This week Dr Rob Bellingham leads the Servants team to Banda Aceh. Last Sunday he preached this farewell message at Mt Albert Baptist…
It was a bright sunny morning in Sri Lanka and a public holiday the day after Christmas. An ideal chance to visit relatives in Galle along the scenic south eastern coastal highway. It seemed that many people had the same idea for the road was full of cars even though they had set off quite early. At 9am they were nearing their destination and the long line of cars slowed to 50kms per hour. A strange rumbling noise made the driver look in his rear vision mirror and it seemed that 100 metres behind him a petrol tanker was mysteriously surging down the road on its side. Spray was shooting into the air. It looked like a wave had leapt from the normally quiet ocean onto the land.
Glancing down the road ahead the driver then noticed that a wave was also surging across the stretch of road they were about to reach. A side road leading away from the coastal highway branched off to the right and the driver instinctively swung the car across the road and up the gentle incline. Of the 30 other cars on that stretch of road noone else followed them. They parked safely up the slope and went back to discover absolute chaos and destruction where they had just been. Cars were smashed into houses or swept out to sea as the water retreated.
For some moments they were dumbstruck, unable to understand what had just happened but thankful to God, for they were a Christian family, that they had been spared. A cry for help spurred them into action and they spend the next hours rescuing survivors. All plans of reaching Galle were abandoned as where the road had been minutes before there were great gaps. They wondered whether they had any relatives left to visit. The drive home some hours later was on the long windy inland route. It was a day they would never forget. There were many prayers of thanks for their survival and prayers of lament for those lost over the next few days as the numbers of dead kept rising. Of the 100 people driving on the coastal road just in front and behind them they calculated that less than 10 were still alive. Why us? Why them? Is it a judgement? Why didn’t God stop it? There were so many questions as the nation mourned, the cost of the killer waves was counted and bodies were recovered and identified.
In Aceh province of Indonesia much closer to the earthquake, continental plate adjustment the damage was much worse. A wall of water 100 feet high had turned the state capital into a wasteland of debris with block after block of houses reduced to piles of rubble with their occupants battered, drowned and dead.
Lois and I were in the heartland of India up on the Deccan plateau a thousand kilometres from the beach. It was Abi’s birthday and for a seven year old that’s an exciting and important event. After the presents were opened Mark wandered into the office and picked up reports on BBC that a tsunami had struck the coastlines on Indonesia, Thailand, Nicobar and Andaman Islands, Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka and had even devastated Somalia on the African coast. It was soon described as the worst disaster in living memory and some claimed, even in history. We had train bookings to go down to the beach at Mahaballipuram an hour south of Chennai/Madras. We checked with friends at the scripture union camp there and on 28 December arrived at a beach where all the seaside cafes were smashed, stone walls had toppled like dominoes and fishing boats were parked in the main street!
I too, like the family we heard about in Sri Lanka, asked the question ‘why?’ I don’t have a comprehensive answer, but from reading, thinking and praying about it I have a few suggestions about how to interpret such events. I want to make several contrasts that focus the ‘why’ question and explore some alternatives.
One God or Many?
The first contrast is one God or many – who do you chose to worship. As I said we were in India on 26 January. It is said that Hinduism has 300 million gods – 1 for every 3 or 4 people. It is a religious system where you choose or if you are imaginative enough even create you own god or goddess. We happened in Kolkata just before Kali puja and every hundred metres or so down every street (except of course in the muslim areas of that city of 14 million people) shrines were erected. Bamboo frames went up, covered with bright coloured cloth and inside on a platform was placed an elaborate paper mache and clay image of the goddess Kali with six arms, a sword, a severed head dripping blood and her foot firmly placed on the chest of her husband. She was gaudy, bejewelled and fierce, and nearly all of Kolkata came out to worship her. It went on for a week with firecrackers as loud as bombs and raucous music going well past midnight. The Bengali leader of the slum handicraft program fasted all the penultimate day and on the last night of the festival visited more than 100 shrines, placing a small offering at each of them. Kali is called the goddess of destruction and death. To appease her and avoid disaster, millions of Kolkatans and others around the country ask to be spared calamity in the year ahead. For 12 thousand Indian coastal dwellers the bad karma was only held off for 6 weeks. On the morning of 26 December they lost their lives.
Hinduism has a god for every circumstance. Most Hindus have a primary god they worship, but have several others they also make offerings or say prayers to. Most temples have several shrines you can do puja at. In Balmoral Road, just a kilometre or two from this church the main one is Ganesh, but there is also Krishna and Lakshmi and Kali.
In the Hindu epics these gods fight each other, commit adultery with each other, deceive each other and even slaughter each other. They are immoral, and the logic of Hinduism is not that you follow god because he or she is worthy of your emulation, but because you believe the spiritual world influences the physical world and you can avoid pain and find wealth and happiness by making offerings to these gods.
In such a worldview the answer to the question “Why the tsunami?” or “why did those particular people die?” is “The god or goddess of death and destruction at that moment in time flexed his/her muscles and gained the ascendancy in the cosmic battle.”
Christians however believe there is only one God – as the creed says “maker of heaven and earth”. “In the beginning God…” begins Genesis. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, says John’s gospel.
Now if there is only one God then God is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the world. He either causes it to happen or allows it to happen. The editors of the Baptist were also in Asia on Dec 26. Writing their first editorial for 2005 they commented that it was only when they got back to New Zealand that they heard the question “Why did God let this happen?” It is only a serious question, in the context of a monotheistic worldview. Islam is also monotheistic. Their creed begins “There is no God but God” But Islam’s answer is totally different from the Christian response.
This leads us to the second contrast.
An All Loving, All Powerful God.
The ‘why’ question also only makes sense if you believe that this one God is at the same time all loving and all powerful. If God is all powerful and arbitrary he can do what he likes. We may rant at the heavens demanding an answer to our questions but God does not have to reply. He has his reasons – who are we, mere mortals, that we should challenge them?
Now the bible certainly teaches that God, the creator of the universe, is all powerful. God spoke and the world came into being – the sea, the sky, the land, the animals, the fish and the birds and finally you and I, the humans made in God’s likeness.
But the bible also teaches that God is all loving. He made us because he is a God of relationship – he loves us and wants to be our friend. In Old Testament times, when things went badly for the nation of Israel. When they were conquered by their enemies, when they were refugees in foreign countries, when they were slaves to cruel masters, they sometimes thought that God had forgotten them or was punishing them. It was Hosea and other prophets that reminded them that God’s love was greater than his anger. The OT formula is that “God visits the sins of the fathers on the children to the third or fourth generation, but shows his love to thousands of generations.” God’s anger is short lived, his love is everlasting.
For anyone who still doubts that truth, God sent his most precious gift, his son, to spread the message of his love on earth and to die on the cross to break the power of sin, selfishness, and rebellion that keeps us from loving God as much as he loves us.
Each day on the tsunami shattered beach at Mahaballipuram, we cleared the sand of the plastic spread everywhere, and made sandcastles and sand sculptures between swims in the warm water. One day we began a conversation about the tsunami and the conflict of interest in claiming that God is all powerful and all loving yet allowed the tsunami to happen. If he was all powerful he could have stopped it! If he was all loving he would have wanted to stop it! So why did it happen?
The best answer Jo, Mark, Lois and I could come up with was that at times God chose to lay aside his power in order to show his love. That is the message of the cross. Because He loves us so much, God volunteered to allow his son to be crucified on a cruel Roman cross, to restore the relationship between him and us. In Jesus God donned humble clothes, walked dusty roads, ate simple food, relinquished power, served the poor, was friends with the outcasts, prayed for his persecutors. To know a God like that, whose essence is love is worth the occasional hiccup in the universe. That may not be good news to a grieving family but it is the best I know.
Ideally my sermon should end here, but there are two other aspects of God and the tsunami I want us to think about.
Active or Passive Universe.
Presumably God could have made a perfect, static world, where storms never occurred, earthquakes never happened and tsunamis never invaded the land, but he didn’t. “God saw what he had made and it was good” says the bible – but not necessarily perfect. Part of that good was separating the sea from the dry land on the third day of creation. But it is an unstable boundary this meeting place of sea and land. Every day erosion occurs and land disappears into the sea. Every day also coral grows and forms a protective barrier around the islands of the Pacific and many other shores. Every year 5000 acres of new sandbanks form in the Bay of Bengal where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra deposit the stones of the Himalayas and the soil of India and Bangladesh into the sea. I remember standing on the banks of the Ganges in flood with the director of a development project. He pointed out into the river about 100 metres and said “Last year our office was there.” I stood with one foot on firm land and the other on a chunk of earth 10 metres across with a gap of approximately 1 foot opening like a crevasse and ready to disappear into the raging torrent of the next flood. God could have created a world where all that stuff did not happen. Where cyclones Olaf and Helen did not attack Tonga and Samoa from both sides, where every day was perfectly peaceful, perfectly calm, perfectly stable and utterly boring! But he chose not to, a long time ago.
Imagine the two possible worlds.
The first is static and unchanging. We are robots programmed to do the right, logical and predictable thing all the time. Everything that needs to be decided has already been decreed by God. You and I can’t change anything, so we have nothing to do and nothing to think about. We are made to be happy and content in such an environment.
Or contemplate the world that is. It is governed by laws of physics, so is not random or arbitrary, but it is constantly changing. We have seasons, sometimes with storms. The sun shines some days on others the sky is filled with clouds. They’re collecting water from that ocean across which the tsunami raced at 2/3rds the speed of sound, and dropping it on the land. Plants grow, flowers bloom, animals graze and we are fed. It is an active world. We shape it and are shaped by it. We have problems to solve, jobs to do, ideas to examine and continents to explore because no two places are exactly alike and no two days exactly the same. On that reality we have science and develop the capacity to think. God chose in fact to make us custodians and co-creators of the world in which we live.
And that leads me to my final point.
Act of God or Act of Man
Events such as the tsunami are called “Acts of God” but should God take all the blame.
Disasters are classified into two categories – predictable and unpredictable. Droughts and floods are predictable – they happen in certain places at regular intervals. The only question is not ‘will they happen’ but ‘how severe will they be this year.’ Earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis are very unpredictable. No one knew they would wake up to news of such horrific damage and loss of life the day after Christmas. In England they were still sleeping while half a world away people were dying! As statistics came in this boxing day event came to be called “the worst disaster in history”.
Maybe it was – though ash from the Taupo eruption apparently darkened the skies over Europe, so that was a pretty big event, as was Vesuvius or even Pinatabo in the Philippines or Mt St Helens in USA. The difference is in the number of people effected – 300,000 dead, millions homeless.
In disaster studies the question is sometimes raised ‘If people are not hurt is it a disaster or merely a natural phenomenon” Imagine for instance that the tsunami was caused not by the continental shelves moving but by a huge section of the ice shelf collapsing in Antarctica. It was winter and only whales, seals and penguins were in the area and the impact didn’t reach New Zealand. One can imagine that the whales enjoyed it, the seals dived through the wave and the penguins surfed the tsunami for 10 or 100 kilometres and then turned round and headed back to the ice. Was it a disaster? No it was a natural event of scientific interest.
Disasters are measured by the degree of damage they do and especially if they result in loss of life. It is because of human habitation of the seashore that the boxing day tsunami was judged to be the world’s worst disaster. Maybe Maori had the right idea when they built their pa on hilltops and ventured down to the sea to fish and travel to other places! Disasters impact the built environment more than the natural environment. It was the smashed buildings, flooded swimming pools and broken walls that we observed most in Mahaballipuram. The land merely showed a black line between 100 and 500 metres inland as the point at which the killer wave ran out of steam and retreated back to the sea. After adequate rain the salt will leach away and grass will grow again. Some trees were toppled but most survived hardly aware of the incident.
The challenge in rebuilding after the tsunami is to either cooperate with nature or build structures that can withstand it’s fury.
This Wednesday, almost 2 months after it happened I lead a team of 6 NZers joining the Union of Baptist Churches of Indonesia relief program in Banda Aceh and planning a longer term response.
Fortunately the tsunami isn’t God’s last word. In Revelation 21, the penultimate chapter of the bible God says he is building a new heaven and a new earth where there will be no more pain and suffering and interestingly “no more sea”. Tsunamis will never happen again!
Rob Bellingham. Mt Albert Baptist Church. 20 February 2005.
