St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
In the Name of Katrina’s Victims
September 4, 2005
The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen the misery of my people; I have heard their cry, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to bring them up to a good land flowing with milk and honey…I will be with you.”
During the past week hurricane Katrina has sorely tested this ancient image of the way God is with us. Our homes, our hearts and our headlines have been filled with cries of suffering from the Gulf states. First this absolutely horrific hurricane hits, and then catastrophic flooding and violence follow, pushing hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to the breaking point. As we look on helplessly we are haunted by their faces, their gestures, and their voices. Where is God in all this suffering, and how are we believers to respond?
When tragedy like this strikes, faith is deeply challenged. The good news promised by God surely comes, but it only comes once the worst is over, and you and I begin to respond. In order to get to this good news, we first have to bear with the bad. There is no escaping the fact that Katrina has brought us face to face with the powers of sin and death that the Bible speaks so much about. Day after day this week, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday, we have seen for ourselves the mysterious dark residue of evil that slithers through God’s world. Along with the Gulf coast’s ruined buildings and bodies, a lot of our own wishful thinking has been swept away by these floodwaters. Katrina has proven once again that very bad things happen to perfectly good people.
Nobody likes to get bad news like this—except perhaps the media, who make their living from it. As for the rest of us, when bad things happen to ordinary people like you and me we usually handle it in some pretty predictable ways. The current favorite in our highly technical, modern society is to throw a bunch of instant analysis at it. How many satellite photos of Katrina’s advance, how many expert opinions from meteorologists, sociologists, civil engineers, political scientists, and psychologists, have been cranked out in recent days, in the effort to make some sense of what is happening? Their banter may distract us for a few moments by framing the storm in sanitized, intellectual terms. It may temporarily pull us out of our hurting hearts and into our logical heads. But for people of faith, all this analysis misses a really important point: hundreds of thousands of human beings, children of God just like you and me, have lost everything. And as people of faith we need to know what to do.
Another way we often handle Katrina’s kind of bad news is to flee from it, to subtly withdraw ourselves from the current suffering by imagining it to be part of God’s perfect plan. Although we can’t put our finger on it, our hunch is that God must be using this storm for some greater purpose. Perhaps to discipline all sorts of people who have been misbehaving, or to draw heroic virtues from those who are on the scene and able to help. Although this kind of thinking may be comforting, it flies in the face of what the Bible actually says. In today’s Gospel Jesus points out that the Palestinian peasants mown down by Romans were no worse sinners than their neighbors who survived. The unfortunate souls trapped under the tower of Siloam as it fell had been doing nothing exceptional to offend God. Of course scripture does go on to say that after the fact, God always redeems such a tragedy by drawing good from it. But that is after the fact. In the midst of a crisis people of faith are hardly sustained by the prospect of some eventual good outcome. They rightly balk at making God seem reliable by making God mean, by imagining that he is using them as pawns in his own master plan. The pain of Katrina’s victims brings us back to the same pressing question: hundreds of thousands children of God, just like you and me, have lost everything. What are we to do?
A third unfortunate way we handle tragedies like this is to let them eat into our faith. By now we’ve heard all the expert opinions about how the situation developed, and all the pious opinions about how it really must be for the best, and we just can’t buy either one. The whole picture doesn’t add up, and so we decide—consciously or unconsciously—that we will trust a bit less in God, and a bit more in ourselves. We grow cynical and skeptical, in a way “getting even with God” for allowing the tragedy to happen in the first place. We hear today’s reading from Exodus with jaded ears, and demand to know why, since God had been watching and listening to the suffering of the slaves all along, he waited until now to help. If God can’t be counted on to jump in and put an instant end to suffering, why shouldn’t we just eat, drink and be merry—since tomorrow it could be us? Letting our hearts grow stony like this certainly shields us from part of the pain, but it also shields us from the strengthening companionship of God and of God’s Church. And it shields us as well from the really important question: hundreds of thousands of human beings, children of God just like you and me, have lost everything. What are we to do?
All of these ways of handling suffering—obsessing over its practical causes, or turning God into some kind of kindly culprit, or giving up hope in the basic goodness of life—all three of these ways of handling suffering have one tragic thing in common. They take the innocent victims of tragedy, and turn them into what’s been called “devil’s martyrs,” into persons whose sacrifice gets perverted into feeding our own fears of the powers of sin and death. We turn their suffering into a way to sap our living trust in the living God. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to do better.
So what are we to do? Let’s look together at the real face of a real victim of hurricane Katrina. This is Sheila Dixon who up until last Sunday lived in the quiet little town of Gentilla, Louisiana. As the floodwaters rose around the family home, Sheila packed her little girl into the family boat, and sailed toward the nearby town of Metairie which stood on higher ground. At the time this picture was taken, Sheila had left the little boat behind for others to use as they needed, and tearfully awaited evacuation. We followers of Jesus Christ need to look closely at the face of Sheila Dixon, and find there a sister made in the image of God, just as we are. There but for the grace of God goes each one of us. But more than that, in Sheila’s face we need to see the very face of God, aching to hold each hurricane victim close the way a mother embraces a fearful child, cradling each one and weeping over the pain this tragedy has wrought. This is the God who cries, in the book of the prophet Hosea, “When Israel was only a child, I loved him. I lifted him, like a baby, to my cheek.” This is the God of Jesus Christ who laments over the residents of Jerusalem, “How often I have longed to gather your children, like a mother hen keeping her brood safe under her wings!”
Katrina has brought us face to face with the very face of God, and now it is plain what we must do. First, we must lift the victims to God in prayer. For those who lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes, and all of their possessions. We must pray also for those who lost their tempers and all semblance of mental health as they battled this unthinkable tragedy. For those who were entrusted with public welfare, who betrayed that sacred trust by doing too little too late for traumatized children, women and men who relied upon them. And finally we must pray for those who betrayed and lost their very humanity, by violently preying upon their fellow victims. One and all of these people we must fervently lift in prayer, to the God whose strong arms reach out to receive them.
And second, we who have been in no way weakened by Katrina must reach out our own strong arms to help. For a start let us donate all we can afford to give to Episcopal Relief and Development, or some other trusted relief agency. Frank Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has assured all of the clergy that he has been in personal communication with local bishops all along the Gulf coast, and has promised them—in our name—that help is on the way. At the same time, the national bishop for Episcopal chaplains is building a Gulf coast network linking police, fire, civil defense and military chaplains with local clergy, to let families know the fate of their loved ones, and to support one another in counseling and consoling survivors. And finally the Episcopal Migration Ministries is actively working a plan to help with sheltering those who for now are homeless.
This is the way that faithful Christians handle a tragedy like Katrina. We turn ourselves into living crosses, holding our hands up to God in prayer, and our hands out to those in need. We bring blessed hope just as Jesus did, to a waiting and wounded world. Amen.
© Copyright The Rev. Ann Lukens 2004