Cottesbrooke:  Sunday 19th August 2007
Heavy weight exegesis on to-day’s Gospel reading  But no. A hurricane on its way to Jamaica.
So I switched to Thought fo the Day mode, thinking about the news and Christianity.  and hope you won’t mind.  For I thought I’d talk a little this morning about Christianity disasters. We’ve had a few of them recently – and I don’t mean those on the stock market. 
Get on to your insurance people straight away and tell them it's official. 
A bishop, no less, has confirmed that the recent flooding in Yorkshire  was indeed an act of God. And it means the Almighty is not at all pleased, according to the Bishop of Carlisle. 
"This is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way," says the bishop. "We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage we have caused." 
He was supported by the Bishop of Liverpool. "God is exposing us to the truth of what we have done." he said. "If we live in a profligate way then there are going to be consequences." 
They didn't say why the Lord picked on South Yorkshire in particular but what they had to say raised a number of eyebrows and led me too to think about Acts of God
Since earlier this week 127 people were reported killed when a church collapsed after an earthquake in Peru I have been wondering how this would be interpreted by the clergy of the area, or indeed anywhere.  Would they take the Anglican bishops line, or find some other explanation, some other way of explaining the situation to Christians.?  
Natural disasters remind us that not only does man too often damage the environment, but that the environment can damage us.  We however, by taking thought, can do something to avoid disasters, the environment cannot.
 As the French philosopher Pascal put almost 350  years ago,  
"The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable."
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble (thing) in nature; but he is a thinking reed.* The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a puff of smoke, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would yet be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it .” 
Natural disasters then are bigger than we are. We can think and so in trying to explain them we turn to God.  And in doing so we have to confront perhaps the greatest of all paradoxes.  How the New Testament’s benevolent creator all seeing and all powerful, who sent his Son to save mankind from sin, inflict destruction and death on innocent people ?  
The benevolent image of God is the one we like to think of.  Yet the bishops seem to be taking their cue from what Jesus had to say in St. Luke’s gospel when he was told that Pilate had ordered the death of a number of Galileans who were sacrificing at the temple.  We don’t know why they suffered this fate but Jesus commented that they were not especially bad people nor, he pointed out, were 18 others who had died when a tower fell on them.  Then He went on  “except ye repent ye shall all perish. “ That seems to be the bishops’ message.
And personally I’m quite puzzled by it.  How can we reconcile disasters such as the tsunami of 2001 with an all seeing and all powerful God who forgives us  our sins and is, as the New Testament makes clear, well disposed towards us?  
But God can and does intervene in human affairs to ensure an outcome that he wants, as the Bible shows: the flood, parting of the Red Sea, the Walls of Jericho Sodom & Gomorrah.  In those cases he was intervening to punish the wicked and reward the good. Using Jonah he threatened the people of Nineveh, and they changed their ways. Those example, of course, come from the Old Testament when things were different.   
Some people believe, like the bishops if Carlisle and Oxford, that he still does intervene to correct humanity and will do so again.  “If God does not judge America, he’s going to have to apologise to Sodom and Gomorrah” is how Billy Graham put it.  
Another explanation of the paradox is that actually disasters are the fault of humanity.  In the case of the tsunami, the argument goes, we have to yet taken seriously our responsibility for the well being of the planet.  Fair enough. But how humanity can stop tectonic plates from moving is not clear to me.  However, I suppose you could argue that, for example, by building in the wrong places we lay the foundations for trouble.
Disaster can put people off God.  Some people cease to believe when they find that he does not prevent disasters to them personally, say, in the early death of a child.  They declare he is dead or never existed or they’ve just given up on Him.  That’s like blaming the referee when you lose the game. So he gets a bad press. 
We get some help from that most extraordinary, and in many ways, beautiful book of the Bibe,  Job.  For whilst confronted with all kinds of disasters does not blame God , of course, but he does question God’s sense of justice which is understandable given what been happening to him as a good man.  And that brings a memorable rebuke from God  “ Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? “  and God follows that with about 100 different questions putting Job, very firmly and very poetically in his place. 
At least Job got the message.  “ Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge, he said.   Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me that I understood not. “ 
Sitting back a Job like acknowledging that there are some things we don’t undertand is commendable, but we were, as Pascal pointed out, born to think. So another explanation comes from Deists who, if I have understood them rightly, believe that God simply wound up the universe and then walked away to let it work itself out.  
Conservative Christians and Muslims tend to believe in the Devil and see his hand in disasters which God though loving humanity is powerless to prevent it. Some have redefined God as all knowing and all loving, but with finite powers to influence us. 
Finally, the atheist have an easy way out: by denying the existence of God at all. To them any given act of nature or man is either immoral, morally neutral or moral according to how you interpret it.  So they win whatever happens. 
Well, there is clearly on definite answer to all of this.  So I shall turn for some help to the epistle for to-day from Hebrews which is part of that memorable Chapter 11 about faith that begins  “ Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.  “   
Christianity, then, is about faith.  As the Epistle says “ Let us run the race that is before us looking t Jesus as the author and finisher of our faith”  
 We cannot be sure, as the Archbishop of Canterbury says, that God is not a “ cosmic puppet master”  It just seems unlikely.  He’s given us a set of rules to run our lives by.  We need faith to roll with the punches of that life.  And I commend it to you. 
At least it’s better than thinking of oneself as just a collection of atoms and water sitting without purpose in a small village, in a small country in a small continent on a small planet in a small universe, one of millions in an infinite cosmos.  
I hope I’ve given you a bit of food for thought this morning. As the Epistle points out “through faith we understand that the world were framed through the word of God.
So even if we are feeble reeds, we can think about ordering our lives with faith as the rock on which to build them  
