Recently, my publisher “outsourced” the publicity on my book Hidden in Plain Sight, meaning they hired an outside agency to garner media attention.  I was surprised to find the agency pitching the book with the headline, “How can a merciful God allow an earthquake in

Peru?” with an accompanying photo of distressed Peruvians clambering over mounds of rubble.  “Ethicist (!) Mark Buchanan,” the press release announces, “is conducting national interviews to address this tough question and others like them.”

            Yikes.

            It’s a good question, though my books touche on the problem of suffering from a very different angle.  But why would a merciful God allow such a thing?

                Several things come to mind:

v      It’s a question that most people through most of history did not ask in the face of catastrophe.  Throughout most of history, people’s  instinctual question was not, “Why has a merciful God allowed this?” It was, “What have we done to a holy God to deserve this?”  In other words, pervious eras began with a clear sense of their own blameworthiness and God’s innocence.  Our age reverses this: we’re innocent, and God’s to blame.  He owes us an explanation, not we him.  C.S. Lewis says that this change in perspective is one of the most significant, and dangerous, theological shifts that’s ever occurred.

v      But I don’t think either question – who caused this, God or people? - is on the right track.  The book of Job tells us that suffering is a mystery, and no clear, cut-and-dried theological explanation exists for it that we can come up with in our lifetime.  Romans 8, however, gives as clear an answer as we can hope for: the whole creation is broken, frustrated, groaning, and waiting for one thing - the children of God to come into the fullness of our liberation.  In other words, earthquakes and the like are a by-product of a fallen world.  But what they do is sharpen our own anticipation for that day when God heals, through and through, what is now broken.  And the fastest way from here to there, as much as it depends on us, is for us to live deeply into the freedom of Christ.

v      In the meantime, Romans 8 says, we can rest in the sure knowledge that “nothing in creation” can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, earthquakes included.

v      And I’d point to Paul’s words when he himself was overwhelmed with grief.  “This has happened,” he says, “so that we would not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).  The earthquake in

Peru has killed over 500 people and injured thousands more.  It is an overwhelming tragedy.  But in the face of it, and other tragedies, God has one profound lesson to teach us: Come to Me.  Look to Me.  Rely on Me. 

                        God does not always provide a supernatural cure for or rescue out of suffering.  But he is always ready to provide his divine presence in the midst of it.

 

Shalom

 

Mark

I finish preaching in my church this Sunday (May 27) a series on Paul’s letter to the Romans (you can download sermons free from our website, www.newlifechurch.bc.ca).  I’ve enjoyed delving into the riches of Paul’s theology, even if my delving was mostly skimming – I covered all 16 chapters in 8 meagre weeks.  But it’s been enough for me, and I think my congregation, to emerge with a deeper appreciation for the revolutionary power of this one document.  No wonder the church many times through history – from Augustine’s conversion to Luther’s reformation to Wesley’s revival to Barth’s (almost) lone stand against Hitler – trace its roots to a rediscovery of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. 

                This Sunday, I’m attempting to cover the letter’s last five chapters, Romans 12-16.  Audacious, maybe foolish, as that seems, the five chapters are united in a single concern: that we would respond appropriately to the great good news of Jesus’ saving work.  If the first 11 chapters are primarily theological, the last five are primarily ethical.  How then shall we live?  Paul elaborates two responses: in the church, seek unity.  In the world, seek peace.  But the furnace that ignites both is worship – a whole-hearted worship in response to God’s great mercy, and issuing into Christ-like transformation (see Romans 12:1-2).  When the church worships for any other reason than that God showed us mercy, transformation never happens.  When we grasp how wide and deep and high and long is God’s mercy, we can’t help by give God our best and our all.  And with that, he always multiplies a thousand-fold.

 

Shalom

 

Mark Buchanan

 

I’ve been waiting for the flood waters to recede so that I can take my daughter Nicola fishing in the

Cowichan

River, near where we live.  Nicola, of all my children, has caught my virus for the sport, for which there is no known cure.  We tried, despite the weather and the swollen waters, to go recently anyhow.  It was a wet grey Saturday, the rain pelting down hard, but she was bent on going nonetheless.  So we drove to a place I know (don’t even bother asking, because no fisherman worth his fly rod will share such secrets).  The rain fell, and drenched us.  The river’s silty waters rode high up its banks and made casting tricky as threading a camel through a needle’s eye.  We broke out a new lure, fresh from the package, a yellow spoon with a flame of red sundering its middle.  Very flashy.  We snagged it third cast, and lost it to the torrents. 

                But we couldn’t have been happier.  As I said, we’ve got the virus.  No cure. 

                Jesus liked fish, and fisherman.  At least four of the disciples – Peter, Andrew, John, James - were chosen from the ranks of the fish trade.  And Jesus, whenever he ate, tended to pick the fresh water menu item.

                I think he understood the virus well. 

                So it’s men like me, and girls like Nicola, who hear with extra poignancy and potency his words, “Now you will become fishers of men.”  He knew what to say to get our attention.  He knew what would pique our interest.

                Could evangelism and discipleship be that captivating?  Could a life of trying to win the hearts of men and women be for us, for all of us, what fishing is to my daughter and me: a thing you’d wake early, and suffer loss, and endure bad weather just to do?  A thing you’d go long stretches empty-handed just for the thrill of that moment when the line goes taut, the rod bends, and the chase is on?

                Yes. 

                One thing the Lord is teaching me (and, as Jesus said, what he whispers to me in secret I will shout from rooftops) is that when we fail to lead lives of witness – showing and telling others what it is to follow Jesus – we are not so much cheating God as we are robbing ourselves.  We are missing one of the best parts about following Jesus. 

                He wants us to go fishing. 

                Why, rain or shine, would anyone want to lay around the house?

 

Shalom,

 

Mark Buchanan