Come Hell, High Water, or Pine Trees

Christopher H. Edmonston

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church

II Corinthians 8: 8 - 15

I.

I have always been told that the Spaniards brought the Live Oaks with them because when fully grown they look like fortresses. The Live Oak across the street from our home in Biloxi, MS, where we lived from 1978 until 1983, was a fortress in my 10 year old eyes. It had a wide space where its branches converged, about 8 feet off the ground.

I would stand on that great tree at the convergence of its branches and look to the south and stare at Biloxi Bay. And then I would look over my shoulder and stare at my house, two hundred feet or so away.

When I saw the stories that you saw last week, of Mississippi residents hanging on to great trees for dear life, I immediately thought of my tree there in Biloxi in that little stretch of woods between the water and my home.

Talking to my father, he and I both are pretty convinced that our home is either no longer there or it is at least flooded beyond repair. The water there rose and rose – perhaps as much as 30 feet over normal. And even though the house is gone or damaged greatly, I would be willing, if I were a gambler, to take the odds on the fact that the tree (unless it has been undone by a chainsaw) is still there.

Perhaps the Spaniards were right –when they become old and thick and strong those great live oaks are like fortresses.

II.

There are many lessons and many sermons in the events of the last 13 days. Just as many lessons and sermons, I suppose, as the tears that have been and will be shed.

For my part, I have been searching for something concrete to say to you all week long. Something that you might hold on to, pray about, and strive to apply in your lives as we seek to understand the fury and chaos wrought during the past days.

To begin with, it goes without saying that we certainly are no strangers to hurricanes or tropical storms –Floyd, for one, is a name I think most of us would rather forget – with all due respect to those of us who know somebody named Floyd. My Uncle Robert pulled my sister and her husband aside last Friday, while the sounds of generators and chain saws hummed in the background, and he told them in no uncertain terms that Katrina was a name that was banned in our family henceforth and evermore – “no little girls named Katrina” he said.

I will also share with you, and it is soul wrenching to do so, that I think I now know better your shock just about 6 years ago in seeing your home town, your Tarboro flooded, your people suffering, and your memories upended. At least two of my childhood homes, one in Metaire, Louisiana and the one in Biloxi, Mississippi are most likely gone now. And while that is a small thing as we, my family, are all safe from the storm, it is still a large thing because the storm could have come anytime and thus serves as a reminder of both our constant proximity to mortality and the frailty of our memories that are associated with place.

III.

One of you last week, just before I left to go home to Louisiana stopped me in the hall, and with tears in your eyes you looked deep into me and said, “God could’ve stopped it. But God didn’t. Can’t God stop it? Why didn’t he just make it go away?”

That’s the question. The classic question – the question of what in formal theology is called theodicy – how the Divine, how God, and evil, and sin, and suffering intersect and interact. It is the question that people asked in the great flood of Genesis and it is the question that the beautiful people of the Gulf Coast and the Cajun Coast are asking today. How, and why, does God let it happen?

And at first run when I try to answer this question I am obliged to say that I am sure that God could have stopped the storm but that for some reason God didn’t or wouldn’t. In other words, I don’t, at first pass have much to say at all.

The most honest answer is, of course, I don’t know why God didn’t stop it, and yes, like you, it shakes my faith mightily.

What I do know is what you already know: the size of the storm and the trees on the ground and the waves that took everything with them back into the sea – they’re all so big that when I try to stand against them I feel helpless and human and empty. That is true whether I am here in Tarboro watching CNN and seeing a mother desperate to find a child gone missing, or if I am in Washington Parish, Louisiana talking to my cousin and her husband about how their home and the schools where they taught in greater New Orleans are now all gone – that is true whether I am here or there.

I could tell you that the pain and the despair I see and hear feeds then into my own sinking despair that its only September 11 (as if remembering the events of four years ago in New York City isn’t enough) – in other words, it is still early September and hurricane season goes on for three or four or five more weeks and the next storm is going to hit Sea Island or Hilton Head or Hatteras or Ocean Isle – far too close for any comfort. I could tell you that the storm is probably going to hit where it is going to hit no matter how hard I pray or how hard I try to stop it. It’s beyond my control.

Yes, that is the reality, the cold, hard, indifferent fact. No different than the fact that in New Orleans far too much swamp was drained for housing; and far too many miles of channel have been cut for pipe dredging to carry gasoline that is more valuable and more essential than even gold itself in 21^st century North America; and far too many cubic feet of silt pour into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River which is leveed and bottled up far more than it ever should have been; and that the result of all of this is that when the demonic storm hit it leveled the levees and it killed the city of my sister’s birth and it left the bodies of young and old alike floating in the water and it changed my homes, all of them, in some way be they in Baton Rouge, in Metaire, in Biloxi, or in Houma. The storm destroyed it all! And it changed my home forever.

So at the end of the day when I asked about God and evil and the storm all it seems as though I can do is turn off the TV and go to bed anxious about where the next storm will come. That is why I have been struggling all week to tell you something concrete, because the concrete realities at least as they pertain to Katrina and to hurricanes and to so-called “natural” disasters are bleak and they are empty. At the end of the day that misery and helplessness is all that there is….

IV.

Or is it?

Listen to this question closely: or is it?

You see, we each have to decide. This storm, this Katrina, this very bad blind date gone terribly sour (like the girl you never wished you’d met), makes us make some choices and answer some questions and dare to look beyond our pain and despair.

Can it be that God has given me another fortress all along to cling to? Can it be that God has equipped me with something that is as mighty and strong as the oak that was my harbor, my haven on the north side of that bay in Biloxi, MS? Is there more going on than meets the eye?

V.

I will confess to you that there is perhaps nothing more dangerous than to stand in a pulpit and prophecy, or predict, or even try and explain the presence or absence of God. So I am not going to do that.

I am going to raise however, similar points to those I raised following the Tsunami last December.

1) We live in a powerful creation and we are no match for Mother Nature. This creation made the storm and it is a powerful planet that we dare not take for granted. When you have seen 100 year old poplar trees and great tall yellow pines snapped, and I mean snapped, like balsa wood in the palm of your hand you understand that the planet is larger than us and when and if she chooses to crush she crushes.

God as the crafter of the planet, the author of Mother Nature, allows for great and terrible storms. I do not think that it this is some judgment or some message from God as some have said. Andrew Zimmerman writing on the internet states, “It is too convenient to say, in the wake of a catastrophe like Katrina, that here is one of the bowls of wrath John speaks of in the Revelation; that God is pouring it out on our nation as punishment for our collective sins. Yes, the end of world is probably coming soon, but I’ll be damned (pardon the pun) if I’m going to let it wash over me like gently rolling surf. No, the suffering of the thousands of victims must strike me with gale-force winds. I have no time for theological quibbles, for debating whether or not a loving God could or would have let such a disaster strike.”[1]

Why then did it happen if it was not wrath? Why would God allow such pain? I do not know fully and I will never know this side of the gates of heaven.

What I do know, though, is point 2): if we dare to blame God for the bad days in creation, and Monday August 29 and the week following certainly qualify, we had better be prepared for properly thanking God for the days and the weeks and the months and the years on end when it all works as it should.

Most of the time the earth spins and the plants grow and the sun rises and sets and we take it all for granted. It is a miracle that it happens. Everyday it is a miracle. The laws of physics, and gravity, and oxygen, and chlorophyll are all miracles. And the power that keeps it going day after day after day is sometimes gets whipped-up and spins out of control and hurricanes happen. Let us be thankful for the days when it does work because it seems to me that catastrophe could strike at any moment.

In Bogalusa, LA, where I was there was no power, there were no lights, and it was dark. It just so happened last Saturday night there was a new moon – meaning there was no moon and the stars were so pure and the sky was so dark and the vastness of it all was overwhelming. It was miraculous and I literally fell to my knees in wonder and awe. If we are going to ask God “why Katrina,” let us always thank God for the goodness of it all and the many times it all works correctly and let us acknowledge that the same power that makes the storm possible is the same that provides the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies. In other words, tears should well in our eyes and our hearts both when we see the tragedy in our midst and the beauty that is yet somehow, inexplicably, save the love of a God who would give us such beauty and wonder, all around.

Lastly, 3), whenever human suffering is spurred by unnecessary and senseless death, the lessons of History almost always point out that human sin is somehow involved in the deaths themselves. One theologian says, “One can interpret the biblical teaching about human sin as the constant attempt to bring under human control what we are not qualified to control.”[2]

Did a human make the hurricane like they flew the planes four years ago today? No.

But did people ignore the warnings? Did nursing homes send the buses away? Did people underestimate in their own arrogance, or presumed indomitability, or ignorance, or poverty, the power of Katrina? Yes. And did some die because of this underestimation? Yes.

Writing for Sojourners a Christian journal, Wes Gransberg-Michaelson the general secretary of the Reformed Church in America offers, “When I see the devastating effects of Katrina, I don't simply regard these as an inexplicable "act of God." I also focus on the sins of humanity. We've disobeyed God's clear biblical instructions to preserve the integrity of God's good creation, and to overcome the scourge of poverty. In the aftermath of Katrina, we desperately need not only compassion, but also repentance.”[3]

Perhaps its time we looked again at poor neighborhoods and housing complexes in the urban core. Perhaps its time we talked honestly about global warming and sea level rise. Perhaps it is time for a little repentance about how we think about neighbors in need and the planet we inhabit.

Taken together, these three things provide a start to begin thinking theologically and faithfully about the storm. They are strong places of thought and faith – that we live a powerfully and beautiful designed world, and that world, thankfully works most of the time, and the way we live in and treat that world and our neighbors really matters for our own oversights and assumptions can lead to pain and suffering for us and for others.

God gives us these kinds of “oak trees” when we think about evil and pain – and while they do not make the flood of tears suddenly cease they do aid and abet the recovery and drying processes. And so we place these lessons alongside the great promises of the dove and rainbow that come long after the floods have subsided. We place this understanding alongside of Genesis 50:20 – “that which was meant for evil can yet, by the power of God, be made good.” So calling upon the promises of God we yet find an oak tree in the midst of the spiritual storm that all great earthly storms inevitably bring.

Will good come from Katrina? It is too early to tell for sure, but in time and in faith if great people choose expression over silence there is no telling and something good indeed might be harvested in times to come.

VI.

My Aunt Cathy lives in Oregon, and she is a wonderful woman with a sharp wit a loyal heart and lovely way of seeing the world as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Her parents are the great aunt and uncle I went to Louisiana to help directly packing in a horse trailer full of water, gas, food, and other items. When I got there they, Uncle Robert and Aunt Doris, were feeding the neighborhood, bringing water and power to neighbors, trying desperately to get sick people admitted to the hospital. They proceeded immediately to give away the horse trailer full of things that we had brought to them.

My Aunt Cathy sent me an email this week, and she wrote these words, “Honey, I know Mom, Dad, Uncle Jim and Aunt Charlene were touched to the bottom of their hearts.  The outpouring of love, compassion, concern has been awesome.  It has been the finest example of God showing His love through His children—‘when I was thirsty, you gave me drink....’”

VII.

In that Spirit, Paul, writing to the Church at Corinth in support of the Jerusalem offering shares this: “8 I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. 9 For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. 13 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between 14 your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.” (2 Corinthians 8)

The greatest oak tree that we have it turns out is the ministry of the church and our love for neighbor.

“It terrible what has happened,” a member of this church said to me in the hall as she was here asking what she could do to help, “but it is amazing how people have come to help, have come to aid, people are wonderful and our country is great.”

So today we might share a little from our abundance, here in this place where we know a thing or two about floods and the promises of God for restoration to come on this anniversary of the dedication of this sanctuary.

What from our present abundance might we share? And not just today but in weeks and months to come? As God has given to us here in North Carolina, in Tarboro, at HMPC, let us be willing to give. For we have received in years past and now we are being given a different part to play in this great drama of recovery.

Folks from all over were oak trees in the face of the storm for us in the past – we dare not now in this hour bury our heads in the topsoil and acts like a bunch of acorns.

VIII.

When I was a child on the Gulf Coast, the expression of determination was “come hell or high water.”

“Come hell or high water, I am going to finish painting this house,” someone nearby might say.

Hell and high water? They came last week to my native home and their after shocks are worse than we imagined.

But, come hell, or high water, or the pine trees of Washington Parish, LA, we are still the people of God and those are still our neighbors in need.

And while I cannot as your minister ever explain fully the suffering of the past days I can completely throw myself and our church upon the mercies of God as we follow his great callings in the future. Today the call to aid and help is before us, as it will be in weeks to come. May God grant us His power as we pray, and share, and work with and for others and do our best to be oak trees for those whose find themselves in stormy places.

Amen.

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[1] Andrew Zimmerman, “Daily Dig” cited from Bruderhof.com – September 7, 2005.

[2] Daryll Guder. The Continuing Conversion of the Church, page 76.

[3] Sojo Mail, Sojourners.com, September 8, 2005.