Christian Mission and the Tsunami in Asia

The tsunami in the Indian Ocean has left a horrible trail of death and destruction. It seems that no fewer than 150,000 people have been killed, and there is the awful possibility that disease and hunger will carry off many others.

People are saying that this constitutes the biggest disaster in human history, and the size of the event seems to show up the weakness of religions – they seem either to babble meaningless platitudes, or to be reduced to helpless silence.

Also, we have been overwhelmed by the arbitrary nature of what we have seen. Some are killed, others left. There is no apparent reason behind the choice of victims. Unlike war and terrorism, there is no one to blame.

The event forces us to ask about God. If he exists, how is he involved? If he is in charge of nature, why would he do such a cruel, undiscriminating thing? Is he weak, or is he a tyrant or is he merely indifferent? These are the sharp issues before which the popular religious understanding of our community falters and even quails.

Our ignorance of history and of the Bible leaves us with a faint memory of God. Over time our god has become domesticated and trivialised. At the same time, we have developed a sense of our own invulnerability. We inhabit a prosperous and safe part of the world. It is easy to think of ourselves as masters of the world, and to assume that such disasters are not merely unique, but an affront.

But neither the Bible nor experience agrees with popular religion. The Bible regards us as being out of joint with nature because we are out of fellowship with God. As a result, the Bible never thinks of the world as safe and secure. Beginning with the biblical flood, the whole assumption of the bible is that we live in a fractured and dangerous world. The Bible was not written into some ideal world where a catastrophe is a strange event. The Bible is written into the world of drought, pestilence and famine, as well as a world of human evil, war and death.

There is no simple or direct connection between suffering and judgement. We can not say that the sufferer has committed a specific sin which leads to this event. But in general terms, the Bible does see moral and spiritual significance in our experience of this world.  It says that the presence of evil and pain ought to lead us to think about our standing with God.
The present catastrophe is horrendous. Unfortunately, history records similarly deadly earthquakes, cyclones, wars, plagues, genocides and other disasters. The world in which this sinful race lives is like that. The power of the Bible is that the authors are fully aware that the world is like this and they speak in that context. It is only the idol created by popular religion, the god who is remote and benevolent who has nothing to say in a crisis.

The first Christian response to this disaster is to give ourselves in practical and long-term ways to the relief of the suffering. We tend to have a short attention span when it comes to disasters – who now thinks of the earthquake in Bam (Iran) last year? – but the real work of rehabilitation will go on for many years. The Christian commitment ought to involve that long-term response.

What of the mission of the gospel? Do we abandon this in the face of immediate human needs such as food and shelter and water and medicine? Human needs also arise in the soul of a person; they are spiritual. The living victims of this catastrophe are going to need help with grief and loss and hopelessness; they are face to face with death both on a huge and on a personal scale. Here are problems of meaning, spiritual problems about which Jesus Christ has magnificent words of life.

Jesus knew that the world was like this; indeed, he experienced the world like this.  But he still committed his disciples to the business of witness, because in the end death is the greatest natural human disaster and forgiveness the greatest need. In the midst of the travails of this world, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ which stands out as the great hope. We must feed people and protect people and house people and care for people, but love will also mean that we share the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.  Far from being irrelevant, the gospel of Jesus Christ provides a profound and effective framework for understanding all of life, even the catastrophe of this horrendous tsunami.

The above is an edited extract of a sermon delivered by Archbishop Peter Jensen at the 2005 Church Missionary Society Summer School. The full text can be found on our Indepth page.

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