In our neck of the woods we experienced a mini "return from exile" as now freed from the snow, people ventured back to church on Sunday. In Gainford, from under twenty to nearly fifty and our Sunday school went from nil to seven!

In the evening we got together with our Methodist and Catholic friends at St. Osmunds RC church where I had the privilege of preaching on discipleship using the "road to Emmaus" story from Luke as our guide.

Last Thursday three of us from Gainford went to hear Bishop Tom speak about Luke's gospel. This was Tom's first speaking engagement since returning from the USA and was held in the Stockton Baptist Tabernacle. You might imagine that my views and Bishop Tom's don't entirely overlap - and you would be right - but It's fair to say that our Bishop has lost none of his verve and is a very engaging speaker indeed - learned and erudite, and able to quote from memory huge chunks of scripture and open to questions on anything at all - very impressive. Do get yourself along to one if you can, or get his book for either private, or better still, corporate study. The deanery is bulk buying copies to make them a bit cheaper at about £3.15 a throw. But one of the most impressive things for me that night was Stockton Baptist Tabernacle itself. A wonderful banked seating arena, warm and comfortable, loads of function rooms, a cafe and a bookshop - I was green with envy! 

 

 

You will hear a wonderful description of the church as the Body of Christ from St. Paul, about our communion, our relationship to God and each other. If you have a Bible get it out and read 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31 to prepare yourself for collective worship on Sunday. If not, I recommend you meditate on the following verse. Verse 27 reads "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it" 

 

I informed you last week of the Big read dates for Churches together in Barnard Castle. This week I can give you the dates for meetings if you live in the upper dale.

 

Churches together in upper Teesdale are holding "Big read" meetings on every Thursday during Lent 7pm - 8.30pm at Middleton in Teesdale school (Ground floor). The dates are; 25th February and the 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th March - poster attached.

 

And here at churches together in Gainford we have selected three dates - 25th February, the 18th March before Easter and one after Easter on the 8th April to discuss the resurrection. All start at 7.30pm and are open to all of course!

 

The lighter side! This is a joke, but a joke with a serious intent that goes with my thought for the day.

 

In the midst of a serious flood a man was stranded on the roof of his house - the waters rising all around him. He prayed that God would rescue him and believed that he would. A rescue helicopter appeared and threw down a rope, but the man declined their help saying - "I don't need you, the Lord will save me!".

A few minutes later a rescue boat came alongside and offered to pull him aboard but he declined saying "No, I don't need you, the Lord will save me". Finally as the waters were threatening to totally engulf him another rescue helicopter hovered overhead and wanted to pull him out. "No" he said. "I am a Christian and I truly believe that God will save me - I don't need you".

Soon after, the waters rose and the man was engulfed and drowned.

Standing before God, the devout Christian shouted at God "I believed in you. Why didn't you save me?"

God replied, "I sent two helicopters and a boat, what more did you want?" 

 

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas by a long way, where people are impoverished, a population squeezed between government corruption on the one hand and criminality on a huge scale on the other, where health care and education barely operates, has now had misery piled on top of misery by enduring an earthquake which may have killed over 100,000 people. A Haitian official puts the estimate at 200,000 people, but whoever is right, the appalling death toll, and the miserable conditions of the survivors in this poor blighted country does beg the question that haunts people of faith - where was God?

 

How you answer that question depends very much on your understanding of God and how he works. I will posit two understandings of God, an interventionist one and a non interventionist but relational and transformative understanding of God. How does each kind of God fare when applied to the tragedy in Haiti?

 

 If you believe in an interventionist God - a God who can and will intervene in human and natural affairs to stop bad things from happening or to protect people from harm when they do happen or to heal people then that is a very serious question to have to face up to. Because if you believe that God can and sometimes does intervene in human history why doesn't he do so at times like this? And this question will haunt you every time a disaster either man made or natural hits your consciousness. If you believe God can intervene in any way, where was he - does he not care?

Post - First world war, post influenza pandemic, post Auschwitz, post Pol Pot, post Ethiopian famine, post Boxing day Tsunami, post Chinese and Haitian earthquakes, after a million other tragedies, post death and suffering on a monumental scale as just normal life, how do you continue to hold on to a belief in an interventionist God? I couldn't, and personally I stopped believing in an interventionist God in a children's AIDS hospice in Romania some years ago.

Believing that God must either be an interventionist God or simply just not exist at all is another false choice many people think they have and huge natural disasters are a potent ally to our secularised society's view of the world. But you may be asking, isn't that the normative Christian understanding of God? Isn't that the orthodox understanding of God we are supposed to believe in - the one that has been drummed into some of us since we were children? Well it may be currently normative but it is certainly not the only way - let me posit a different understanding of God and how he interacts with the world and see which one seems the most plausible to you when applied to Haiti in particular but also to life in general.

 

How might God act in the world if not by directly intervening? Well believing and trusting in a God who is seen primarily in relational and transformational terms rather than an interventionist one offers a different way of addressing the question - where was God? One of the best books I have read recently is by Rabbi Lionel Blue and was called "My affair with Christianity" and is a book so honest that it hits you between the eyes (unlike most religious output you come across). He writes at one point;

 

"I am convinced that the only power God has in this world is the love that He inspires in his followers"

 

It might take a few readings of that line to fully appreciate what Rabbi Lionel Blue is saying. That God works though us, and only through us - with us - not separate from us. Understood in this way - where is God in the Haitian earthquake?

He is in the individuals who, fired with compassion rather than indifference contribute their money, expertise and prayers to people and a situation thousands of miles away. He is in the pilots, rescue teams and Aid agencies, struggling at huge personal cost to search for lost people and bring relief to those who survived. He was with the survivors who clawed through debris with their bare hands to reach parents children and grandchildren crushed under tonnes of rubble - their hearts broken, in despair, hoping against hope that their families might still be alive. He will be in the reconstruction of the country, with architects and builders, scarred by grief, determined to design buildings better able to withstand this kind of disaster in the future, with politicians repentant at their unjust corrupt past ways determined to re-build with justice and to fight corruption in this the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. He will be in people throughout the world inspired to help and keep helping long after this disaster has been dropped from the front pages.

The love He inspires in us is the only way God can act and react to the Haitian earthquake. He is in our hearts, where He always was, and inspired by that, he is in our hands and feet and our personal resources and intellects, our actions, as we bring them to bear on any given situation. When we act in accordance with the character and passion of God - there is God acting. Where people ignore, disparage and do nothing or view these people as too poor, too remote from us to care about, where people care nothing about the reconstruction of Haiti, where criminals exploit and abuse the suffering people, where politicians continue to act corruptly - there God is made absent.

In the same fashion, harking back to my days in Romania, God was present and wonderfully active in the selfless care and compassion of those dying children in two Christian women, Lorna and Kathryn - who I will never forget, and who went the extra mile every day of their lives to make a tragic situation better, to work tirelessly for the outcasts of Romanian society, stigmatised, poor, mostly orphaned, many Roma, and dying from AIDS. To educate, inspire and change things.........There, in those people I saw the presence of God.  God acted in and through Lorna and Kathryn. 

 

I put before you two understandings of God. It is for you to decide which one rings true for you. A God who can intervene but apparently chooses not to, or a God there in the thick of it, working in and through all the people struggling to help and make things better now and in the future.

 

The Prayer for today is psalm 142

 

 

Love and peace

 

Martin