Eternal Perspectives

Rita is supposed to come knocking on my door sometime Saturday morning.

Actually, the hurricane will not only knock on my door but will pound my roof, windows, walls, and everything else on my little turf of dirt here on the planet. Rita is a serious threat: think of an F-3 tornado a couple hundred miles across. In F-3 tornados, the only place that’s safe is underground or out of its way.

I think I know that by the time Rita arrives here she will have lost some of her strength: my home is over a hundred miles inland, north and west of Houston. If she casts her eye to the east of me, it shouldn’t be too bad. But who knows where she’s looking to land?

Events like this tend to focus my attention on the weightier matters of living. I don’t have a lot of energy right now for discussions or debates on the finer points of theology: somehow proper modes of baptism or the presence of Christ in communion aren’t so pressing. I’m thinking about other things – like water and food for the next few days. Forget about gasoline: the migration of folks from Houston to higher ground has decimated the local supply of fuel. It’s as if Joel’s locusts drove into town and ravaged all the service stations. It doesn’t really matter: you can’t drink gasoline.

Rita has also caused me to reflect on former things, too. Specifically, it has made me recall some conversations and statements following Katrina; it has made me recall older things I don’t think about too often.

There were too many Christians – actually just one would be too many – who knew the mind of God and proclaimed that Katrina was God’s judgment on New Orleans for its sin. Apparently God was judging the people of Mississippi and Alabama, too, since the hurricane destroyed those areas even more.

There was an apparent ease with which such pseudo-spiritual judgments were made, an ease that reveals an remarkable shallowness and ignorance. At times the proclamations sounded triumphant, as though it was a great victory for the “righteous” people who weren’t like the reprehensible publicans residents of the Crescent City. “Ha, ha!” they seemed to imply, “You got what you deserved!”

Some of my ordinarily-suppressed memories also make an appearance at times like this. Those recollections are of a period of my life decades ago when I was witness to more than enough death and dead bodies. It was not from war but from human error, stupidity, evil, and bad weather. Losing a race with a train, dying in a house fire, traffic accidents, murders. And the autopsies: the autopsies are particularly haunting.

There’s something about the frozen expression on the face of a corpse that arrests your attention. It’s as though the eyes can see right through you, into your soul, somehow searching for something that’s been lost. The cold, naked body in the morgue, sliced open for an autopsy, eyes fixed in an empty gaze at the ceiling. Or the smell of someone whose death went unnoticed for days or weeks, or the bloated remains of a life floating face-down in a pool of water.

When you’ve smelled those things, touched the bodies, seen the looks of horror, and tried to comfort the survivors, statements about God’s judgment seem cruel and hateful. Death isn’t just a concept at such times: it’s staring you in the face, brushing against you, reminding you of the eternal realities of life.

Katrina and Rita: judgments of God? We can say with certainty that death is a judgment of God. Sometimes it comes in the form of a hurricane, sometimes as cancer, sometimes at a familiar intersection. When someone dies of heart disease is it the judgment of God? When terrorists kill soldiers is the judgment of God? When a child overdoses or starves to death, is it the judgment of God?

Death is the judgment. Everything else is just a means to an end, a door that opens on eternity in our lives before closing again for awhile. When you see the dead looks on the lifeless faces, you know what judgment looks like. It’s not just a word to be thrown around recklessly: it’s the end of a life. Or many lives.

God’s judgment comes every day. Read the obituaries. Go by a cemetery. Volunteer in an oncology unit at a hospital. You’ll see the judgment of God. You won’t want to stand up and pontificate at moments like that. It will humble you and cause you to tremble.

And you will understand the death of Christ a little bit better, and the judgment of God upon your sin that caused Him to die. And maybe – hopefully – you’ll have a little more compassion for those upon whom the deadly judgments of God fall.