Brunswick Baptist Church

Sunday 15 February 2009

Scripture reading: Job 2

A week after the bushfires in King Lake, Churchill, Beechworth, Bendigo, Marysville

I doubt there would be a preacher in Victoria who will not be speaking about the bushfires this morning. The question is, ‘What can we say? – should we say anything?’ When Job suffered the loss of everything he had, his best mates Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar met together to go and console him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance they could not recognise him and they raised their voices and wept aloud. They tore their robes and threw dust on their heads and then they sat with him for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him because they saw that his suffering was very great. I reckon they knew a thing or two about pastoral care. And yet, when they started to speak, they blew it. They wanted to tell Job why it happened, and they got it badly wrong. Well our seven days are up, and it is time to speak.

I feel reluctant to speak into the bushfire tragedy about meaning, about God, because I might get it terribly wrong, and I might compound someone else’s suffering. And so before I speak I want us to sit in silence for a minute and metaphorically tear our robes and weep aloud for the appalling suffering in our state, before we speak …… [silence]

We are people who pray; we are people who believe that God  in some way has an influence in what happens here on earth. Why else would we pray to God for the sick, the dying, those who live in danger, peace in  the world. If God has no influence on human circumstances, or if God chooses not to intervene in human history, then we could all become Stoics and accept tragedy as an inevitable part of the human situation and not allow ourselves to become overly emotionally disturbed by it.

So what can we say about God and the bushfires that will hopefully not compound the suffering of the victims, suffering that will continue for days and weeks and months and years to come? What can we say about God and the bushfires that does not deny the magnitude of the holocaust but looks for inklings that God is not absent.

1. God has caused it or allowed it to happen

Some of you would have read about the furore caused by the pastor of the Catch the Fire Ministries (interesting name!) this week. He is reported to have said that in a dream last October God revealed to him that God had removed his protection from Victoria because the State Parliament had legalised abortion. So, had the abortion bill been defeated there would have been no bushfires and no deaths or property destruction because God would still have had God’s protective screen around Victoria. This kind of response draws a straight line between sinful human behaviour and the shack and awe response of a vengeful God, the kind of line that Eliphaz used to Job:

Think now, who that was innocent ever perished, or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed. (Job 4:7ff)

This is diabolical theology, because it creates of God a monster who wreaks havoc through the forces of nature to punish sinners. Only in this case, God punished, not the perpetrators of the abortion legislation, but innocents who happened to live in a beautiful forest. This is arrant nonsense and appalling theology and I don’t want to say any more about it.

2. God had the power to prevent it but chose not to

I remember in my early days as a Christian hearing preachers talking about the active will of God and the permissive will of God; God is interventionist  sometimes but not others. This is like having five bob each way on your favourite horse in the Melbourne Cup, and I confess I think there is a little bit of me that operates like this from time-to-time. I like to ascribe to the grace of God the good things that happen to me but to fate or chance or my own stupidity the bad things that happen to me. And of course guilt about ones own stupidity, and a sense of responsibility for the bad things that happen to us tends to cling to us like mud on our shoes on a rainy day (if you can remember what that is like).

But it still doesn’t work. If God is indeed all powerful and all loving, as a creator must be, then God must be able to influence the course of nature and has chosen not to and that takes us back to the Catch the Fire scenario and to the question of guilt. What do we do with guilt? We can tell survivors that they should not feel guilty but that won’t stop them experiencing torments of survivor guilt because they are alive and dozens of their neighbours are dead. Guilt and blame are already working their destruction upon us; greenies are blamed because they prevented the burning of natural habitat which allowed the fuel load to build to dangerous levels; we are all to blame because we drive cars and use air conditioners which pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and produce climate change which causes cataclysmic events like tsunamis, floods and raging bushfires; this kind of guilt is potentially productive if it leads to a change in our behaviour, but not if it makes us jump off the bridge.

3. God suffers with and for us

So where was God in the catastrophic events of a week ago? If God is non-interventionist other than for the occasional miracle, does that mean that nothing can be said about God in the face of overwhelming tragedy? Perhaps the portrayal of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah and the cry of abandonment of the crucified Jesus give us a clue:

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Terrible tragedies such as we have witnessed this week remind us once again, that human existence is fragile and that nothing can be taken for granted. The awesome power of the forces of wind and heat and fire terrify us, but they also remind us that our theological attempts to categorise and contain God are puny in the face of the wonder and the terror of the universe we inhabit. But what we can say from a Biblical and Christian perspective, and with conviction, is that the God whose life embraces all of Creation, has suffered in and with the people of Marysville and Kinglake, Churchill and Redesdale, this week. The spirit of God (small ‘s’) is seen in the faces of weary firefighters; in the compassion of men and women making sandwiches and dispensing cups of tea; in the listening ear of counsellors and chaplains and clergy sitting in silence with breaking hearts as they hear stories of appalling loss and terror; in the fish and chip shop where a vet set up an emergency clinic to treat burned and traumatised animals free of charge; in the Aussie cricketers and AFL footballers trying to bring some relief to kids who have seen things kids should never see; in the $100 million donated to the bushfire appeal. If the horror of the crucifixion of Jesus has anything to say about the nature of God, it is that God is right in the centre of human history and human suffering. The crucifixion says to us that God takes into God’s self the horror of death and transforms it through self-emptying love; the death of Jesus on a cross says to us that God has joined the relief effort for God’s suffering Creation. God is both victim and saviour.

This has been a most remarkable week in the history of our state and nation, one that will affect some for the rest of their lives, and all of us for a long time to come. If we speak of the fires let us choose our words carefully, especially if we want to ascribe blame. Let us pray for those who started fires deliberately, and their families, as well as for those who lost everything through those terrible actions. Let us create spaces of calm and rest and silence, and let us provide soothing, healing waters for heated spirits and heated emotions.

Emma Ayers, compere of the concert at the Myer Music Bowl on Saturday night 14 February, said:

- St Valentine’s day is for lovers.

- But love is more than that between a man and a woman.

- Love is  the firefighter who fights to save his neighbour’s home when his own is threatened; love is the volunteer making endless cups of tea and coffee for the firefighters.

- Love is patient and kind, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13)

Let us love as God loves.