Romans 8. 18–25; Matthew 6. 25–34
Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
“…the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
Can any of us imagine anything more terrifying than an earthquake? In Turkey and Syria last week millions of lives were devastated in the space of a few minutes in the middle of the night. The images on our screens overwhelm us even from this distance; we can scarcely imagine the feelings of those on the ground, sleeping in tents or in their cars amid the rubble.
When I was in my twenties, I took three holidays travelling on my own in southern Turkey, around some of the regions worst affected by this week’s earthquake. Cities mentioned in news reports this week – Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman – aren’t abstract places to me. They’re where I met the Arab workmen on the bus who didn’t speak Turkish, let alone English, but shared their peaches with me. They’re where I met the police officer on the first morning of Ramadan who invited me to break the fast in his home with his family that evening. They’re where, a few days later, I found the pub on the upper floors of an office building that was still open in Ramadan, and got drunk late into the night with left-wing political activists while we taught each other Irish and Kurdish folk songs.
It is a part of the world with its troubles, like many places, and also an incredibly hospitable one, rich in music and architecture and human kindness. Its people did nothing to deserve the hell visited on them last week.
Earthquakes aren’t caused by human beings. The slipping of tectonic plates is simply the way the world works. Their randomness and violence can leave us angry at God. Perhaps all the more when we hear Jesus telling us in this morning’s Gospel reading to look at how pretty God made the lilies of the field and so trust that He will make sure we will have all we need. But sometimes God doesn’t send people what they need to eat and drink or wear. Many thousands of people over the next few weeks, especially in Syria, some of them devout Christians, are going to die from hunger and cold. Let’s be honest about that. A faith that is incapable of being honest about the reality of human existence is a faith that is scarcely worth having.
Stephen Fry, who is a rather crusading atheist, was once asked in an interview about what he would say to God if he found out after he died that there was in fact an afterlife. He responded with honest anger “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?’” If the best answer Christians can give to that, or to the dead children under the rubble in Turkey and Syria, is that if only everybody lived as Jesus taught us, then the world would be wonderful, then we deserve to be rejected by the world. If promises of material security – that often seem to be broken – were all there were to the Christian faith, then the world would be right to reject it.
That isn’t the whole story, however. St Paul reminds us in this morning’s epistle that we do not hope for things we see, but what cannot be seen. Our hope as Christians doesn’t lie entirely in this world, but also in what lies beyond it. St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle that the agonies of today are the labour pains that herald the coming glory, which we wait for along with the whole of creation.
