen. We have only hints: things like Free Will, our
responsibility, the way God seems to act in our lives and world... but these
hints only make sense as part of a life lived by faith, prayer and
contemplation leading to Christian action.
The responsibility that goes with
our Free Will means for example that we have material resources in this
country that others don’t. We can give money, we can pray for them, we can
remember them and their plight, we can carry on asking the faith questions
about where was God when it happened, and we can carry on reflecting on our
responsibility of living in a privileged part of the world...