Community and National Tragedies
For a few years, I had been noticing that on the corner of Cable Avenue and Sycamore Street, the narrow brick road beside our church building, the fire hydrant was sinking into the muddy hillside. Or rather, I should say that the hillside was gradually sliding down and beginning to cover the hydrant. At first, just the bottom quarter of the fire hydrant was enveloped in muddy earth. Then several months ago, I noticed that about one-third of the hydrant had sunk into the mud. But a couple weeks ago, about half of it was enveloped by the moist hillside. [The following contains a bit of hyperbole:]
Then it happened: the spring rains had soaked the whole steep hillside, from Highway 30 seventy-five feet above down to our church building and the apartment buildings just 350 feet away, causing the earth to liquefy and come pouring down upon and into the church and apartment buildings. The walls and the roofs collapsed under the force of this mudslide, the basements and first floors were totally filled with mud, with a huge section of Highway 30 fallen into this muck and mire so that heavy excavating equipment was called in to haul away what was left of the highway and the buildings.
State disaster officials have applied for federal disaster relief and estimate that it will require at least six months of intensive, almost round-the-clock work to build a 500-foot-long and 75-foot-high concrete retaining wall, then fill the hillside with compacted earth up to the level of Highway 30 and reconstruct the highway. Meanwhile, the church and attached rectory are no more. The apartment complex was evacuated as the hillside began to give way. so nobody was injured. Residents, mostly elderly and/or disabled, have been placed in extended-stay motels until more permanent housing can be found for them. Thankfully, one church member who lived in those very apartments had vacated his apartment due to a systemic infection just days before this disaster, so we had time to remove his possessions.
"Why did this have to happen to me?" in his case changed to: "Why did this happen to our town, to the church and all those poor people?" We might be able to answer the "How?" question: in order to extract coal and iron ore, human settlements gradually built up the whole Pittsburgh metropolitan area from the three rivers confluence basin into the steep hillsides of the northern Appalachian Mountains. Then came decades of economic decline and infrastructure neglect after the coal mines and steel mills shut down, and finally heavy rainfall. But the "Why?" we may never fully know.
And yet, this was not to be the only tragedy to befall our community and nation. Exactly one hundred twelve years earlier, on April 18, “The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” (HistoryNet) destroyed most of that city, which had risen in just 60 years from a 500-inhabitant sleepy hamlet of Yerba Buena to become one of the wonders of the world. And yet, the works of man were no match for the power of nature and nature’s God. The San Andreas Fault, running right through San Francisco Bay, creaked and rumbled at 5:12 a.m., causing great fissures in the earth, collapsed houses and city buildings, broken gas mains and resultant fires that destroyed much of the city: the quakes had broken the water mains, so what remained of city fire crews could barely get a trickle to fight the flames.
But this was just a foretaste of the disaster to come: in the same month in 2018, the San Andreas Fault gave way again. The North American Plate that creaks south and the Pacific Plate that creaks north “came unstuck” and broke completely apart, causing hundreds of miles of the Pacific Plate to slide into the sea. Tens of millions of people were simply swallowed up by the collapsing earth as the sea rushed over them. The tremors, 9.4 on the Richter Scale, caused buildings to crumble, huge fissures to appear in the earth and fires to destroy many cities and towns from British Columbia to the Mexico border and inland for hundreds of miles. The entire U.S. civilian economy came to a halt as virtually all available resources were directed toward this national emergency. The resultant tsunamis severely damaged countries all around the Pacific Rim. Hundreds of millions of human lives were lost or forever traumatized and trillions of dollars expended trying to piece the country and the world together again.
The "Why?" question was asked over and over: "Why could God – if there is a God – let this terrible, awful tragedy happen?" Some would blame it on the fact that for several decades, California had been the “leading edge” of modern culture with its sex-and-violence themed movies selling all over the world, more recently had become a center of the LGBTQ movement, and just in the last few weeks even banned the expression of anti-LGBTQ ideas, including traditional Christian doctrine – it had become a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.
But when Jesus Christ sent out His disciples to preach the Gospel and heal the sick, He warned those who would not receive the Good News: "And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!" (Mat. 10:14-15). Are sexual sins more evil and deserving of divine judgment than any other kind of sin? No! It was not directly because of sexual sins that a huge chunk of California was wiped off the map and much of the remaining "left coast" of America decimated by earthquake and fire: it was because they had rejected the Gospel. Granted, the enemy of our souls often uses the hook of sexual temptation and sin to lure people away from the path toward holiness and godliness: far too many are kept from the faith in Christ by these temptations and too many Christians have fallen away due to this kind of sin.
But outwardly religious people who haven’t succumbed to sins of the flesh may be bound by the sins of complacency and pride in their pseudo-piety. Christ told us about some Jews whom Pilate viciously slew and mixed their blood with their sacrifices: "Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish." Then Christ brings up a natural disaster: "Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all the other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish" (Lk. 13:2-5). Death can come by the malice of others or by natural disaster as well as by our own sins.
The point of all this, all these community and national tragedies, human malice and natural disasters, is that we live in a fallen universe where both the natural world and human nature are distorted by the Fall. The results of Adam and Eve’s sin, as well as our own sins, are all around us in our broken relationships and our despoiled environment. We build cities, houses, churches and apartments on hillsides and on geological faults unsafe for human habitation. We likewise build our relationships on shaky "I’m OK, you’re OK" relativistic foundations. Then we ask: "Why did God let it happen to us?"
Thus we blame God for our personal sins and our collective errors. In his apocalyptic vision, the Apostle John foresaw this as the fourth angel poured out his bowl: "And men were scorched with great heat, and they blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues; and they did not repent and give Him glory." And when the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the beast’s throne: "his kingdom became full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues because of the pain. They blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds" (Rev. 16:9-11).
America needs to repent. Each and every one of us need to repent of our outward sins and our inner pseudo-piety. Refusing to repent only hardens us in our sins. Let each man and each woman, all of us together, examine ourselves, the hidden motivations of our own hearts, and pray: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" Only then He will spare us and restore our land.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!
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