Red in Tooth and Claw

Texts: Job 38:1-11; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41 From time to time over the years I have come across people who assure me that they don't need to come to church to meet God; they only have to go for a walk in the great outdoors.  God reveals himself to them, they tell me, in the beauty of his creation.  I'm always tempted to ask them to describe such an experience to me.  When and where did God last reveal himself to them in this way? My bet would be that it was on a lovely day.  The sun was shining, it was warm without being too hot, and the birds were singing happily in the trees.  The sea and sky were beautiful shades of blue, and in the fields stock were munching luscious green grass.  In the distance the mountains towered above the landscape, majestic and eternal.  Yep, surely God was in this place, at least as much if not more than in a cold, musty old church. But would these people see God in his creation while standing on the deck of the Wahine during the storm that destroyed it; or in the middle of Cyclone Bola?  Would they see him in the parched Aussie dirt following seven years of drought; and what sort of God is revealed to them by the Boxing Day tsunami?  The English poet Tennyson famously described Nature as "red in tooth and claw"; is that how we would describe God?  And as the biting winter winds chill the edges of our ears (and much else besides!), do we find ourselves thinking that it is really God whispering sweet nothings to us? I suspect not.  I suspect that in midwinter we are least likely to fall prey to the sentimental twaddle that seems to attach to "Nature" – and especially to "Mother Nature" – from time to time, inside the Church as well as outside it.  We need to remind ourselves at such times that we cannot have it both ways: if a lovely, warm, calm sunny day reveals to us a loving caring God, then a tsunami or an earthquake must reveal to us a capricious, spiteful God who doesn't care two hoots about the vast numbers of people who are killed by such natural disasters.  And that can't be right, can it? Let's turn to the Scriptures for some clues, if not answers.  One thing we can say for certain is that God and Nature are not the same thing!  The Bible is very clear about that: God created all things – Creator and creation are set apart.  But go beyond this and we have to admit there is more ambiguity; and it seems to begin at the beginning.  Our theologians tells us that God created all things ex nihilo, meaning out of nothing, and that's certainly one interpretation of the opening verses of Genesis.  The first two verses say this: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Then follows the various creations, beginning with light.  So did God create the earth formless and empty, etc., and go on from there; or does this mean that the earth was formless and empty when God started the creative process?  Well, no doubt many Ph.D. theses have been written on this critical question; but why it matters seems to be the basis on which the Bible develops the relationship between God and his creation...  Did God begin by creating chaos out of nothing, and then set about bringing order out of chaos?  Or was chaos there and God set about overcoming it by bringing order out of the primeval chaos?  In other words, is God responsible for the chaos as well as the order in the world; or is chaos simply the absence of order in the same way that darkness is the absence of light? Which of these two approaches we choose will guide our response to natural disasters, particularly if we accept the view that the creative process is ongoing.  Many years ago I was teaching a Bible class of 8-10-year-olds, and one of the bright sparks asked me an awkward question.  If God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, what did he do on the eighth?  I didn't know; so later I asked the Vicar.  He didn't know either, but his wife had a suggestion: tell the boy we are still in the sixth day.  I think she said it as a joke, but I have often thought since that that would have been a very good answer.  That God is still creating the world; God is still bringing order out of chaos. So that when a terrible natural disaster strikes, that comes out of the chaos against which God is still working. A similar approach might be to rely on the common but clumsy word we sometimes use about God, "Sustainer".  We call God "the Creator and Sustainer of all things"; which reminds us that God doesn't merely set everything in motion, he keeps it in motion.  If God ever ceased to sustain all things, creation would revert to chaos (or cease to exist, depending on your point of view). One of the things I torture my brain with sometimes is "new physics", and related topics; and I recently read an article about so-called "dark matter".  One of the mysteries of the universe to scientists in this field is why the universe is expanding and shows every sign of continuing to do so.  It should be slowing down; gravity should be pulling everything back together again, but it isn't?  Why not?  The scientists' best guess so far is that there must be another force in the universe that counteracts gravity, and this force keeps the whole thing from imploding.  That seems to me to be a useful analogy to illustrate the sustaining power of God.  If God did not counteract the destructive force of chaos the whole of creation would collapse. And so to the sea.  The Hebrews did not much like the sea, and there are many references in the Scriptures to the destructive power of the sea.  It was important to them, therefore, that God had authority over the sea, and could command it to behave.  The psalmists, in particular, regularly talked to God about the sea, and reminded him that he was in control of it.  In Psalm 89(9) the writer tells God: You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them.  Similarly, in Psalm 107 the psalmist recalls the plight of some mariners who were rescued by God: He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.  In both those cases, the understanding seems to be that God exercises power over the sea, to overcome it.  However, in Psalm 107 the author first attributes the storm to God: For he spoke and stirred up a tempest that lifted high the waves.  They mounted up to the heavens, and went down to the depths.  And there's that ambiguity I spoke about.  Is God responsible for causing atrocious weather, as well as counteracting it? In our reading from Job this morning, God is shown very much in charge of the sea: Who shut up the sea behind the doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt"?  And in our gospel reading we see the same sort of relationship between Jesus and the stormy sea; it obeys his word of command. But that is not always the case, is it?  Sometimes chaos erupts causing widespread devastation, and we are left with our desperate questions: did God cause that disaster or was he unable to prevent it?  I end with this poem that I wrote in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami as I reflected on this same passage from Job.