-- Heraclitus
Opening Words: by the Reverend Mark Morrison Reed (SLT #580)
The central task of religious community
is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all…
Once felt [our bonds inspire us] to act for justice…
The religious community is essential,
for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen,
and our strength is too limited to do all that must be done.
Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.
Meditation: by the Reverend Max Coots (from Leaning Against the Wind)
I have witnessed a miracle,… I have seen God! I saw God last spring, underground, pushing seeds up into plants; between the rows, pulling beans and tomatoes and squash out of blossoms; and, after frost, wilting it all down to give it back to soil - as all are given back.
I saw God. I saw her with her arms around her child, laughing. I saw him talking to his child as if the child were as real as he.
I saw God dressed like a clown in this fall’s leaves and know God will come back as April and as buds…
I touched God and was touched: in the wood and the words I worked; in whatever it was that moved me to do what I should, but didn’t want to do; in the hands and hugs of a very small boy I know and from a very old woman I know, and so many in between, in the sun of summer and of hope, in the wind of autumn and of grief, in the snow that creeks cold under my feet but warms the roots of grass and the lives of mice, until spring lets them out again….
And, maybe, in a week or in a year, I will think back to now, and maybe I’ll realize that I saw and touched and heard God here. Maybe not. I never know.
Reading: by Nick Paumgarten, from an article entitled “Acts of God” (The New Yorker, July 12, 2010)
Last month, after a limb fell from an elm tree near the Central Park Zoo, critically injuring a woman and killing her infant daughter, citizens wondered, as citizens will, how such a thing could be allowed to happen. When trees kill, as trees will, you blame it either on the tree pruners or on “an act of God.” You are supposed to choose one or the other—last week, Mayor Bloomberg cited the latter—rather than detect any trace of God’s will in the fallibility of arborists and bureaucrats. This assumption owes something to the fact that “act of God” is a legal term specifically deployed to absolve human beings of any fault or indemnity. When God acts, apparently, the rest of us do not…
Questions of agency, divine or otherwise, dog us these early-summer days, amid a pileup of ill tidings: an intractable war; hints, once again, of economic depression; the deep-sea oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Who’s to blame? Who’s in charge? On the day of the Mayor’s pronouncement, a technician who is working with British Petroleum to drill relief wells told the Times, in response to questions about the state of the damaged well, and about the prospects for fixing it, “No human being alive can know the answers.” A line like that could put a [person] in a theological mood…
Reading: by Jeff Stryker, from an article entitled “Suing God” (The New York Times, December 9, 2007)
It sounds like a kooky law-school exercise. Your life has been upended by a horrible tragedy, one of those “acts of God” listed in the clause in your insurance policy denying coverage. Why can’t you take a higher power to court and make it pay through the nose? The hypothetical became real on Sept. 14 when State Senator Ernie Chambers sued God in Douglas County District Court in Omaha.
The lawsuit blames God for a passel of alliterative ills, including “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues” and “ferocious famines.”
The complaint anticipates law students’ objections. Jurisdiction is obvious “by virtue of the fact that Defendant, being Omnipresent, is personally present in Douglas County.” The suit asks to waive the requirement for personally serving notice, noting that it would be futile to “nail a notice to the front door” of the various “religious denominations, persuasions, cults and the like” who claim to speak for God.
Reading: by the Hindu teacher Swami Muktananda from Play of Consciousness (God in All Worlds, edited by Lucinda Vardey, p. 727)
This world is a perfect reflection of God. …Everything is God. All countries, all holy places, all names are God’s. Only in the eyes of men [and women] are there differences between high and low. Truly, all the regions of this earth are holy places of the Lord. All bodies of water are holy rivers of God. All shapes and forms of the world contain the very sound of God’s name. … There is no end to God. However much you read, there is something left to study. However many holy places you visit, there are still more left to see. However far you see, there is always more ahead. Such is the pervasiveness of the divine principle, the divine vastness…
Acts of God
A Sermon Delivered on March 30, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
This has been a bad winter. Too long, too cold, too much snow. This is my opinion. But I know I am not alone. In the course of the last weeks and months I have commiserated with many of you and exchanged mutual complaints about the cold. The News-Gazette said, we got about twice the annual average of snow this winter. Maybe you read that too. But did you know we survived a natural disaster? Did you know we suffered through several acts of God?
This is what I learned from the superintendent of Urbana schools, who has been under some scrutiny in recent months, because of the number of snow days he declared for Urbana school kids, of which my daughter is one.
The Urbana school district, I learned, allows for up to five snow days per year, as required by state law. And those five days missed in the winter are added at the end of the school year, just before summer vacation. But if the weather is so forbidding that more than five days need to be canceled, the district can apply to the Illinois State Board of Education for additional days off, which aren’t added to end of the year. And they aren’t called snow days. They are called “Act of God Days.” The district calendar codes them as “AOG” days. This year we have been granted several of them.
Several times this winter, I now realize, I was in the midst of an act of God, and I didn’t even know it. This left me wondering what, exactly, constitutes an “act of God.”
* * *
So what is an act of God? According to the Wex Legal Dictionary, it is “an overwhelming event caused exclusively by natural forces whose effects could not possibly be prevented (e.g., flood, earthquake, tornado). In modern jurisdictions, "act of God" is often broadened… to include all natural phenomena whose effects could not be prevented by the exercise of reasonable care and foresight.”
Last week the residents of Oso, Washington, were victims of a sudden devastating mudslide, that many have called an act of God. And while the tragedy is real, and certainly more serious than a few extra inches of snow, not everyone agrees it qualifies as an act of God. As Timothy Egon points out in this morning’s New York Times, the danger of a mudslide was pointed out by scientists years ago, but their warnings fell on deaf ears. Logging above and into the area of the current landslide went beyond legal limits, but no one, it seems, was concerned enough to confront the issue. Calling the landslide a “completely unforeseen” act of God, Egon says, is blatant denial, a willful ignorance of cause and effect.
* * *
Legal scholars Gerald and Kathleen Hill say acts of God are significant for two reasons: First, “for the havoc and damage they wreak.” And second, “because often contracts state that "acts of God" are an excuse for delay or failure to fulfill a commitment or to complete a construction project. Many insurance policies exempt coverage for damage caused by acts of God, which is one time an insurance company gets religion. At times disputes arise as to whether a violent storm or other disaster was an act of God (and therefore exempt from a claim) or a foreseeable natural event. God knows the answer!”
* * *
I wonder, what kind of a God is it, that is imagined by legal experts and insurance agents? Is God the culprit responsible for “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, [and] terrifying tornadoes”?
As Nick Paumgarten points out, we may have an opportunistic incentive in imagining God as a ferocious, fearsome fellow. By blaming all things horrendous and terrifying on God, we can conveniently absolve human beings of any fault or indemnity.
This God of legal documents and insurance policies was not made up by lawyers. Rather it is a God that grew up in the context of a distinct theological tradition.
As the physicist and religious naturalist Chet Raymo sees it, there have traditionally been two major pathways to understanding God. The first path, he writes,
“followed by the overwhelming majority of believers – looks for God in exceptional events. In miracles. The stacked crutches at Lourdes. The raising of Lazarus from the dead. Making the blind see. The virgin birth. Answered prayers. There was a time, of course, when everything was explained by the interventions of supernatural agencies. The sun was driven across the sky each day by the god Helios in his golden chariot. Comets were divine portents. Plagues were signs of God’s displeasure… A second pathway to God looks to the creation [- the world of nature-] as the primary revelation.” (When God is Gone Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist, p. 114)
It is the first path to God - a God found in extraordinary rather than ordinary events, and imagined in supernatural rather than natural dimensions - that even today, even in the twenty-first century, still “retains a powerful hold on the human imagination,” he says.
* * *
In a book entitled Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, the historian and legal scholar Ted Steinbert offers this example:
“On March 27, 1994, Palm Sunday, over 100 parishioners of the Goshen United Methodist Church sat together in prayer when suddenly an F3 tornado tore the church to shreds. Twenty members of the congregation lost their lives, including four-year-old Hannah Clem, the daughter of the church’s minister, Rev. Kelly Clem. Some said it was an act of God. [The] mayor, Vera Stewart, remarked that people were asking a lot of questions. “The said, ‘Why did God do this? Was he mad because we were wrongdoing?’ We have gotten a lot of negative letters, things like ‘Where was your God while you were praying?’” (p. 147)
For Christians and non-Christians alike, for both theists and atheists, this kind of tragedy provides a perfect opportunity for a religious blame game, in the midst of which onlookers can consider themselves superior, because they were spared God’s fury, and victims may wonder what they did to deserve it.
But not all religious people would consider the tragedy an example of divine intervention. As Steinbert writes,
“The Rev. Kelly Clem…said that God had little to do with the tragedy. In the mind of this 33-year-old pastor, wind, not God, killed her daughter, though she did tell Vice President Al Gore, who toured the area immediately after the disaster, that a better system of storm warning might have prevented the calamity. … In all the rhetoric that grew out of the disaster, the vast majority focused on the forces beyond human control – God or nature – responsible for the tragedy. Certainly nobody called it an act of man, or better yet, an act of man’s inhumanity to man.” (p. 149)
And yet, as Ted Steinbert sees it, the pastor Kelly Clem was right. Her daughter would be alive today, if the town had been equipped with tornado sirens, and had been served by the government’s National Weather Radio service. Like many people who live in poor rural areas, the members of the Goshen United Methodist Church, just happened to live beyond the 40-mile reach of the nearest radio tower.
The term “act of God” is little more than a convenient evasion, Steinbert says, that allows us to plead innocence and helplessness when disaster strikes. Regardless whether we portray ourselves as helpless in the face of “natural disaster” or the “whim of God” – either way - the catastrophe is stripped of any moral dimension or ethical implication for us.
Steinbert offers another example: When Hurricane Hugo swept over the South Carolina coast in 1989, Time magazine proclaimed in its headline that the “Winds of Chaos” had arrived, citing a wind speed of 150 miles per hour. Most news reports used a slightly lower number, 135 mph. Yet according to civil engineers the sustained winds were actually in the neighborhood of 90 to 95 mph.
He wonders, could there be a connection between the effort to puff up nature’s fury, and the fact that even five years after the storm virtually no action had been taken to update building codes throughout South Carolina. It turns out that since the early 1960s engineers had known about the need for proper wind-loading criteria when building in hurricane-prone areas. But that standard was largely ignored out of respect for development interests.
A very similar approach was taken a few years later in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Civil engineers long knew that the dikes surrounding the city were inadequate. And the thousands whose homes were subject to severest flooding just happened to be overwhelmingly poor.
Examining the historical record, Steinbert finds that “the concept of “natural” disaster developed [in the 19th century] when those in power in disaster-stricken cities sought to normalize calamity in their quest to restore order, that is, to restore property values and the economy to their upward trajectory.”
He writes,
“The emphasis on [God or] chaotic nature as the culprit – to the exclusion of human economic forces – has… influenced not [only our] local response to disaster, but the entire federal strategy for dealing with the problem. … Natural disasters are not simply technical matters in need of more and better engineering; they are at their core sociopolitical issues. … Worse still, by recruiting an angry God or chaotic nature to their cause, those in power have been able to rationalize the economic choices that help to explain why the poor and people of color – who have largely borne the brunt of these disasters – tend to wind up in harm’s way. [Our] response to natural disaster… has both contributed to a continuing cycle of death and destruction and also normalized the injustices of class and race.” (p. xxi)
* * *
Whether or not we believe in God, there is something deeply disturbing about the habit of using “God” as a supernatural scapegoat, for our very natural moral failures.
There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it encourages us to distance ourselves from what is happening in the world. There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it allows us to throw up our hands and plead helplessness when we witness the suffering of others. There is something wrong with our notion of God, if it allows us to close our eyes and ears to the consequences of wrong-doing, the consequences of our efforts to advance our own self-interests, while remaining blissfully indifferent to the interests of others – others who are less privileged, less prosperous. This is a tragic abuse of the religious imagination.
The central task of religion at its best is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all, and thus inspire us to act for justice.
Likewise, any understanding of God should serve to show us how we are not separate, but all intricately bound up in an interdependent web of creation, inseparable from the natural world.
Acts of God are taking place all around us, every day. Every day is an “Act of God Day.” If we pay attention we can see the everyday miracles of the natural world. The miracle at work underground, that will push seeds up into plants, will pull beans and tomatoes out of blossoms. The miracle of a mother’s love, and child’s laughter. The miracle of autumn leaves that fall, and turn to earth, and come back in April as buds. The miracle of hands and hugs, and hope beyond grief.
As Swami Muktananda sees it, the whole world is a perfect reflection of God. All regions of the earth are holy places. All bodies of water are holy rivers. And no matter how many holy places we may visit, there are still more left to see.
Whether we believe in acts of God or act of Nature,
May we open our eyes and ears to the miracles all around us,
May we be mindful of holiness everywhere,
And may we recognize the miraculous power that dwells within each of us
To help us create a better world.
Amen.
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