Hilton Head Island, SC – October 16, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 13:1-5; Genesis 19:15-26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. – Genesis 19:24 (RSV)
Are Natural Disasters “Natural”?
What we are about to engage in is a circumstantially-produced study of theology. “Theology” is a word derived from two Greek roots: Theos, meaning “God,” and the English suffix “logy,” which comes from a Greek word that means “the study of.” In medicine “cardiology” is the study of the heart, in biology “entomology” is the study of insects, and in linguistics “etymology” is the study of the origin of words. But today we are thinking about theology, the study of God.
However, this sermon did not just bubble up in the mind of a preacher who decided, quite by chance, to preach today on the question “Are Natural Disasters ‘Natural’?” In fact I planned last Sunday to preach on the prophet Isaiah, except that Hurricane Matthew intervened the day before and there was no service last Sunday. Quite obviously this sermon is being preached because our island was hit by the worst hurricane to come here in the past 131 years. In 1885 a hurricane which no one knew was coming completely flooded every inch of Hilton Head in an enormous and probably unprecedented storm surge. Between Savannah and Charleston over 2500 people were killed, most of them by drowning. But for accumulated material losses, Matthew shall far outdistance that long-ago unnamed hurricane on a then-thinly-populated island. On Hilton Head Island alone there will be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. However, it was not primarily because of flooding, but mostly as a result of the thousands of trees which crashed down in the Category 2 winds. A complete clean-up will take several months, and Hilton Head will never again look quite the same as it did before Matthew made his visit.
So we begin with the theological and philosophical question, Are Natural Disasters “Natural”? The answer to that question is quite simply, “Yes, all natural disasters are natural.” They are acts of nature, and only of nature. They are never acts of God.
Nevertheless, from Florida to Virginia there will be thousands of insurance claims which are based on what the insurance industry mistakenly calls “acts of God.” When a tree in a hurricane flattens a car, it is not “an act of God.” When a tornado blows a house away, it is not “an act of God.” When an earthquake swallows up an entire city block, it isn’t an act of God. Those are acts of nature. If acts of nature happen and no one is affected, the people are fortunate (a tricky word when thinking theologically), but they are not acts of God. When someone is struck by lightning and is injured or killed, if that person had an accidental death clause on a life insurance policy, it may be termed “an act of God.” But it isn’t; it is an act of nature. If 800,000 Haitians were killed in an earthquake (which happened in 2010) or if 1,000 were killed by Hurricane Matthew a few days before Matthew struck a glancing blow on Hilton Head Island, God did not cause the destruction; nature did.
Now wait just a minute here. Doesn’t God control nature? No, He doesn’t, and that is perhaps the most important statement to emerge from this sermon. God does not control nature; nature controls nature.
But what, more precisely, does that mean? In terms of theology, it means this: When God created the Big Bang, and as a result of the Big Bang everything that physically exists in the ever-expanding universe began to be created, what is often called “natural law” came into being. God doesn’t control natural law; nature controls natural law. Thus H20 is water and H2SO4 is hydrochloric acid. And thus snakes eat bugs, and mongooses eat snakes, and hyenas eat mongooses, and lions eat hyenas. God causes none of that to happen; the nature of each of those animals causes whatever happens to happen. In nature, stuff happens. Never forget it. And that includes hurricanes. When meteorological conditions are gentle, as Eliza Doolittle said, “hurricanes hardly happen.” But when conditions are fierce, hurricanes hurriedly happen. And depending on the movements of masses of air in the atmosphere, hurricanes can be categorized One through Five, or tropical storms can fizzle out before they ever become hurricanes.
Our hurricane didn’t fizzle. It was a Category Four immediately around its eye. But a few miles out from the eye, which is where Hilton Head Island was when Matthew passed us, it was a Category Two. In that respect, we were fortunate (there’s that word again). Had Matthew passed directly over our sand spit by the sea, the damage would have been far, far worse.
Does that mean that God prevented Matthew from doing greater damage? No, it does not. It means that very particular weather conditions kept Matthew from coming ashore here. Instead he came ashore in McClellanville, thirty miles or so northeast of Charleston. Therefore does that mean God likes Hilton Head better than McClellanville? The short answer is no, and the long answer is too long to answer, if it can be answered at all, which it probably can’t be.
Here is something important to try to remember. God is never directly involved in any natural disasters. It may be claimed that indirectly God is involved, in that it was He who presumably created the laws of nature. But if it is true that He did that (which is debatable), for reasons ultimately known only to Him God gave nature free reign to “do its thing.” And when nature does its thing, it provides seeds for crops, rain to water the crops, and the proper conditions to allow the crops to be harvested (unless it doesn’t provide seeds, rain, or harvests, which sometimes happens. Stuff happens. That’s where being “fortunate” or “unfortunate” comes in. But that isn’t really what this sermon is about. That is the theme for another sermon.)
Two weeks ago we all knew Matthew was down there off the coast of South America. Hurricanes usually don’t go that far south. Could it be a result of climate change? Ask one major presidential candidate and you’ll likely get one answer, and ask the other candidate and you’ll likely get quite a different answer. In other words, does human activity affect climate change, or doesn’t it? Well anyway, up until we were told to evacuate the island, and afterward in phone conversations, people asked me to pray for God to keep the hurricane out to sea. I don’t pray for God to alter the weather, because I don’t believe He ever alters it. Thus it is a pointless exercise. I don’t ask God to give victory to anyone’s team, either, or even to “my” teams, of which I have a considerable number, because I don’t believe God does that. And if He does, I am almost certainly convinced I want no part of such a God. God does not play favorites with anyone.
If prayers move the Creator to alter the laws of nature, what kind of an arbitrary deity do we have? In 1989 did God move Hurricane Hugo three degrees of the compass to the east so that it directly hit Charleston rather than Hilton Head? Hugo was supposed to nail us, but it nailed The Holy City instead. What kind of a capricious God would ever do that?
Here’s something else to try to remember. Up until the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, people believed in a decidedly malleable deity. Prayers could cause God to change His mind, they believed. Countless people still believe that, against both reason and scientific laws. But it isn’t so. God does not alter the laws of nature, because for reasons known only to Him He chose to give nature sovereignty for what nature is intended to do. In the words of Albert Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe.” And it is not at all certain that Einstein believed in God, which further adds to the mystery of theology, nature, and science.
In the first five verses of the 13th Chapter of Luke, there is a peculiar incident that is found only in Luke. Jesus was addressing the very complicated issue of the causality of catastrophes. Some people reminded Jesus about a group of Galileans who had opposed the Romans. In retribution, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had the Galileans killed, and as a terrible warning to the Jews, Pilate had their blood mixed with the blood of the animals the Jews had intended to sacrifice, if they had triumphed. “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered thus?” Jesus insisted they were not.
Then Jesus asked, “Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?” In these two instances Jesus is not talking about natural law resulting in injury or death, but he is suggesting, without saying it directly, that things happen to people for which they experience either good fortune or ill fortune, but that God is not involved in the process at all. The Galileans were killed by Pilate because they rebelled against Rome, and the eighteen unfortunates were killed by a tower which apparently was badly constructed. In both instances it was human actions which caused death. God was not involved at all. Jesus stated that with pointed clarity.
The Genesis account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a very memorable story with very bad theology. I will not refer to the sins of which the men of Sodom were supposedly guilty. Suffice it to say that this story is primitive, pre-scientific, and has a distinctly defective interpretation of an alleged natural disaster.
There is almost certainly no historical validity to the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. But this much is certainly factual: the two cities were located on or very close to the shores of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is at the northern end of the Great Rift Valley. The Great Rift is a geological fault line which begins at the base of Mt. Hermon at the common border of modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. The valley runs for almost three thousand miles to the southwest, all the way to Lake Victoria in east-central Africa. For most of pre-history and for all of history there have been earthquakes all along this massive rupture in the earth’s crust.
Assuming that at some point there were actually two towns called Sodom and Gomorrah near the Dead Sea, the writers of Genesis presumably knew of their existence. IF they were simultaneously destroyed in an earthquake (which probably no one shall ever know for certain), the Genesis theologians attributed their destruction to their manifold and allegedly outrageous sins. It may possibly be historically accurate that the two towns truly were obliterated by an earthquake, but it is seriously flawed theology to attest that God did it because of their sins.
If it happened that they were thus liquidated (after all, stuff does happen), it happened because two tectonic plates collided in an unfortunate subterranean rending of the earth, and NOT because God made it happen. He has never acted in such an ungodly manner, nor shall He ever. The obliteration of Sodom and Gomorrah, if it happened at all, was the result of an act of nature, not an act of God. It is a calumny against God to suggest otherwise.
My guess is that most people who returned to Hilton Head Island in the last few days concluded that not only was the island fortunate but that they also were personally fortunate.
Nearly all of us intuitively realize that the damage from this hurricane could have been much worse. We could be Haiti, after all. The Book of Job is a collective Book of Haiti.
On Friday morning Lois and I drove through Sea Pines to see the damage Matthew had visited upon the southern part of the island. It was horrendous. Nearly everywhere thousands of trees were down. I came here to The Preston on Friday afternoon, hoping to visit the returnees, but they did not return until yesterday. It appeared to me that the north end of Hilton Head perhaps has fewer trees down, but there seemed to be more flooding on this end.
One thing struck me again and again as I witnessed the fallen trees. Though many trees did fall on homes or other buildings, most of them fell between the houses. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove all the trees, but had they all fallen on structures, the damage would be in the hundreds of millions. As it was, I would venture to say Hurricane Matthew did more damage per square mile on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina from fallen trees than any other hurricane in recorded history. We have so many structures, and so many trees.
We live in The Seabrook retirement community. It consists of four five-storey buildings and one three-storey building. Dozens of trees fell around the Seabrook campus, but not a single one hit a building. From this I deduce that humans can affect which trees hit which structures, and God may be as amazed by that fact (if it is a fact) as I am. But it was not God who caused so many trees to miss so many houses. It was the nature of how structures affect where falling trees fall.
There is an old aphorism that goes like this: “Man proposes, but God disposes.” In hurricanes God does not dispose anything to happen, but human beings can do much to lessen the damage caused by the great storms.
I suspect that most of us who managed to get here this morning came through Matthew relatively unscathed. Some of us lost nothing at all, some may have damages in the hundreds or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there are other islanders who have lost nearly every asset they ever owned. Did God single them out for destruction and He decided to spare the rest of us? If He operates like that, He is a God to be avoided at all costs, and we must ruefully conclude that in life we are completely on our own.
All natural disasters are the result of natural causes, and God has no part in their destructive force. There is no point in praying for God to prevent natural disasters, but there is great reason to pray that He may uphold, strengthen, and sustain those who experience the forces of nature, “red in tooth and claw” - - - and plunging barometric pressure, and the fierce rasping of tectonic plate against tectonic plate, and the collision of masses of warm, moist air bumping up against other masses of cold, dry air, with their resultant tornados or cyclones
We who have come through Matthew undamaged can ignore the pain and suffering of others, or we can thank God for our good fortune and open our checkbooks to those who emerged from the natural calamity far less fortunate than we. What do we conclude about God in such circumstances? What do we conclude about those who are major victims? And what, in our theological ponderings, do we conclude about ourselves? Are natural disasters “natural,” or are they part of some perverse plan by the Creator of the universe?