Trinity Sunday, Year A
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8 or Canticle 2 or 13
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20 
 
                   

                      When God and Good Are Hard To See
                                                 

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
                                               Genesis 2:3
 
When the news is of devastation. as it has been recently, many people wonder if the world really is good.  Why are there terrible earthquakes? Cyclones?  Where is the goodness when thousands of innocent people die in an instant?
 
Of course, none of these things we call "natural disasters" would be disastrous if there were no people involved in them. The earth just quakes, the winds just blow -- by themselves, these events are neutral.   It is our living in the tectonic fault, by the sea, in the river valley that puts us at odds with nature's power.  The earth goes about enormous business of its life, and the tiny people on it are sometimes just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
When that happens, the tiny people band together.  They run to the scene, paw through the wreckage, call out hope to the wounded they cannot see but whose voices they hear. Tenderly, they lift the dead out into the daylight and lay them carefully on the ground.  They feed other people's children, comfort devastated parents they don't even know, carry cases of bottled water and bundles of blankets through the mud. 
 
It is easy to see God in a flower or a glorious sunset.  But God is present in the terrible things, too: not as the one who perpetrates them, but as the one whose thousands of emissaries join to help us through them.  Want to find God?  Go where something terrible has happened and look around you.  All of the saving you see -- boats, trucks, hand-to-hand relays of water buckets, first aid, all of the help, whatever its name and whoever does it -- all of it is the physical manifestation of the divine love.
 
We have seen the photographs of Chinese parents bending over the lifeless bodies of their only children, and suddenly we have felt our closeness much more than our distance.  The Anglican Communion is just about everywhere in the world, and that means that we have sisters and brothers already on the ground in these stricken areas, whose work we are supporting right now. Over the past weeks, we have been privileged, through Episcopal Relief and Development's partnering with churches there, to embody God's love for people in Burma and in China whose lives have been shattered. People we will never meet.
 
Why do such terrible things happen?  Nobody has that answer.  But what is God doing about it?  We ourselves are the answer to that one.
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