In seminary, I had the opportunity to travel to Iceland to learn about the Lutheran Church in Iceland and to experience, per the course description, “a profound experience of darkness in the land of fire and ice.” I have to say, I didn’t find the darkness all that profound, more weird that the sun didn’t rise until 11 every day, and then set again at 4. But the fire part, the geologic activity that creates power and heat, was profound. One particular day still stands out to me as an having shaped my understanding of God as creator.
Quick geology lesson: Iceland sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and the Eurasian plate are moving apart from each other a rate of nearly two and a half centimeters a year. What that means is that Iceland, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is growing. In Genesis, we read about how God separated dry land from the waters, Iceland is a place where that separation is still happening. One day we went to the epicenter of that divergence, and as I stood looking across the moon-like expanse of volcanic rock, the stark, stillness of the place filled me with awe. In the silence, I felt the wind from God sweeping over the face of the earth, literally bringing new earth into being. I cannot explain it to you other than this deep profound knowing that God did not form creation into being long ago and leave it, but God is still creating, still moving, still forming, still bringing the cosmos into being. Standing in this vast barren landscape, on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, looking out into an open sky, I had a sense like I have never had before, of the nearness of God, a presence and a power active in our world.
What I did not know in that moment was as I was standing on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, contemplating the glory of God’s creation in the stillness, some six thousand miles south of me, on another island in the middle of the ocean, the same Mid-Atlantic Ridge was creating conditions much more like the description from our Psalm this morning, “The God of glory thunders…The voice of the Lord is powerful…The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness, the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.” The day I stood on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland, was the day of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where one-hundred and sixty thousand people lost their lives.
As humans, we are dualistic thinkers. We like everything in very specific, clearly spelled out categories. You're short or tall. You're fast or slow. You’re an introvert or an extrovert, a thinker or a feeler, a Republican or a Democrat. We like categories, and we like to know where we and others fit in those categories. Those categories are fairly benign, but they can get messy quickly. Something, someone is good or evil, you are saved or you are damned. You are human or you are an animal. Our need for duality at its best, which is still not very good, creates barriers that keep us separated from each other. At its worst it justifies horrendous acts of violence, because if you are evil, if you are not human, then not only do I not have to care about you, but I have almost an obligation to destroy you.
This need for duality is as old as humanity itself, but older than humanity is God. And God is not dualistic, God is much to vast for such simplistic categorizations. God is the air around, the space between all the categories we seek to create. In the beginning, the voice of God moved over the deep. God separated land from sea, light from darkness, and called all of it good. God made plants and animals for the lands, of complexity beyond number, and fish for the sea, to numerous to count, and called all of that good as well. God made humanity, of every different type and style. Not one of us the same, yet God made all of us imago dei, in the image of God, and God called us good. Categories of in and out, one or the other, they are too small to contain the God who created and is still creating the universe.
That’s not to say there is not evil and brokenness in the world, that’s just to say that the lines are not as clear as we’d like. I talked about standing on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge marveling at God’s creative power, while that same creative power was seemingly causing the death of thousands of people. But the earthquake in Haiti was not the cause of destruction, it was a revealer of it. It was apocalypse in its truest meaning, an unveiling of truths already present.
I grew up in southern California. I know earthquakes. I’ve been through earthquakes not quite the size of the one that shook Haiti, but close. And you know what damage my family sustained when a similar earthquake was epic entered in my hometown? One cut-glass punchbowl. No lives lost, no homes destroyed. Just one cut glass punch bowl that fell off a shelf in my grandmother's house.
What made the Haiti earthquake so devastating wasn’t the size of the quake. It was decades upon decades of corruption, mismanagement, and poverty that left the country with crumbling infrastructure, substandard housing conditions, and a crippled economy unable to provide for even the basic needs of its citizens. Conditions that can be traced back the racism and fear of slave revolt that kept other countries from recognizing Haiti as a nation when it declared independence in the 1800s, the colonialism and the slave trade that predated that, and on. What happened to the Haitian people in 2010 was horrible, and it was evil, but it is not accurate to say that the earthquake, an act of God, caused that devastation. Sin, human sin, our sin, created the conditions that led to all that suffering.
We, you and I, are complicit in this. Not all of it, certainly, but let us claim our part. Let us claim our own internalized racism, our own desire to take more than we need at the expense of others, our own fear or unwillingness to stand up to the imperialist tendencies of the world we live in. Let us claim, as the old confession and forgiveness reads, "the things we have done and the things we have left undone." Let us admit that we are sinners, let us admit that we are broken because, in the upending good news of the Gospel, it is in admitting that we are broken that we become restored.
If earthquakes and fires, famines and war, are acts of God, then there is nothing we can do. We are blameless, but we are also powerless. To quote the great fire and brimstone preacher Jonathan Edwards, we are "sinners in the hands of an angry God." A God who is vengeful and powerful, playing with us the way a cat plays with a mouse.
But when we recognize our own complicity in the the brokenness of the world, then we get our power back. Because if we, not God, have caused suffering, then we are not stuck waiting for some outside intervention that never seems to come fast enough. If we, not God, have caused suffering, then we can also undo it. Recognizing our sin lets us stop seeing ourselves as helpless beings in the hands of an all-powerful deity and puts us back into the relationship God created for us, stewards of the kingdom, co-workers with God in the world. The point of the confession and forgiveness at the beginning of the service is not about making us feel sufficiently bad about ourselves so that God can revel in our suffering, it is about God giving us our power back, about God reminding us of our rightful place as children of God, as heirs of God's kingdom. Because if we caused it, then we can fix it as well.
We cannot lay on God the conditions that humanity created. But we can look to God to find the solution. The powerful, hopeful, world-changing good news that comes from having a God who is too big for our dualistic mindsets is that God created us to be free from them too. God did not create us good or evil, saint or sinner. Instead we are, as our Lutheran theology reminds us, one-hundred percent of both, all of the time. And when we are able to recognize that. When we are able to not look to the mistakes of others, but to see ourselves for who we truly are, capable of tremendous acts of evil but also incredible acts of goodness, that is when we find ourselves empowered to do amazing things.
In our first reading today, Isaiah found himself, in the year that King Uzziah died, standing before the throne of God. Under Uzziah, the kingdom of Judah reached heights of economic prosperity it hadn’t seen before. But that wealth was not evenly distributed, cracks began to form in the society, and eventually Uzziah’s arrogance led to Judah’s decline and destruction at the hands of the Assyrians. Isaiah’s prophetic call was to point out these cracks to the Judean leadership, to make them aware of their failings in hopes that they might turn from their wicked ways and be different. But before Isaiah could prophesy—could bear witness—to this sin, he first had to see it.
So Isaiah found himself standing in the throne room of God, with the whole of God’s goodness and majesty stretched out before him, serenaded by seraphs singing God’s praises, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s glory.” When Isaiah looked upon the glory of God, he knew. “Woe is me,” Isaiah proclaimed. “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Isaiah recognized and confessed his own brokenness and the brokenness of his people. And with that, one of the seraphs touched a burning coal to his lips and he was forgiven. Then the voice of God said to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” A rhetorical question if there ever was one, who will be the one to go out to Judah to offer the same revelation of truth that Isaiah himself just had, so that the rulers of the nation could know their need for healing and be healed? Who will be the one to bring God’s promised redemption to the world, to help a nation turn from their wicked ways and be set free? And Isaiah said, if it were me with a bit of a quaver in his voice, “Here am I; send me.”
It is not comfortable, it is not easy, to look around a broken world and see the ways in which we are culpable in that brokenness. To see how our sin, our greed, our pride or self-absorption, or even misguided ignorance, has caused the suffering of others. But here’s the thing, there is power and hope and healing in the recognizing. Because when we know, when we are made aware, then we too, like Isaiah, get to be prophets of redemption. We get to be the ones who get to make changes, who get to be God’s messengers, who get to lift up the lowly, bring down the mighty, and bring God’s kingdom into being. What a privilege, what a gift, what an incredible honor we have, to be the ones who get to say, “Here am I; send me.” Amen.
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