No cheap grace

The suffering in Haiti intensifies - it is hard to look at the pictures and video and see that as someone's reality. But it is.

When terrible things happen we want to understand them - we want to remove any thought that we are sometimes subject to the bad and unexpected. It is almost as if, if we can pin down the suffering of others and make some sense of it, then we will remove ourselves from the possibility of suffering.

I noted on Facebook yesterday that Pat Robertson said that the continuous trouble in Haiti was due to a pact with the Devil during the ousting of the French. I watched the segment today and he claims that the Dominican Republic, although on the same island, is spared the same fate because of better behavior. (watch the face of his co-host if you watch it).

I certainly gives an easy answer to a painful uncertainty. But it also seems sweeping and careless - especially as, in my memory, the Dominican Republic used to be a frightening place and has only recently been cashing in on the tourist industry.

Easy answers are not to be had in the face of human tragedy. God does not give them to us, not in neat packages which make blame the excuse for not mourning. But mourn we must and that hurts. As we look in shock and grief we will find God already there - read Psalm 139 - God is in the depths and the heights of human experience - God has knitted together each life so wonderfully.

Then why? We do not know - we will not know and the only answers which we can manufacture will denegrate both the humanity of those we answer for and, ultimately, our own. And so, we are asked to watch and wait with those who mourn. To reach out to those who live. To pray for those who suffer. This faith of ours demands much in these dark, dark places - more than anything it demands we allow the situation in all its gravity and that we pledge that we will work alongside those who seek to restore life and promote justice in the world.

Those who hide behind the false strength of judging others are cowards. They rely not on the strength of a merciful Savior but on their own abilities to concoct and pronounce judgments which maintain their own position regardless of the children of God who they crush in the process. This is not Christianity - this is not the love of Christ.

Those people who believe that Christianity is a road to simplistic one line answers have misunderstood it. Those who look to be told and skate along the surface instead of entering in deeply to themselves and to the world, have been misled.

Jesus says in the Gospel of John, of his disciples, that they are bound in, they are linked, He in them and they in Jesus - this is not cheap grace and there are not easy answers in this world of grief and hushed voices - but God is here, God is in Haiti - love not vengeance.