Omniscient God, why the natural disasters?

Jim Bratt is away today. We thank Angie Mabry-Nauta for blogging today.

“Dear God?” nine-year-old Sophia petitioned. Her voice was more purposeful last night than it usually is when she says her bedtime prayers.

“Please help the people in Oklahoma,” she continued. “I know that there are seven mothers who are very sad because they lost their children in the tornado. There are also many other mothers who are rejoicing because their children were found alive. Whether the mothers are sad or happy, please be with everyone in [Moore] because everything that they have was destroyed by that huge twister. Please, God. Please be with the people of Oklahoma. Amen.”

She gets to ask one question after we have prayed. Anything she is curious about is fair game. I waited with baited breath.

The theodicy question is coming, I thought. She will ask why God let the tornado come and hurt so many people.

She didn’t. Sophia asked something about our family schedule tomorrow.

My first born didn’t ask why. But the local Christian radio station does -- several times a day, as a matter of fact. They recorded a short segment that asks listeners to pray for the people of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, as they work to put their lives back together. “During those times when we just want to know why ...” it says, “Pray. Pray for our friends in Oklahoma.”

Whoever wrote the segment was wise not to attempt answering why, almost as wise as my daughter was for not asking in the first place. And yet, it’s unavoidable. We can’t help but ask. When television images show weeping residents, sad, but determined rescue workers, flattened buildings, an influx of American Red Cross volunteers, and rubble as far as the eye can see, how can we not ask why?

Why all the suffering, God?

And the doozie: does God cause the suffering?

The witness of Scripture seems to say that God does. Think the flood, the ten plagues of Egypt, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Assyrian exile of Israel, and the Babylonian exile of Judah, and the visions of John in Revelation.

As a Reformed Christian, Scripture has authority over my life and faith. I struggle with the “why” question as much as anyone else. I also chew on the aforementioned texts for their theological significance, and question the divinely-caused calamity. So God used world events and destruction in the past. I’m not convinced that this necessarily means that God has done it since that time, nor that God continues to do so.

Reformed folk confess to the providence of God, but I do not subscribe to the belief that God brings about destruction and suffering. I will say that God is in control, but I will not say that God uses such awful events like natural disasters, war, and disease outbreak to punish or even send a message to humanity. The farthest I’ll go with that line of thought is to say that God allows such things. Even then, I hold steadfastly that God does this to bring us back, closer and/or to a new level of wholeness in Christ.

I certainly do not profess to understand, or even like this. I am confused and bothered by the presence of suffering in this world that God Almighty created and reigns over. I question and cry out to God as much as everyone else. Why, God? and What are you doing?!?! fall from my lips in prayers of lament quite often.

I don't have all the answers, or really any, for that matter. Quite frankly, neither does anyone else. No one, absolutely no human being, is able to grasp the mind and purpose of God. To claim otherwise is naïve and idolatrous.

As much as it might stink, the most faithful answer to the question about the problem of suffering and the righteousness of God is I don't know. (Even Job, who probably comes the closest to being entitled to seek an explanation from God about all of the bad things that befell him, never gets a direct answer.)

Following that, appropriate responses are cries and prayers of lament (there are some good ones in the Psalms); trusting God who sees what we cannot (see Isaiah 55: 8-9); and offering the ministry of presence to our neighbors in the midst and aftermath of tragedy.

Earlier today Sophia saw that our community is doing a supply drive for tornado victims. She didn’t skip a beat.

“Can we donate, Mama? Can we?” I took a breath to respond, but Sophia jumped right back in. “We have to give what we can, Mama. Those people need us. It’s what God would want us to do.”

No question of why. Just trust, and compassion and ministry in God’s name. This is the Lord's doing; and it is marvelous in our eyes (Psalm 118:23).

Rev. Angie Mabry-Nauta is a writer and an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. She served as a solo pastor for six years. A member of the Redbud Writer’s Guild, Angie blogs at “Woman, in Progress…”. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @Godstuffwriter.

Shades of Green

        As you outlanders might have noticed, the bloggers at this site who live in the upper Midwest have been musing out loud (it’s not complaining, because upper Midwesterners don’t complain; it’s not nice) that winter held on long in these parts this year, deep into April, and then was succeeded by a spring that was hardly worth the name. Cold. Grey. Wet. More cold. More rain. In West Michigan, a whole lot more rain. The Grand River hit its highest mark in decades, the basements of rich and poor were joined in a democracy of drowning, and my brother-in-law the drain commissioner had nary a moment’s rest.

        Well rejoice and be exceeding glad, Gentle Reader, for sun and warmth have well and truly arrived even here. The landscape has exploded with growth and color, and the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, yea, every living thing have burst forth into song and bleat and pollen and beauty. You walk outside and are dazzled by how green everything is. Bright, pulsing, screaming green. It’s enough to make the heart sing, except we upper Midwesterners only allow that to happen in private. Like kissing. There’s a room for such things; for singing, it’s called church.

        I’m not grousing about this warm turn one little bit. It’s just that the suddenness of it all cost me my annual turn to recite Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” A great professor of mine used to take his class outside to read that poem on just that pivoting day when spring makes it clear that it’s here to stay, that resurgent life is about to create a thick new covering in the trees above and on the ground below. Frost found this magical moment to be a little bittersweet: “Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold/. . . So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay.” I love to recite that verse. Maybe in honor of Ken Kuiper, maybe out of the sort of Calvinism that led a senior colleague of mine, one glorious June 23^rd morning years ago to sit down heavily at lunch and sigh: “Yep, days start getting shorter now.”

        Since green blurred past gold too fast to notice this year, here’s a prose ode to the color. Green tends to have such (as the commentators say) contradictory valences. The balladeer waxes nostalgic for the green green grass of home, but it’s definitely wrong to be green with envy or so greedy as to pile up the green. The monetary green comes from greenbacks, a paper currency floated in the Civil War, then withdrawn to keep the bankers happy. A phenomenon unknown these days. Rather, green in today’s public discourse is very definitely a Good Thing, a sign of concern for sustainability, ecology, untoward waste, and the survival of the planet. Unless you’re in the Right, where it’s all black oil and red meat—and white skin. Al Green, an erstwhile fellow Grand Rapidian, is one of my favorite singers. At the first pop concert I ever attended The New Christy Minstrels opened with the folksy “Green, Green” (“… it’s green they say/on the far side of the hill./Green green I’m going away/to where the grass is greener still.”), while the nonpareil Gordon Lightfoot of my 20s nailed the color’s paradoxical character perfectly in “Bitter Green.” (I’m running up my word count—google the lyrics.)

        Oddly enough, the same paradox runs through biblical references to green. To descend from the lofty heights of redemptive-historical hermeneutics to Dwight Moody’s sermon-building by concordance, we find green laid out promisingly in Genesis as the hue of those plants expressly given to sustain animal life. By Leviticus it’s turned into a suspicious sign of mold (“reddish” is there right next to it) to be reported to the priest for ritual purification. In the Psalms and the prophets the same alteration: the righteous flourish like green plants and trees planted by the living stream, but punishment comes down upon the fickle and faithless in the sign of green things being blighted at noonday. Mark has people sitting down on green grass to receive the bounty of the loaves and fish, but Luke cites it in one of Jesus’ warnings, and Revelation has all of the green grass burned up but only a third of the earth and the trees (8:7).

        So where does this litany end? For me, in one of the few sermons I remember precisely. Oh, many of the rest have sunken in and shaped my heart and mind, no doubt about it, but perhaps because there have been so many, so few live on whole and clear. This one treated the most famous citation of green in all of Scripture: Psalm 23: 2, “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” Our pastor, who made a specialty out of Old Testament context, explained what this meant. Not the lush meadow of England’s green and pleasant land. Not the lawn-with-lamb on that cheesy sympathy card. But scattered sprigs of grass, peeping out of rock and dust in the cool of a Palestinian morning, glistening with beads of dew, just enough of them here and there for the sheep to find and make it through another day. A good shepherd knows where these few and fleeting things are likely to be, and so brings the flock around to avail themselves of the offering. Nature’s only green is soon gone, is the point, but it will be enough for those who feed in faith.

Which Deaths Count?

I’ve been trying to figure out which deaths count and which don’t—not in the eyes of God, of course, but in those of the American public. Or at least of the media that purport to purvey reality to the American public. The unholy trinity of carnage last week brings the question starkly to mind: bombing in Boston, factory explosion in Texas, and the threat of a filibuster in the Senate thwarting the most modest attempt at handgun control.

Each has a body count, but the least counts most. That would be the Boston explosion: three dead, over 200 injured, some of them critically, half of them seriously. The explosion at the West, Texas fertilizer plant killed fourteen and injured another 200. The fatalities from firearms in America this year will probably top 30,000 again (32,000 was the toll in 2011, the most recent numbers I could find). That represents over half of the 55,000 violent deaths that occur every year in the USA. Fully 20,000 of that total are suicides by handgun— by far the most effective, most impulsive, and most predictable means of suicide.

Those are the counts; here’s what counts. In response to Boston: a million people shut up in their homes, a city brought to a standstill, and day upon day of saturation coverage by national news networks and papers. From Texas, a recurrent place in the news cycle that day, but fading interest once the smoking crater had been pictured and the lack of any ‘terrorist’ agent behind the blast established. From Washington: a pride of the Senate minority gloating at a news conference that they had stopped a dastardly assault upon American freedom. So dear is that freedom, one of their number (South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham) has said since, that while a terrorist suspect may be denied jury trial, he may not be denied the right to possess whatever firearms his addled heart or mind desires even if he’s on a watch list.

How do we make sense of this, other than by joining the long line of commentators pointing out hypocrisy, lunacy, or ignorance’s firm hold on the American mind? For me it comes down to the power of narrative in the national culture: which ones compel attention and belief? To be sure, production values have something to do with it. I mean, how exciting is that gaping Texas hole once the camera has settled on it for five minutes? The poor schlumps who off themselves in a fit of despair? Meh—that happens. Their choice. Plus private and secret, with a hushed-up aftermath. Not good drama. But Boston? Can you say reality TV on steroids? Blood, mayhem, panic, throngs fleeing from—and lesser numbers jumping into—the fray? Endless eye-witnesses to interview; a manhunt to follow; terse-talking cops to pump for information. And oh those cops! All SWATed up in the full panoply of military gear, many of them. Not the ones who caught the perp, but never mind. Focus rather on the files of Darth Vader types streaming down the streets, assuring us that Security is at hand.

My father used to tell me about cop shows he tuned in on the radio as a boy in the 1930s, featuring G-Men, T-Men, and other heroes tracking down Public Enemy #whatever. Boston gave us the 24-hour news-TV version of the genre. But it also gave us a resonant Bad Guy. This was lacking in Texas. After all, death by negligence is very common and undramatic; we have people falling every day to workplace accidents. And the American public like the tax reductions and small government that spell fewer inspections of questionable factories. The Texas plant was last certified in 1986; neighbors’ complaints about noxious odors and haphazard conditions went a-gleaming. Until the plant became one big bomb bursting in air. But if you couldn’t find live footage thereof, the viewer draw just wasn’t there.

But the Boston Bad Guy was made to order. At least once his ‘foreign’ credentials had been established. Never mind that he’s lived half his life in the USA, is wired up like any good American youth, participated in no mosque or Islamic study club, and has disappointingly light skin. Muslim he is and dark he counts and rights—so says the Right—he does not have. He and his dead brother can be thus fit into an older American story than even my father’s crime-busters radio serial. One of our oldest stories, in fact, and certainly the most precious. The story of the Savage Indian. Savage Indian, first, incarnates pure evil; secondly, is not one of us but comes from the outside; thirdly, threatens children and women-folk; fourthly, can be brought to heel and eliminated by the Strong Brave Hero, which elimination—fifthly—restores peace and quiet and equilibrium so that the good folk of the community—for good we all are, every mother’s son of us—can go back to their business.

That negligence kills far more every year than ‘terrorism,’ and suicidal despair, guns handy, far more yet; that the leaders of the good people do little in the first instance and maximize gun-availability in the second; and that the High Rulers of the good people, Presidents Barack Bush and George W. Obama, exercise freely the right to rain death from above on anyone they decide is a Savage Indian on whatever frontier around the world, levying that particular bit of terror by a surgically precise weapon which nonetheless racks up the collateral damages once known as the death of innocents, thus triggering more resentment and more likelihood of terrorism—well, it all adds up to a story of a good people and true trying to preserve their liberties from bad actors who hate them.

Only, the Hero in the saga of the Savage Indian has to ride off into the sunset at the end of the show, heading over the next mountain range so as to carry out his purgative vengeance anew, for civilized society offers him no abiding place. Our hero, on the other hand, has become collective: the military abroad and a militarized police at home and fevered talking-heads who sell their story. These all do not, cannot, abide across the range in the wilderness but come back home, where the good citizenry in the meantime arm themselves to the teeth. How, then, to invoke Francis Schaffer, shall we live, and where?

Casting Out Demons: Mental illness and the church’s response

Rev. Angie Mabry-Nauta is subbing for James Bratt today. She is a writer and ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America (RCA). She served as a solo pastor for six years. A regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Gifted for Leadership, and member of the Redbud Writer’s Guild, Angie blogs for the Church Herald Blogs and at “Woman, in Progress…”. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @Godstuffwriter.

The evangelical church world turned upside down last week when news of Matthew Warren went viral. The 27-year-old was the son of Rev. Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life) and Kay Warren. After a years-long battle with depression, Matthew took his own life. As far as I could tell from the outpouring of prayers and messages of love and support flooding social media, Christians responded most appropriately.

As Reformed folk, we look to Scripture for answers to life’s greatest questions. Unfortunately, there is no specific text that addresses mental illness. What is a Reformed Christian to do? How are we to understand mental illness?

The closest Scripture comes to speaking of mental illness is its mention of those who are inhabited by demons. (See for instance Mark 5:1-20, Matthew 17:14-20, and Acts 16:16-18.) This reflects antiquity’s understanding of how the world works. Sickness was not the cause of bacteria, viruses, or cancer cells. It was the result either of sin or of malevolent spirits’ capricious play.

If someone behaved, spoke, or moved his body in an uncontrollable or inexplicable way, he was declared to be demon possessed. She may be epileptic, she may be depressed, she may be schizophrenic, she may have obsessive compulsive disorder. Lacking the knowledge, vocabulary, and trained psychotherapists, wise and common people alike lumped all of these ailments into one evilly-oriented category.

While we understand more today, the church still lacks a good response to mental illness. Amy Simpson, editor at Christianity Today and author of the forthcoming book Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013) found the church ill equipped to serve its mentally and emotionally ailing sheep.

• Ninety-eight percent acknowledged they had seen some kind of mental illness within their congregation.
• Only 3 percent of church leaders indicated they feel like experts in ministering to people suffering from mental illness.
• More than 77 percent of church leaders said they are approached at least two times and even up to 12 times per year for help in dealing with a mental illness.
• Almost 30 percent of those church leaders said mental illness is never mentioned in sermons at their church.
• Just over half of church leaders have reached out to the family of someone with mental illness within their congregation.

“Very few churches have ministries specifically geared toward reaching out to and helping people with mental illness,” Simpson reports. “So people with mental illness and their families continue to be lost in the church.”

So, when Scripture provides either outdated answers or no answer at all, what is the church to do?

Perhaps we pray that God cast out our demons that prevent us from caring from the mentally ill, – fear, ignorance, anxiety, etc. – and do what God does. We love and care well for those who are sick and their families, as those who suffer from mental disorders are indeed ill. In a recent article, Simpson suggests starting simply and practically.

Step one, which may be the most important one of all: the church must break its silence. Merely talking about mental illness serves to normalize it, remove social stigmas, and help remove the shame that people who suffer and their families often carry.

Also, the church could care for a mentally ill person and his family the same way that it does those who are physically ill or recovering from surgery.

“Families affected by mental illness need the same kinds of practical help,” Simpson says. “We can help with the cost of medications, which can be exorbitant. We can help with the expenses of hospitalizations and ongoing treatments. We can provide food, we can make sure their children have rides, we can simply ask them how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, how their treatment is going. We can tell them that we care about them and what they’re going through. We can visit them in the hospital.”

Additionally, the church can remain a journey partner with congregants who are in treatment. Oftentimes pastors and church leadership will acknowledge their lack of psychological expertise and refer someone to a professional. At this point, it is important that the church not lose contact with the hurting person and her family. If the church fails to do this, it sends a painful message.

“Unfortunately, [this] suggests that the church is not willing to stick with the person now that their problem is known, that their problem is too overwhelming for the church and perhaps too overwhelming for their faith and for their God,” Simpson writes.

As the body of Christ, we can do better. 

“Share each other's burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

Bargaining at the Cross

Good Friday when I was young was a day for bargaining. Not just between the pulpit and my ear, as I tried to do the mental math implicit in the inevitable substitutionary-atonement sentiments of the day, but even before that in respect to what sermon I’d have to hear. What set of mini-sermons, in fact.

The deal was, you could get out of going to your own church that night if you took in X percent of the three-hour service on the Seven Last Words from the Cross held at one of the neighborhood churches that afternoon. The attraction was not in hearing something new or exotic, since the dominies on the list were almost all Christian Reformed. (They let in one RCA pastor of sound theological repute.) Part of the lure was negative since the noon to 3:00 p.m. slot was too sacred anyway to permit shooting hoops in the neighbor’s driveway, much less trying out softball at the park. By contrast, you could get in some TV at night while your parents were at church, maximizing the utility of the reduced pleasurable hours that Good Friday afforded.

The tougher, more intriguing bargaining came with your parents—and then in comparing the deal you had wrangled with those struck by the other kids. My folks were of the moderate maximalist school: you had to take in four of the Words plus the hymns following each, which probably spelled a net elapsed time of an hour and a half. That was four 15-18 minute homilies, which made for much more sermon than you’d have at night, but four brief prayers instead of the long one, plus you could exit while the fourth hymn was being sung. Other parents seemed more liberal—three Words. But, if you took them at the start of the service, that entailed sitting through part of the organ prelude, plus the opening prayer (neither Long nor Short), plus an extra opening hymn. So your net time wasn’t that much less. No one I ever heard of had to stay for all seven Words, and only teenagers with cars would try getting away with going in to grab a bulletin and then taking off for the beach or a movie.

Once you had settled up, the debate turned to which Words to attend: the first, the last, or the middle block? Denny liked “I thirst” because it reminded him of “Jesus wept,” his favorite verse in the Bible, being the shortest. The mother and son exchange further down always struck me as a little creepy, and “It is finished” got to be very doleful, the minister in charge of that Word having to outdo all his predecessors at seriousness and woe. Personally, I liked the opener, on forgiveness, and its follow-up when Jesus assured the baddest guy on the hill that he, the thief, would be that day with Him in paradise. Did I like these because they came early and so promised quicker release into the free afternoon air? Or because all the bargaining, like the dicing at the foot of the cross, so missed--or made--the point as to make the Savior’s load heavier?

We had Bible teachers at our Christian school that could have helped with that question, but even then I was too uneasy to ask it. I probably didn’t even see it. I sensed it a bit, though, which helped give an authentic pang to the played-up ones the ministers were trying to conjure from the pulpit. Maybe we do make our own best sermons after all.