Tierney's Sermon (St. Paul's, WC)

At the Lutheran camp we stayed at in Biloxi, our cultural and theological differences were apparent from the moment we arrived. Outside from stricter dress codes and different graces before dinner though, I think I witnessed one of the biggest theological differences for me in a more subtle way.

One night at dinner the camp director asked one person from the different groups from around the country to share a story about where they saw God in their work. All the stories sounded the same, the workers recounted how those who survived through the storm told of how they were saved by God’s grace from the brink of death or total destruction. One older woman even told of asking God that if she’d done anything good in her life to save her from the storm.

While it was somewhat uplifting to hear stories of these people who were putting their lives back together one brick at a time with our help, I couldn’t help but wonder where God was with the thousands who lost their lives to the hurricane. This idea of a micromanaging God who performed miracles where he deemed fit was completely irreconcilable to me with the scale of the tragic destruction we had witnessed.

I expressed my misgivings about what was said at dinner to Father Michael Carney and we discussed the many different ways the people view God, and the disparities between the way that the haves and the have-nots, even from the same denomination, describe the Christian God.

As a fairly privileged group of people that were staying at the camp, it was generally easy for us to believe that every good thing that happens is the grace of God, and dismiss everything else as some part of God’s greater plan.

Michael explained to me that often people less privileged than us accept suffering as a part of life to a much greater degree, and that this is often what helps them get through their hard times.

These themes of differences between the privileged and the unprivileged also echoed the themes of civil rights and social justice that we had a chance to investigate on the trip. In the end of our lengthy conversation in which I came to a better understanding of what I had previously viewed as gaping inconsistencies in religion, Michael asked me what I thought about God, and the only thing I could honestly say was that I believe a higher power exists, but we need not depend on him to perform miracles or dismiss the bad things in life as part of his greater plan, we need to take action with our own two hands and make the little changes where God cannot with him in our hearts.

Michael said that all he knows is that we need to give love wherever we can, and I couldn’t agree with him more. As today’s psalm states, “For with the Lord there is steadfast love”, and I believe we need to take this love and transfer it to others that are suffering instead of glossing over or trying to explain the suffering.

Whether that love is in the form of direct support to individuals like we gave on the trip, or trying on a larger scale to right the injustice and inequality that we witnessed and learned about on the trip, what I am most taking away from my trip is an affirmation that I want to take the privileged life and chance at a higher education that I will have next year and give love in as many ways as I can.

I want to use it to not only help those in need, but examine the system that continually keeps these people in need. And the amazing experiences that I have had for the past two years on mission trips and God Squads, the incredible community that has been achieved and the obscene amount of fun we always manage to have to me is just further proof that we must be doing something right by starting to give love where it is needed the most.