Natural and Conceptual Disasters: Where is God in the Chinese Earthquake?

I preached in our college Chapel last night. Here is what i said:

Knowing quite what to talk about in one’s first sermon is rather difficult; and the brief of ‘something from the news this week’, while broad, both frees and limits one somewhat. I hope in this brief slot to demonstrate something I believe very profoundly: that the resources of religious tradition – in this case the Christian tradition, with which I am most familiar – remain important resources that may enhance, rather than impede, the good living of human life. A great number of my sentences will begin with variations on a reflective ‘I wonder if’. This is entirely intentional, and, I think, the only legitimate response to some of the issues that I will talk about. To speak with certainty about God is surely to speak of an idol; and easy answers to these issues are rather more commonplace than good answers.

The last fortnight has seen China devastated by an earthquake, and Burma’s already suffering people inflicted by the presence of a massive cyclone. The Boxing Day tsunami a couple of years ago is also still in the back of our minds. My chosen angle of discussion is to ask where God is in all of this?; and how the resources of Christianity might be of help in formulating sensitive and searching means of engaging with these difficult issues.

The so-called ‘problem of evil’ has been the subject of many an A-level exam answer, pub conversation, CU event and even a sermon in this Chapel last term. Adopting largely philosophical and abstract understandings of the nature of divinity, these events may come to a variety of conclusions – some less awful than others. I hope to adopt a different way of thinking about God and the world, and see how things might work out as a result.

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Our first reading today tells surely the most horrifying tale in all of Christian Scripture: a concubine, who is entirely under the control and influence of her religious master, ends up dying a lonely and painful death in order to preserve the sexual purity of her master’s host’s daughters, as well as that of her master himself. As a result, she is raped all night, and eventually cut into twelve pieces by the man to whom she is object – the man who sanctions her abuse in his place. In the whole story she isn’t the subject of a single active verb, and this dehumanisation is completed by her lack of even the dignity of a name.

As a brief aside, one might remember the recent finding of a Lithuanian woman’s dismembered head and hands on a beach in Scotland; the woman was a migrant worker. I can’t help but see some connection between the two women’s social status of vulnerability, as well as the mode of their being murdered.

An obvious omission from the Judges story is the intervention of God. Why does God not appear in this story, convicting the Levite, his host and the men of the town of the atrocities they have committed; protecting the woman from their malicious and murderous intentions? In a similar way, where is God in this week’s stories coming out of China and Burma? It appears that God is all but absent.

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I wonder if we can continue to believe in a God who does things like we do things, says things like we say things, and exists in a personal form like we exist in personal forms? I wonder what it might mean to pay more than lip-service to God being beyond language and beyond human conceptuality, and to see language of God ‘speaking’ and ‘doing’ things as rather more symbolic than descriptive or propositional? I wonder what a rejection of God as the cosmized projection of the self might mean for our understandings of divinity?

I wonder if God might be in things, rather than outside of them; a presence that resonates deep within the depths of our experience, rather than one that acts on them from outside; if God might be the language that expresses – ever more partially – in symbolic and poetic forms the transcendent mysteries of existence, which are by definition beyond the remits of experientially-derived language. I wonder where this God might be in the story of the Levite’s concubine if God isn’t zapping the wicked, protecting the righteous and ensuring that they all live happily ever after?

To say a little more about this understanding of God, I note my indebtedness to Paul Tillich, a twentieth century theologian. Tillich suggests that:

‘The name of the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means.’

God, then, is not a being, like you or I are beings; but the depth of being itself. This is mystical, for sure – but then the God of certainty is most surely an idol.

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Commentators – not least Phyllis Trible, a feminist scholar – have drawn many parallels between the death of this woman in Judges 19 and the traditions of the death of Christ. She talks of this ‘text of terror’ in deeply moving terms: ‘Of all the characters in scripture, she is the least. Appearing at the beginning and close of a story that rapes her, she is alone in a world of men. Neither the other characters nor the narrator recognizes her humanity… Her body has been broken and given to many. Lesser power has no woman than this, that her life is laid down by a man.’

The Eucharistic and Christological undertones of Trible’s comments ring clear, and I wonder if our second reading might supplement this understanding: Christ’s presence in the poor, the naked, the imprisoned, the sick and the displaced locates divinity in the suffering of humanity – it is here that we should look for God, rather than in the grand actions – or, in these cases the lack of actions – that would appear to solve these problems in an instant.

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Where might this understanding of Judges 19 leave our understanding of God, and how does this, in turn, offer a life-giving understanding of faith in response to natural disasters?

This is a difficult question, and one in which a brief bit of Hebrew might offer some help. Hebrew nouns are constructed from verbal roots, so ‘melek’ – ‘king’ – is derived from the verbal root ‘maalak’, which means ‘to rule’. As such, the root from which nouns are constructed most often offers a window into the scope and intention of these words’ usage as nouns. The Hebrew word for wilderness – ‘midbar’ – is interesting; it is made from the root ‘dabaar’, ‘to speak’. Precisely what the significance of ‘speaking’ in concepts of wildernesses is is open to much discussion, and the sense of finding quiet and potentially painful places to be ones in which speaking – the speaking of God, perhaps – might occur is an interesting understanding of such places. Of course, God does not have a voice and so does not speak as humans speak – but the use of the discourse of divinity in making sense of these experiences of ‘otherness’ may, as I have suggested, be a fruitful endeavour, and a persuasive remodelling of traditional theistic concepts.

In addition to this, I propose another verse of the Bible, from St Paul, to be of help in understanding how these ideas might be of some use in understanding the presence of divinity within suffering:

‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’

The precise scope of this rich verse is hotly debated, and I can only offer one particular understanding within the chorus of other understandings: in our suffering we become enjoined to the crucified Christ, who lives in us through both our suffering and self-giving for the good of others. When we become the wilderness Christ lives in us – for the wilderness is Christ’s home. See, the home of God is among mortals.

The paradox if finding of one’s home – finding one’s being – in the wilderness, rather than in the comfortable times of life, marks a rather different response to suffering than is often suggested in religious circles: Christ’s being was nowhere more revealed than in the suffering and desolation of crucifixion; similarly, through suffering we too may be brought into close relation with the depths of our being also, and may be open to the speaking of the divine in our experiences of midbar, our place of speaking, our wilderness. Through suffering, we become open to a deep engagement with divinity within, and as a result of this openness we may discover who it is that we are, and what God is in us. Through the pain of suffering we may discover true strength, which is found not in the preservation of comfortable life at all costs, but through a searching and authentic connection to the ground of our being: God, who is enjoined to humans in their weakness, and shares their pain.

But what comfort is this to those who are suffering as a result of recent natural disasters? I don’t know. But if the narrative of Christianity is about anything it is about hope, about true strength being found in the pain of weakness and despair, rather than the exaltation of power and strength. And out of this hopelessness and desperation can emerge peace and life and goodness. Not as a result of God poking his finger in and making everything alright again – for that is not the God of which I speak. Instead, God is somehow in the suffering of humanity in some mystical and unknown way, a compassionate presence that finds its being in all things. And through engaging with this God within we may be transformed.

Hope does not and should not do two things: firstly, belittle suffering in the present through a speculative ‘better future’; and secondly, offer mistaken hope through easy answers and clear solutions that ultimately end in disappointment and resentment.

I wonder what it more affirming and more hopeful than to acknowledge the presence of the divine in the suffering of humanity, and out of this to seek hope and life with the familiar discourses of divinity, which may articulate these experiences of ‘otherness’ in beautiful and poetic forms.

I have never heard a sermon on Judges 19 – in fact, I only came to know the story myself after a lecture in my first year. This is a great shame. To acknowledge religious tradition’s place in the articulation of that which grounds human existence requires that these most challenging and most dangerous modes of human being be not left without sacred symbol and story to engage and dramatise them. I find it deeply liberating that the Canon of Jewish and Christian Scripture contains stories such as these, as for many people in the world these events are not something that can be implicitly ignored at will, but are everyday reality. These stories contain nothing for religious people to hide – they say it like it is, and they don’t come up with easy answers to the issues that they raise. Instead, they invite us to think about them, to live them out, to listen for traces of these stories in those stories that happen to us and our fellow humans today, in the hope that they, and their broader context in Canon and Church might offer hope and life those who experience them in the present. As Denise Ackerman has said about another rape story in the Old Testament:

‘There is no prevarication, no avoidance of the horror, no cover up. "Saying it as it is” is the place to begin.’

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I have made several points here:

• God is not a cosmic version of myself who either fails to or cannot act to prevent evil; instead, God is mystically intertwined in the everyday realities of human beings – an underlying mysterious presence that is present particularly in the poor and needy
• As an example of this, Judges 19 is a story in which God appears to be absent – yet it is actually a story in which the crucified Christ is the narrative’s victim: a nameless concubine, an object not a subject, who is mercilessly abused by the powerful
• God – the ground of our being – may be found in weakness rather than strength. The examples I have suggested offer some playing out of concepts of divinity within things, and particularly within things of suffering and hopelessness. It is here that God might be found in natural disasters, and this finding of God within these places may transform us and bring us life and hope
• And as a result of this, Theology – ‘God-speak’ – when thoughtfully and sensitively deployed, may offer suggestive and searching resources for coping with the otherness of suffering, and offer grounds for hope not rooted in the more or less subtle variants of ‘God is in control so don’t worry’ that many Christians espouse. The deployment of Christian jargons in affirming the suffering of the needy, and seeking to transform their experiences through an engagement with the ground of being is central to this

Whether this is of any consolation to the victims of the world’s recent natural disasters – or, indeed, those who are suffering here or anywhere – I am not to judge. But I hope that the conceptual disaster of the God of many Christians might have been restated in rather more helpful and humane terms as a result of these reflections, and that the thrilling, despairing and challenging resources of the Christian tradition might retain at least some usefulness in this crisis and those crises to come.

So my final reflective question is about the nature of God, and completes Paul Tillich’s paragraph from which I read earlier:

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about [God]. You cannot call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God

My question – and it is a question, not a confrontational challenge – is exactly as mine at the outset: ‘where is your God in the sufferings of people in Burma and China; and where was your God in the rape and dismemberment of a nameless concubine?’