THE NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST October 19, 2014 Napa Valley Lutheran Church, Napa, CA WEAL AND WOE David Hamilton, Pastor Isaiah 45:1-7 Denise and I had met our bird-watching tour group in London on Friday morning. We flew from there to Bucharest, and after a whirl-wind tour of the Romanian capital and a traditional dinner in an outdoor restaurant, we all took an overnight train to the north, to Suceava, arriving early Saturday morning. Another hour or so of driving in the tour van got us to our first appointed spot, a lovely mountain area near the small town of Sucevita, which is also home to the first of the half a dozen so-called Painted Monasteries that we were to visit as part of the tour - beautiful historic 15th and 16th century Eastern Orthodox monasteries that have been covered, from floor to ceiling and inside and out, with paintings illustrating Bible stories and religious history. We looked at Romanian birds in the morning, and we looked at Romanian monasteries in the afternoon. At the end of our third day there, Sunday, we returned to our room a little bit before dinner and put on the TV. We had watched a few minutes of Dracula that morning, with Bela Lugosi dubbed into Romanian. It seemed appropriate since we werent all that far from Transylvania there in Sucevita. But just before dinner, we found an English-language channel we could watch - CNN. It was a few minutes before the hour, and we were startled by the news anchors words - A moderate earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area early Sunday morning - well have a full report at the top of the hour. We waited with some anxiety, hoping that it hadnt been too bad there in San Francisco or Hayward; and then were made a bit more anxious when they started calling it The Wine Country Earthquake, north of San Francisco. Hmmm - that sounded a little too close to home for comfort! When the top of the hour came, and they led off with pictures of downtown Napa, and the Alexandria Buildings damaged second floor, and the fires burning in the mobile home park, we began to wonder if we would be cutting our Romanian travels short to return home to whatever was left of Napa. Thank God (and I mean that sincerely) for the internet, and for Facebook, and for the ability to not only communicate with folks back home, but to be sent pictures of our own house that Pastor Julie took that afternoon and the next day, and to see that it was still standing, even if kitchen cabinets, shelves, and a bookcase had been more of less emptied of their contents, which lay scattered and broken on the floor. The only thing worse than being 6,000 miles away when an earthquake strikes your hometown, I suppose, is to actually be in your hometown at the time, and to face the chaos and the terror of being so rudely awakened by what is one of the most powerful forces of nature. We noticed, when we got home, the amazing randomness of so much of the destruction. Some things flew off the shelf and shattered on the floor; other equally fragile things right next to them either hit the floor but didnt break, or stayed on the shelf as though they had been glued there. Our house shook and our chimney cracked, but just a couple of houses away foundations were split apart and walls went all askew. Of course, there are probably physical reasons for all of that, but when you see it, you can’t help but wonder about it. When Pastor Julie was asked by a community member how her house had done in the quake, and she reported that she had suffered very little damage, the person responded by saying that of course pastors and other people like that who are especially close to God were more protected than the average citizen. She thought he was joking, but he said, No,” he really was sure that that was the way it worked. Im pretty sure that Im no better in Gods eyes than the people who live just around the corner from me whose house is still raised three feet off the ground on jacks while a new foundation is being built to replace the old one that was destroyed. Yet there does seem to be some human inclination, especially among the religious, to try to explain these things in reference to Gods wrath or God’s providence. And while I certainly want to give thanks to God that my own house didn’t suffer any greater damage, I also dont want to imply that God was looking upon my house more favorably than he was looking at my neighbors’. I think we have to admit that sometimes there is just a real randomness about things like this, that the freedom that God has built into the creation also extends to the way in which natural events like tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes strike, leaving one place damaged and another untouched. And that, I find, is one of the hardest things to come to terms with, both in times of disaster as well as in normal life - the notion that there are things that are beyond our control. That we are not as “in charge” of our own destiny as we would like to believe. And that no amount of religious fervor and faithfulness will make us immune to the possibility of disaster. You cant avoid earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, illness, death by just saying your prayers and being a good person. Good people - faithful people - also suffer in this world. Prayer and faith are not ways of controlling the bad things that might happen. And yet, in all of the things that might go wrong and hurt us, God remains a loving and caring presence in our life. And prayer and faith are such important parts of being able to live in a world where disasters can occur so suddenly; they are important reminders of God’s closeness to us and of God’s love. I was struck this week by the ending of this reading from Isaiah (45:7): I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things. Weal and woe; that is, happiness and sorrow. I guess it might be tempting to think that God threw a little woe at us on August 24. But I find it more helpful to think that woe comes all on its own, and doesnt need any encouragement from God. But our courage and compassion in the face of it - that comes straight from Gods Spirit. What is it like to live in a world where woe can come at any moment, where the future really is beyond our control? Kind of scary when you think about it, isnt it? And this is part of the fear of the earthquake, and the difficulty in returning to a normal state of mind afterward for many of us. That which we thought was rock-solid - the earth itself - can be shaken. The control we thought we had over our own lives turned out to be an illusion. We are vulnerable, and we do not like the sound of that truth rumbling through our lives in the middle of the night. Shortly after returning home, I was invited to participate again this year in Congregation Beth Shalom’s Yom Kippur service (that is, the Day of Atonement). In the Jewish calendar, New Year’s Day, Rosh Hashanah, is celebrated first, followed a week and a half later by Yom Kippur. The entire ten day period is a time for repentance and recommitment, not unlike our period of Lent. There is an ancient Jewish traditional belief that on New Year’s Day, God determines the fate of every person for the coming year; but then there are ten days that follow during which a person might change their fate by prayer, fasting, and deeds of kindness. We used the reading that goes with that on the evening that I was in attendance, and it, along with Rabbi Lee’s interpretation of it, brought to my mind the randomness and the unpredictability of things like our earthquake. Part of the traditional reading, called the Unetanneh Tokef, reads like this: On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed - how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by upheaval, who by plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But, Rabbi Lee said, this need not be interpreted in some fatalistic way, but simply to understand that what the reading is saying is that these are things that are beyond our control. God knows what the future will bring; we do not. Except that we can expect that the future will be some combination of “weal and woe,” of “darkness and light.” And that in the midst of it all, whatever it is, God will be God. And in the midst of it all, we can live trusting that God will be with us. One of my favorite prayers is the one they pray at Holden Village: O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We offer prayers and blessings today, and the anointing with oil, not as some sort of magic to try to ward off the perils that overtake us, but rather as a way of reminding one another that the stress and the strain that life brings is more than matched by the love and the mercy that God provides. There may be earthquake and storm, illness and death. There will be weal and woe. There will be times that life is beyond our control. But through it all, the Holy One walks at our side to calm our hearts and to bring us peace. Amen.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 01:42:35 +0000
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