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January 16, 2005
God and the Tsunami/Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
God and the Tsunami
Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
Psalm 32 / Psalm 2
Luke 2: 26-27, 30-31, 34-35
January 16th, 2005
The theme of my message this morning hovers around a statement in that very old Christian document, the Nicene Creed. It describes Jesus Christ, the Son of God as “begotten not created.” There is an exclamation point after this phrase. The big issue for those who hammered out the Nicene Creed was, who was this Jesus of Nazareth?
If Jesus was just another man, a great religious teacher, His whole benefit was as a role model or teacher. But nothing was done about the human condition. All the miseries of life are unaffected. We’re no better off than a common oyster, as a great cynical Scots philosopher put it. Life has no significance beyond trying to make it through with as little misery as possible.
But the Gospels made clear Jesus was not just a great teacher and prophet. He was God fully entered into the human predicament as a man.
But how can God become a man? Nobody can say how. But when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and when the events surrounding His birth and death were filled with such mystery and majesty, it’s clear something too marvelous for exact description was going on. It mattered that those who trusted in Jesus know “in whom they believed.” This is why we find in the Nicene Creed this string of strange statements describing Jesus, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, and now, “begotten not created.”
Only the Creator was uncreated. This fit too. Of Jesus the Gospel says, “By Him all things were made that were made.” The New Testament goes on to say of Him, “In Him all things hold together.” This is the stuff God does. Jesus Christ was God entering His creation.
This was the idea behind Mark Twain’s story “The Prince and the Pauper.” Prince Edward Tudor, son of Henry VIII, sees Tom Canty, a poor boy living in squalor in London’s Offal Court in Pudding Lane, being roughed up by palace guards. The prince stops them. To make a long story short, they trade places. The Prince says to Tom Canty, “Doff thy rags, and don these splendors, lad! It is a brief happiness, but will be not less keen for that. We will have it while we may, and change again.” They can pull it off because they look so much alike that nobody can tell the difference from appearances. And so the prince wanders in London’s unfamiliar streets, to the degraded slums of Offal Court on Pudding Lane. And there the noble lad discovers what life is like as the poorest of the poor in his city, while the pauper discovers how out of place he is in the palace.
Many of you know the story, but had you thought of it as an illustration of what happened when Jesus was born? Now the Son of God did not trade places with man on the spot but made it possible for us to be children of God. But on the spot the Son of God came to Offal Court in Pudding Lane, only it was called Bethlehem. Now a great mystery found full expression. The Immortal One became mortal, the Author of Life could see and feel what life for us was like, and what death was like and the fear of death, in fact, the worst kind of death—full of humiliation and pain.
Why? To rescue us from the full human predicament. The human race was reeling in the grips of a natural disaster—a disaster that hit human nature worse than anything happening outside “in nature.” Something was terribly wrong that needed repairing. God should do something about nature. God went to see the disaster personally.
When a natural disaster hits we expect our high government officials to go on location. Very often a president will go to see the flooding to see in person the mud slides, to stand amid the ruins after a series of tornados. It is an encouragement to know he cares.
But a president or a governor can go only so far. The most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth cannot bring back to life one person who drowned in a Tsunami. I wonder if this sense of futility made President Bush pause before responding recently.
The most recent Tsunami killed at least 155,000 people. The earthquake that caused it, exploded with destructive energy comparable to 23,000 atomic bombs the National Geographic reported. A lot of people think this was not only an unfriendly act of God, but also irresponsible, if not criminal.
When someone has been drinking and gets into her car and drives straight towards some motorcycles coming down the other side of the road, maiming two people for life, the courts throw the book at her. Many people would like to throw the book at God now for permitting the monster tsunami that wrecked havoc beyond what we can imagine on December 26th.
The shock of this sudden disaster leaves us numb in more ways than one. If God is good and in control of the universe, why such dereliction of duty? Others think God had nothing to do with it because tsunamis are beyond God’s control, if indeed there is a God.
John Wesley preached a sermon after a similar earthquake and tsunami hit Lisbon, Portugal on November 1st, 1755. Some reports were that 60,000 people died in Lisbon out of a population of 230,000. Ten thousand more died in Morocco from the tsunami it caused. Seven years earlier a monster earthquake and tsunami hit Lima, Peru. Wesley spoke to a London congregation:
“Why should we not now, before London is as Lisbon, Lima, or Catanea, acknowledge the hand of the Almighty, arising to maintain his own cause? Why, we have a general answer always ready, to screen us from any such conviction: “All these things are purely natural and accidental; the result of natural causes.” But there are two objections to this answer: First, it is untrue: Secondly, it is uncomfortable.
First. If by affirming, “All this is purely natural,” you mean, it is not providential, or that God has nothing to do with it, this is not true, that is, supposing the Bible to be true. For supposing this, you may descant ever so long on the natural causes of diseases, winds, thunder, lightning, and yet you are altogether wide of the mark; you prove nothing at all, unless you can prove that God never works in or by natural causes. But this you cannot prove . . . Therefore, allowing there are natural causes of all these, they are still under the direction of the Lord of nature: Nay, what is nature itself, but the art of God, or God's method of acting in the material world? ...
A Second objection to your answer is; It is extremely uncomfortable. For if things really be as you affirm; if all these afflictive incidents entirely depend on the fortuitous concourse and agency of blind, material causes; what hope, what help, what resource is left for the poor sufferers by them?
What defense do you find from thousands of gold and silver? You cannot fly, for you cannot quit the earth, unless you will leave your dear body behind you. And while you are on the earth, you know not where to flee to, neither where to flee from. You may by intelligence, know where the shock was yesterday, but not where it will be to-morrow,-to-day. It comes! The roof trembles! The beams crack! The ground rocks to and fro! Hoarse thunder resounds from the bowels of the earth! And all these are but the beginning of sorrows. Now, what help? What wisdom can prevent, what strength resist, the blow? What money can purchase, I will not say deliverance, but an hour's reprieve? Poor honourable fool, where are now thy titles? Wealthy fool, where is now thy golden god? If any thing can help, it must be prayer. But what wilt thou pray to? Not to the God of heaven; you suppose him to have nothing to do with earthquakes.... But how shall we secure the favour of this great God? How, but by worshipping him in spirit and in truth; by uniformly imitating Him we worship, in all his imitable perfections? Without which the most accurate systems of opinions, all external modes of religion, are idle cobwebs of the brain, dull farce and empty show. Now, God is love: Love God then, and you are a true worshipper. Love mankind, and God is your God, your Father, and your Friend. But see that you deceive not your own soul; for this is not a point of small importance.
I wish I might have been there to hear Wesley preach that sermon. But other matters come to mind having to do with that realm of nature we call “human nature.” What are our expectations of God with regard to human nature?
I find it remarkable that we are accustomed to the millions of people in sub-Sahara Africa whose lives have been devastated by AIDS for many years now. Their situation is made worse by famine, and by governments that oppress them instead of helping them. But who is asking about God’s role in this immense disaster—because we know how AIDS is transmitted?
We respond with questions for a while when disasters on a large scale happen suddenly, or when tragedy hits close to home, but we become numb to on-going disasters that cruelly crush far more people elsewhere, for generations.
Or think of this: Each time I am with someone whose freedom has been taken away by the courts for some misdeed, I am struck by what an awful thing it is to lose freedom. To be locked in a small space for years on end, or for a lifetime—what a hell! Yet I don’t hear people asking, “Why did God let that person commit that crime?”
I don’t hear people asking, “Why has God allowed alcohol to become a menace to society so that even “respectable people” get drunk and get behind the wheel and make their cars into weapons of mass destruction. Instead we sell alcoholic drinks by the case in our grocery stores. People can, if they want, pop a lid and drink on the way home. The very one who arrests or tries in court someone else caught drinking and driving may do it himself. If anyone suggests prohibition, we scorn the idea. Let me be free! Is God to blame for how we use our freedom?
I never hear people asking why God permits various kinds of habits that destroy the body? I have stood by the bed in a hospital more than once watching someone die of suffocation after years of polluting his/her lungs. Nobody asked, “Why did God allow this?” The one dying and I both knew the connection between the cause and the effect of death. Where is God in all that we do in which we insist on the freedom to make choices we know are bad? People seldom challenge God’s responsibility even though far more people die more miserably every year than died suddenly during the recent tsunami.
Or when I follow the course of marriages after they begin before me in front of a church, and discover that the many pairs who pledged their life-long love to each other and then went to expensive receptions, have exchanged that brief fond attitude for life-long selfishness, so now multiple married pairs live in misery, who challenges God for letting this happen? Who asks “How can God allow this?” when people freely choose to act with gross incivility to each other in the home and society? We have freedom of speech – but how tragically we freely use our freedom! We insist on separation of God from real life except as we choose His role.
Who can calculate the damage done by untamed tongues, or by untamed tempers, or so many other foibles we defend as “human nature,” that in their consequences far exceed the damage of a tornado, a flood, or a tsunami.
We so easily ask questions of God related to nature “out there,” but don’t ask questions about God’s control of human nature. Oh, we may ask about God’s responsibility when a great tyrant like Hitler unleashes the Holocaust against all whom he hates, but who asks the question of God when, from person to person, whole populations of people live in painful desperation, the result of their own choices?
We see so selectively the misery of life. We see large or momentary tragedies and lay the blame on God, and fail to see how far larger the scale of damage is from the ordinary miseries we inflict on ourselves and on one another. Is God to blame for these miseries too?
So we pastors preach monotonously, “Submit your life to your loving Creator. Accept Jesus as the Lord of your life. Acknowledge and confess your sins. Accept the forgiveness of your sin and then move on claiming Jesus’ authority over your often foolish will. Let His loving authority govern your impetuous and unreasonable will.” And people may yawn and ask for more interesting thoughts on a Sunday morning, and claim their right to do as they please.
I believe that God has something to do with natural disasters that happen, but I have no means to know what or why. Did God send the tsunami that hit Indonesia and countries all around the Indian Ocean? I believe God is the Lord of creation. Perhaps he sent this tsunami for a purpose. Why there? Why not elsewhere? If God did, is it our place to challenge the Almighty God’s morality, particularly when all the damage of that tsunami was only to the body? Jesus said to His followers, “Don’t fear the one who can kill the body, fear the one who can do in your soul.”
God is merciful. I don’t know, neither can anyone, how merciful God has cared for the invisible souls of all those who suffered death and destruction this past month. All we can see is what took place outwardly.
I believe you and I are to be reminded how altogether fragile is physical life so that we respond wisely. If in the death of 155,000 people, and in the destruction of the means of life for millions more, more multiplied millions of those who remain find their lives re-ordered in wisdom, we might even say the sacrifice was worth it.
After all, we send thousands of young soldiers, in the flower of their youth to the battlefield to defend the freedom of millions with their bodies. In our world wars all nations cruelly sacrificed millions of their young people for the sake of the freedom of older and younger who stayed at home. For sake of freedom soldiers obey the order of their superior.
If we waste our thought on impossible-to-answer questions accusing God, while clinging to the imprudence of selfish living, we show our hypocrisy and waste much of the good that might come of this recent tragedy.
In the New Testament we read, “It is appointed unto people once to die and after this the judgment.” We know we will die, everyone of us. For some it will happen sooner, for others, later. When death approaches we realize that all of life has been a preparation for this moment.
I can offer you no better wisdom than to freely give your life to God, who created you, who cares for you at the deepest part of you. Jesus was God become a human being to take the rap for my sin and yours, and then to give us life better than we can dream of. But you and I must accept this gift of life, and then turn over our lives to the loving authority of Jesus to receive the benefit.
You and I must study Jesus to know how he governs us, because Jesus will never violate the freedom we claim. I invite you to begin this life, if you have not, by freely giving your life to Jesus. And if you have begun, but have lost sight of what it is to want to follow Jesus, begin again and keep on. Let those who have died and suffered in the tsunami not suffer in vain. Wake to the serious meaning of life.
Let us pray: O Lord, we pray for those who still suffer in the lands hit by the tsunami. We pray for that greater multitude that suffer from natural disaster within. Help us, O God, to accept your relief, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 16, 2005 09:30 AM