I had another sermon ready to preach before the earthquake hit Haiti last week. After that I put the following thoughts down. They are not exactly what I preached, but you will get the drift.
Sermon The Dover Church
January 17, 2010 – 2nd Epiphany Scripture: Psalm 46, Psalm 121
• Once again, if we choose to look we are staring chaos of Biblical proportions in the face – 100k dead in Haiti – more thousands injured, without medical care, housing, food, water – mourning the dead
• Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in China, earthquake in Pakistan, the south Asian Tsunami, every time the enormity seems to defy possibility
• Hard to get our minds around, let alone our hearts – staggering, beyond belief really, even if we were to see it with our own eyes
• Also get calloused and jaded – happens regularly and somewhere else, not here to us
• We want to come to grips with it, engage with it – our faith is a place where we ought to find some answers, some handles to grab, a path to begin walking into it
• As the in-house professional theologian, I am supposed to have some idea where God is in all of this – so here goes
• Just because the scope is Biblical, that does not mean that the prime mover or responsible agent is God - God did not do this, this is not God’s punishment of the Haitians for practicing voodoo as some very visible people who call themselves Christians are saying
• The worst sort of religion – simplistic answers offered thoughtlessly with tragic consequences for everyone
• Seems obvious to us, but important to say it – lots of people think that callous stupidity is what Christianity is all about – we need to witness to the opposite.
• Nor did this happen according to God’s will - Too often people thoughtlessly say that catastrophes like this week’s in Haiti are “the will of God” which we must accept or that “everything will work out for the best.” If this happened by the will of God, that would make God out to be one rotten, despicable God, a God in whose eye I would spit, a God not worthy of respect, let alone worship. So that’s obviously another “wrong” or “bad” answer, especially if it’s youfr family buried
• So, let’s leave God out as the cause here – we cannot gladly praise God for the wonders of places like Bermuda, Iceland, Japan, Hawaii, also a products of tectonic shift, or for the air we breathe, carbon balance which is also somehow related to this although – don’t ask me to explain that – I’m in the God business, without recognizing that it is dangerous places like Haiti, or California for that matter – beautiful and a time bomb
• But let’s stick with Haiti– the poorest country in the world - $520/year, half of children under 5 malnourished, 50% children not in school – that’s just statistics – real life is worse
• You might be aware that most corrupt government in the world, that our government complicit in their government being in power, that their poverty result of 2 things – enormous foreign debt that they can never pay back, money stolen by their leaders – the interest alone cripples the economy – and too many people trying to farm too little land
• Hard to create democratic change when you are uneducated, sick, hungry and powerless – Jean-Claude DuMarais on the streets of Port au Prince is a far cry from George Washington at Mt Vernon, Jefferson at Monticello, Franklin in Philadephia, Adams in Boston
• You all knew that before this week, right? Or at least vaguely aware
• 681 miles from Miami not the other side of the world – if vacation in Dominican Republic, on the same island
• But when did you last think about Haiti? When was the last time Haiti was in the news? The last political crisis
• So, if you’re like me, you’re thinking to yourself
o This is terrible
o I want to do something
o I have money, they need money, I’ll send some
o BUT
o It won’t help
o The pre-existing problems are too big to fix
o Why are countries like these such a mess?
o My money will probably only disappear into the pockets of either local politicians or criminals and not actually reach the people who need it
o I want to help make a difference I don’t think anything I do will right now, even as part of the huge amount of money and aid already on the way
o What about all the other natural catastrophes in the world – tsunamis, mudslides, forest fires, droughts? Why choose to help Haiti instead of others? Sort of arbitrary
o Isn’t Haiti just the catastrophe de jour? In the news today, check in the mail tomorrow, on to the next story next week, forgotten by March
o What about closer to home? Still plenty to do in Louisiana and Florida after the hurricanes?
o What about right here in Massachusetts? Boston? Framingham?
o What about people right here in Dover?
• These are powerful thoughts, the thinking of them is able to paralyze us into doing nothing while people die, we don’t help or we send a token amount, we feel bad, we turn off the TV or change the channel and the next disaster comes anyway and we cycle through again – which only makes our doubt and skepticism seem that much more valid
• If, however, we turn all of these negative statements into positive ones, we move from the language of complaint to the language of commitment, from the language of blame to the language of personal responsibility
• And what does that sound like?
o The pain of others touches me deeply and I want to do something to help them
o I want what I do to make a difference in the real lives of real people – not into drops in buckets
o I want to be personally engaged with the people I am helping
o I want to understand so that I can help change the large systems which create countries like Haiti
o I want to know that what I do is going to actually be part of a long term transformation so that the lives of the people involved will actually end up better than they were before
o This is important to me but I don’t know what to do – easy, quick solutions seem doubtful
o I don’t like feeling ineffective
o I don’t like feeling hypocritical – Christian who doesn’t or cannot do anything
• Those are our commitments – maybe you have more – now I am going to offer you two ways forward which will seem to be in direct contradiction with each other – at least I do this knowingly – there is a paradox
• First - This is not a learning experience in which we somehow learn something. This is not a wake-up call opening our eyes to the need for us to live and love fully right now. No, this is life. We cannot trivialize the loss and despair by seeing it as somehow to our spiritual benefit.
• True Love, Christian love, is not a feeling as much as a task.
• The love of which I speak is not some warm and fuzzy love of hugs and teddy bears, some romantic love of kisses and good wine, some sense of deep mutual understanding of which the poets sing, but true love, the love of God in Jesus Christ, which is selfless and up-building.
• Into broken hearts we must offer our love. Into broken lives we must offer our love. Into despair we must offer our love. We must love for those who cannot. We must be a light in the darkness of so many of our brothers and sisters, not that they might see the light but rather so that there merely be any light at all in their darkness.
• Many will still die. Many families will never recover. Many people will never love again. It is not going to work out for the best in God’s good time. But we, as Christians, have seen God’s love for each of us and all of us and for all of creation, and so, as co-creators with God, we must love, holding empty hands, helping people to try to live or die with dignity. We cannot categorize or explain and thereby make this catastrophe somehow more understandable and thereby trivialize it.
• To questions like why an earthquake this week, there is no Christian answer. There is only the Christian task. In Paul’s famous passage on love to the Corinthians which we hear at so many weddings, the passage often stops one verse short, before the whole point of the explanation of love which we hear. Paul writes in chapter 14, verse 1: “Make love you aim, pursue love, strive for love.” Make this our resolve this New Year. Love one another as God loves us.
• Which brings us to the contradiction – there is something we can get out of this – we need to build ourselves up in love and work at loving others
• This weekend, we remember MLK – he wrote: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
• You and I, here in Dover, cannot be truly happy and content as long as places like Haiti exist – we can do our best to ignore them, but they are there, working on our souls
• Example closer to home – urban violence, drugs, gangs in Boston or Framingham – not here in Dover but we cannot sleep easy at night – alarm systems, locked cars, close watch on where our children are
• Terrorists – very far away – think about travel, airport delays
• Same with Haiti – as long as there is so much human pain in one place, there can never be complete shalom anyplace – God’s ultimate hope for everyone
• So, what are we to do? Do we give lots of money to Haiti? Sure, we have more than enough and they need every cent – live on an average of $10 a week– our missionaries will use it
• Do we go to Haiti to do something? Probably not – need to start somewhere else right now
• We do need to start doing something that involves all of us as a church – something around which the life of the church revolves – one pole of the axis being worship – love of God – the other pole mission – love of neighbor
• We have IHN and other small ministries here and there – IHN may change church culture in Dover - but one thing that all of us can be about all the time – real love embodied in this place – enter into a partnership with a church and village in Honduras, go down, come up, build life with them, know them, learn about each other, create real change there and here
• In healing others we are healed, in reaching out to others we see what needs to be healed in us, paradox of Christ
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