I’m not sure how you’ve
been doing, riding out this windy, rainy weather that’s come to us from Hurricane
Florence. As I am writing this, 1:25,
Saturday afternoon, we have had power and no problems. I’ve made trips to Walmart. It’s been OK.
I know people in Wilmington and
along the coast are significantly affected by floodwaters, wind, and rain. As of this writing, 7 have died in hurricane-related
incidents. It’s a tragedy. I have no inspired words to make emotional
sense of it. We believe in God and rely
on God, and then a natural disaster comes.
Why? I don’t have a good
answer.
One of the people in the Bible
frequently referenced in times of catastrophe is Job. God boasted of Job’s righteousness and Satan
challenged God on this. God allowed
Satan to harm Job. Through weather
disasters and military assaults from foreign enemies and accidents, Satan, with
God’s permission, was able to kill Job’s children and take all of Job’s
things. A key phrase in that sentence is
with God’s permission.
Why would God let Satan do
that? In the 1000’s of years of Bible
students combing through the scriptures, the “why” question has never been
sufficiently answered. But know
this. From Job’s perspective, the issue
is with God, not Satan. The book of Job has 42 chapters and Satan is off the
scene after chapter 2. Job’s wife, who
lost everything just as Job did, loses faith.
She says to her husband, “Do you … persist in your integrity? Curse God and die” (2:9).
Curse
God and die. Someone prays fervently
in the days leading up to Hurricane Florence.
He has relatives in Wilmington.
For whatever reason, they don’t evacuate. They’ve ridden out hurricanes before. They’ve got things at home they need to
protect. They’ve got a parent in the
hospital in Wilmington that cannot be moved and they don’t want to leave dad
behind. It’s doesn’t matter why. They stay.
And the cousin, who lives here, away from the flooding, away from the
danger prays for them.
Then the hurricane comes, power is
knocked out, and the cousin loses touch.
Finally, the dreaded call comes.
The one who stayed died in the flood waters. Does the cousin who prayed so hard now look
to Heaven with heartbroken frustration and curse God? What words does a pastor offer to soothe the
ultimate loss? I don’t know.
For his part, Job responded, “”Naked
I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return; the Lord gave, and the
Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Frustrated, Satan asked permission to attack
Job’s body. Job was made deathly ill,
breaking out in loathsome boils.
He professes faith even in the face
of terrible loss. His wife blames God
and abandons faith. Read on through the
rest of the book, and Job brings his own complaints to God even as his three
friends mercilessly blame him for what’s happened. He needs comfort, and they weigh him down
with bad theology that puts all the responsibility for his plight on his own
shoulders. It would be like saying to
the people at the beach, “It’s your fault this hurricane happened. If you had not sinned, it would never have
come.” Job’s friends relentlessly pound
this idea.
However, before they get started in
their misguided diatribes, look at their action in chapter 2, verse 13. It says, “They sat with him on the ground
seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that
his suffering was very great.”
Sometimes, that is the only response a pastor or a loving Christian
friend has. Sometimes to be a Christian
is to sit with another person in their misery.
You
see someone in a terrible mess. It doesn’t
matter who made the mess. You see the
mess and the person who can’t get out of it.
So, you say, “I love you and God loves you. I can’t think of how to show that. I can’t think of what to do. So, I’m going to sit with you in this mess.” There comes the time to do the recovery
work. Maybe the building needs to be
cleaned. Maybe the church needs to
provide supplies to the family who lost everything. Maybe the building is so damaged it needs to
be leveled. To save money, some the work
can be done by volunteers from the church.
We had a bunch of volunteers from here head to Eastern North Carolina
last year to do recovery work. The time
for that comes. But, sometimes, the only
we have to offer is presence. I don’t know what to do. But I’ll sit with you because God loves you
and I think that’s what God wants me to do.
Philip
Yancey has spent his writing career trying to see God in the midst of the world’s
greatest pain. Pain produces fear. The dire forecast of what kind of damage the
hurricane might bring sent people in our area into a mania of worry. I was in Lowe’s hardware earlier in the week. They had cases of water bottles. At that point several stores were completely
out. I grabbed one case, but other
people had their carts stacked high with cases.
They had enough water for over a month.
The fear of being out of something drove people crazy.
Don’t
get me wrong. Preparation is
important. Many who decided to ride out
the storm regret it now, even if they survived.
We should prepare and heed warnings, like the warning to evacuate, but
we do not need to be ruled by fear. Yancey
writes, “The cure to fear is not a change in circumstances, but rather a deep
grounding in the love of God. I ask God
to reveal his love to me directly, or through my relationships with those who
also know him – a prayer I think God takes delight in answering.”[i]
A deep grounding in the love of God;
is that what allowed Job, at his lowest point, to say, “Blessed be the name of
the Lord?” Was he so grounded in God’s love
because he had so much, a big family and great wealth? If he had no children and was a poor man,
would he have said that?
Is that deep grounding in the love
of God what led the author of the New Testament letter 1 John to write these
words in chapter 4? “There is no fear in
love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). That New Testament letter claims that we are
able to live in love and show love because God has first loved us (4:19). The
ultimate expression of God’s love is the death of His beloved and only son,
Jesus, on the cross for our sins. Jesus
is God’s testimony of love. When it
feels as if our own deaths have come upon us, is the love of God that we have
in Jesus enough to help us face it?
What does deep grounding in the love
of God look like?
Often, it looks like people who show
God’s love. It looks like Job’s friends
when they sat with him in silence, before they started blaming him. Just sitting with him, they were God’s
presence. They didn’t heal his painful
condition. They didn’t bring his
deceased children back. But, they
communicated that he was not going through this alone. Their presence said to
him, “You are beloved. We will stand by
you.”
Yancey relays a story from Tony
Campolo.
Tony Campolo was going
to a funeral home to pay his respects to the family of an acquaintance. By mistake he ended up in the wrong funeral
parlor. It held the body of an elderly
man and his widow was the only mourner present.
She seemed so lonely that Campolo decided to stay with her for the
funeral. He even drove with her to the cemetery. At the end of the graveside service, as he
and the woman were driving away, Campolo finally confessed that he had not
known her husband. “I thought as much,
said the widow. I didn’t recognize
you. But it doesn’t really matter.” She squeezed his arm so tightly it hurt. She said, “You’ll never know what this means
to me.”[ii]
Yancey goes on to say, “No one offers
the name of a philosopher when I ask the question, ‘who helped you the most?’ Most often they answer by describing a quiet,
unassuming person. Someone who was there
when needed, who listened more than talked, who didn’t keep glancing down at a
watch, who hugged and touched and cried.”[iii] Presence.
The first time I ever saw my dad cry
was when I was about 8 or 9. We would
run out of the house when he got home around 6 PM yelling, “Daddy’s home.” Well, one day, he didn’t come. And it got dark out. This was the late 1970’s, so no cell
phones. We didn’t know where he
was. Mom didn’t know where he was.
Finally, after 8PM, we heard the
garage door open. I went into the garage to greet him. He had a strange expression on his face. I had never seen such a look in his
eyes. There was blood all over his
overcoat. He sputtered out, “I couldn’t
help him. I couldn’t do anything.” And my dad cried. I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen this.
The story came out. He was making his daily commute home on I-75
from downtown Detroit to 14 Mile Road where we lived in the small town of
Clawson. He saw someone walking on the
Freeway get hit by a tractor trailer. My
dad always carried an old army blanket in his trunk. He stopped the car by the stricken man, and
got that old blanket out. Stooping by
the man whose body been run over by an 18-wheeler. My dad covered him with the blanket and stayed
with him so he wouldn’t die alone.
Why was Dad crying? He was crying God’s tears. This man was a stranger to my dad. This man was God’s beloved child and God wept
at what happened. God weeps for those
who fall in the hurricane’s path. God
weeps with you when life hits you hard.
Grounded in love, my dad was the
presence of God for a dying man.
Grounded in love, Job’s friends were the presence of God with him as he
suffered. In the aftermath of the
current storm, our church will send people to do whatever kinds of relief
efforts and clean-up efforts we can to help.
Going and working is important.
Going with a heart of love to be with people in their distress – that’s
living grounded in love. God’s love for
us, demonstrated in the sacrifice of Jesus, expresses itself when we are
present with people who need to know they’re not alone.
None of these words fix what hurricanes
break. None of these words heal the
wounds in your life. These words insist
that God is with us and is with you and will stay with you, no matter what you’re
going through. Because I believe in the
goodness of God and because I believe His loves overcomes all that we face in
life, this is the best I can offer. God
is with us. And when we sit with those
in pain, God is there.
AMEN
[i] P.
Yancey (2000), Reaching for the Invisible
God, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), p.83.
[ii] P.
Yancey (1990), Where is God when it
Hurts?, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), p.195.
[iii] Ibid.
No comments:
Post a Comment