After the Quake

John 20: 19-31

A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Epworth United Methodist Church

This month’s edition of the National Geographic is entitled “QUAKE:  the Next Big One.” It includes a fold-out chart giving a global view of earthquake danger zones.  Our daughter works for the Geographic.  And while she was working on this story she left the following message on our telephone answering machine: 

“You have to move out of Berkeley.  Now.”

How many of you were not aware that this week was the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco?  It defies understatement to say that there has been a lot of ink and airtime given to the April 18th centennial of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, or as chamber of commerce leaders like to call it, “San Francisco Rising.”

Earthquake prediction and preparedness has proliferated, emphasisizing preparing ourselves for the first 72 hours after the quake. 72 hours is the estimated time it would take emergency services to reach individuals.  There is even a website: www.72hours.org.  After Hurricane Katrina we question if and when some homes would be reached at all when disaster strikes here.

We tend to view earthquakes as major events with “anniversaries” of devastation, heroism, greed and corruption, of survival and rebuilding, as we continue to live in the state of denial….I mean, the state of California.

A new Field Poll of Californians indicates that 9% worry a lot about earthquakes, 51% worry a little, and 40% do not worry at all.

Steve was a graduate student involved in our campus ministry at Cal while I was the pastor.  Steve also worked at Cal’s Seismological Laboratory and he often wore a beeper that went off whenever there was an earthquake.  I remember that I went into high alert the first time it went off, but settled in after about the 14th time and Steve reminded me that the earth moves on many fault lines all the time, hundreds of seemingly imperceptible quakes… daily reminders that we do live on shifting ground.

“The next big ones” … whether  social, political, spiritual, or so-called “natural” disasters … are often preceded by signs, movements, and moments we do not heed. …Stephen Tobriner in his book Bracing for Disaster wrote: “If the earthquake of 1865 was a wake-up call, the earthquake of 1868 was a double espresso” What are the “wake-up calls” we do not heed today?

A teacher and fourth generation San Franciscan wrote this letter to the editor, “A wealthy landlord purchased my building, only to evict all the tenants, some of whom are ill, seniors and other teachers like me.  The city that once showed compassion and valued its hard-working citizens and seniors has turned into a speculator’s paradise.  At least my relatives, after the earthquake of 1906, were able to rebuild and stay in the city they loved.  The same will not hold true for me.”

A City that once rose from a stunning natural disaster may suffer irreversible displacements and devastation through political and economic forces that seem to be less violent or threatening.  The city, the state, the nation, the earth have become a speculator’s paradise … but a disaster for those who are poor, --those whose labor is needed, but whose well-being seems largely irrelevant when the talk turns to economic growth, let alone to national security. Those who live lives with little prospect of ever having a stake in the future. Plates are shifting. Tensions building.  

I read one account of an Alaskan pilot who had been in Anchorage in the 1964 earthquake that registered 9.2 on the Richter scale – he had been thrown from his car onto the road, and then clung to a chunk of asphalt as the earth jerked and threw him around like a bucking bronco for four minutes!  Traumatized since that day, he only feels safe in the air, away from the movements of the earth.

That’s one solution… try to stay above, stay away … move out of Berkeley… stand outside …hide inside… try to live beyond the reach of the tension … try to avoid the hazards of movements beyond control. 

After the earthquake, after the crucifixion… the disciples met behind locked doors!  But one thing that their attempts to shield themselves from the outside world could not do … was keep out the resurrected Christ.  Christ walked into the midst of their fear and spoke a blessing of Peace, not once but three times in this text. 

And Christ’s peace is not the uneasy peace between aftershocks or the illusion of peace behind locked doors.

In Christ, we dare to find peace in the depths of the quake itself!

Bill McKibben’s new book is entitled:  The Comforting Whirlwind:  God, Job and the Scale of Creation.   Whirlwinds and earthquakes are not often thought of as comforting – but they do remind us of the scale of creation! God appears to Job as a whirlwind offering a future based on radical humility and wild joy in creation, rather than on practices of pride and privilege and entitlement. McKibben challenges us to remember God’s question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?”

Being reminded that we are not the center of the universe, and that we are not in control … can be devastating in whatever form, but it can also grant a deeper, longer and larger view of our lives, our neighbors and the earth.  

We find the disturbing peace of Christ by going where the pain is, by touching his wounds, by paying attention to the movements of the earth and its peoples … to learn about and from the powerful forces that are bound and at loose.

John King writes,   A tectonic plate shoves against its neighbor as tension builds.  Something snaps.  Pressure is released, and the process begins anew.  This long-range view gets lost amid the hoopla of the 1906 earthquake centennial, …earthquakes are not just events. They can be starting points for studying society – explorations of our shifting cultures as well as shifting earth…scientists -- treat each temblor as a discovery. 

Whether we worry about earthquakes or not, we don’t necessarily pay attention to the movements which lead to the shaking of foundations:  in Darfur, Sudan, along the wall that imprisons Palestinians, extreme weather changes around the world, generations of children growing up without hope to name just a few.

And theology is born at the friction points.

Arguably, one of California’s dramatic shifts was the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, which rolled back property taxes to 1975 levels and prohibited reassessment until the property was sold.  This event has been analyzed ever since, most recently in Peter Shrag’s book California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment.  He points out that among the effects of Prop. 13 have been a 60% cut in local tax revenues … which cut or eliminated funding for social programs, while oil and utilities profits have boomed.  Poverty, income inequality, and a dramatically expanded prison network have increased, while public support of health care and education has decreased.  He suggests that one result has been personal gain for home owners, but that another result is a loss of commitment to the common good.

Ironically, Shrag sees hope for California in-- immigrants – those with familial ties outside California. He suggests that those who value community engagement, cultural pride, education and spiritual sensibilities, those with roots outside of our current dominant cultural context may help us restore core American values.

We misread Lev. 19 when we read it as a call to give charity to immigrants (the sojourner among us is to be treated as native born)—Radical hospitality is for the welfare of the whole society.  Radical inclusivity is for the welfare of the whole church.  It is for the sake and soul of all people that the sojourner is treated as citizen and that Christ’s church has open doors.

Writing to a people displaced, the prophet Isaiah says, ”The foundations of the earth do shake.  Earth breaks to pieces!” (24:18),  ”… the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed.  But my kindness shall not depart from thee; neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that has mercy on thee!” (54:10)

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote a sermon titled “The Shaking of the Foundations.”  He says, “’The foundations of the earth do shake.’  ‘Earth is split in pieces,’ is not merely a poetic metaphor for us, but a hard reality.  That is the religious meaning of the age into which we have entered.”  Tillich wrote this 60 years ago in the immediate aftermath of World War II and America’s use of nuclear bombs against human populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he describes a social and spiritual reality still very much with us.  He praises prophetic voices who are willing and able to name the painful realities of the time and thus bring a word of hope.  He says,  ”Prophets are able to do so because they did not speak of the shaking of the foundations, but of the one who laid the foundations.”

With every quake, there’s more to our physical world than shaking ground can destroy.  There’s more to our social world than shifting powers of domination can ultimately threaten.  There’s more to our souls than even the greatest disaster and loss can defeat.

After the quake … we can claim our vulnerable, beautiful place in creation with humility … we can seek to understand the movement at the depth of the earth, of history and of our hearts… we can trust the sustaining love that never will let us go.

Amen