A sermon on Psalm 30 by Nathan Nettleton, 15 February 2009

“Lord, how I begged you, and you, God, saved me. You pulled me from the pit, brought me back from Sheol.”

Those words from the psalmist have an eerie ring this week We’ve heard such things a few too many times

“I’ve seen the inside of hell,” they say “The sky was black and the air was full of burning embers and rocks.” “The heat and the wind and the ferocity of the fire were indescribable Everything was just engulfed” “We’ve been to hell, the pit of hell, and some of us have come back”

Some came back, but a lot didn’t “What good is my blood to you? Why push me down the pit? Can dead bones praise you, recount your unbroken love?”

There are bodies in the burned out streets In Marysville, many of the bodies have been so thoroughly incinerated that the investigators can’t tell whether they are looking at one body or several Why, Lord. What good is this? “Can dead bones praise you, recount your unbroken love?”

We are humbled to the point of despair by a disaster like this Of course, we’ve see disasters on our TV news before Often. More often than we care to remember But usually we don’t relate It’s a long way away They don’t look like us They didn’t have much and so they didn’t lose much They die in their thousands and we move on to the sport and the weather

But this is different It’s not really, but it feels different This time we notice, this time we relate This time it is just up the road This time they look like us, talk like us, and some of them are even personally known to us My God, they could just as easily be us

And we are brought to our knees with the psalmist, humbled to the point of despair: “When all was going well, I thought I could never fall; with God’s powerful blessing, I would stand like a mountain! Then you hid your face; I shook with fear!”

Before the ferocious power of a fire storm everyone is helpless nobody can stand normally we can easily divide ourselves up, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless, the good and the bad, but when the firestorm comes down the street we’re all the same Then there is only the lucky and the unlucky and even the lucky are scarred and traumatised and often wracked with senseless guilt

A friend of mine whose been up there this week as a chaplain spoke to a man who had been protecting his home from the fire He’d seen two little girls running down the street terrified so he grabbed them and sheltered them in his house while he continued to fight off the fire But eventually his house began to burn and when he tried to find the girls he couldn’t and despite his efforts, the fire drove him out and the girls died as the house burnt around them And as he sobbed he said over and over again, “I murdered those little girls. I murdered those little girls…”

The man’s a hero but when heroes can’t turn back the fire even they feel like failures like murderers even.

“What good is my blood to you? Why push me down the pit? Can dead bones praise you, recount your unbroken love?”

In the face of unspeakable trauma and tragedy this psalm, like many psalms, is full of “Why, Lord, why?” Cries for help and anguished questions and even some hope for the future: “You pulled me from the pit, brought me back from Sheol. Laughter fills a day after one brief night of tears. You changed my anguish into this joyful dance, pulled off my sackcloth, gave me bright new robes”

Clearly the psalm wasn’t written in one sitting on the day of the tragedy Those are the words of hindsight when life has begun to rise again from the ashes We are not going to hear those hope-filled words echoed too often while they’re still trying to identify the bodies

But that’s one of the beauties of the psalms They run the whole gamut of human emotions Wherever we are at, it’s in there somewhere out most gut-wrenching feelings preserved in the form of a prayer The Bible itself assuring us that God is big enough to cope no matter what has been stirred up inside of us and that God has even sanctified our anguish in the words of sacred scripture itself

“Why, God, why?” is not an expression of sinful doubt In fact it is an act of faith, an expression of trust in the God who is big enough to take whatever grief we hurl at him

But what the psalms almost never do and in fact what the whole Bible very rarely does is attempt to give a simple answer to that “why, God, why” question The question is allowed to hang in the air and its power is honoured by the inability to answer it

The Bible certainly knows of the temptation to try to find quick and convenient answers Job’s friends are rebuked for their confident attempts to answer it “Suffering only comes as punishment for sin” they said “No” said God “I am honoured by Job’s ‘why’ more than by your facile answers.” Jesus too quickly dismissed the view that a disaster was a proof of someone’s sin (Luke 13:1-5)

Why can’t we take heed?

Last week in my sermon I said that “Religious lunatics with their pet hates will always want us to see the fires as Gods judgement on this or that.” I’d have been a lot happier to have had that ‘prophesy’ left unfulfilled. But no This week, a self-publicising preacher who doesn’t deserve to be named issued a press release claiming that the Spirit of God had revealed to him that God had stopped protecting Victoria from fire because our government had decriminalised abortion

He doesn’t just publicise this as being his own opinion He attributes it directly to God This is precisely what the Bible names as the sin of blasphemy: dragging the Lord’s name through the mud

He leaves himself some wriggle room He doesn’t say God sent the fires; he says that God stopped protecting us from the fires I tried to explain this distinction to my ten year old daughter She snorted and said, “Well, it’s the same thing really, isn’t it?” I reckon she’s right

If my dog was trying to attack you and I was restraining it, would “removing my conditional protection” leave me any less culpable than if I had attacked you myself?

If God was protecting the people of Kinglake and Marysville and deliberately stopped doing so because he didn’t like a decision made in Spring Street, then God is culpable for the fires And to use an indiscriminate attack on the innocent public in order to cause mass terror in the hope of getting your message through that way is precisely the definition of terrorism

When people do that, we call them terrorists Any god who would do that would be unworthy of our worship And you can perhaps begin to see why such teachings are not only mind-bogglingly insensitive but downright dangerous If we can imagine God seeing such terrorist tactics as an appropriate response to the prevalence of abortion then we are only a very short slide away from seeing ourselves as serving God by committing similar acts as part of the same protest That is how violence always cloaks itself in sacred legitimacy

It is true, I know, that this very psalm I am preaching from could be bent to back up his view: “I thought I could never fall; with God’s powerful blessing, I would stand like a mountain! Then you hid your face; I shook with fear!”

God hiding his face could be equated with removing his conditional protection But the psalms do that They give voice to our feelings, our fears They give us permission to ask that, to point the finger at God and yell “Why?” They don’t give us permission to issue press releases and proclaim it as God’s definitive word for this week’s specific nightmare

At the risk of sounding as arrogant as him, I am willing to say that this preacher is guilty of blasphemy and false prophesy And yes I would be willing to say it to his face for it couldn’t cause half as much hurt as he has inflicted this week

Compare the content of his dream and his proclamation of it to that of a true Christian prophet, Martin Luther King jnr when he said “I have a dream” Which of their dreams sounds more like something that would come from the kind of God revealed in Jesus, a loving and merciful God who is willing to endure any amount of our violence but is never willing to retaliate and perpetuate it

On the basis of the witness of the crucified Jesus himself and in his authority I can declare to you that there is no link between the fires and an angry action of God

If it could be proved that God unleashed the fires in anger over abortion or anything else, then we would have to conclude that Jesus misled us in his portrayal of God And I would hand in my ordination tomorrow and call on you to join me in renouncing our baptism for we could not follow a God who would do that even if he were the creator of everything and held our eternal destiny in his hands

We will follow and serve a God of self-sacrificial love but if God is evil and capricious then we would be right to turn our backs on him and refuse to spend eternity with him no matter how attractive his accommodation is

The God of our Lord Jesus Christ is with us in our anger and shock and confusion God is with us to love and to comfort and to grieve and weep in solidarity

Some people came back from Sheol this week Others were lost in the flames Maybe as many as three hundred of them There is no sense, no rhyme or reason There is no justice

But there is a God who can cope with our questions, with our furious doubts, with our despairing anger And if you could look into the eyes of God, into the eyes of Jesus, you would see there too the horrified eyes of one who has seen the inside of hell You would see there too the bloodshot eyes of one who has fought on through the searing heat of hostility and the choking smoke of human misery in order to pull us from the pit and bring us back from Sheol

He is there now on the blackened streets of Kinglake, Flowerdale, Marysville, and the rest

He is there where the survivors hug and weep He is there where the grief knows no bounds And he is there even in death, grimacing against the searing pain of blasphemy as he cradles the dead in his wounded arms until the day of resurrection

He is there in unfailing solidarity in mercy that lasts a lifetime and in the bottomless cup of grief and love that mingle forever and are poured out for the life of the world “Forever I will thank you, O Lord my God.”

Nathan Nettleton

Feb. 2009