January 31, 2010

1 Kings 19:9b-18 and Acts 16:25-34

Sooner or later, the question arises. Things go wrong – terribly wrong – and we ask, “Where was God?”

·         When Adolf Hitler gassed six million Jews?

·         When a tsunami killed 200,000 people the day after Christmas, 2004?

·         When the levees broke on the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans?

·         When those planes hit the twin towers on a bright September morning?

·         When the earthquake hit Haiti?

·         When we had a fight and our son walked out and we didn’t hear from him for a month?

·         When the doctor looked at my friend and said “I’m sorry. There’s nothing more we can do”?

·         When everything I believed in and worked for wasn’t enough?

Where was God? Where is God?

An old friend sent me an email. I mean “old” in both ways. She’s 85. Her son is in his 50s. He worked for decades in newspapers. You know how it is for newspapers these days. He lost his job in 2008, and still hasn’t found work. Now his 20 year-old daughter is pregnant, unmarried, uninsured, and has dropped out of school. Neither she nor the father-to-be has an adequate job to raise their child. The guy’s parents blame the pregnancy on her – as if the boy wasn’t involved!

The email said, “I pray” about these things, “but don’t get an answer.” She might as well have written, “Where is God?”

Some earthquakes rattle an island or nation and stir the world’s compassion. Other quakes register in one household at a time, or in a solitary heart. But the devastation is equally harsh – shaking our convictions, flattening our hopes, and crushing our spirits until we cry: “Where is God? Am I all alone? Who will answer my prayer?”

Sometimes we do get an answer – most likely not from God, but someone else willing to give their two cents worth.

Televangelist Pat Robertson told his viewers that the destruction in Haiti was God’s punishment for “a pact made with the devil” 200 years ago. (But if that’s true, what took God so long? Why punish the great-great-grandchildren instead of the perpetrators themselves?)

Likewise, the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 was blamed on the heathen lifestyle in that city at the time. In which case, how come many churches were destroyed, and houses of ill-repute were left standing?

Less judgmental, but still not so reassuring: A tradesman, let’s say, in his 30s dies of a heart attack while walking the dog. A well-meaning neighbor tries to comfort the grieving family by saying, “God must have needed a plumber in heaven.”

Or you do a favor for someone but it backfires. And you catch yourself thinking: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Where is God?” For some folks God is at the root of all our catastrophes and woes, but not in a nice way – not with mercy and grace, giving life, or forgiving us “70 times 7” –as a God of vengeance instead, capricious and fickle … a God who doesn’t like us that much, really.

Consider Elijah. In 1 Kings 17, he provided miraculous food for a widow and revived her son from the dead. In chapter 18, he singlehandedly defeated 450 prophets of Baal – worshipers of a fertility cult – endorsed and supported by Queen Jezebel.

Now she’s out for blood. Jezebel wants Elijah, dead or alive. He runs for the hills, but hides in plain sight – under a solitary broom tree … in the middle of the desert!

She wants to kill him, and he’s ready to let her. He’d just as soon die, he says. In fact, he prays for it! These two adversaries share one desire. They want the same outcome.

God’s plans, however, are different from the intentions and desires of mortals. God’s way is not for death. Or destruction. But life.

“Go stand on the mountain,” God tells the prophet, “for I am about to pass by.”

And there arose a great wind – strong enough to split mountains and rocks into rubble. God has been present before in the wind. On Day One of creation, God moved over the water like a wind. In days to come, God will inhabit the wind once again, lifting Elijah up to heaven. But, for now, God is not in the wind.

An earthquake ensues. God works in earthquakes too. According to Matthew, it took an earthquake to roll back the stone in front of the tomb on the first Easter morning. And Luke says (in Acts 16) that Paul and Silas were set free, and the life of their prison guard was changed by an earthquake. But, for now, God is not in the earthquake.

Last of all, fire sweeps over the mountain where Elijah is standing. God is expert with fire. When Moses saw the burning bush, God was in it. And when Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal in the previous chapter, God brought fire down from heaven. God will work again with fire on Pentecost day, when the Spirit is given to followers of Christ from every nation on earth. But, for now, God is not in the fire.

God was not in the earthquake … nor the wind … nor the fire, 1 Kings 19 says.

Listen carefully, for after all the noise and commotion, there came “a sound of sheer silence.” Older translations called it “a still small voice.”  But even that is too loud. It was softer than a whisper … yet spoke volumes.

And Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle – knowing that’s where God was: in the sound of sheer silence. He immediately grasped the fact that God does not live not in the big, bombastic, obvious ways we expect God to behave, but in the little, contradictory incongruities of life – be it the “sound of sheer silence” or a bush that burns but is not consumed, or a man who lives and who offers everlasting life after being sealed in a tomb for three days. God could use the big stuff. But most often God is in the details – the things that we can’t explain any other way.

God is in the things that – amazingly – bring life out of death and rejoicing out of sorrow: a child in Haiti pulled alive from the rubble after four days. A man crawling out from grocery store wreckage eight days on, having survived on soda pop and other things I won’t mention. Or, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wrote on Friday (1/29/2010, p. 2A): a “16-year-old choir girl who came close to dying but wouldn’t in the crumbled concrete graveyard of Port-au-Prince.” Talk about incongruities! Life that shows up two full weeks after the quake – after most of the rescue workers had given up and gone home!

Such news reminds us that God is a God of life, living in the man who walks out of the tomb – alive! – after being hung on a cross … speaking to Moses from the burning bush, saying, “Set my people free!” … and stirring the sands under Elijah so that he’ll get up and go to the busy city of Damascus and anoint people to bear the torch of the life-giving God … and to discover that seven thousand others are on God’s side with him.

You are not alone, God tells Elijah. Wind and fire and earthquake and flood can be awesome. Their power is often traumatic. But for us, those things are not God. God’s power is greater … and God’s power works for good, not harm.

So “When you pass through the water,” God says through Isaiah, “I will be with you. When you walk through fire, it will not consume you.” God doesn’t guarantee that we’ll be spared the testing of water or fire, earthquake or wind. But we will not face them alone. God is with us.

As was true for Elijah, God will find us before our enemies draw near. In the desert of life, with no more than a solitary broom tree for shelter, we are not lost or forgotten. God will lead us. God’s way and God’s will are for life.

Though the mountains quake and fall into the sea, we will not be afraid. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help (Ps. 46). God is present – not to rebuke but to rebuild. Not to wreck, but to redeem.

And after the earthquake, wind or fire? God is still present, sending people – like Elijah (and you and me!) – to conquer our fears, and rebuild cities and towns into communities again.

God does not dwell in vengeance or grudges closely-held for 200 years, till the score can be settled. Instead, God moves in peaceful armies and air transports that bring food and clothing and medical supplies as tangible signs of resurrection and life starting anew. God lives in human hearts that reach out across hundreds or thousands of miles to provide second chances for people who have eked out an existence for too long on the brink.

It is incredible– and heartwarming, isn’t it – that aid is being offered in Haiti in so many ways? Tip jars in coffee shops. Texting from your cell phone while watching a football game on TV. A rock concert for relief. 

I’m glad to see that we as a society are capable of such generosity. Generosity is one of the things that defines us as human, and reveals us as being “in the image of God.” Yet, while I marvel at what is being done, I’m also troubled that the world no longer seems to count on the church to lead by example. They’re trying to do it without us. That’s tolerable, maybe, if our message to “love your neighbor” has rubbed off so well. But if we’re the only ones who can answer “Where is God?” in the midst of disaster, we better keep doing our part and not leave it to others.

“God was not in the earthquake,” 1 Kings 19 says; and I say it too: God was not in the earthquake – not on Elijah’s mountain and not on January 12, 2010, nor in the private quakes that rock us one-by-one and knock us off stride.

But God is in the earthquakes that open sealed tombs … and in earthquakes that rattle locked doors and shackles for prisoners to come out and for their captors to hear the good news of freedom in Jesus Christ (Acts 16).

Above all, God is in events that shake us out of complacency toward our fellow human beings … moments that remind us we are not alone, and that we need one another and there is social and economic inequality to be addressed, so that we are drawn more deeply into communities (like this one right here) for mutual support … and celebrations of hope … and victories that can be won by working together!

God was not – and is not – in any earthquake to flatten hope or inflate fear. But God is in every tumultuous and trembling beginning we receive through Jesus Christ.

To the glory of God.