Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 1/17/10
Haiti Response
Psalm 29
Luke 4:1-13
The terrible earthquake in Haiti has certainly been on our hearts and minds this week. Both the images and the stories have been heart-breaking. Our own country has responded, in typical fashion, with an outpouring of donations – literally tens of millions of dollars pledged or given.
When Katrina hit in August of 2005, we formed a task force here at Fox Chapel to guide our donations and efforts. That first year we dispersed some $80,000 in response, and sent two mission teams to help with the rebuilding in New Orleans. In the two years that followed we sent four more teams and still more support.
Our plan is to take the same approach in response to the earthquake. Kelley Denny has agreed to be the chair of the task force. The rest of the membership – people such as Dr. Judy Albert and Linda Thier – has been drawn from the forty-five to fifty members of our church who have been to Haiti over the last five years.
You may have already made a donation through some other organization. That’s great. But if you would like to make a donation through the church you can certainly do so. Just make sure there is a note specifying “Haiti” on the check or donation. The task force is committed to identifying those places where our funds will have the greatest impact.
As many of you know, we had already planned a medical mission to Haiti this June. We had ten doctors and about fifty people overall express interest. The Haiti group will be deciding whether to go ahead with that trip, or whether our resources and energies might best be used in some other way. I’m sure there will be trips at some point in our response. Our commitment and the great driver in all these decisions is what will be most helpful for the people of Haiti.
Pat Robertson’s comments about the earthquake certainly got some attention. He suggested it was the result of Haiti’s pact with the devil during the slave revolt some two hundred years ago. The scary thing is not that he said it (it is pretty consistent with other statements he has made through the years), but that there are so many in this country who will believe it.
Now at one level we can’t help but wonder why this region that has already suffered so much would be hit with a devastating earthquake on top of it all. It seems so unfair. It makes no sense. Haiti was already the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.
Our first lesson proclaimed God’s unsurpassed power. It lifted before us a God who stands over and above the primeval forces of chaos. How do reconcile a God with that kind of power on the one hand with what happened in Haiti on the other?
Well, Pat Robertson offered one way to do it. What makes his solution attractive is that it allows people to affirm God’s power and activity, and at the same time explain the horrors of that earthquake, “This was God’s punishment. These people had it coming.”
There are some real flaws with this approach, however. Just take one as an example: Do we really think that the people of Haiti are more evil or more deserving of punishment than we are? Consider our involvement with slavery. Consider our treatment of the Native American population and the numerous treaties that we broke in our westward expansion. Consider our life-destroying, God-denying addictions to pornography, to handguns, to violence and unfettered materialism… It is a slippery slope when we begin suggesting one country is somehow better or worse than another. The truth is that every nation has fallen short of God’s intention. All of us could justifiably be the target of God’s wrath.
The reason, however, that we are taking time here to discuss this is that this kind of thinking infects so many of us. It is there every time something bad happens to us and we wonder if God is punishing us. It is there in the woman who has been physically or verbally abused and who tells herself that she deserves it; the woman who stays in that abusive relationship because she is convinced that it is somehow her fault.
It is there whenever we look at the poor, or the oppressed or the dispossessed and think to ourselves that they are to blame for their circumstances… as if we, placed in those same circumstances, raised to the same standards, and subject to the same cultural influences, would have somehow found a way to break free.
You know, we can point at Pat Robertson and shake our heads in disbelief, but the truth is a lot of us are guilty of the very same thing. We might not go quite as far, but in our need for some kind of answer when terrible things happen we, too, tend to go to that exact same place. We, too, tend to blame the victim even if that victim happens to be ourselves.
Understand here that I’m not suggesting there aren’t consequences for many of our choices. There are times when we can make a direct connection between what has happened and what someone has done. Most would say there was a direct connection between the great boom of the 1920’s with their lack of financial regulation, and the collapse of the markets and the Great Depression which followed. Most would make the same connection between the rise of sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, and the recession of the past year and a half.
The same principle holds true on the individual level, as well. If we choose to drink and then get behind the wheel of a car, then we know that we’ve significantly increased the likelihood of being in an accident. If we ignore our school work, then we shouldn’t be surprised by a terrible report card.
But an earthquake as God’s punishment? That doesn’t work. It is like saying the people of the ninth district down in New Orleans deserved to have their homes destroyed because they were somehow worse that the people of other districts whose homes survived, or that the students at Columbine who got shot were greater sinners than the hundreds who escaped unscathed.
That is an unhealthy kind of thinking, and it just isn’t true. We know, for example, that the ninth district was historically vulnerable, and that many of the people living there were simply too poor to live anywhere else. And we know that many of the students shot at Columbine were the ones who happened to be in the library at precisely the wrong time. In both cases, it had nothing to do with being better or being worse.
So that kind of thinking doesn’t work. It breaks down in the face of the overwhelming evidence. It does an incredible disservice to the very ones who have suffered most. And it does a great disservice to God. It might help us explain how something so terrible could happen, but how could we possibly love a God who would arbitrarily destroy a people who have already suffered so much in life? Most of all, it doesn’t work because it is so fundamentally contrary to the God that we have come to know in Jesus.
Show me one place in the Gospels where Jesus punishes someone who is already suffering. Or one place in all of Scripture where God takes the side of the “haves” against the “have-nots”. It doesn’t happen. When Jesus chose to define his ministry, rather, he chose passages from the prophet Isaiah that move in precisely the opposite direction:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Isaiah 61:1, 58:6, 61:2 as quoted in Luke 4:18, 19).
The Jesus we see is constantly there for the least of these; the down and outers, the folks on the fringes, the people that everyone else has chosen to ignore. How did he respond to the woman caught in adultery? There was no question about her sin. She had made a mess of things. But he didn’t encourage people to throw their stones as the Law required. Instead, he asked who of her accusers was without sin. And when they all had left he turned to her and said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way and sin no more.”
Think about Jesus’ temptations here: to turn stones into bread; to rule in glory all the nations of the world; to leap from the pinnacle of the temple and let the angels of the Lord protect him. The temptations were all about power; they were Jesus’ capacity to impose his will on others. It was the kind of power that God might use in bringing an earthquake to a desperate people, or giving cancer to someone who has made some terrible mistakes.
Jesus refused to go there. God in Jesus refused. Instead, he chose another way: the way of service; the way of suffering; the way of love. Jesus chose the way of the cross. As he, himself, put it so long ago, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believe in him may not perish by may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order the world might be saved through him.”
Not to condemn, but to save. Not to destroy, but to love.
Don’t tell me that the earthquake in Haiti was God’s punishment. The very suggestion is an abomination. If you are in an abusive relationship, don’t think for one moment that you somehow deserve it. God wants so much more for you. If you are struggling with loss or with illness in your life, know that this isn’t God punishing you for something that you’ve done.
The truth is we live in a fallen world; a world in which there is an awful lot that happens that is contrary to God’s will. Yes, God is a mighty God even as the psalmist proclaims. But God’s doesn’t promise that nothing bad will ever happen to us. God’s promise, rather, is that He will stand with us no matter what might come our way. The waters may rush down upon us, but they will not overwhelm us. The fires might envelop us but we will not be consumed.