Nine nights ago we gathered here to sing and celebrate We told stories about a baby A baby who would save the world A baby whose birth was greeted by angels A baby whose birth meant tidings of joy for all people everywhere We spoke of God-made-flesh Cute chubby baby flesh We sang familiar songs We enjoyed familiar company We smiled at baby Piper playing over here as we sang about the baby We drank champagne and ate Christmas cake God was in heaven and all was well with the world Or so it seemed But all was not well with the world A pressure was building up deep beneath the surface Two unyielding forces were pushing against each other And we sang on, oblivious And others partied on And holidayed on Walked along moonlit beaches hand in hand Wrapped final presents as the kids fell asleep But underneath, the pressure grew and grew "All is calm, all is bright," we sang "Sleep in heavenly peace" "Now you hear of endless bliss," we sang "While mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love," "We will live forever more, because of Christmas Day,", we sang But the pressure grew and grew knowing nothing of the bliss of our songs or the angels' watch Nothing gave way that night, or the next But the pressure went right on building And the next morning all hell broke loose It was a simple thing really Those two great forces pushing against one another One slipped a bit The earth shuddered The pressure was released All quite simple The sudden movement caused a wave Quite explainable But as the churches went on singing that Sunday morning Singing songs about that lovely baby again That wave was tearing babies out of people's arms Sucking beds out through hotel windows with people still in them Dumping sharks in swimming pools Turning idyllic beachside villages into churning soups of angry water and broken glass and car parts and blood and corrugated iron and dying children and splintered wood It was all over in minutes The water ran back into the sea taking with it whatever it wished whatever it hadn't impaled or trapped or buried We've all seen pictures of what it left behind Haunting horrible pictures Mud and ruins and corpses Tens of thousands of corpses Old, young, men, women The life sucked out of them Dead children strewn everywhere Hundreds and hundreds of dead babies What child is this who laid to rest on Mary's lap is sleeping? What child is this who laid to rest in the mud and devastation of Aceh? And what child is this? And this? And this? Who knows? Corpses everywhere Battered lifeless unnamed corpses Every now and then there is a scream and one of the living gives a name to one of the dead and grieves and thousands more lay waste in the sun some perhaps with no one left alive who knew their name What can we say? Who wants to sing of cute babies now? Who wants to stand up and talk of the Word made flesh? There's flesh strewn all over the streets Broken lifeless flesh Beginning to bloat in the sun What do those songs we were singing mean now? Do the angels' tidings of great joy mean anything in the face of this? Can we stand in the mud and debris of Banda Aceh or Phuket or Galle and speak of the one who is called Emmanuel God with us? Or would it sound obscene? But that's the challenge isn't it? Because if the Christmas gospel has nothing meaningful to say in Tamil Nadu or the Maldives or Meulaboh then it doesn't really have anything meaningful to say at all Someone once said - perhaps it was Athol Gill I can't remember - that any theology that can't be preached in the presence of parents grieving over their slaughtered children isn't worth preaching anywhere else either But in the midst of the carnage and shock and horror what can we say? There are no words The lovely lines of peace on earth and goodwill to all sound impossibly trite and hollow And worse still we are afraid to even speak the name of God aren't we? For inside there is a horrible question that we dare not face that we don't know what to do with It is not just that our faith seems to lack adequate words of comfort It is that our faith is not sure that God is not to blame What did our psalm say just a few minutes ago? Our words of sacred scripture? God sends the snow and frost and hail God speaks, the ice melts God breathes, the waters flow That's what it said And if we believe that If we believe that that is not just poetic hyperbole but fundamental doctrine If we believe that God directs the weather that God speaks and the earth shudders that God can calm the waves with a word then can we escape the awful conclusion that the tsunami is God's doing? And what did John say in our gospel reading? All things came into being through him and without him, not one thing came into being The tsunami? Through him? Those who shake their fists at heaven and say that either there is no God or that God is a callous tyrant have got irrefutable evidence on their side this week Perhaps every week Even if God didn't directly make the tsunami doesn't God have to accept responsibility for creating the things that create tsunami? Or is God somehow exempt from manufacturer's liability questions? Let us not speak too hastily in defence of God lest we be guilty of simply trying to prop up our own shaky faith and silence the doubts and fears that lurk within all of us Let us allow God to speak for himself Another preacher rang me up on Thursday he needed to know that he wasn't the only one with a head full of horror wondering how to preach the gospel this week It's lonely, he said, being the one who has to find words to say Impossibly daunting too bearing the responsibility of preaching the gospel in a week when the news of the world seems to make a mockery of it It struck me that we preachers should probably feel like that every week charged with the responsibility to speak the word of God to a desperate people in a world that seems always capable of proving our every word a lie So my friend and I are stuck As much as we might want to flee the wave of fear and uncertainty that threatens to uproot us and suck the life out of our faith we have been called to preach the faith of the Church in season and out of season and preach it we must So I cannot hide behind my own advise to let God speak for himself because when God speaks for himself I am one of the ones God has called to interpret to you the word God speaks And at times like this such a responsibility can feel a bit like some of those awful pictures I can feel a bit like the man wading through the chaos with his beloved child cradled in his arms limp and lifeless Here is the gospel the faith of the Church Is there life in it yet? Or has it drowned in the angry wave of awful reality? I'm not sure but dead or alive I still love this child I can't speak to you as one who has the answers Like you I am looking for signs of life amidst the chaos and devastation But I can and must speak as one called by God to interpret what God says in the face of all this So what does God have to say? What word am I to interpret? There is a Word from God And the Word became flesh The Word became flesh and cast in his lot with us Why do we call Jesus "the Word"? We call him the Word because he is what God has to say What God has to say is made flesh in the Word All that God has to say is made flesh in the Word What God has to say in the face of unspeakable suffering is made flesh in the Word There are all too many other words spoken about God Everyone has an opinion Some will say that God is absent, dead or doesn't care Some will say that God is all-powerful that nothing happens except at God's say-so and that yes, tsunamis only happen if God wills them to Some will say that the tsunami is God's judgment words words words there are no end of words about God But what does God have to say? Jesus God, are you all-powerful? Jesus God, do you care? The Word becomes flesh God, did you make the tsunami? The Word becomes flesh God, where are you? The Word becomes flesh Of course there is always a temptation to try to repackage the Word to make it say what we wish it would say We want a messiah who will protect us from every danger and we can find words about God that will say that We want a messiah who can calm the waves before they get us and we can find a story of Jesus doing that We want a messiah who will ride in triumphant like the cavalry at the last minute and vanquish all that would harm us and bring us singing and weeping tears of joy to the victory banquet Our reading from Jeremiah speaks with such words But if we make the words say whatever we want we may miss the Word that God speaks altogether the Word that takes flesh Because God has spoken a Word and it hasn't charged in like the cavalry God has spoken a Word and it did make the world shudder The Word became flesh and the world shuddered and a great wave of hostility and selfishness and bitterness rose up and flung itself against the Word devastating all in its path killing even children in its rage snarling, surging, seething, smashing a great wave of darkness furiously seeking to annihilate the light And where was God as the wave hit? Wasn't God right there bearing the brunt of it Wasn't God there clinging to his beloved child only to be overwhelmed by the wave and have the child ripped from his arms and torn away on that surging flood of hatred and battered and smashed and pierced and tossed limp and lifeless to the earth As a father I've been tormented by those images this week Imagining myself trying to protect my child as the wave hit desperately clinging to her with every ounce of strength only to feel her ripped from my arms and torn away in the surging blackness and then later hunting for her in the chaos and ruins checking body after body desperately hoping that none of them are her that somehow she will have been washed to safety and then finding her crumpled and lifeless and blindly carrying her limp body looking for someone who could help but knowing in the hollow depths of my guts that nothing can help and seeing in the eyes of everyone who passes that to all but me she is just one more of a hundred thousand corpses It took three days of news footage before it really got to me It finally broke me when I saw footage of a mother in Australia who had just got news that her daughter who she thought had been lost was safe and she wept tears of joy and relief and it struck me that everyone of those hundred thousand corpses represented a real person over whom there would be no such tears of joy and relief and I wanted to hold my daughter close and cry but I couldn't because ironically she was at the beach with her mother so I broke down and sobbed alone Do I have any idea what it would really feel like? I doubt it It was bad enough just imagining it I don't know how I'd cope if it was real I certainly wouldn't want to be hearing any comfortable cliches like all things working together for good or they've gone to a better place I doubt whether I have any idea what it would really feel like but I reckon God does because when we cried out for answers for explanations for deliverance God spoke a Word and the Word became flesh as a beloved child and the child was torn from the Father's arms by a ruthless wave and the waters of death closed over him and spat him out as just another of the hundreds and thousands and millions of unnamed innocent victims down through the ages I reckon God knows And I reckon that as hard as we might find it to talk about flesh while the nameless flesh of countless corpses are necessarily treated as little more than a threat to public health and piled into mass graves God is still not afraid to be identified as flesh fragile flesh brutalised flesh limp and lifeless flesh Because the promise of Christmas is not just that the Word became cute and chubby baby flesh but that the Word became flesh and cast in his lot with us hunted flesh despised flesh tortured flesh dead and buried flesh three days dead flesh stinking and a threat to public health And although our story of the Word made flesh does not stop with dead and buried we will not really understand the rest of the story if we think of resurrection as just some kind of miracle cure which means that death is no longer part of Christ's reality In the book of Revelation we see the vision of the risen one on the throne who still looks like one mortally wounded The risen one is still the crucified one The rising one is still the being-crucified one The people who say all crosses must now be empty are wrong because the risen Christ is still the suffering and dying Christ The risen Christ who promised we would meet him in the least of these desperate and vulnerable ones can be seen lying dead in the mud in Khao Lak and Meulaboh The Word became flesh If you want to see what God has to say in the face of this go walk among the ruins of Banda Aceh or just turn on your TV for God is speaking and the Word has become flesh Perhaps as we begin to see what God is saying we will begin to comprehend how blasphemous so much of what we blithely say about God really is and how chillingly we treat powerful and dangerous realities and casual and comfortable little things Perhaps when water is flung at us in a few minutes to remind us of our identity as those who have been buried in the deep waters of death with Christ perhaps this week we'll have a little more sense of what a serious matter it is to go under the deep waters of death Perhaps when we hold out our empty hands to receive the piece of bread we will be offered shortly we will recognise something of our solidarity with desperate hungry people holding out empty hands for the food aid the world is trying to muster And perhaps we will see in those images of the Father holding the limp body of his dead child the image of the Father who spoke the Word that becomes flesh and whose grief and suffering take flesh still in body and blood offered for the life of the world and placed into our empty hands that we might live even in the face of death And perhaps when we have heard that Christmas story the story of God speaking a Word which becomes human flesh and falls victim to the full force of the waves of horror that assail the earth and its inhabitants, a Word which continues to take flesh in all the suffering and grief and desperation perhaps then we will be capable of hearing the story of resurrection and recognising that our songs of endless bliss and our promises of sorrow turned into joy are reduced to pious platitudes if they are not seen in their contexts of unspeakable fear, death and anguish I pray that we and I might have the courage and compassion to recognise the Word that God speaks this week and follow where the Word calls into the places that terrify and horrify us the places where we will know what it means to cry out for salvation the places perhaps the only places where we are capable of knowing the Word of resurrection the Word made flesh the Christ born of Mary
Preached in response to the South Asia Tsunami disaster. Texts: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 147:12-20; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:1-18 A sermon by Nathan Nettleton, 2 January 2005 pastor at South Yarra Community Baptist Church in Melbourne. © LaughingBird.net Reproduced on Everything2 with permission. Softlinks are entirely my own doing. CST Approved. South Yarra Community is a liturgical, High-Church Baptist church (not necessarily a contradiction in terms). Nathan Nettleton has a Master of Theology and has been pastor at South Yarra for about 10 years. He is also a Lecturer in Liturgical Studies at Whitley College in Melbourne. I have been attending South Yarra Baps for over two years now. I guess I find the mix of Liturgy, quiet contemplative prayer, biblical paraphrases, icons and silence a very welcome change from the noisiness and impersonality of giant "contemporary worship" churches.
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