The Reverend Silvanus Wilfred is pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Kimues village, on Car Nicobar Island. He and the
church are part of the Diocese of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which in turn is part of the Church of North India.
Now, the island of Car Nicobar lies over a thousand miles southeast of the rest of India, across the vast waters of
the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the closest landmass to Car Nicobar is Sumatra, Indonesia, where Banda
Aceh, the city that was at almost the epicenter of the recent, horrendous earthquake and tsunami, sits just 300 miles
southeast of Car Nicobar.
This morning, I want to share with you Pastor Silvanus’s first-person account of that earthquake and tsunami. (as
quoted in an e-mail to Margaret and me from Bishop P. K. Samantaroy, Diocese of Amritsar, Church of North India)
“On 26th December, as I was preparing to go to Church for Sunday worship, the ground started to shake. I rushed back
to my house shouting for people to come out of their houses. My wife Temar and I took out our three children—daughter
Fobi, 20 years old; son Emerson, 2 1/2 years old; and our baby daughter, just 6 months old. We ran away to the jungle
for safety. I climbed a tree with the small baby, and my wife went up another one with our son Emerson. Our older
daughter climbed up a separate tree on her own.
“The first and second waves came about 30-feet tall, but we were still able to cling to our trees. The third wave
broke the trees, and suddenly we were in the water. My left hand got wedged between two large tree trunks and was
broken, but I was still able to hold the baby. Then the fifth wave came and took the baby away from my hand. My wife
also lost to that wave our little boy, and our older daughter, too, was gone.
“The following wave parted the two trunks a bit, and I could free my hand. I saw my wife clinging to the roots of a
nearby floating tree. I swam to her, despite my broken hand, and found her unconscious. So I grabbed hold of a floating
plank of wood, placed her on it, and managed to push her to the dry land. Then I revived her by sprinkling sea water on
her face.
“When I looked back to the water, I saw many people still struggling there. So I went back in and managed to pull
more than sixty of them out to higher ground. Later, I also found a blind man struggling in the jungle, and I helped
him out. Then I led all these people to a safe place and prayed with them.”
Pastor Silvanus and his wife Temar survived the tsunami, but their three children died in those waves, as did some
10,000 other inhabitants of the tiny Nicobar Islands chain—more than half of the whole population. Indeed, the killer
tidal wave has now left Car Nicobar itself split up into three separate islands. It has also leveled nine of the eleven
houses of worship on the island and has turned all of Car Nicobar’s coastal villages into nothing more than sea beach
and concrete slabs. In those villages, no houses, no church buildings, no belongings of any kind remain—just faith in
God. Indeed, the sole request that Pastor Silvanus made of a bishop visiting from the Indian mainland was not, as one
might have expected, for food or for money, but was rather for a new supply of Christian literature, so that, in the
face of having lost all his books, he could continue to train those young pastors and laypersons who are left. In those
coastal villages, no houses, no church buildings, no belongings of any kind—just faith in God.
But how can this be? How can the flame of faith still be burning so brightly in Pastor Silvanus’s heart after such
great losses to this tsunami, to this cataclysmic “act of God”—after his losses of all three children, his house, his
books, his church building, and fully half of all his parishioners and neighbors—gone, just wiped off the face of the
earth by a natural force that seems in some way to be quite an integral part of God’s created order of things?
Did you happen to read the article by William J. Broad in the science section of The New York Times nearly 3
weeks ago? (1/11/05, pp. F1, 4). It reported that scientists are thinking this: “[I]n the very long view, the global
process behind great earthquakes is quite advantageous for life on earth—especially human life. Powerful jolts like the
one that sent killer waves racing across the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 are inevitable side effects of the constant
recycling of planetary crust, which produces a lush, habitable planet. Some experts refer to the regular blows [of
these earthquakes]—hundreds a day—as the planet’s heartbeat.… [Indeed, m]any biologists believe that [this constant
recycling of planetary crust] may have even given birth to [the first] life itself.”
Well, there you have it. Without mentioning the name of God, of course, today’s scientists affirm that the short-term
devastation caused by underwater earthquakes and the tsunamis to which they give rise—that this devastation is in fact
simply an unavoidable byproduct of “plate tectonics,” a process that’s indispensable to this planet’s created order of
things.
But what are theologians supposed to do with this information, about the long-term essentiality to the health and
well-being of Planet Earth of the short-term violence and destructiveness of plate tectonics? For theologians are
confronted with the necessity to somehow account for the circumstance that the short-term violence and destructiveness
of tsunamis is, as a matter of fact, an act of God. For if the violent death of 200,000 persons at the hands of a
tsunami—or for that matter the painful death of even just one person at the hands of cancer—is part of the order of things
that God has created and pronounced “good,” then how can we continue to call the God who has created such an order of
things—how can we continue to call the God of earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer, and their likes—either “good” or “just” or
“loving”?
It was the year 1980, and Elsa Marty was dying of cancer. Martin Marty, her husband of 25 years and a professor of
the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago, “had agreed, through[out] the seasons of [Elsa’s] terminal
illness, to take turns with her reading a biblical psalm at the time of each midnight taking of medication…” Martin
“had agreed to read the even-numbered [psalms] and [Elsa] the odd-numbered [ones]. But after a particularly wretched
day’s bout that wracked [Elsa’s] body and [Martin’s] soul, [Martin] did not feel up to reading Psalm 88,” the psalm that
was for us here at Rutgers this morning our First Lesson. Elsa noticed that Martin had skipped this troubling psalm, so
the following dialogue ensued [for the quotations immediately above and below, see Martin E. Marty, A Cry of
Absence, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. xi]:
“SHE: What happened to Psalm 88? Why did you skip it?
“HE: I didn’t think you could take it tonight. I am not sure I could. No: I am sure I could not.
“SHE: Please read it, for me.
“HE: All right:
… I cry out in the night before thee …
For my soul is full of troubles …
Thou hast put me in the depths of the Pit,
in the regions dark and deep …
[LORD, why castest thou off my soul?
why hidest thou thy face from me? …]
“SHE: I need that kind [of psalm] the most.”
And in the moments that followed, Elsa and Martin “continued to speak, slowly and quietly, in the bleakness of
midnight but in the warmth of each other’s presence and in awareness of the Presence [that is God].” And they came to
agree with each other “that often the starkest scriptures [are] the most credible signals of [God’s] Presence [that come]
in the worst [of] times.” [Ibid., p. xii]
You see, Psalm 88 is about experiencing the absence of a God who is good and just and loving and about experiencing
instead the presence of a God who allows pain or maybe even inflicts it. Perhaps that’s the reason why the creators of
the Revised Common Lectionary, which we usually follow in the worship life of this congregation, have chosen never
to include this psalm in the readings they prescribe for our use. As a result, I know for a fact that you have not heard
Psalm 88 read in this sanctuary for at least the past nine years, the time I’ve been your pastor. I suspect, also, that
there are very few Christians in the whole of the world who have ever striven to commit Psalm 88 to memory!
Yet this psalmist unwittingly speaks for patients in the anger stage of their terminal illness, and also for victims
of earthquakes and tsunamis, when he cries out to God, “Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and You overwhelm me with all Your
waves.” (vs. 7) Yes, God’s created order does include suffering and mortality. And this is a psalm that dares to face
and confront those limits to our human condition. As Martin Marty has gone on to observe: “Whoever devises from the
Scriptures a philosophy in which everything turns out right has to begin by tearing out this page of the volume.”
(Ibid., p. 72)
And yet, even in this most anguished of all the psalms, the author does not allow the world that’s described in the
text to collapse “into the world of those who exclude God from their horizon.” (Ibid., p. 76) Even in this psalm,
there can be found a glimmer of the same trust and faith and hope that filled Pastor Silvanus on Car Nicobar Island. For
in spite of natural disaster and the “evil” that seems to be a built-in feature of the created order of things, this
psalmist’s opening address remains: “O Lord, God of my salvation…”
We humans cannot rearrange the universe. So death will remain integral to the created order of things, so that space
can be made for the next generation. Yet in the face of all this, there are two things that we can do. First, while
acknowledging that there is a fearsome order to the natural world, we can also join with the psalmists and with Jesus
and with the apostle Paul and with the company of the saints who have gone before us—we can join with all of these in
hoping and trusting that, when all else has been said and done, it is our Creator’s purpose and pledge, to love us and
save us.
We can join with the author of the 23rd Psalm in hoping and trusting (vs. 4) that: “Even though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for You are with me.” (NIV) And we can join with the apostle Paul
in affirming, through the words of today’s Second Lesson: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God [that is] in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39)
Notice both what Paul does not say in this passage and what he does say. As the theologian Tom Driver, who’s
worshiping with us these days, has observed (in “Power Outage,” The Living Pulpit, January–March, 1997, p. 27):
“It has taken me the better part of a lifetime to recognize that Paul did not say that nothing can separate us from
the power of God.” No! “‘I am persuaded,’ wrote Paul, ‘that [nothing] can separate us from the love of God.’”
We can hope and trust in this love of God, which “calls [out to us] across the dark intervals of meaning,
reaches [down] into the depths of [our] human despair, embraces [all of] those who live in the shadow of death,… [and
then] looks [both] at the present with clear faith and at the future with sure hope…” [N. T. Wright, in “Romans,” The
New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), p. 619.] For God’s love in Christ Jesus is a love that
has participated in our human condition and has suffered alongside us in such a way as to merit our trust. Thus the
first thing we can do in the face of the natural order of things is to hope and trust in the love of the Creator who’s
made known in Christ.
And the second thing we can do is this. We can live wisely. We can choose to accommodate ourselves humbly to the
created order of things rather than to shake our fists arrogantly at that order.
The Moken are a tribal group of about 200 people who inhabit South Surin Island, a part of Thailand that is some 400
miles due east of Pastor Silvanus’s Car Nicobar Island, across the Andaman Sea. The Moken are not Christians; they’re
animists. And perhaps that’s a principal reason why only one of the Moken died when the tsunami struck. For as a part
of their animist religious tradition, they’ve learned to heed the wisdom of their ancestors and to adapt to the natural
order. (This and my other information about the Moken come from the article by Abby Goodnough in The New York
Times, Sunday, January 23, 2005, p. A6)
The Moken chief had learned from his elders to expect “a people-eating” wave if ever the tide receded far and fast.
So when he saw such a sight on the morning of Dec. 26, he sounded the alarm, and only one man, a disabled person sadly
left behind in the confusion, was claimed by the waves. The others had already fled to safety in the hills. The Moken
expect to have all fifty-four of their simple thatched huts made of bamboo and palm fronds rebuilt in just a few months
time. Compare their wisdom to those who audaciously build million-dollar mansions along eroding ocean beaches or atop
active geological faults and earthquake zones.
So today’s tsunami theology is this: live wisely, by acknowledging and adapting harmoniously to the dynamics and
forces that are part of God’s created order of things; and live with hope, trusting that the purpose and pledge of the
Creator, as shown to us in Jesus, is love.
Let us pray:
O God, amidst all of our fears and doubts, as we seek to understand You and Your creation, we acknowledge that You
know us far, far better than we can know You. Yet we affirm that it is through Jesus Christ, who shared fully in our
human experience of suffering and death, that we do know with certainty of Your great love. Grant us the wisdom to
accept the limits of our human condition and then to live with hope and with trust in Your love. Through Christ Jesus
we pray this. Amen.