Location: Home > Worship & Spirituality > Minster Sermons > Minster Sermon
Don't blame it on God!
Date: 8th July 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jonathan Draper
Ok; so the Bishop of Carlisle didn’t say that the recent floods were sent by God as a judgement on gay sex. What he did say, however, is equally alarming: ‘We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused.’ Depending on what moral degradation he’s talking about, it’s pretty difficult to distinguish between him saying that the floods were sent by God as a punishment for our sin, and those Muslims who saw hurricane Katrina as God’s judgment on American foreign policy, or those Christians who saw 9/11 as a punishment from God for the evils of abortion. In commenting on the recent floods in this way, my Lord of Carlisle has wandered into dangerous territory indeed.
I don’t think anyone would argue with him and the Bishops of London and Liverpool who also saw the floods as a possible consequence of human action and that they are, in that sense, a judgement on the way we live; and to be fair there is an element of that in the Bishop of Carlisle’s statement as well. The difficulty comes in the link he makes between our moral degradation and the floods which have destroyed the lives of so many people.
I don’t know which bits of moral degradation he means. If, as is widely reported, he meant our sexual degradations, and specifically our increasingly relaxed attitudes towards gay and lesbian people, then he needs to be even more cautious; for what is degradation in his eyes will be seen as liberation in the eyes of others.
The difficulty here is not only in linking these floods to specific matters of human behaviour – as those on the extreme fringe of many religions do, and which generally leads to amusing arguments between members of the extreme fringe about which sin was actually being punished; the real difficulty is linking these floods to God at all.
It may be a shock to you when I say this, but not only did God not send those floods to punish anyone for anything, God didn’t send those floods at all: they happened. And it may well be that they are an instance of how our weather patterns are changing because of what we are doing to our climate, but God didn’t do it.
I used to quite enjoy the slightly childish arguments that took place at theological college about the kind of role God plays in our world. We argued, from first principles, that God, being God, can, of course, do anything God likes, therefore leaving open the possibility that God could send floods, as God is reported to have done in the past, and, apparently, only a few thousand years ago as well. And we would argue, if God did do this in the past why could God not do it again now? It’s quite fun in the abstract to have the argument, and it is one way in which people new to theology can begin to sharpen their wits and deepen their understanding. But when that sort of argument seeps out of the common room and into the real world, we have to understand the great disservice, and indeed damage, it does to God.
It doesn’t take great theological understanding to see how remarks like those of the Bishop of Carlisle bring God, or at lease the notion of God, into disrepute. In fact they turn God into the kind of caricature of God that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins love to hate and which is so easy to pillory. Is God really lethally concerned about whatever issue it is that the extreme fringe think is most important at the moment that he (and God is always a ‘he’ for this lot) would send floods to poor towns in northern England to punish them? Is God really that brutal and that inept? Did God really send a thunderbolt into the south transept of this building in 1984 because he had a theological disagreement with the then Bishop of Durham David Jenkins? If so it not only means that God is very petty indeed, and behaves in ways that we try to educate out of our children, it also means that God didn’t understand David Jenkins very well either. We bring God into disrepute through these kinds of careless, thoughtless and crass ideas.
God does act in the world: let’s be clear about that. But God only acts in the world through us. If we pray that God will care for those whose lives have been washed away in these floods, then God will do so insofar as we do: God does not have a separate disaster relief department that kicks into action whatever we may do. How far we are able to be compassionate in God’s name will be the measure of how compassionate God is held to be. That is an alarming truth both for us and for God. If God’s reputation matters to us, then we can do something about it. But that’s the way that God’s mission in the world happens in any case. God entrusts to us the future of the world, and through us God loves the world.
If God did send the floods into poor parts of Sheffield, Doncaster and Hull because someone, somewhere has transgressed some cosmic moral code, then God is a monster who must be fought and Pullman, Dawkins and Hitchins ought to be our guiding lights. But I don’t believe that to be the case: God is not that kind of monster; and I would no more go to Richard Dawkins for theological understanding than I would go to Mickey Mouse for an understanding of cinema. The floods, however, have happened; and as God moves us, so in God’s name we should be doing what we can to help those whose lives have been so devastated. For it is of the nature of the Christian faith that we should seek not to judge those whose lives have been so blighted by these floods, but that we should love them with God’s own compassion. Any other response is not only unhelpful, but misunderstands the Christian faith.
Amen.