WEST DOVER, Vermont -- Tonight I'm watching Hurricane Isaac as it bears down on the Gulf Coast. Seven years after Katrina, Isaac has the potential to re-devastate an area that's still recovering, and still will be for years.
I'm watching these developments as I read the results of a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Religion News Service which shows that 44 percent of Americans see an uptick in natural disasters as "evidence of what the Bible calls the 'end times'." Narrow that polling body to white Christian evangelicals, and that number increases to 67 percent.
Right now I'm thinking about those two things as I sit in my living room in southern Vermont. One year ago I sat here and called my congregational leaders and we reviewed the weather forecast and reluctantly decided to cancel church services the next day. By the middle of the next morning, Hurricane Irene had devastated the community where we live.
That night I stood with friends and neighbors and parishioners in a street filled with upended asphalt, twisted metal and busted glass. I spent two years as a trauma chaplain in a pediatric hospital in Atlanta, but I had never seen devastation like I saw that night. It looked, quite literally, like a bomb had gone off.
The next Sunday I told my congregation that, contrary to what 44 percent of Americans think, God did not send the flood to our town as a punishment, a warning or a judgement. I still believe that. Others do not. We've had our fair share of bad theology here in Vermont. Missionaries disguised as trauma counselors. Judgmental Christian "leaders" calling us to repent for the sins that caused the flood. Even the Westboro Baptist Church had us in their sights.
What's sad is that some folks, the ones hardest hit and looking for answers, believe this Gospel of Wrath. Bad theology is often the second wave of trauma. And the Christian leaders who perpetuate these ideas move from natural disaster to natural disaster, tragedy to tragedy, spreading the same rhetoric of judgement. From Vermont to Aurora, Colorado to western wildfires, to Oak Creek, Mich., to midwestern droughts, to every other place you can name where blood was shed or destruction widespread, those voices of warning have followed, jockeying for airtime. They have somehow become the predominant public voices of Christian faith.
It's really too bad they don't stay around long in one place. Because if they did, they might actually catch a glimpse of God.
Those of us who stuck around past the news cameras and soundbites saw incredible testaments to the love and grace of God. We saw it as good people took seriously the idea that one should "love their neighbor as themselves" and got to work. Some were Christians. Some weren't. But all behaved in a way much closer to the way Christ commanded us to live than anyone on TV talking about God's judgment coming in the form of a hurricane.
The people here wasted little time before rebuilding. The next morning they donned masks and bandanas, picked up cleaning buckets and got to work. They cooked meals for the shelter in the high school cafeteria. They gave hours as volunteer firefighters and rescue personnel. They staffed the food pantry in town every day for weeks. And they gave and gave of every resource they had until it hurt.
They didn't do it for a day. Or a week. Or a month or season. They kept doing it, day after day, no matter what was happening in their own lives. People I knew who had lost almost everything came asking who had it worse, and what they could do for them.
That's where I saw God this past year. That's where I saw grace. And that's where I saw hope.
Tomorrow we will gather at that same place we did last year, at the same time, as the sun goes down here in southern Vermont. But this year the road is repaved, the glass is swept up and the river has contained itself to its banks once more. We will light candles, and we will offer our memories. But more that that, we will offer our gratitude. Gratitude for strangers, gratitude for one another, gratitude for grace. And more than all of that, we will offer our hope.
I know God will be there tomorrow, because I know that wherever there is hope, there is God. And while the flood "was," God "is" and God will be.
God will be there on the Gulf Coast tomorrow too. And God will be there if that storm makes landfall. Not because God wills our destruction, but because God does not abandon us in the storm. And no matter what happens, God will be there in the aftermath.
My hope is that wherever the news cameras flock to next, whether it's in the wake of the storm or, God forbid, the aftermath of another act of violence, that we will look for testaments to God's love and grace, and not the destructive voices of those who would use Christ's name to spread their own judgements.
You know that old song, "They will know we are Christians by our love?" It's still true. More than ever, and especially in times of destruction or pain. And if you can't hold the statements of a Christian talking head on TV up to that standard, then don't allow them to be the only voice out there that is speaking for God. Lives, and hearts, depend on it.