Sermons

Because even today, whenever the power of nature is involved, human beings want the comfort of believing that some natural things are reliable and predictable. We know with certainty, for instance, that the seasons will change, that the winter solstice will reverse itself toward an equinox, and so on. We have spent billions on perfecting satellite weather prediction networks that can track and prepare us for hurricanes- scientific technology which has spared untold thousands of lives through the past few decades. And we even have simple early warning systems in some of our oceans that can alert us to the traumatic movement of tectonic plates that might trigger the massive tsunami waves that scoured the face of so many seacoasts last week. Technology. We have such technology. It simply wasn’t in place over there. Not yet. Perhaps those coastal villages weren’t high on the priority lists of nations where preventive science was deemed to be important. Perhaps all those 150,000 lives were further down on the world’s list of priorities. Perhaps someone, somewhere- perhaps some bureaucrat among the world’s power players forgot that all people everywhere have become increasingly interrelated and interdependent residents of one single planetary village. So today the entire world is torn by the sounds of wailing grief in southern Asia. If these had been our own physical neighbors, suddenly physically and economically destitute, you and I would be making room in our own houses for them. As it is, we can only send what we can, relying on the surrogacy of other human hands and eyes to act in our place with the accumulated wisdom of years of emergency management. Yet we still feel impotent and incompetent, and we dread that the world’s best response will not be enough to counter the continuing threats of disease, hunger and thirst.

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