“Can a Tsumani Teach us Anything about the Will of God? God’s Footprints”

Jan. 16, 2005 Crestwood UCC

By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

Texts: Exod. 33:12-23

It has been a little over two weeks since one of the greatest tsunamis in recent history occurred, causing over 150,000 deaths and destruction beyond measure. It is being described as 1 of the 7 worst natural disasters in recorded history. Last Monday (Jan. 10, 2005) on NPR I heard a story about how people of various faiths are interpreting the tsunami, and I was reminded of how little we really understand about the will of God. I will quote the people interviewed as closely as possible from my hastily written notes as I listened to it.

One priest living in an area where the tsunami hit said, “This is not the time to try to explain God’s purpose; the mystery is why a God who glories in people would wipe them out.” This priest appears to believe God caused the tsunami and its destruction to happen. A Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka was interviewed; he leads a temple of about 500 families; every single family has lost some one in the giant waves. He himself couldn’t eat or sleep for a week. He said that some Buddhists believe the victims deserved to die, if not for sins in this life, then for past karma, committed in an earlier life. But he said, “I disagree. I don’t believe in collective punishment,” i.e. punishment of an entire population of people equally and all at once.

A Jewish Rabbi, Michael Fieshback (sp?), was appalled at the idea that people would assume the tsunami was a punishment from God! He said, “God does not micromanage the universe. Think about the father who lost his grip on his 3-year-old daughter and saw her dragged out to sea. I find it offensive to charge God with such a crime,” he said. “I prefer to believe in a God who does not control every single one of life’s events.”

The NPR reporter moved on to a Muslem religious leader, or imam, named Malek (sp?) who believed the opposite of the rabbi. Now keep in mind there are as many interpretations of the Muslem religion as there are of Christianity. This particular imam said that Allah—which simply is the Arab word for God—Allah caused this tragedy! He declared, “An earthquake quakes by the command of its creator; a wave crashes to shore by the command of its creator; every atom in that wave moves at the command of its creator,” etc. He added, “Nothing happens without a reason, but we won’t understand it until we meet Allah.”

The story moved next to an interview with an American Hindu spiritual counselor. Keep in mind there are as many interpretations of Hinduism as there are villages in India. This one said that she believes nature is angry because humanity has mistreated the environment. Furthermore, each one who was killed, including each child, deserved it due to sin in their past life, if not sin in their present life.

Finally, a Christian Baptist preacher was interviewed by the NPR reporter. He agreed 100% with the Muslim leader who said it was God’s will for the tsunami to kill 150,000 people. Only he added this: This punishment was deserved by everyone who was a victim, even the babies, because we are all stained by sin and deserve punishment. According to this Baptist minister, it is fair for God to wipe out people, and it serves as an effective call to repentance for the survivors who rightly fear the mighty wrath of God.

Now, although I’m a Christian, I disagree with the Christian Baptist who was interviewed, and I tend to agree with the Buddhist monk and the Jewish rabbi! Like the Buddhist monk, I don’t think our creator would collectively punish 150,000 people at once, and I see serious theological problems with believing God micromanages the universe, down to directing every last movement of every living being. To suggest that everything that happens in life is God’s will is to suggest that God causes rapists to rape, murderers to murder, and that God causes us to do the evil we are commanded not to do. If everything that happens in life were God’s plan, then we would have to lay the blame for the holocaust at God’s feet. I refuse to believe that a God who is good would cause the death of millions of Jewish children in crematoriums during WWII or the deaths of thousands of children dragged out to sea last month.

What all of these people, from all of these religious faith backgrounds are doing is looking back on an event and trying to make meaning from it. Some are asking WHY God allows or causes bad things to happen to people. Now some of you may recall that I draw a distinction between God causing and God allowing, but that discussion must wait for another day. Many folks believe that bad things that happen are punishment—but others come to the opposite conclusion and are convinced that God would not do such a horrific thing. Same event, but very different meaning is attached to the event by devoutly religious people looking back on it.

I want to point out today, that people who are looking back and trying to figure out what this experience means about God are doing the very same thing that the writers of scripture have done over the course of thousands of years! What we have in the Bible are writings that were done by human beings looking back on what had happened to them or their ancestors, and saying, “This is what I think it means about God.” The scriptures of all these religions were written by human beings who recorded their impressions of the truth, based on what they had seen and heard about God’s activity in the world.

Look at our own scripture. The stories about the Israelites were written by people looking back on what happened to the Israelites. When times were hard, like when they were slaves in Egypt, they wondered if they were being punished. When they were led out of Egypt by Moses, they interpreted it as God acting in the world to free them. Then later, as they fought for “40 years” to gain land, they tried to make sense of battles won and lost, often interpreting a loss as punishment, and a win as a sign of God’s approval.

But eventually, their writings entered the age of what is called Wisdom Literature, when, this simplistic understanding was called into question. The book of Job is a perfect example of Wisdom Literature that calls into question earlier beliefs about catastrophes being punishments. The ending of the book of Job says, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people who don’t deserve it, so don’t assume that bad things that happen are God’s punishment.” Jesus also called earlier beliefs into question, when a blind man was brought to him, and the people asked, “Who sinned that this man is blind, his parents or him?” Jesus’ answer implied that his blindness was not the result of anybody’s sin.

The Bible gives us a mixed message on why bad things happen, and for good reason—because people have always interpreted life differently! The Bible’s writers reflect a range of responses, just like religious leaders today. It illustrates to us that we can never presume to really know the mind of God, which is so far beyond us, that we must be humble about our impressions.

I want to take 3 minutes today to look at a delightful illustration of what I am saying, and it comes from our little story in Exodus, which I read earlier. I think it demonstrates that whoever wrote this story, about 3000 years ago, knew very well that they, too, could only glimpse God through experiences, and that it was not a direct knowing. Let me explain.

In this tale, Moses is portrayed as demanding an opportunity to see God face-to-face. Up to this time, Moses had sensed God’s presence and direction only in a cloud or in the thunder, or as fire and light, but now the one who would be called the father of the Isrealites wants more—he wants a face-to-face meeting. He’s got questions he wants answered, just like us! He wants to know and understand this God he is dealing with, and so he demands a direct appearance by God!

But the story says God declined Moses’ presumptuous attempt to know him this well. This fits with the belief among the early Hebrews that the very name of God was so sacred that they could not say it out loud, and the belief that the holiness of God was so intense that no human being could see God and continue to live. But Moses keeps insisting, until finally God is said to have offered Moses a compromise: if Moses would cover his eyes, God would pass before him; and then, as God went around the bend in the mountain, Moses could open his eyes and stare momentarily on God’s “back parts” or “hindquarters,” as one translation puts it. Later versions of the Bible render this word as God’s “backside” or “back.”

Bishop John Spong suggests that references to the divine derriere may seem amusing at a literal level, but the ancient writer was pointing to something far more profound: he was asserting the common human experience that mortal men and women can never see who God is but only where God has been. We see God’s tracks. We visualize and experience God’s effects, not God’s being.

We are only able to look back on our experiences of God, and try to take meaning from them, just as our ancestors looked back on their experiences and wrote down the meaning they attached to the events in their past. No one has seen God nor talked directly to God; we only see where God has been. You might say that we are “retroactive meaning-makers.”

Getting back to the question of what meaning we can take from the tsunami, I think the question is this: “Can a tsunami really teach us anything about the will of God?” If we, following the example of Jesus, define God as love, or as the highest good then we would do well to simply wait for a time until we can look back on this catastrophic event in history and ask, “Where did we see good in the midst of it, for that is where we glimpse the God we identify as Good.” But let us take great care not to presume we know the mind and will of God. We can only see where God has been, God’s footprints, or God’s backside if you will.

From that perspective we might look back and recognize God in the loving acts of relief workers who are sorting through the wreckage, and who are hauling water jugs and United Nations food sacks. We will see that God walked by in the form of doctors and nurses and ordinary caretakers who went without sleep for weeks in order to meet human need. We will see God’s footprints in the sand where Buddhist priests, Moslem imams, Christian ministers, and Hindu spiritual leaders prayed and blessed people and gave them hope that God is to be trusted, and that there is enough love in the world to sustain them even in the midst of tragedy.

Elizabeth Stewart writes: The only reason we speak about god at all is that we see her shadow cast across the faces of people, events, and other things; we detect her trails; we smell her perfume on the wind; we see dim echoes of God’s image impressed upon the wet clay of our world.

Tsunami’s happen. We do well not to dwell on why, nor to presume to know what we cannot know about the will of God. I don’t for a moment believe it was punishment. I don’t know if God caused it to happen, or simply let the laws of nature play out even though an earthquake might result. What I do know is that people sense God’s presence in very real ways, even in the midst of tragedy, and that we find meaning in looking back at those time when God seemed very real. It is all we have, and it is enough. Let us trust the mystery that is God. Amen.