sermons on the tsunami...

The Salty Vicar offers this reflection on faith and catastrophic tidal waves.

When we contemplate the savage immensity of suffering – the entire rim of the Indian Ocean with rotting children’s bodies, we don’t need to make trite and banal statements about God being a great counselor or God’s good judgment or His mystery.

It is enough simply to hate evil and death and suffering and waste and idiocy, to know that our love, our sharing, our generosity, our charity is what we have to sustain ourselves against our fate, or our chance, the random evil that continually threatens us.

Our faith can survive such disasters. What we can do, is help one another, and continue looking in the distance, knowing that while creation is in agony, in our hands we have the tools to do a little, open a small breathing space, light a candle, hold a hand, or carry a dead body lovingly to its grave, the same way our Savior's body was carried into the tomb.

It is in that silence we find ourselves, that tomb, caring for the dead, unaware about what God has in store for us tomorrow.

Bishop Tom Wright of Durham had this reflection in the Independent.

[The Bible] constantly acknowledges evil - "human" and "natural" alike - as a terrible reality. It doesn't try to minimise it, to explain that good will come of it, or to blame someone (reactions which correspond uncomfortably closely to the excuses offered by immoral or warmongering politicians). It tells a story about the Creator's plan to put the world to rights, a plan which involves a people who are themselves part of the problem as well as the bearers of the solution.