St. John’s United Church

“The star they had seen in the east went on ahead of them
until it stopped over the place where the child was.” Matt. 2:9b

Every year since the Middle Ages, Hasidic Jews have celebrated ‘Simhath Torah’ - the festival to mark the completion of the annual cycle of reading through the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. It’s a time of rejoicing - for God’s gift of life-giving law to his people. The scrolls of the Torah are hoisted overhead and paraded around the synagogue or temple, and there is singing and dancing and weeping for joy because God has been faithful.

For the Jews in one concentration camp, during the Holocaust, the time came for this festival. But how could they possibly celebrate, when death was all around them? Besides, there was no Torah scroll, to carry about in the traditional procession… But then, an old man picked a young boy out of the group. “Can you remember the heart of the law, the ‘Shema Yisrael’?” he asked. “Yes,” the boy responded: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And so, the old man lifted up this thin and vulnerable child in his arms, and the child became the Teaching-made-flesh. Holding the boy above his head, the old man began to dance all around the barracks. And one by one, all who are present joined in - singing and dancing and weeping - while the boy spun and twirled high above the old man’s head, celebrating with a fervour that refused to die.

Singing and dancing and weeping - how appropriate the response of people of faith to the tragic events of our world a week ago today! With so many dead or dying, with so many bereft, with the veil of normalcy and security that once covered our lives seemingly rent beyond repair – it is hard to be joyful. And yet, joy itself is an act of defiance, a refusal to let the forces of destruction seize the final victory – a victory that belongs to the One who was and is and is yet to come.

Nine nights ago, we gathered here – in this place –
to remember and celebrate.
We told stories about a baby –
a baby who would save the world,
a baby whose birth was greeted by angels,
a baby whose birth meant tidings of great joy
for all people everywhere.
We spoke of God-made-flesh –
cute chubby baby flesh.

We sang familiar songs.
We enjoyed familiar company.
We smiled at baby Ainsley and her parents, Michelle & Andrew,
as they lit the Christ candle.
We shared in a meal together,
and wished one another a Merry Christmas.
God was in heaven and all was well with the world.
Or, so it seemed…

But all was not well with the world.
A pressure was building up deep beneath the surface.
Two unyielding forces were pushing against each other,
and we sang on…, oblivious.
And others partied on,
and holidayed on,
walked along moonlit beaches hand in hand,
wrapped final presents as the kids fell asleep.
But underneath…, the pressure grew.

“All is calm, all is bright,” we sang. “Sleep in heavenly peace”
“While mortals sleep, the angels keep
their watch of wondering love”

And the pressure continued to grow,
knowing nothing of the bliss of our songs
or the angels’ watch.

Nothing gave way that night, or the next…
But the pressure went right on building.
And the next morning, all hell broke loose.

It was a simple thing really –
those two great forces pushing against one another.
One slipped a bit.
The earth shuddered.
The pressure was released.
All quite simple.
The sudden movement caused a wave.
Quite explainable.

But as the churches went on singing that Sunday morning –
singing songs about that lovely baby again –
that wave was tearing babies out of people’s arms,
sucking beds out through hotel windows
with people still in them,
dumping sharks in swimming pools,
turning idyllic beachside villages
into churning soups of angry water
and broken glass and car parts
and blood and corrugated iron
and dying children
and splintered wood.
It was all over in minutes.

The water ran back into the sea,
taking with it whatever it wished,
whatever it hadn’t impaled or trapped or buried.

We’ve all seen pictures of what it left behind –
haunting, horrible pictures –
mud and ruins and corpses –
tens of thousands of corpses –
old, young, men, women,
the life sucked out of them,
dead children strewn everywhere –
hundreds and hundreds of dead babies.

What child is this who laid to rest
on Mary’s lap is sleeping?
What child is this who laid to rest
in the mud and devastation of Aceh?
And what child is this?
And this? And this? Who knows?
Corpses everywhere –
battered, lifeless, unnamed corpses.

Every now and then, there is a scream,
and one of the living gives a name to one of the dead…,
and grieves.
And thousands more lay waste in the sun,
some, perhaps, with no one left alive who knew their name.

What can we say?
Who wants to sing of cute babies now?
Who wants to stand up and talk
of the Word made flesh?
For there’s flesh strewn all over the streets –
broken, lifeless flesh,
beginning to bloat in the sun.

What do those songs we were singing mean now?
Do the angels’ tidings of great joy mean anything
in the face of this?
Can we stand in the mud and debris
of Banda Aceh or Phuket or Galle
and speak of the one who is called “Emmanuel,”
God with us?
Or would it sound obscene?

But that’s the challenge isn’t it?
Because, if the Christmas gospel
has nothing meaningful to say
in Tamil Nadu or the Maldives or Meuloboh,
then, it doesn’t have
anything meaningful to say at all.

Someone once said that
any theology that can’t be preached
in the presence of parents
grieving over their slaughtered children
isn’t worth preaching
anywhere else either.

But, in the midst of the carnage and shock and horror,
what can we say?
There are no words.
The lovely lines of “peace on earth” and “goodwill to all”
sound impossibly trite and hollow

And yet, I am one of the ones God has called
to interpret to you the word God speaks.
And, at times like this,
such a responsibility can feel a bit
like some of those awful pictures.

I feel a bit like the man wading through the chaos
with his beloved child cradled in his arms,
limp and lifeless.

Here is the gospel – the faith of the Church.
Is there life in it?
Or has it drowned in the angry wave of awful reality?
I’m not sure, but dead or alive, I still love this child

I can’t speak to you as one who has all the answers.
Like you, I am looking for signs of life
amidst the chaos and devastation.
But I can and I must speak as one called by God
to interpret what God says in the face of all this.

So what does God have to say?
What word am I to interpret?
There is a Word from God.
And that Word became flesh.
That Word became flesh
and cast in his lot with us.
That Word is “Jesus.”

The writer of the gospel of John puts it this way:
“1In the beginning was the one who is called the Word.
The Word was with God and was truly God.
2From the very beginning the Word was with God.
3And with this Word, God created all things.
Nothing was made without the Word.
Everything that was created
4received its life from him,
and his life gave light to everyone…
14The Word became a human being and lived here with us.
We saw his true glory,
the glory of the only Son of the Father.
From him, all the kindness
and all the truth of God
have come down to us.”

Many words are spoken about God.
Everyone has an opinion.
Some will say that God is absent, dead or doesn’t care.
Some will say that God is all-powerful,
that nothing happens except at God’s say-so,
and that, yes, tsunamis only happen
if God wills them to.
Some will say that the tsunami is God’s judgment.

words — words — words
There is no end of words about God.

But what does God have to say?
“Jesus”
Does God care?
“The Word becomes flesh.”
Where is God?
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Of course there is always a temptation
to try to repackage the Word –
to make it say what we wish it would say.

We want a Messiah who will protect us from every danger,
and we can find words about God that will say that.
We want a Messiah who can calm the waves before they get us,
and we can find a story of Jesus doing that.
We want a Messiah who will ride in triumphantly -
like the cavalry - at the last minute,
and vanquish all that would harm us,
and bring us singing, and weeping tears of joy
to the victory banquet.

But if we make the words say whatever we want,
we may miss the Word that God speaks, altogether –
that Word that takes flesh and lives among us.

For God did speak a Word,
but it didn’t charge in like the cavalry.
God did speak a Word,
and it made the whole world shudder.

The Word became flesh
and a great wave of hostility and selfishness and bitterness
rose up and flung itself against the Word,
devastating all in its path,
killing even children in its rage –
snarling, surging, seething, smashing –
a great wave of darkness
furiously seeking
to annihilate the light.

”Where were you, (God), when the ocean broke the shore?”
the Rev. Jennie Gordon asked this week.
I was playing on the beach.
Fishing in my boat.
Eating breakfast with my family.
”Where were you when the sea sucked lives away?”
I was holding on tight until I couldn’t.
Afraid and running.
Caught in the swirling chaos.

”Where were you when all those people died?”
I was struggling to breathe.
Letting go.
Counting the lights entering eternity.

”Where were you when the waters receded?”
I was standing on the shore.
Weeping with grief.
Aching to hold my lost people.

Indeed, God was there…
In Word and deed, God is there…
bearing the brunt of it all.

As a mother,
I’ve been tormented by those images this week –
imagining myself
trying to protect my children as the wave hit,
desperately clinging to them
with every ounce of strength
only to feel them ripped from my arms
and torn away in the surging blackness
and then, later, hunting for them
in the chaos and ruins –
checking body after body –
desperately hoping that
none of them are them,
and that, somehow,
they will have been
washed to safety.

And then, finding them -
crumpled and lifeless -
and blindly carrying their limp bodies,
looking for someone who could help,
but knowing, in the hollow depths of my guts,
that nothing can help,
and seeing,
in the eyes of everyone who passes,
that to all but me,
they are just a few more in a
hundred thousand corpses.

It took three days of news footage before it really got to me.
It finally broke me when I saw footage
of a mother in Australia
who had just got news that her daughter,
who she thought had been lost,
was safe,
and she wept tears of joy and relief.
And it struck me that
every one of those hundred thousand corpses
represented a real person
over whom there would be
no such tears of joy and relief.

Do I have any idea what it would really feel like?
I doubt it.
It was bad enough just imagining it.
I don’t know how I’d cope if it was real.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be hearing
any comfortable clichés, like
“all things work together for good, “
or “they’ve gone to a better place.”

I doubt whether I have any idea what it would really feel like,
but I suspect that God does;
because, when we cried out for answers,
for explanations, for deliverance,
God spoke a Word
and the Word became flesh
as a beloved child.

And that Child was torn from the Father’s arms
by a ruthless wave,
and the waters of death closed over him
and spat him out
as just another
of the hundreds
and thousands
and millions
of unnamed innocent victims
down through the ages.

And, as hard as we might find it to talk about flesh,
while the nameless flesh of countless corpses
are necessarily treated
as little more than a threat to public health
and piled into mass graves,
God is still not afraid to be identified as flesh –
fragile flesh, brutalised flesh, limp and lifeless flesh.
Because the promise of Christmas
is not just that the Word became
cute and chubby baby flesh,
but that the Word became flesh
and cast in his lot with us –
hunted flesh,
despised flesh,
tortured flesh,
dead and buried flesh -
three days dead flesh,
stinking flesh -
and a threat to public health.

If you want to see what God has to say in the face of this,
go walk among the ruins of Banda Aceh,
or just turn on your TV,
for God is speaking -
the Word has become flesh once more.

And, perhaps, when we have heard that Christmas story –
the story of God speaking a Word
which becomes human flesh,
and falls victim to the full force of the waves of horror
that assail the earth and its inhabitants,
a Word that continues to take on flesh
in all the suffering and grief and desperation,
perhaps, then, we will be capable of hearing
the story of resurrection,
and recognizing that our songs of endless bliss
and our promises of sorrow turned into joy
are reduced to pious platitudes
if they are not seen
in their contexts of
unspeakable fear,
death and anguish.

I pray that we, like the wise ones,
who travelled from afar so many years ago
to search for a King,
might have the courage and the compassion
to seek out the Word –
the Word made flesh –
that God will show us this week.

For God has been born
in the shore-line stable of chaos
built by the sea-hammers of destruction.

Let’s go with the wise ones -
open and eager to finding our God
who lives among us still.

Let us follow where the Word calls –
into the places that terrify and horrify us,
into the places where we will know what it means
to cry out for salvation,
into the places – perhaps, the only places –
where we are capable of really knowing
the Word made flesh,
the Christ born of Mary,
the Word of resurrection.

And as we set out on this journey,
let us take some gifts with us -
precious, life-giving gifts -
gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

Gold will buy
food, fresh water, clothing, medicine and shelter.
Come, bring your gold.
Bring your money and resources
to the cradle of poverty and devastation.

Frankincense - the sweet fragrance of prayer -
will rise like a phoenix from the pyre of human suffering.
Come, bring your frankincense.
Bring your prayers of faith and healing
to the cradle of hopelessness.

Myrrh - that blessed balmy oil of anointing –
Touches one gently,
soothing aching, orphaned souls,
stroking away the pain of empty arms.
Come, bring your myrrh.
Bring your care and comfort
to the cradle of grief and pain.

Come, as followers of Jesus, to walk in the light of God.
Come, bring the light of God’s love
into situations of darkness and despair.
Come into this New Year,
bearing the light of Christ
to everyone you meet in person
or in prayer.

By the light of a star,
God will show us the way. Amen.

Acknowledgements:
Nathan Nettleton: “A Christmas Tsunami,” a response to the South Asia Tsunami disaster;
Jennie Gordon: “God in the Tsunami” and “Go Home Another Way”
David Cobb: “’And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” following September 11, 2001

A meditation preached by the Rev. Myra Garvin at St. John’s United Church, Brockville
Sunday January 2, 2005 – Christmas 2 / Epiphany (1 week after the East Asian Tsunami)