Guilsborough:  2 January 20005
Help us, O Lord, 
to become masters of ourselves
that we may become the servants of others.
Take our lips and speak through them, 
our minds and think through them,
and take our hearts and set them on fire,
 Amen.
Job:  Chapter 1 verse 21
And Job said “naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.” 
A fairly long time ago when I was a teenager at school, it was the custom to spend the last few minutes of some of our French lessons, whatever the theme of that lesson had been, on looking at some English or French poetry.   
First, the master would recite a few lines himself, explaining their origins and meaning. Then he would pick out one of the boys to recite, always standing on a chair.  Each of us had our favourite snippet that we knew by heart, and always they were taken from a book of snippets, know as “Spells” that our teacher himself had edited and published.   
The book had six sections:  Sheer, Queer, Fear, Love, Death and God.  And if education is what is left over when one has forgotten all that one learned, then that book was my education.  
For through that poetry I caught a glimpse of the mind of man ranging from the moving to the frankly bizarre and of Man’s understanding of God – themes to pursue and think about for a lifetime. 
Here is the prophet Isaiah  “I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. I am Yaweh who do all these things.” 
And God said let there be light and there was light. And in juxtaposition to that: 
Or Shakespeare: as one of her attendants says to Cleopatra: “Finish good lady the bright day is done and we are for the dark”
If the Brazilian Consul…..
Lord Berners on seeing a picture by Salvadore Dali: 
“On the pale yellow sands there’s a pair of clasped hands and an eyeball entangled in string……………….
But most relevant to the issue that I want to address to-day was the French 17th century philosopher Pascal very relevant to –day’s theme on the human condition:
 
”Man is only a reed, one of the feeblest creations of nature. But he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary for the entire universe to take up arms to destroy him. A breeze, a drop of water is enough to kill him.  But when the universe destroys him, man remains nobler than his killer, because he knows he is dying. And the advantage that the universe has over him is that the universe knows nothing
Which brings me to the vast human tragedy of the last week. “ But when the universe destroys him, man remains nobler than his killer…”
Human thought triumphs over death. When the tsunami sweeps you away, there is at least this satisfaction. You know what is happening.  The tsunami does not. Cold comfort you might think. But comfort of a kind.
Let’s go back to Isaiah proclaiming the unity of God  “I make peace and create evil. I am Yahweh who do all of these things” I was reading how in exile the Hebrews met for the first time the Persian dualism of Zoroastrianism. Two gods: a good one and an evil one fought for the mastery.  We may owe the figure of Satan to this influence.  But Isaiah rejects that doctrine and is making it quite clear that, in the last resort, not only good but also evil comes from God.  The problem is dealt with in Job, where Satan is Yahweh’s servant, not his equal.
But how can a loving God, as we are taught in the New Testament, stand back and allow over 250,000 people to be killed as a result of an earthquake?  How on Auschwitz Memorial Day, we may wonder, did he allow the murder of millions of Jews during the Second World War?   Why does he, as Isaiah says, allow such evil to happen?   The argument rages on, as you may have heard on the airwaves this week. 
The growing number of unbelievers, at least according to recent opinion polls, or those who are indifferent to God’s existence, would surely say that events of this kind make a mockery of the idea that God is benevolent.   
We humans have free will. We choose to do good or evil. God let’s us get on with it  - is one idea.  But an earthquake has no free will. It destroys the innocent and the helpless without reason. The Universe knows nothing.  So where does that leave divine purpose, the sceptics say?  And they draw the conclusion that God does not exist. 
But there is no logic in that proposition.  If human catastrophes are described as evidence that God does not exist, those arguing in that way must accept that all the good, or fortunate, things that happen are evidence of the contrary.   I’m not proposing this morning to prove the existence of God.  I would not be standing here if I had any doubts.   But being conscious that I might break the 7 minutes rule to day, don’t want to try your patience!  
The problem with God for many people is, however, that they do not see him in their lives.  And thus they are apathetic, indifferent. It’s a national characteristic one might say. 
“ Oh, I’ve got no influence”, the argument goes,  “therefore I can’t be bothered, say, to vote or take an interest in politics or to take part in the community’s projects”.   This characteristic is, as one commentator put it recently, “a detachment from any abstract or profound understanding of life and its meaning………  Only immediate satisfactions and concrete rewards count”.   
A walk around Northampton Town centre on Friday or Saturday nights illustrates the point that “having a laugh” is what matters to a great many people with pretty dire consequences.
And yet we are the British people who changed the world for good in so many ways: think of the Anti-Slavery Society, the Salvation Army, the Scout Movement, Amnesty International, Meals on Wheels, St. John Ambulance all home grown, now world wide, institutions.   The people living at YMCA in St. John’s Passage may be in different to the C in that acronym.  But was the British C that was the driving force behind that institution and indeed all those great movements. 
So the huge response of the British public to appeals for aid to the victims of the tsunami, now £200 million, is a sign that indifference and apathy are not at all  universal in  our land.   Jesus’ injunction about loving our neighbour does have meaning – even if the context of the story of the Good Samaritan is unknown to many who contribute.  
I can’t read God’s purpose in the disaster or the Holocaust.   But I can see it, at least in the former case, as an opportunity for all of us to make a difference to the lives of others to whom we have been indifferent for too long.  Let’s put ourselves in context.  If we could shrink the earth’s population to a congregation in this church of 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look more or less like this:  
There would be in St. James’s to-day: 
 
57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 8 Africans. 52 would be female, 70 non-white, 30 Christian. Six people would possess 59% of the wealth of the entire world and all would live in the United States; 70 would be unable to read; 50 would suffer from malnutrition; one would be near death, one near birth.  Only one would have had a college education and one would have a computer. 70 would never have used the telephone. Those are very telling statistics.  We don’t have to have a bad conscience about them. We just need to do something. 
So, rather than asking why God allowed the disaster to happen, we need to think what we do next and how we do it.  
 Well, this is the right Sunday for New Year resolutions.  If this disaster brings about a profound change in the relationship between the developed and developing world, and involves each of us, then some good will have come out of the terrible events of this last week.  We can resolve to help to build that New Jerusalem in this country, in this county, here in this benefice in practical ways by, for example, adopting one of the stricken communities and helping to rebuild it.  
No doubt there are many other ideas on how to show our love for the people of South East Asia and Africa who have lost so much. 
“And some there be which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been”, the writer of Ecclesiaticus tells us….” but their name liveth for evermore”.   We can make that happen.
 
There is, as Thornton Wilder put it,   “a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love - the only survival, the only meaning. “
It’s our job to help to join a revolution and build that bridge.  
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A prayer from Martin Luther King. 
And now to him who is able to keep us from falling and lift us from the dark valley of despair to the bright mountain of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy; to him be power and authority for ever and ever  - Amen.
 
 
 
