When tragedy comes, it’s necessary to want an enemy.
In times like these, when faced with the unthinkable and the horrible, we need a place to direct our shared outrage; someone to shoulder the full force of our collective grief.
We all find some odd comfort, in determining the identities of shooters and bombers and terrorists and disgruntled school kids, because we can put a face to the evil. In some way, when we’re in acute pain, it helps to have someone to hate.
But what happens to us as believers, when the only logical place to assign blame for the unfathomable destruction we’re seeing or walking through, is Heaven?
As the communities around Oklahoma City begin to pull themselves from the utter devastation, we all watch and read along; trying to make some sense of scenes that seem to make no sense, and to reconcile what we’re seeing, with a God of love and mercy.
And it ain’t easy.
In the aftermath of 9/11, or the Newtown shootings, or the Boston bombings, we almost had it easy. We in the Church could rationalize away, that evil is real, and that that evil can make people do disgusting, wasteful things to other people. As Christians, we could ultimately chalk it up, to a guy in a red suit and a pitchfork, pulling the strings of humanity; perverting their free will, and wreaking havoc on God’s good creation through them.
We could then go about the business of Tweeting and blogging and preaching, about how sin has ravaged mankind, and that we need to repent and turn to God.
But when we see elementary schools filled with sweet, innocent second graders, leveled in an instant by an act of nature, (the very wind and waves that the Gospels tell us Jesus commands), it’s difficult to come up with any other conclusion, than God did it, or at best, allowed it… and that’s a tough pill to swallow.
When we can’t blame guns or gays or mental illness or terrorists or politicians for the madness around us; when horror brings us to our knees, and our soul’s only response is to pray, how do we pray?
Prayer is a strange place at times like these. We find ourselves asking God to help rescue people from, well, God; to now bring mercy, where He has seemingly brought destruction in the first place.
These are hard questions, and to be honest, I don’t have any good answers.
The easy, religiousy answer, (one that I’ve heard too many times to count in church circles), is that “we live in a fallen world”; that creation itself has been corrupted by sin, and that nature is not as it should be. I’m not sure that is much comfort to you, or to those who are emerging from the rubble in Oklahoma City this morning.
Yes, there is always good to be found in the wake of tragedy. We see what we recognize as God’s character, in the outpouring of kindness and compassion toward those who suffer, yet even as we do, the cost just seems too high. Couldn’t God, being God, have found a better way to teach us all of this?
I wish there was more I could offer here, but maybe this is just one of those Psalms, like so many in Scripture, where the writer looks around, and realizes that we who believe, live in a profound tension; between trusting that God is love, and wondering why that loving God, allows so much calamity to come to his children.
Today, we pray our flawed prayers, and we look for faith to be rescued from the wreckage.
