The God of Hurricanes

St. Paul’s Church in Nantucket

THE GOD OF HURRICANES

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                                                                    October 3, 2004

 

The Scripture readings, the hymns, and the sermon this morning are all chosen to illuminate a particular theme. Here is just a bit of another Psalm that I want to read in the context of Nantucket Island:

 

O Lord, how manifold are thy works!

...the earth is full of thy creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide...

There go the ships,

   and Leviathan which thou didst form to sport in it. (Psalm 104)

 

            The writer Bill McKibben, in his wonderful little book about the book of Job,  The Comforting Whirlwind, quotes this passage:

 

“Leviathan which thou didst form to sport in it”¾anyone who has seen a humpback whale breaching understands that phrase, and the world of meaning it conveys. Those who make fun of the “save the whales” crowd make fun of God.[1]

 

Our first reading was a portion of God’s address to Job, from the famous book of Job in the Old Testament. You know how the story goes. God and the devil have a wager. The devil bets that if God afflicts his servant Job with all sorts of tragic losses and terrible diseases, Job will curse God. Job’s friends come to try to comfort him in his suffering. As long as they keep their mouths shut they are true comforters, but when they start trying to give theological explanations they cease to be of any use. Job responds to them with long-winded laments. This goes on for 37 chapters¾talk, talk, talk. Then suddenly the Lord God appears to Job in a whirlwind and says, basically, “Where were you, O person of infinite insignificance, when I, the Lord, laid the foundations of the earth?” For some weird reason this seems to satisfy Job. It wouldn’t satisfy you or me, but it seems to satisfy him. He says,

 

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?

I lay my hand on my mouth...

I despise myself,

and repent in dust and ashes.”

 

            We aren’t likely to find that speech in any self-esteem workshops. Yet the writer(s) and editor(s) of this story seem to find it entirely satisfactory. Something about the actual appearance and speech of God to Job has made all the “why” questions irrelevant. The revelation of the overpowering presence and majesty of God lifts Job out of his troubles.

 

            Listen again to some of the rhetorical questions with which the Lord stuns Job from the whirlwind:

 

“...who shut in the sea with doors...?

[who] prescribed bounds for it...

and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

     and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?....

Can you send forth lightnings...?

Who...can tilt the waterskins of the heavens...?

 

            In other words, can you, Job, create a storm? Can you even manage a storm? Of course not. So get back in your place.[2]

 

            When we are in landscapes like Nantucket, we tend to feel that we are somehow closer to God. “God’s creation,” we call our favorite places¾“God’s country,” “God’s acre.” Indeed there are many passages in the Psalms that praise God for his wonderful works shown in the beauty of nature. Look at your own stained glass, with these tranquil scenes of flowers and sky. But this is not the whole story. You don’t see any windows of hurricanes or tornadoes in churches, yet just a few moments ago, we read the “Thunderstorm Psalm” (Psalm 29):

 

The voice of the Lord is upon the waters;

the God of glory thunders...

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars...

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness...

The voice of the Lord makes the oaks to whirl,

and strips the forests bare;

and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”

The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;

the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever.

 

            This depicts the people of God not only worshipping God for his power shown in the mighty storm, but even crying out “Glory!” to him in the midst of it.

 

            The Biblical testimony about storms raises all sorts of questions. I recently read David McCullough’s book, The Johnstown Flood.[3] In the year 1889, a broken dam in the Pennsylvania hills near Pittsburgh unleashed waters that drowned more than 2000 people and utterly destroyed much of the town. It mesmerized the entire nation to a degree that was almost comparable to 9/11, except of course without television. McCullough reports that “countless sermons on ‘The Meaning of the Johnstown Flood’ were delivered in every part of the land for many Sundays running...The story of Noah was read from many pulpits.”[4] This was a time in America when many people had intimate knowledge of the Bible. As the cataracts of water stormed through Johnstown, one group huddled together on the third floor of their house as the Rev. Dr. David Beale read aloud from Psalm 46:

 

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled...

 

But two passages in particular really captured my attention. McCullough writes that the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmadge, one of the most eminent preachers of the day, took Psalm 93 as his text:

 

The floods have lifted up their voice...

the floods lift up their roaring.

Mightier than the thunders of many waters,

mightier than the waves of the sea,

the Lord on high is mighty!

 

The Rev. Dr. Talmadge, obviously a man of penetrating theological intelligence, preached that those who want “only the religion of sunshine...blue sky and beautiful grass” would discover that nature was merciless. “Let me ask such persons what they make of the floods in Pennsylvania.”

 

The Scripture teaches that God is not “in” nature, is not an extension of nature, is not co-existent with nature. Mountains, rivers, flowers and sunsets testify to God, they praise God, they give glory to God, but God is not “in” them. God is the Creator of them; God is separate from them. The voice of the Lord is not in the waters, it is “upon the waters.” “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood.”

 

The second passage that struck me in McCullough’s book was this one:

 

The flood and the night that had followed, for all their terror and destruction and suffering, had had a certain terrible majesty. Many people had thought it was Judgment Day...that the whole world was being destroyed and not just Johnstown. It had...come as a destruction from the Almighty. It had been awful, but it had been God awful.

 

It is very difficult for us today to think like 19^th century American Christians, but I’m trying to suggest that we have something to learn from all this. Today, even knowing what we do about hurricanes, some people simply cannot resist going into harm’s way to see the power of nature fully unleashed. Even though they know there will be frightful damage and possibly death, they want to see that power. It is strangely uplifting to catch a glimpse of something that is completely beyond the capacity of human beings to control. The experience offers a fleeting glimpse (emphasis on “fleeting”) of a transcendence that we cannot find in a calm sea or a quiet garden. There is a ditty that says we’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth, but in the Bible, Satan seems to specialize in gardens¾the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane.

 

In the recent best-seller Isaac’s Storm, the deadliest hurricane in American history is described. On September 8, 1900, much of Galveston, Texas was destroyed and 6000 people drowned. The book creates a remarkable atmosphere of menace and dread as the unforeseen and unnamed storm gathered offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The descriptions of the implacable forces of wind and water assaulting the city are described with exceptional skill. The passage that remains with me is a description of the ordeal of a man named Samuel Young who rode out the storm using his bedroom door as a raft. It was an incredibly terrifying experience. For eight hours, in the blackness of the night, he thought he was the only person left alive in Galveston. Yet months later he testified that the sight of the storm in its full power was “the grandest [scene] I ever witnessed.”

 

I would fully expect many of you here to be shocked by much of this. Talking about hurricanes and reading these Biblical passages raises many disturbing questions about who lives and who dies, and where God is in the darkness, and whether we can praise God even in the midst of cataclysm. David McCullough continues his story about the Johnstown flood, telling us that the experience of being in the hand of God all night drained away in the morning. When the sun came up and disclosed the devastation, the sight before the survivors “in the dismal cold was just ugly and sordid and heartbreaking, and already it was beginning to smell...”

 

The suffering caused by natural disasters raises questions that challenge us at the very heart of our Christian faith, and I am not suggesting that we avoid them. This morning, however, I am trying to focus on just one specific facet of our theological inheritance. If we are truly to understand the miracle of God’s mercy and loving-kindness, we need also to know the might, majesty, dominion and power of God. We can’t fully grasp the magnitude of what God has done for us unless we have some sense of the unimaginable power that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ possesses. This is a very important aspect of the witness of the Old Testament.

 

Fooling around with nature is analogous to underestimating God. No doubt every Nantucketer has read Nathaniel Philbrick’s book In the Heart of the Sea. You know that the story of the whaleship that was attacked by an enraged sperm whale gave Herman Melville the idea for his mighty novel Moby Dick. The prize-winning nonfiction book by Philbrick and the masterpiece of imaginative fiction by Melville each has a deep symbolic connection to our theme. Philbrick writes that the deeply religious Nantucket whaling merchants were serenely convinced that they had been called by God “to maintain a peaceful life on land while raising bloody havoc on the sea.”[5] When the fire of 1846 destroyed much of this town, the worst damage was done on the waterfront because the sperm whale oil stored there burned beyond the capacity of any human firefighters to extinguish it. It was therefore said, writes Philbrick, that the leviathan had finally achieved his revenge.[6]

 

For what it’s worth, my own study of Moby Dick has led me to the conclusion that this heroic novel is Melville’s repudiation of the soft and sentimental God that was beginning to predominate in American Christianity in his time and after.[7] If Melville was going to reject God, he was going to reject the towering God of the Bible, not some pale and ineffective substitute who was unable either to judge or to condemn, let alone save. Melville lampoons the “romantic, melancholy” young sailor, apparently common in his day, who signs on for a whaling voyage in order to have some sort of spiritual experience. A sailor of this sort, Melville writes, would rather dream atop the mast than actually see a whale. He writes savagely, “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all...[and] with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.” And Melville ends with a sardonic thrust at the liberal Protestants of his day: “Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”[8]

 

            It is this dangerous God of storm and wind, waves and water, fire and flood, this God who is infinitely bigger than the sum of all natural phenomena put together, this God who tilts the waterskins of the heavens and speaks to the waves saying, “Thus far and no further,” it is this God who in Jesus Christ is lying asleep in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. A potentially lethal storm comes up, a storm of the sort that still to this day, I’m told, whips up suddenly on that lake:

 

...the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But [Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4:37-41)

 

Here’s the point. This is what the evangelist Mark wants you to know, here, today, by the power of the living Spirit of God. “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate Creator. Just as God, in the beginning, said “Let there be light, and there was light,” the mere Word of Christ is enough to quiet the storm and bring “a great calm.”

 

Does this action of Jesus mean that we will always be delivered from storms? No. Does the knowledge of God as Lord over the hurricane solve the problem of suffering? No. Does the glory of the Lord “enthroned upon the flood” deliver us from “the ugly and sordid and heartbreaking realities” of this mortal life? No. There are many things in this life that we cannot understand.

 

But there are some things that we can understand. It is good for us to have humility in the world, to know our place, to know that there are powers beyond our control.[9]

 

And it is good for us to reflect deeply upon the use that God makes of his power. If you and I had power over hurricanes and earthquakes and tornadoes, what would we do with it? All the evidence suggests that we would unleash it against our perceived enemies. The last thing we would do is give it up and turn ourselves over “to be betrayed into the hands of wicked men.” Yet that is what the Son of God did. It is this contrast between the cosmic might of the Creator God and the suffering of the Messiah on the Cross that makes the Christian story unique.

 

Through these passages today, he speaks to you, the living God of infinite power yet infinite mercy. “The fear of the Lord,” says the Scripture, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Dear friends, know this: however much the storms of this life may batter you within and without, we may, as the little song says, “put your hand...

 

“...put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.” r