Haiti Vigil draws hundreds to St. Mark's Cathedral

Bishop Jelinek welcomed hundreds to St. Mark's Cathedral just two days after Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake. People came carrying pictures, art, and heavy hearts as they struggled with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Bishop Jelinek preached the following sermon.

We have come together in shock, grief, dismay, concern and a sense of helplessness in the aftermath of one of the most awful devastations of human life in Haiti the day before yesterday. While many bodies lie undiscovered and others are still lost from their families, we are not yet hearing stories of what we call miracles that warm our hearts and cheer our souls. 

We come together in our helplessness, for we know we cannot bear helplessness all alone. There may be something we can do—at least pray; there may be a word of hope to hear; there may be a moment of solace in holding onto one another. 

Tragedies like this, where so many lives are lost, when urban landscapes are unrecognizable, when people are still caked in dust, when whole systems of production and order and care-giving and transportation and communication are interrupted or cut off—tragedies like this challenge our whole sense of security and justice and even hope. We like to believe we stand and live on solid ground. 

And yet...

We live our whole lives on a fault. Those of us who have lived in parts of the world where the deep tectonic plates of the earth are still moving and shifting know that one of these shifts can happen at any moment, causing an earthquake, or, as we say in French, a “tremblement de terre—a trembling of the earth. 

We would like to believe that life can be predictable, certain, clear, but it is not so. Today we grieve over the devastation and loss of life from an earthquake. Recently we have grieved over the devastation of tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, floods, tornados, blizzards—natural disasters of many kinds.

The insurance companies call them “acts of God,” but if they are, so are warm sunshine, gentle rain, a lightly falling snow.

Some believe that the God who created the universe still pulls the strings like a puppeteer or a stage director, finding ways to punish those God does not like or who make God mad. But I do not believe that. If God were so vindictive, so cruel, then how could so many of God’s followers be moved to open their hearts to be so generous, so helpful, so willing to pour out care and affection and resources? 

If humankind has grown at all over the centuries and the millennia, it is in our awareness that God calls us to love and forgive and give beyond our families, beyond our friends, beyond people who look and speak like us. We can explain how natural disasters happen. We can understand why in terms of geology and climate, but we cannot explain them in terms of God’s anger or displeasure. This is not about blame. This is about being able to suffer together, and we either suffer together or we suffer apart. 

I prefer to suffer with you rather than without you. And I believe that God suffers with us. It was Jesus who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. It was Jesus who revealed God’s heart in the midst of the most painful dimensions of human life. And how can we imagine that God’s heart, like ours, is not broken by the loss of so many lives, cut off in the bud or even in full bloom. It is not that God causes or allows terrible things to happen. We believe that God is with us and between and among us in the midst of the terror and grief. 

I want to ask you to do something together: reach out and touch the person next to you. You’ll have to decide if you have the courage to hold hands when some are warning and scaring us about flu, but I think we need touch and the sense of the Spirit coursing through us as a people as we hold up the people of Haiti for blessing and for safety and for healing and comfort—for we need it, too.   And now, repeat after me:

O God of mercy,

Bless the people of Haiti

Give them safety, healing and comfort.

And bless us, too. Amen