The following sermon was preached by Archbishop Jensen at the Summer School of the Church Missionary Society (NSW Branch). Because of the occasion, it seeks to consider the challenge of Christian mission in a world that has suffered the tremendous catastrophe of the recent tsunami. The offertory at the service was dedicated to the relief of sufferers and the Archbishop's Overseas Aid and Relief Fund is also appealing for financial support.
Luke 24:36"53
At this great missionary conference we are encouraged to be ambassadors for Christ, to promote the preaching of Christ in all the world. But we have met at a time of immense crisis, when the Tsunami which followed the earthquake in the Indian Ocean has left a horrible trail of death and destruction across the region, and the full story is only beginning to emerge. It seems that no fewer than 150,000 people may have been killed, and there is the awful possibility that disease and hunger will carry off many others. Furthermore, the lives of nearly 5 million people have been blighted and the infrastructure of whole regions destroyed. Our hearts go out to the sufferers, and we long to help them and restore them as much as possible. They share our common humanity and we have no option whatsoever.
But what are we to do about mission, which after all we have come to discuss? Should we put it quietly aside as we respond to the immediate and pressing needs of the wounded? At a deeper level, should we put it aside permanently as an outworn and irrelevant response to the needs of the real world? Does it retain any relevance to the disaster and its aftermath?
Telling the old, old story
Long before the coming of the present crisis, I chose Luke 24:36-53 as a bible reading for today. As you can see, it recounts one of the pivotal moments in the old, old gospel story. Luke insists that when the disciples encounter Jesus, they are not seeing a ghost. They all believed in life beyond death and in the possibility of spirits visiting us. But Jesus was no ghost. He was resurrected from the dead; he invites the disciples to touch his body; he eats before them.
The point then is not mere survival, but resurrection. Here was a man who had succumbed horribly to the final human indignity of death and defeat. In the New Testament this defeat is physical and spiritual, since death is a prelude to judgement. The law of God, which is righteous, agrees helplessly with the justice of a negative verdict. As we die, we are pulled down by universal sin into the darkness of death and judgement.
The resurrection of Jesus, then, is amazing. It is the reversal of the condemnation which has brought death in the first place. It is a vindication by God. More than that, it is the intrusion of the future into the present. In the End, all men and women will be resurrected; that was the faith of the disciples. Now, before their very eyes stands a resurrected man, proof that their hope was a reality, that their faith in God was not a fiction. A significant experience of the future has arrived. The resurrected Jesus Christ stands as a living hope for all men and women.
Jesus then opens their eyes. He takes them back to their Bible, to Moses and the prophets and the writings. He shows them how these ancient texts actually witness to him, actually show in advance what is to occur. In so doing he is implicitly contrasting the God of the Bible with the gods of the nations. This God is one who speaks and one who controls the future. His promises come true, because he brings them to pass by his mighty power. Now the witness of the prophets is going to be joined by the witness of the disciples. They will be empowered by the Spirit to witness to him, and their witness will penetrate into all the world, to all nations. This is not merely a command of Jesus. It, too, is a promise. Within all that now remains of history, between the first resurrection of Jesus himself and the general resurrection which will one day follow, the gospel will be preached in every culture.
The gospel message demands repentance, the turning away from the worship of false gods including power and the self and money, and the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord. It will yield, as its most precious gift, the forgiveness of sins, the reversal of the negative verdict, exemplified in the resurrection of Jesus. The judgement beyond history is in view, but the repentance and forgiveness will have powerful historical effects.
As Luke's gospel ends, we see that the disciples have lost the earthly presence of Jesus, but they are filled with great joy. The gospel ends as it began, in the temple. But the temple is soon to be transcended, in the Spirit-empowered mission of the disciples, bearing witness in the whole world. And, indeed, just as Jesus predicted, so their mission has gone literally to all nations, and continues as the word of God is preached.
Here, then, is the "old, old story'. Like the disciples, we are to be ambassadors of Christ. But does it make any sense to be such? Have the events of the last week in particular not made the whole thing totally irrelevant? Is not this story merely a fading memory of no practical help?
Shattering the story
Why has the Indian Ocean Tsunami opened this issue with such force?
In the first place it is its sheer size. I have already referred to the scope of the devastation, and devastation furthermore amongst some of the poorest nations, not able to recover easily or to protect their citizens. People are saying that this constitutes the biggest disaster in human history. If so, we are passing though a defining moment, when the world can never be the same again. Everything now will have to be rethought.
The size of this event seems to show up the weakness of religion. If we turn to religions to provide us with meaning and solace, a catastrophe of this magnitude simply outclasses them. They seem either to babble meaningless platitudes, or to be reduced to helpless silence. A religious response may well help us to cope with a domestic loss; but how can it speak to this colossal, international crisis?
Secondly, we have been overwhelmed by the arbitrary nature of what we have seen. The tsunami is occasioned by a major seismic movement hidden from view beneath the sea. It travels at great speed across the ocean, but is almost undetectable. Certainly it could rock fishing boats and other small craft as it passes under them without being especially remarked. Quite close to land, however, it draws up its enormous strength and seems to hurl itself at the unsuspecting and unprepared coast. Within moments human beings and all our works are prey to chaotic and deadly power. Some are killed, others left. There is no apparent reason behind the choice of victims. Unlike war and terrorism, there is no one to blame, no one to scapegoat.
Thirdly, the event forces us to ask about God. If he exists, how is he involved? If he is in charge of nature, why would he do such a cruel, capricious, undiscriminating thing? Is he not meant to be a God of love? If he is not in charge of nature, what good is he? Does he look on helplessly, wringing his hands and unable to intervene? Is he weak, or is he a tyrant or is he merely indifferent? These are the sharp issues before which the religious understanding of our community falters and even quails, leaving us with a silent universe and an absence of meaning.
The matter was put clearly in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald from Mr John Gilhooly:
As the scale of the tsunami tragedy unfolds I wonder just how all the religious people among us are going to explain it to themselves and to people like me. When I hear that 300 Sri Lankans were swept away to their deaths while praying in church I think I can be excused for being somewhat cynical about God's benevolence. Yet the natural reaction of the faithful after an "act of God" is to flock back to church to praise Him.
Has not the old, old story been shattered beyond repair? Why would we continue to be ambassadors for Christ and continue to talk about repentance and forgiveness?
Re-hearing the story
I do not doubt that these events have shaken the general religious understanding of the community. Our ignorance of history and of the Bible leaves us with a faint memory of God. Over time our god has become domesticated and trivialised. At the same time, we have developed a sense of our own invulnerability. We inhabit a prosperous and safe part of the world; we have just passed through one of the most peaceful and least troubled times of our national history. It is easy to think of ourselves as masters of the world, and to assume that such natural disasters as we have witnessed are not merely unique, but an affront. The world is not meant to be like this; God is benevolent and safely inactive; if disasters do occur they are almost always far away and beyond our imaginative reach; we do not have to explain or respond to them; our short attention span makes us forgetful of what the world is really like.
But neither the Bible nor experience agrees with popular religion. The Bible regards us as being out of joint with nature because we are out of fellowship with God. As a result, the Bible never thinks of the world as safe and secure. Beginning with the biblical flood, the whole assumption of the biblical religion is that we live in a fractured and dangerous world, in which we humans will frequently experience drought, flood, famine, earthquake and pestilence. The Bible sees that the normal relationship between humanity and nature involves exploitation and pain.
Of course this is not the whole story. The Bible regards men and women as having been placed in the world as God's representatives, to care for it and rule it. The world has been created good. It is filled with beauty and wonder. But, by human choice, we have turned away from God as a race, with painful consequences which we all experience daily. The Bible was not written into some ideal world where a catastrophe is a strange event. The Bible is written precisely into the world of drought, pestilence and famine, as well as a world of human evil, war and death. The God of the Bible knows all about such things.
There is no simple or direct connection between suffering and judgement. We may not say " we are forbidden to say " that the sufferer has therefore committed a specific sin which leads to this event. But in general terms, the Bible does see moral and spiritual significance in our experience of this world. It says that the presence of evil and pain ought to lead us to think about our own standing with God. Furthermore we need to observe how human sin and selfishness exacerbates the pain of natural disasters. Corruption, injustice and war make any disaster far worse than it need be.
The trivialised and domesticated god of popular religion fades away when disaster strikes. But the whole Bible is premised on a world in which such things occur. Its revelation is of a God who understands pain from the inside; who is involved intimately with the natural order. He is the Lord both of life and of death; he is the Lord of an unfolding history which offers an explanation of the world as we find it and our place in it. To such a God, love is not inconsistent with judgement; his compassion is not inconsistent with suffering. It is only the idol created by popular religion, the god who is remote and benevolent who has nothing to say in a crisis. A painful world is not inconsistent with the compassion or the justice of God. Christ himself predicted that world history would be marked by earthquakes and wars. The Bible is not silenced by suffering; it speaks powerfully to that very state.
Take the suggestion in the letter I read that the death of 300 Sri Lankan Christians was inconsistent with the God we serve. I can understand that this may be inconsistent with the vague god of our culture. But it is not in the least inconsistent with the God who reveals himself in the Bible. The God of the Bible does not exempt believers from the normal consequences of life in this world. They, too, suffer like all people. The letter betrays a superficial understanding of Christianity.
The present catastrophe is horrendous. It is not unique, but it takes its place as one of the worst that we have experienced. Unfortunately, history records similarly deadly earthquakes, cyclones, wars, plagues, genocides and other disasters. The great flu epidemic of 1919-20 killed 20-40 million people; the Japanese earthquake of 1923 destroyed 140,000; in 1976 the worst earthquake in China in the twentieth century claimed at least 242,000: 3 million people have been killed by war in the Congo in the last decade. Both the Bible and history are aware of the scale which human disasters can reach. Furthermore, we can confidently predict that other momentous tragedies will occur. The world in which this sinful race lives is like that. The power of the Bible is that the authors are fully aware that the world is like this and they speak in that context.
Using the story
Of course the Bible has much more to say than that. In telling us that the gospel is to reach "all nations' Christ turned his followers into world-citizens. We do not let our compassion stop at family, tribal or national boundaries. The Bible itself insists that we recognise in any sufferer one who is ultimately related to us, one who shares our common humanity, one with a special claim on us. Furthermore, the missionary movement initiated by Christ means that we Christians often have a more intimate knowledge of afflicted areas than other people. We have friends there, and often brothers and sisters in the faith. For us such places are not merely holiday destinations (not that there is anything wrong with that) but regions in which we have a long-term interest.
The first Christian response to the disaster is to give ourselves in practical and long-term ways to the relief of this suffering. Thus, for example, the offertory this morning will go to the victims of this event. But our long-term interest is also helpful here. We all tend to have a short attention span when it comes to disasters " who now thinks of the earthquake in Bam (Iran) last year? " but the real work of rehabilitation and renewal will need to go on for many years. The Christian commitment ought to involve that long-term response.
What of the mission of the gospel? Do we abandon this in the face of immediate human needs such as food and shelter and water and medicine? But human needs cannot be compartmentalised. Because we are human, needs also arise in the soul of a person, they are spiritual. The living victims of this catastrophe are going to need counselling; they are going to need help with grief and loss and hopelessness; they are face to face with death both on a huge and on a personal scale. Here are problems of meaning, spiritual problems about which Jesus Christ has magnificent words of life. In fact, the suffering and resurrection of Jesus is especially relevant.
Jesus knew that the world was like this; indeed, he experienced the world like this. But he still committed his disciples to the business of witness, because in the end death is the greatest natural human disaster and forgiveness the greatest need. In the midst of the travails of this world, of hopes dashed and lives blighted, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ which stands out as the great hope. We must feed people and protect people and house people and care for people, but love will also mean that we share the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Mission and mercy walk perfectly together. Far from being irrelevant or disproved, the old, old story of Jesus Christ provides a profound and effective framework for understanding all of life, even the catastrophe of this horrendous tsunami.
