Hell came to town

I was reading a book on preaching (yeah, yeah, I do on occasion at least try to improve) about the time hell came to Hattiesburg, Miss., Sunday.

The book, Alyce McKenzie's What not to Say: Avoiding the Common Mistakes that can sink your sermon, takes on the ideas that spread about the nature of God and what damage can be done by those who might say something they really didn't mean to say about said nature.

For instance, "God's loving purpose trumps your painful present," is but the tip of the doctrine of providence iceberg.

I know I've said, not necessarily in sermons but in studies, that I believe God causes or allows all things. I do this because it helps me make sense of Paul's telling us in Romans, "and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

As I read this, hell dropped out of the sky in the form of a large, voracious, dark cloud of twisting wind that picked up trucks and dumped them like garbage.

And being whom I am, I began to wonder about where could the good be in this tragedy. Where can God go with these results. What can God do here?

We tend, according to McKenzie and a co-author, to "portray a universal order in which everything that happens is specifically arranged to serve God's good purposes." But I wonder. Where was God in the winter storm in New England? Where was God in the Katrinas, Issac's, Ike's, Sandy's? Doesn't it seem he's allowing quite a bit lately that is on the dark, tragic side.

Where was God in the elementary hallways of Newtown, Conn.? Where was God in Iraq and Afghanistan when the mines blew up and limbs blew off? What good can come from these things?

Or....

Does this fallen world, the one God didn't create but human falliblility contributed so heavily to, have laws and physics and such that God did set into motion? Is the weather governed not by God but by the very atmospheric difficulties we've created? Is there no such thing as an accident any more?

I am content to say I don't know. I am content to tell, as a pastor more so than a preacher, that I believe God mourns when we cry. That Jesus weeping outside the tomb of a friend is a snapshot of a God who the scriptures tell us is pure love. I am content to say I don't know why some things happen, but I refuse to believe a God who loves so dearly and completely would simply turn buildings into toothpicks on a whim or God forbid for a lesson or a test of faith.

I understand the confusion that reigns sometimes in this regard, or rather I recognize it as some of my own feelings. But through it all, through the deaths of children, through the loss of even photos that prove a life was lived before the fire, the storm, the earthquake, through evil as present as Satan himself prancing beside us, through it all I believe in the Redeemer who is at work not only in myself but in my world. His voice can still the storm, still.

Paul, beaten and banged and bruised with regularity for his beliefs, knew that God. That though all falls apart around us, God still walks in the garden looking for us.

McKenzie writes of Rabbinic theology's statement, "Our lives are to be a participation in (the repair of the world)."

Today, perhaps, let it begin in Hattiesburg.