Genesis 12: 1-4a Psalm 121
Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17 John 3: 1-17
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
What a week it has been. It seems that more than ever, turning on the news has meant hearing about nuclear disasters, air strikes, and the ongoing effects of an earthquake and tsunami on thousands and thousands of people. On Tuesday of this week the Broadview Community Council had their March meeting in our Fellowship Hall. As it happened, their topic, which had been determined many months ago, was disaster prevention. Generally speaking, this fine organization has between 50-80 people at its meetings, depending on the subject matter. Tuesday night there were probably 200 people in our fellowship hall. They spilled out into the hallway, trying to see the visuals and hear the speaker. They snapped up pamphlets addressing how to prepare for and respond in the event of a disaster. Eerily, there were even bright yellow signs for you to wave around if you needed to be spotted from a rescue airplane or helicopter. They said simply “HELP”.
The Psalmist writes I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from where is my help to come?
That sign has stayed in my imagination this week, especially after I saw several people clutching them as they sat in that meeting. Do you remember another sign…the big “John 3:16” sign that the guys in the multi colored wigs used to hold up at critical camera angles. A beloved and often memorized verse “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” A wonderful verse. There are many things worth noting about this verse. God loved the world…not just the people in the world, but the world. Rivers and trees and dogs and cats and gardens and grass…God loved it all enough to send Jesus.
But if I were one of those guys with the multi colored wigs and I wanted to grab the camera’s attention with my sign I’d put “John 3:17” on my sign. “Indeed”, verse 17 beings, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him”. God didn’t send the Son into the world to condemn the world.
And yet, every time there is a disaster, whether it’s an earthquake or a hurricane or a tornado, someone calling themselves Christian suggests that God did send Jesus into the world to condemn the world and that these disasters are a part of that condemnation. Friends, we need to go back and read again John 3: 16 and 17…“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Still, there are those voices suggesting that such disasters are the work of an angry God. Those are the voices and the minds that want to place human characteristics on God, theologians call it anthropomorphic zing…saying that God smiled or that God wept or that God out of human spite or anger waved God’s hands and caused the latest natural disasters. Such points of view, for one thing, completely ignore good solid science. They forget about fault lines and weather patterns that cause earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes. Such understandings of God are rooted in a sort of magical thinking….not in any good understanding of how the natural world works. And we can hold these two things, science and religion, together very easily. In fact, the more we understand about the world, the more scientists and geologists and meteorologists and biologists and anthropologists discover, the more amazed I am at the miracle of our world. The world that God loves and created in some way we don’t fully understand and sent Jesus to, not to condemn, but to save.
Many of those who embrace this sort of theology…that God causes such disasters are often the very same folks who think that we have it all figured out…that God is only on our side. They ignore almost the entirety of Scripture that points to the wideness of God’s mercy and claim to be God’s only children. The reading from Genesis today reminds us that the LORD chose Abram from whom came Jews, Muslims, and eventually, Christians. The writer of Genesis says that in Abram all the families of the earth will be blessed. All the families. Not just the Lutheran ones. Not just the Christian ones. All the families of the earth. God so loved the world, not just a part of it.
This is not the word that society would have us hear. Our world does not leave room, most of the time, for thinking that includes everyone. Someone must be excluded. It must either be me or you, us or them, good or bad, right or wrong. And into this kind of thinking, this thinking that eventually leads people to believe that God causes terrible disasters, into this kind of thinking comes words like these: in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. And from the Romans reading “in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, for he is the father of us all.” and God so loved the world.
Careful reading of the Old Testament offers evidence that natural disasters like earthquakes or floods or tsunamis happened in ancient times. Before there was a scientific understanding of the earth. Before they knew about weather patterns and fault lines they wrote of hills that skip and mountains that clap their hands. They told of great floods and long rains. And how else to tell these stories if you don’t understand what is making the earth tremble or the mountains quake than to attribute it to an angry God? It was done in Greek mythology as well. And so we must carefully read today’s texts that tell us that we are kept, we are held closely, by the LORD. The Psalmist says that the LORD will not ever fall asleep while watching over us, but instead will preserve us and keep us. Oh, we might die on this earth, but we will not be out of the care and keeping of the Lord who loves us, who loved us enough to send Jesus to save us, not to condemn us.
When I was in New Orleans with our youth group following Hurricane Katrina, we were given a tour through the Ninth Ward, an area hardest hit by the storm. Our tour guide was a teenage girl, about sixteen years old. We drove through and saw the abandoned homes, some still bearing the spray painted marks of the National Guard…a large circle, divided into four parts, each part bearing a number and a letter, indicating how many bodies had been located in each place and whether they were human or animals. News footage from other disasters has shown equally difficult images…children’s toys, photo albums, even human remains. And I cannot reconcile those images with a God who loved the world so much that a Son was sent to save it. God didn’t send a program, or a rule book, but the only begotten Son.
Our task then, as people who have been born from above, as people who follow this Son, is to join with our sisters and brothers from all families…from all nations…and bring love and healing to the broken places of the world. If we are, as we say we are, followers of Jesus, then it is not now and has never been and will never be our task to condemn others. Sometimes it is the easiest response, because what else could it possibly be, we ask. If a hurricane or an earthquake is not God’s wrath on the other, then it leaves open the possibility that it is random science…and it could happen to us. And God willing, there would be others, other children of Abraham, from other families, also loved by God, who would be there to reach out to us and show us the image of the love that God has for the entire world.
Amen.
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