Where Was God? Tsunami’s and Sovereignty
Isaiah 61 January 16, 2005
Intro: (video clip)
The Issue:
Romans 12:2 (NLT) says, “let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think”. What should we think about the recent disaster which has been the focus of much of the world since December 26, 2005? What does is say about God?? What does it say about us??? Does the Bible have anything to say about the issue????
Psalm 93
To answer the last question first, yes. More directly than you might think: “The seas have lifted up, O LORD , the seas have lifted up their voice; the seas have lifted up their pounding waves. Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea- the LORD on high is mighty.” (Ps 93-3-4).
Principle 1: God is Mighty
In thinking about the recent tsunami, that Scripture is principle 1: God is Mighty. We see that in nature. Most often we marvel at it – we watch a sunset, we hike to the top of a mountain, we catch a 27 pound Chinook salmon; but we are also terrified by it, as we have been over the past 4 weeks. It challenges our thinking about God – is God good? is God strong?; about life – is it really that fragile?; and about control.
Does that last one surprise you? As we affirm the might of God, what we are affirming is that God is in control, and that you and I are not. We don’t like that very much, do we? It is uncomfortable for us to be confronted with our essential helplessness, with our complete and utter dependence on God for our existence. I felt that as I watched numerous video clips – the water was everywhere, in every crack, in every street, in every building. It just came. The force and the devastation was from the sheer volume of water displaced by the earthquake, crossing an entire ocean and bringing us face to face with the raw power of nature. And our helplessness in the face of the power and might of God as seen through nature.
I think a little bit of discomfort about God is a good thing. As we are mindful of the might of God, we also see some of the wildness of God. God is not tame. God is not a gentle lap cat, who will climb up and purr when you pet Him. God is much more like a lion, like CS Lewis’ Aslan. We must be forever mindful that God’s might is not under our control, can not be tamed by us, and does not exist to pander to our desires, no matter how often we mis-quote Psalm 37:4 “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
It is uncomfortable, but it is also true: God is mighty. More precisely, God is All-Mighty. All of the power of the entire universe is a mere reflection of the might of God, because God is the originator of it and the source of it. And next to that power and might, you and I feel very very small, and very powerless. Because, though we don’t like to say it, we are small and we are powerless. But, we are also adopted.
And that is precisely why the principle of God as Mighty is ok for all of us who have a relationship with God. God is almighty, He is awesome in power, and He has also invited us to be His children. And, by the way, that is also precisely why it is ok for us to not be in control. Because we are the children, God is the boss.
Principle 2: God is Good
That brings us to the next problem: if we accept principle 1, that God is mighty, and then take refuge in the fact that we are God’s children, does it necessarily follow that God should use all His power to protect His children?
Some narrow-minded, racist bigots would only go this far and conclude that disasters such as this one are God punishing all those who are not His children. That this is God’s vengeance, God’s judgment, against people who have rejected Him. I say, poppycock! This is a false portrayal of God as a tyrant, mindlessly wiping out hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were God’s children. We cannot retreat into such simplistic conclusions.
We need to go to a more difficult place, and that is principle 2: God is good. In His very nature, His very essence, we must affirm that God is good. That was Jesus’ pronouncement: “No one is good, except God alone.” (Mk 10:18).
This is a sticking point for many who do not believe: they look at events such as the recent tsunami and say, “If God is able to do something to stop that kind of loss of life, and does not, how can you say that God is good?” An excellent question… anyone want to take a crack at an answer?
For me, the answer comes back to the nature of the relationship: I am only a child in relationship to God. Now, I say “only” in terms of my ability to understand the ways of my Father, not in any way to diminish the privilege of being a child of God. But in my ability to understand even what “goodness” is, I am but a child.
A simple illustration: my four year old was hungry yesterday just before dinner, and so I let him have a couple of mini marshmallows. That was quite good of me, don’t you think? Thomas certainly thought so! At least, until I said that was enough. Then he didn’t think I was so good… The analogy fits. Only God knows and defines what is “good”.
You see, there are not only the two options that first appear in the face of bad things – be they tsunamis that effect nations or more personal bad things in your life. We first see only two options: God is either not strong enough to stop them or not good enough to stop them. There is a third option, which leads to Principle 3.
Principle 3: God is With Us
Maybe there is something better, something more “good”, than being spared from the things that we see as “evil”. Maybe there is a bigger plan, a higher purpose, something far greater that God has in mind for you and for me, than simply living a life free from tragedy or hurt or even persecution or hatred.
And I’m not talking about simply “seeing the good that came out of it.” Yes, seeing the world come together to reach out in human kindness to help is a good thing that has come from the tsunami. Yes, seeing individuals understand how fortunate they are and seeing them choose to donate money is good. Yes, we have heard stories of great survival and self-sacrifice. I acknowledge those as good outcomes of a bad situation, but that is not a good line of reasoning. That type of reasoning takes us to a place of trying to balance the “good” outcomes against the “bad” outcomes. That line of thought ultimately forces us to “add up” all the “bad” things, and try to believe that all the “good” things on the other side somehow make the “bad” things worthwhile.
When I say that there is something beyond the two choices of God not being good enough or else God not being mighty enough, I don’t mean the good that comes out of it. I mean this: principle 3 – God is with us. God never promised us an easy life. God never promised that bad things would never happen, we would never lose a loved one, we would never be treated unfairly, we would never be personally effected by a natural disaster. What God did promise was that He would be with us.
Come with me to Is 61. “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion- to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor.”
Familiar words, not so much because of their original place in Isaiah but more because it was the passage Jesus read at the very beginning of His ministry. It speaks directly to the point of all that we have been saying:
Principle 1: God is mighty and in control: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord”.
Principle 2: God is good: we see in every line that follows.
Principle 3: God is with us: we see in the very person of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us.
And notice, most of all, the difference that God being with us makes: good news to the poor. The binding up of broken hearts. Freedom for captives. Comfort for the mourners. Beauty for ashes, oil of gladness instead of mourning, praise instead of despair. What makes the difference?? Does God restore all the losses, bring back the loved ones, deposit money in the bank accounts of the poor? No. What makes the difference is that God comes and enters into our loss with us. He comes and shares our pain, and the pain of our world. And that makes all the difference.
If you don’t understand that, it is maybe because you have never experienced it. You have never let God be with you in your hurt, you have taken your own heart captive to the pain and nurtured anger and bitterness instead of opening yourself to God and allowing God to come in and join you. You have fought and held on instead of releasing and inviting, you have done everything you could to stay in control instead of letting God be in control.
If you don’t understand that, it is maybe because you have been convinced by the lie rampant in our world that says the outer “stuff” – material things, surface level happiness, even physical health – is more important than the inner “stuff” – like our hearts, our character, our maturity and completeness, our relationship with God. In God’s economy, our inner lives are far more important than the outer things, and that I think is one of the key things in understanding and responding to the “bad things” that happen in our world. God cares more about our character than our comfort. God cares more about our joy than our happiness. God cares more about our hearts being good than our bank accounts being full. James puts it this way: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4).
Let me tell you, it really is worth it. Knowing the presence of God with you in your life is worth every bit of hardship that we might experience in this fallen world.
Review:
I am aware that I have not answered the “big” question – “why”? That is simply because there is no answer. Thomas didn’t understand why he shouldn’t be allowed to eat all the marshmallows he desired, I don’t understand why God would create a world with tsunamis that destroy. So I’ve chosen to talk about what we do know, through God’s Word and His Spirit. God is mighty, and we see that in the world around us. God is good, we know that from Scripture and from our own lives, including our own times of difficulty. And God is with us, joining in our lives and our experiences and forming us through them. Beyond those principles, I turn to Is 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
So, How Do We Respond?
This coming Saturday night, we are going to talk a lot more about how we can respond, and about what God’s Word calls us to do as His children in our world. How can we engage our world? Our missions committee is hosting a fundraising dinner, followed by some entertainment, and we will have the opportunity to respond as God would have us respond. We will put into action the commands to be compassionate, to share with the needy, to express our love for God by giving to the poor.
But let me, as we wrap up, just tell you what you have already done, perhaps without knowing it. As a church, we tithe a little more than 10% to missions and projects beyond ourselves. That means that of every dollar you give to Laurier Heights Baptist Church, 10 cents goes straight to other missions organizations doing ministry in other places. Through those organizations, we partner with people across the globe. One of those organizations, “The Sharing Way”, is supporting a team of Baptists from Hungary that were on location within two days of the disaster. We have a missionary, Bill Dyck, in Indonesia right now providing trauma counseling and directing other aid projects. And I read of a program we are part of through the Canadian Food Grains Bank which is providing food for work in many areas, with the idea being that such a program will keep people from leaving their communities to look for work in the big cities, and will instead be able to rebuild their communities and be paid with food.
Conclusion:
In reading the communications from The Sharing Way, I found this which I thought was very well put. After writing specifically about the tsunami efforts, they wrote: “we also leave you with a challenge. With the amount of massive relief from so many agencies and governments and concerned people pouring into these affected areas, we encourage you to consider support for our existing programs and personnel. It’s one of the best ways to consistently provide hope and the caring presence of Christ in areas of the world so often torn apart by largely preventable forces such as poverty, conflict, and disease such as AIDS and malaria. As one aid agency official recently noted, "deaths as a result of poverty and preventable diseases in Africa amounted to the equivalent of the tsunami death toll every week."
We hope you will join us in fanning this new spirit of generosity in our country and many others. May we work together to provide support and encouragement year-round to those who are in need, physically and spiritually. To help each other develop healthier places to live, stronger communities of faith, and people equipped to lead. Small, faithful efforts that make a big difference.”
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
With little warning, director saves 28 orphans from tsunami
By John Lancaster / The Washington Post
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NAVALADY, Sri Lanka -- Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was due to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under his care were still in their rooms, getting ready for services.
Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face.
"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!"
Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of countless survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal disaster that so far has claimed the lives of an estimated 78,000 people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.
It is also the story of their chief rescuer, Sanders, a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, Md., where he once owned a townhouse. A member of the country’s Tamil ethnic minority, Sanders, 50, studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s to work with Tamil refugees displaced by fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, which have been observing a cease-fire since 2002.
In 1994, Sanders founded the Samaritan Children’s Home in Navalady, a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka’s economically depressed east coast, about 150 miles northeast of Colombo, the capital. He built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his Maryland townhouse, he said.
With ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other, the four-acre orphanage was a strikingly beautiful place, set in a grove of stately palms. The children -- some of whom had lost their parents in the civil war -- lived four to a room in whitewashed cottages with red tile roofs, attending school in the village nearby. Bougainvillea spilled from concrete planters.
"People used to come and take photographs of the flowers," said Sanders, a handsome, youthful-looking man who speaks precise idiomatic English and peppers his conversation with Scripture. "They used to say it looked like Eden."
It was a busy, happy time at the orphanage. On Friday, the children sang, danced and performed the Nativity scene at their annual Christmas pageant, followed the next day by Christmas services and dinner for 250 guests, many of them Hindus from the nearby village. Sanders was so exhausted by his duties as host, he said, that he went to bed early on Saturday night. He also forgot to check, as he usually does, on whether the outboard motor had been removed from the orphanage launch, as it was supposed to be each night as a precaution against theft.
It proved to be the luckiest mistake he ever made.
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On Sunday morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray, then went back to bed. He woke up again around 7:30. He recalled the stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle hiss.
"It was so calm and so still," he recalled. "The surface of the ocean was like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved." Two young men on his staff wandered down to the ocean for a swim.
It isn’t clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea. Even the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like ash."
Kohila ran to tell her husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I said, „Be calm. God is with us. Nothing will ever harm us without His permission."’
Wrapped in a sarong, he ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot wall of water," racing toward the wispy casuarina pines that marked the landward side of the beach.
With barely any time to think, let alone act, he ran toward the lagoon side of the compound, where the launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then, many of the children had heard the commotion and had also run outside, some of them half dressed. Sanders shouted at the top of his lungs, urging them all toward the boat.
Desperate, he asked if anyone had seen his daughter, and a moment later one of the older girls thrust the toddler into his arms. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along with the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the orphanage staff, clambered aboard on their own. One of his employees yanked on the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life -- something that Sanders swears had never happened before.
"Usually you have to pull it four or five times," he said.
Crammed with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch roared into the lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Sanders said, that the wall of water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its single-story buildings to the rafters.
"It was a thunderous roar, and black sea," he said.
As the compound receded behind the boat, Sanders said, he watched in amazement as the surging current smashed a garage and ejected a brand-new Toyota pickup. "The roof came flying off -- it just splintered in every direction," he recalled. "I saw the Toyota just pop out of the garage."
The vehicle bobbed briefly on the surface, collided with a palm tree -- the mark of its impact was clearly visible Wednesday -- then slid over the edge of the compound in the torrent before slipping beneath the rapidly rising surface of the lagoon. Another vehicle, a maroon van, was smashed against a palm tree. A three-wheeled motorized rickshaw parked on the property whirled around as if it were circling a drain, Kohila Sanders recalled.
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The orphans’ ordeal did not end when their boat pulled away from the shore.
Not only was water cascading over the lagoon side of the peninsula, but it also was pouring in directly from the mouth of the estuary about two miles away. Sanders feared the converging currents would swamp the small craft. At that point, Sanders said, he recalled a line from the Book of Isaiah: "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it."
He raised his hand in the direction of the flood and shouted, "I command you in the name of Jesus -- stop!" The water then seemed to "stall, momentarily," he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining things." With the water pouring into the mouth of the lagoon, he then began to worry that waves would overtake them from behind, swamping the small boat. Reasoning that it was better to hit the waves head on, he said, he ordered the driver to reverse direction and head back toward the open ocean.
But that maneuver carried its own risks. As it made for the mouth of the lagoon, the boat was broadsided and nearly capsized by the torrent pouring over the peninsula. "The children were very frightened," Kohila Sanders, 30, recalled. "We were praying, „God help us, God help us."’
As the waters began to roll back out to sea, the turbulence subsided. It was then, Sanders and his wife recalled, that they became aware of the people crying for help as they bobbed in the water nearby. They were villagers who had been swept off the peninsula. The passengers rescued one young man, who was "howling for his missing wife and daughters," Kohila Sanders said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn’t any room.
"People were crying, „Help us, help us,"’ Kohila said. "Children were crying."
Eventually the boat made it to the opposite shore, about a mile and a half distant in the city of Batticaloa. The Sanders, their daughter and perhaps a dozen of the orphaned and now displaced children have found temporary refuge in a tiny church; the rest have been sent elsewhere.
The city is short of food and water, and on Wednesday afternoon, corpses were being burned where they had been found at the edge of the lagoon. With more than 2,000 people dead in Batticaloa district, local officials say they lack the means to dispose of the bodies properly and that residents are burning them as a precaution against disease.
The scene at the orphanage was one of utter devastation. The grounds were covered by up to three feet of sand. Several buildings, including the staff quarters, were entirely wiped away, and the others were damaged beyond repair. A body burned near the ruined chapel.
Surveying the wreckage, Sanders broke down and cried. "Twenty years of my life put in here, and I saw it all disappear in 20 seconds," he said between sobs. The orphanage had no insurance.
But at other moments, Sanders was philosophical about his loss. "If there was anyone who should have got swept away by this tidal wave, it should have been us," he said. "We were eyeball to eyeball with the wave."
