The eCrozier

Hurricane Matthew has brought tragedy to the sisters and brothers in the Caribbean and Florida. As I write this we in Georgia are awaiting the tragic results of this hurricane. To reflect on any tragedy, we need to employ some spiritual geography. We need to locate it. There are, of course, the geographical locations where it took place. But there are also our own individual locations.

We all will remember where we were when this hurricane passed through. That, however, is not the only “where” of spiritual geography. Many also ask: “Where was God?” We’ve all heard cheap answers to that question. It’s a question, not asked by people of mature faith, but by people who have lingered on the edges of their faith for a lifetime and are forced by tragic events to ask that question. It’s a question that is as old as the Bible. It’s asked in John’s Gospel by Martha as she grieves over the death of her brother, Lazarus. She asks: “Where were you, Jesus, when my brother was dying? If you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” It’s a question and a conclusion that cries out from her pain and grief.

Many ask about God’s location when tragedy strikes. I don’t wish to be insensitive, but it’s a faithless question. That question in its naïve form has been asked for millennia. Where was God in the Yellow Fever epidemic that wiped out thousands of people in Memphis, Tennessee in 1873? Where was God when we brutally killed one another during our Civil War? Where was God when millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocost? Such questions imply that God owes a particular favoritism to the people in question, because the question really asks: “How could you do this to us, God?” It’s as if other people deserve their tragedies, while we don’t. We aren’t the first nor will we be the last to experience a tragedy. It’s common to all of us. The question of where God is in all this is clear from our faith. God is in the midst of us, hanging on a cross, dying for the sins of the world. Asking where God is in a tragedy is like asking where God was when Jesus hung on the cross. God was right there. And this God we worship and glorify, bids you and me to take up that cross and follow Jesus.

A sonnet written by the late Vassar Miller, speaks powerfully. It’s called The Wisdom of Insecurity.
There’s no abiding city, no, not one.
The towers of stone and steel are fairy stories.
God will not play our games nor join our fun,
Does not give tit for tat, parade His glories.
And chance is chance, not providence dressed neat,
Credentials hidden in its wooden leg.
When the earth opens underneath our feet,
It is a waste of brain and breath to beg.
No angel intervenes but shouts that matter
Has been forever mostly full of holes.
So Simon Peter always walked on water,
Not merely when the lake waves licked his soles.
And when at last he saw he would not drown,
The shining knowledge turned him upside-down.

You remember that when Peter was sentenced by the Romans to death by crucifixion, he asked to be crucified upside-down, because he thought himself unworthy to die in the same way as his Lord. Christians call this “good news,” a rather odd claim to make about a public execution. Part of this good news is that Peter, who by all gospel accounts was a slow learner, became a rock of the church. So there is hope for us as well. The lessons are hard, but not new. The world is not safe. It has never been ours to control. We’ve always needed each other more than we care to admit. God is God alone, and we’re not. Learning that is easy; we can do it again and again and again. Living it, however, is our calling.

And that brings me to the last part of the spiritual geography. For the question is not where we were when a tragedy struck, or even where was God? No, the most important spiritual geography is “where are you and I going?” Has tragedy made us bitter and drawn us inward. Or, has it opened our eyes to God’s world and made us even more committed to carrying the cross of Jesus?

Death should not be the issue, not the deaths caused by a tragedy, and not our own deaths in the future. As Vassar Miller says in her sonnet: When the earth opens underneath our feet, It is a waste of brain and breath to beg. The issue is our faith in a loving and redeeming God, who, as Vassar Miller writes: will not play our games nor join our fun, and a God who Does not give tit for tat, nor parade His glories.

Martha came to that conclusion. In the end, she knew it was by the power of God, and God alone, that her brother would be raised. And that is where we need to go as well in our own spiritual geography

+Scott