Back in January 2005, just after the terrible tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, I listened to a very meaningful commentary on NPR (the podcast is at this link if you want to hear it yourself: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4276173). The discussion was between faith leaders from different religions throughout the world on the issue of God’s presence in the tsunami. The religions represented were Christian (Catholic and Baptist), Reformed Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. The three main questions that people of faith were asking all over the world and that they were charged to explore were – Why did God let this happen? What part did we play in causing such a terrible disaster? And where was God in the face of this tragedy?
As you can probably guess there were many different answers to those questions. Some of the religious leaders put the blame squarely on people: In essence, we have abused our planet and so nature is rebelling against us by bringing devastation to the poorest of nations. Or our past sinfulness either in this life or in previous lives has created our own punishment and all of us, even the smallest and most vulnerable, deserve what we get. Other leaders put the responsibility squarely on God: Essentially, God sent the tsunami and was ultimately and intimately involved in its destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives. God is completely in control and the fact that anyone was even spared shows God’s mercy in meting out punishment. And in fact, they claimed that this “loving, holy, and just” God is calling all of us to repent but sending the tsunami, because each of us was born stained with sin and so, once again, we deserve our punishment. It’s only by God’s mercy that God doesn’t judge us more, therefore we should be grateful it wasn’t us being dragged out to sea.
Well, I don’t buy any of that. And I never will.
There was one voice in that discussion that did make sense to me and that I remember to this day. The voice was that of a Reformed Jewish Rabbi from Maryland who stood alone and said that God didn’t cause the tsunami and that it was no one’s fault. He said that how we respond in this type of crisis is where we find God and how ultimately we find meaning in the tragedy. He was willing to give up the idea that God controls everything in the universe in order to clear God of a murderous crime in order to hold fast to the idea that God is ultimately love, mercy, and justice because God acts in loving, merciful, and honest ways. It is a bold stand to take. And it is the one I take now in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti.
We have already been hearing from the religious and political leaders regarding this tragedy and the reactions are all over the spectrum. So may I make a suggestion when discerning for yourself where you stand on God’s presence in catastrophes such as this? Tread carefully. Because God revealed God’s self as the emissary of some disasters in the scripture, does not give us access as to why they happen today. We do not know the mind of God – and to think we do and put it out there as the divine truth is pure hubris. And it’s dangerous. It endangers relief efforts and confuses our call to love our neighbor as ourselves.
As a nation we have been at the mercy of devastation. There are those that say we deserve what we got because of our politics or because of our morals or because of our way of life or because of our carbon footprint or…. The list goes on. It is never that simple. If it were, we’d fix it. But it’s not. Disaster happens to good and bad alike and I don’t know why. But I know where God is. God is with the poor, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, and the infirmed. And we are with God when we are with them. God is our Emmanuel – our “God with us.”
