PARCHED HEARTS AND FLOODED EMOTIONS
Psalm 148; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20
September 4, 2005
Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper

Rev. Charles Davy was writing between nine and ten o'clock in the morning when his papers began to tremble. This surprised him since the day was calm and beautiful. He heard a rumble, which he thought came from carts in the street. Then his room shuddered. It dawned on him that he had been jolted by a mild earthquake. While he debated whether to stay inside or run out, the house shook so violently that its upper stories collapsed.

Holes appeared in the stone work of his room. The air was so choked with dust that for several minutes he could scarcely breathe. Only with difficulty was he able to keep his footing. Outside, he heard screams and wails. In every direction churches and stone buildings toppled in ruin. Priests led prayers. Frightened people shrieked to the saints for help and clutched crucifixes and images seized from the churches, apparently thinking these would save them.

"The sea is coming, we shall all be lost" cried a voice. Davy turned and saw a wall of water, about twenty feet high bearing down upon him. The quake had generated a tsunami. He ran for higher ground. The roaring wave smashed all in its path. When it retreated, it bore bodies with it. He found herself up to the waist in water and clung to a heavy beam to keep from being dragged away. Fire followed. Candles and ovens had lit the city. Looters set even more fires. Once a jewel on the Atlantic, Lisbon burned for five days.

I thought of the Lisbon earthquake this week. The falling buildings, the tsunami driven floods, and then the fires, some started by household candles and ovens, some by looters, that burned for five days. Twenty thousand, perhaps thirty thousand people perished in less than a week of horror. A beautiful cultured city was utterly destroyed, and along with it, a smug and scary pattern of thought.

All of the nations of Europe were monarchies in 1755, and the great and popular thinkers of the day taught that this was because God willed and created such a pattern for human organization. While some, including early Methodists, strove to improve the lives of poor workers and miners and decried the on-going concentration of wealth in well-gloved hands, they were considered not only mistaken, but heretics. Poet Alexander Pope, writing in England, had captured the dominant thinking, that this was the best of all possible worlds, in his “Essay on Man,� containing these lines:
In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels, men rebel:
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against th' Eternal Cause.

...

See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth.
Above, how high, progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being, which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see,
No glass can reach! from infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing!--On superior pow'rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd:
From nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

And, if each system in gradation roll
Alike essential to th' amazing whole,
The least confusion but in one, not all
That system only, but the whole must fall.
Let earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky;
Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurl'd,
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world;
Heav'n's whole foundations to their centre nod,
And nature tremble to the throne of God.
All this dread order break--for whom? for thee?
Vile worm!--Oh madness, pride, impiety!
...

Submit.--In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

“One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.� It’s an easy philosophy, perhaps, for those who aren’t on the receiving end of “whatever is�, reminiscent of the oft-repeated phrase, “Well, you know, God has a plan in this. It’s God’s will.� With that I disagree.

I was trained as a physicist before I studied for ministry. I know that hurricanes form whenever vast bodies of water warm up. We all know that late summer into the fall is hurricane season and that all of the Southeast coastal United States is at risk for hurricane damage. We can also recall that there have been more and more devastating hurricanes in recent years. Right now, the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico are at 90˚, significantly higher than normal. These waters fed the strength of Katrina. Days before the hurricane hit, as it crossed Southern Florida, scientists were warning that the warm Gulf waters would make it a much more powerful hurricane.

While the hurricane churned across the Gulf, I read articles predicting where the levees would break in New Orleans, at 17th Canal and in the industrial region. The reality is that disaster preparedness experts had used New Orleans as a text study, had determined what would happen, had predicted the overflow of the Lake into the city, for years. This was not an “if it happens� prediction; it was a “when it happens� analysis, accompanied by plans and requests for public investment in repaired levees, in public infrastructure. It was known that the levees on the lake would only withstand a level 3 hurricane, not a level 4 or 5.

What happened and is happening in New Orleans is not a freak of nature or the will of God. It is the consequence of our choice to believe that an economic system that moves great wealth into the hands of corporations and their highly placed employees while undercutting organized labor and eliminating wages on which men and women can support families, an economic system that enables companies to discharge waste products and excess heat into the air and water, warming the climate and polluting the waters, an economic system that has deferred responsibility for public infrastructure while cutting taxes for those same corporations, it is the consequence of our choice to believe that “whatever is, is right.�

We cannot help but notice that most of those trapped in New Orleans were black. Here are the social facts behind that reality: Two thirds of New Orleans residents are black. That was not the determining statistic, however. This was: in Orleans Parish, 21 percent of all households, 27,000 families, earn less than $10,000 per year. Most of these families are black. When the mayor of New Orleans ordered everyone to evacuate, 80% of the population complied. Twenty per cent did not evacuate. Twenty-one percent of the families of New Orleans live on less than $10,000 per year. Do you see the closeness of the numbers? Twenty-one percent live on extremely inadequate incomes. Twenty percent did not—could not—evacuate. They didn’t have cars, or gas, or money for motel rooms. They lived, grandparents and grandchildren, in the most at risk housing in New Orleans, and they had no way to leave. No private transportation. No public transportation. No fleet of buses organized to take them to higher ground. Moreover, since the 1830s, when the levees were built, the wealthy have built homes on higher ground, near the levees. The poor folk, the black folk, have lived in the marshy lowlands of East New Orleans; lived in the most vulnerable housing, low shotgun housing located where the waters would pool the deepest.

Twenty-five years ago, our nation took a turn to the right in its social commitments, embracing the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats and that increased wealth for some would trickle down to raise life standards for all. We adopted, as we hadn’t since the profiteering that followed the Civil War, the notion that it was good to get rich, good and maybe even a blessing from God. In the ensuing years we have pared the safety net into a fishing net, insisting that the poor were poor because they didn’t work, and then pared it again, removing the links that are safe housing and public transportation, effective environmental protection laws and anti-pollution regulations until we have woven, in New Orleans and elsewhere, I believe, a net of nooses that entangle the poor, making it impossible for them to flee the utterly predictable consequences of global warming. This week, we saw the faces of those poor. May we never forget them.
After the earthquake of Lisbon, the writer Voltaire wrote to M. Tronchin of Lyons:
24 November 1755
This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.
Voltaire was deeply affected by the earthquake; writing a poetic answer to Pope’s essay in his own poem on the Lisbon disaster, “An Examination of the Axiom, ‘All Is Well’�
UNHAPPY mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,�
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God�?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death�?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Voltaire followed up with his great and searing ironic novel Candide, taking this naively optimistic young man through all manner of world trauma as he tours the world with his priestly mentor, who explains to him that every seeming evil is actually for the best, and in the process, shredding the hold of thinkers like Pope on European—and colonial—minds. Is it any wonder then, that the next half century saw people rising up against monarchy in the American colonies, in France, in South America, in Mexico, in the Caribbean? The world had shifted; old explanations did not ring true; the earthquake of Lisbon brought down the edifice of monarchy.

And what of our time? We will begin, of course, with charitable acts, with health kits and donations given through our United Methodist channels to ensure that all that we give goes to those who need it. But will we go on, like Voltaire, like people who lived in the time of the earthquake of Lisbon, to understand that this disaster was not an act of God but a natural consequence of the prior decisions to act, as a nation, as though we are not all one family, brothers and sisters to one another? Will we hear the call of God to understand that love—the act of seeking the same good, the same safety, the same sanitation, the same chance to flee disaster for your neighbor that you would desire for yourself—that love is the fulfillment of God’s law? Will we be changed enough to bring down the rotten edifices of individual well-being and self-interest and build a new infrastructure of neighborly connection and public good? Oh, God, I hope so.


Davy, Rev. Charles. "The Earthquake at Lisbon, 1755," Modern History Sourcebook. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1755lisbonquake.html).
Alexander Pope, (1688-1744) “An Essay on Man�

Marcus Franklin and Jamie Thompson, “Crisis raises questions of race,� September 2, 2005.

“Poem on the Disaster in Lisbon, or An Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well,’� Toleration and Other Essays by Voltaire. Translated, with an Introduction, by Joseph McCabe (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912).

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