It seems that a few in the
US have been connecting Hurricane Irene with God’s judgment upon New York for
the issue of same-sex marriage. God is really angry at the whole issue,
apparently, and wants to show that anger by punishing those responsible. And so,
Sodom like, he sends this awful storm to the east coast of the country and
blasts the city for its sin.
An awesome God?
What an awesome God! Right?
Wrong. Not awesome at all. In this theory, apart from appearing like an
absolute monster, god comes over as someone who is quite impotent. The only way
this god can punish those responsible is by blasting the whole city – innocent and
guilty together. Even NATO were able to use pin-point technology quite successfully
in Libya keeping innocent civilians relatively unharmed, whereas god still has
to rely on his trusty elephant gun and hit and hope.
Wrong thinking
Taking for granted for a
moment the correctness of their view of homosexuality as sin (and there’s a
whole different debate to be had on that one), there are three reasons why this
kind of medieval thinking is wrong:
- It totally wrongly
portrays God as some kind of arbitrary, retributive monster who is willing to
hit anyone so that his righteous anger can be satisfied. This surely is not the
God and Father of Jesus of Nazareth.
- It totally devalues
the passionate interceding of many who have been praying for New Yorkers at
this time. If this storm was God’s judgment on the unjust in one single issue,
then this intercession has failed miserably, for there must have been far more
just than unjust in New York at the time.
- It harms the work of
churches throughout the world who preach a God of compassion, love and true
justice and plays directly into the hands of those who seek to counteract this
good work.
Creating God in our image
Of course, we in the
twenty-first century are as guilty as those in the eleventh of creating god in
our own image. But I would suggest that at least our construct is closer to
Jesus than theirs.
