Psalm 46
It has been a tough week. On Christmas Eve, I began to be sick and had to have Andy Prins take my place, reading my part in the joint French-English service. On Christmas morning I felt miserable and had to enlist the help of six people to lead different parts of the service. I came home, went to bed and slept. I was continually blowing my nose. You can not say I was unproductive. It was just that what I was producing was of no use or interest to anyone, including myself.
I had a headache; I had an occasional fever; I had no energy. And I missed Christmas. After a couple days I came downstairs and watched TV and then a day later was able to begin reading and I am still not feeling that well. I had a tough week.
Oh, and by the way, a week ago on Sunday, over 150,000 people were killed in South Asia when a 9.0 earthquake triggered tsunamis that devastated costal areas in Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and other area countries.
I sat on the couch watching BBC and CNN news and watched as the death count rose from just a few thousand to 20 to 40 to 60 to 80 to now moving past 150,000 deaths with more to come as remote devastated regions are discovered. And then there will be large numbers of people who will die because of cholera and other diseases that will sweep through the devastated areas. Close to 200,000 people will die because of this disaster.
This week I also read a book about Sir Ernest Shackleton who in 1914 left England to lead an expedition that would cross for the first time, the Antarctic Continent. His boat, Endurance, was caught in the ice in January 1915 and drifted with the ice for nine months before they abandoned ship because the ice flows were crushing the ship. For five and a half months they lived on the ice in search of open sea so they could put their three little boats out to sea to reach land. They lived in horrible conditions being wet and at best, damp, all the while living in freezing conditions. In April as their ice floe broke under their feet, they escaped to their little boats and set out to sea and after 7 days, landed on an island that offered the barest bit of refuge from the sea. With no hope of rescue, Shackleton and two others set out on an 800 mile, 1280 kilometer open sea voyage through the Wedell Sea to reach a whaling station on South Georgia Island. The Wedell Sea is the worst sea in the world with waves whipped up by the wind and not blocked by any land mass. Their little 23 foot boat made it through rogue waves 100 feet tall and gale-force winds and below freezing conditions and in an amazing navigational feat, they made it to South Georgia Island. Their ship rudder was destroyed in the landing so they then had to set off on a 29 mile, 46 kilometer crossing of the glacier mountains of the island to get to the whaling station. The second time in history that this island was crossed was in 1955 with a large team, well-equipped and it was a difficult crossing. Shackleton did it with his two companions, in inadequate gear, in an undernourished state and they made it across to the whaling station in 36 hours of non-stop trekking. Three attempts to get back to the men left on Elephant Island failed because of weather conditions. This is the same sea Shackleton had crossed in his little 23 foot boat. The fourth attempt made it and all 27 men who set off were rescued and made it back to England.
So this week I thought a lot about suffering. My cold, the devastation of the tsunamis and the unbelievable conditions through which Shackleton persevered and brought he and his men to safety. I was talking to my brother-in-law about this and told him I thought my suffering might come out on the short end of the stick in this sermon about suffering.
I thought a lot about suffering this week and decided to postpone the Romans series for a week and talk this morning about how we react to suffering, particularly something as large-scale as the suffering in South Asia this week.
I have two comments to make about suffering and then two ways in which we respond to suffering.
1. Suffering is personal. The closer the personal connection, the more intense the suffering.
You don’t suffer if you don’t have any connection with the person suffering. I read the news, Man dies in house fire in Moscow, and I don’t even blink. I don’t think about this man’s life. I don’t think about this man’s family. I read it and what I read barely penetrates my mind. It comes nowhere near my heart.
I lay on the couch with a stuffy head, achy and no energy and although I appreciated the tragedy being revealed on BBC and CNN, it was an intellectual appreciation. My infection, on the other hand, had nothing to do with my intellect, it was all about how I felt. So my headache is more important than the death of a man in Moscow and even more important than the suffering I watched on TV. When I suffer my world shrinks and I barely notice the suffering of those around me.
The same week as the tsunami in South Asia, there were many others who died. Five people died in the plains of Uttar Pradesh in India from a cold wave that swept through the region. Five people died in Johannesburg, South Africa when their bus ploughed into a truck sitting by the side of the highway.
What makes the suffering of the survivors and families of the cold wave in India or the bus accident in South Africa any less significant than the suffering in South Asia? It depends who you know and how well you know them.
Our daughter Caitlin and her husband John are in Penang, Malaysia this Christmas, visiting John’s parents who live there. On Sunday morning while John’s parents were at church, Caitlin and John along with John’s sister and her husband were in the family apartment on the 18th floor of their apartment building when the building began to sway. Susan and James ran down the stairs but Caitlin said she figured if the building was going to collapse, she would be dead before getting to the bottom so she stayed. There are times when she clearly shows she is my daughter and this was one of them.
A couple hours later, John’s mother was looking out at the ocean and saw something was wrong with the sea all black and swirling. A village just up the coast had been swept away and the debris was in the water.
Caitlin and John took a scooter to go into town and drove on the sea road. They went into a movie theater and when they came out, heard sirens and figured something had happened. The road they had traveled to get to town was now impassible with boats and mud clogging the road. The tsunami came just five or ten minutes after they had passed by this section of road.
I would be much more emotionally connected if Caitlin and John had been hit by the wave as they drove by on their scooter.
If it was the family of the Ramamoorthys or Anthony Paul who had been killed in India, we would pay more attention to the suffering that took place there. If it was the family of Mariska and Tertius who lost family in the bus accident, we would be paying more attention to that incident.
As I lay watching the TV coverage and watched bodies float in the water and people hanging on and then being swept away and heard the stories of the survivors, what happened became more real to me and their suffering became a little bit more of my suffering.
The television made the tragedy more real to me and so for that reason I am talking about it in this sermon. But there is still a large distance between my heart and what happened.
The closer personal contact to the tragedy, the more intense the suffering I feel.
2. Suffering is constant.
60,000,000 people will die each year over the next 100 years. 5,000,000 each month and 168,539 each day. 117 people will die each minute of the 21st century; 2 people every second. 2,750 people will die while I preach this sermon. If the 21st century is like the 20th, 52,500 people will die each year from natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanos, floods, etc. This tsunami used up three to four years of natural disaster suffering in just one brief day.
Suffering is constant and a tragedy like the tsunami in South Asia is significant because it concentrated what happens year after year into a brief period. But if you kept a graph of average deaths per year due to natural disasters, this disaster would not significantly raise the average. It is tragic but not unusual if you measure it over time.
Every day of the year people drown, babies die an accidental death, husbands and wives lose their partner. Nothing happened in South Asia last Sunday that has not happened before.
We make a mistake when we focus on a particular tragedy and carry the illusion that this is abnormal. We don’t know how to properly respond to tragedies when we carry the illusion that tragedies are infrequent.
Suffering is constant and the pain of suffering increases as it become more personal to us. How should we respond to suffering?
1. Life is fragile so hold on to Jesus.
It is a sunny day with a beautifully calm ocean. You lie on your beach towel soaking up the rays of the sun with your wife lying next to you and your children building a sand castle and five minutes later, you are terrified, searching for your children and wife, bruised and battered by the wave that swept you up and smashed you against the concrete wall at the edge of the beach.
Just five minutes and your world turned upside down.
When Shackleton and his men were trapped in the ice of the Antarctic, one of his men was out skiing when all of a sudden a 4 meter long seal leopard, a predator seal, burst through the ice and started undulating along towards the skier. He raced back toward camp and the seal dashed again into the water. As he was looking around, it burst out of the ice again much closer to him and again pursued him. Fortunately one of the men, having heard the screams, ran out of his hut with a rifle and as the seal leopard came toward him, kept firing until it dropped dead on the ice. 12 feet, four meters long, with a jaw bone 9 inches, 24 centimeters wide.
Life is very fragile. One second you are skiing along and the next you are some creature’s meal.
You take a bus trip home to see your family and the bus hits a truck and your holiday is over.
You sit at a restaurant having dinner and the person you are talking to clutches his chest, falls over and dies.
I’m not trying to depress you but I want you to know that this life is a lot less secure than you imagine it to be and for that reason don’t put your trust in this life. It will not last for any of us and for some of us, it will be a lot shorter than we expect or hope.
If your hope is for what you can do or get in this world, prepare to be disappointed. I do not mean that we are not meant to achieve but if we try to find meaning in life through what we achieve, we will be terribly disappointed.
Life is fragile and what we accomplish is temporary so be wary of putting your trust in what will not last.
Psalm 146:3
Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortal men, who cannot save.
4 When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Instead put your trust in the Lord who will never leave you or forsake you.
2. Suffering in the world is like a tsunami that will overwhelm and destroy you.
I’m convinced that the reason we keep suffering distant from us and don’t allow the suffering of others to become too personal is that we are not capable of bearing it. We grieve, mostly intellectually, with the victims of the tsunami in South Asia. We would feel the pain of suffering more intensely if one of more of the victims had been related to a member of the church. If one or more of the victims had been someone in our church, we would be more grieved and if one or more of the victims had been from our immediate family, our spouse or child or grandchild or sibling or niece or nephew our suffering would have little intellectual content and be mostly grief of the heart.
I am convinced that if we were to stand on a hill in Rabat and look over the houses for one area of Rabat and God were to give us intimate knowledge of all the suffering in that one area of Rabat, that knowledge would be too great for us and we would suffer a breakdown of some sort, emotional, mental or physical.
Look out over a section of this or any city in the world and there is mental, physical and sexual abuse. There is utter despair because of life’s circumstances. Disease strikes without discrimination. Husband betrays wife and wife betrays husband. Trust is broken and crushed. Friends discover they have been used by people they trusted. Little children have their innocence stripped from them and they sit in a corner weeping in fear.
And so we push away intimate knowledge of suffering to protect ourselves. We don’t like to think about the circumstances of suffering because we cannot bear it.
When suffering becomes too intense, some turn to hedonism. Life is short and life is cruel so eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we too may die. Hedonists turn from the suffering of the world and focus on their pleasure.
To escape the suffering of the world, some turn to cynicism or indifference. The heart is hardened so no news penetrates and interferes with a personal life.
Others refuse to turn away from the suffering of the world and they are overwhelmed by it and are filled with despair. There is simply too much suffering to deal with and depression sets in.
The suffering in the world is more powerful than we are and will destroy us.
I watched a movie titled The Patriot about the American revolution. This movie stars Mel Gibson and watching it you see why the critics of Gibson’s movie about Jesus criticized him. Gibson does seem to have a preoccupation with blood. Gibson plays a man who led a militia that raided the British troops. In retaliation, the British set out to kill the wives and families who were serving with Gibson. In one scene, Gibson and his men come to one of his men’s home and discover his wife and six year old son lying in front of their house with a bullet through the head. The husband and father is distraught, pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head.
Whether we react to the suffering in this world by retreating into hedonism, cynicism, indifference, or despair, we will be overcome by suffering. Suffering in the world is more powerful than we are.
Henri Nouwen in his series of lectures to priests in the priesthood makes the point that God calls us not to be spectacular but to take on the suffering of the world. We are meant to take the suffering of the world on our heart.
He then goes on to say that if we do that by ourselves, we will be overwhelmed so we need to have a love relationship with God that will sustain us as we take on the suffering of the world.
This then gets at the heart of what ought to be our response to the suffering in South Asia and elsewhere in the world. We need to pursue our relationship with Christ and grow in our ability to perceive his love and to love him in return. If we fail to do that, we will be unable to respond as he wants us to respond.
God wants us to care about and care for those who suffer. He wants our caring to be from the head and heart. But we need to have his heart when we care.
Psalm 46 is an amazing psalm to read in response to the events of last week.
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.
The immense forces of this world were on display this past week but Psalm 46 goes on to show us where we have hope.
4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
5 God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
6 Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
7 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
The tsunami was a river of destruction that swept people away from each other and to their death. But there is another river, a river of life, and it is in this river that we find hope.
8 Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
11 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
This is the psalm I would be reading to people if I were in South Asia this morning.
The suffering we saw this week in South Asia takes place every week of the year, in a less concentrated form.
God is intimately involved in the suffering of every person who was affected by the tsunami as well as those who died in the plains of Uttar Pradesh and in Johannesburg. God is intimately involved in the suffering of those who live in Rabat and everywhere else in the world. When God looks out over the world, he sees the hearts of those who suffer and he cares deeply.
God is able to be intimately involved in the suffering of every person in the world because his love is perfect and more powerful than the suffering of the world. God is not crushed by the suffering of the world because his love is more powerful.
God wants us to take on his heart and care from the heart and not just the head for those who suffer. If you take on the heart of Christ for the world and open yourself to the suffering of the world, you will need a living love-relationship with Christ that will sustain you and protect you from hedonism, indifference and despair.
So seek the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. Open yourself. Devote yourself to his teaching. Learn from him and find your strength in him.
Don’t put your trust in what will perish, rust, spoil and fade away. Put your trust in God who will strengthen you to do his will, to care for others in the name of Jesus.
