2009 Letter No 04

    Each month Bill writes a pastor's letter for our monthly church magazine called 'The Messenger'. Here is the letter for April 2009:

The bush fires which raged in Australia in February have rather fallen out of the news, but one recent radio interview caught my attention. It was with Reverend Norman Hart, the rector of the small town of Marysville, which was almost completely destroyed by the fires.

He spoke of the sense of repeated and ongoing grief for the whole community as there were funerals needing to be conducted nearly every day. In Marysville fifty people had died out of a total population of about five hundred. Only fifteen buildings remained standing after the fire. His own home, the church building and most other buildings had been totally destroyed. The population was only now beginning to return, having spent the intervening weeks staying with family, friends and even strangers in other parts of the country.

Norman Hart talked about the church meeting together where it could, in people’s homes, and he talked about God being with them as they experienced their terrible sense of grief and loss. This tragedy had clearly left him reeling, suffering and disorientated, but it had not left him with a sense that God had abandoned the community he served or that God did not care. He believed that God was with them in the darkness.    

Tragedy often leaves us reeling, suffering and disorientated, but it need not leave us feeling that God has abandoned us or does not care. Many in our own fellowship have experienced their own losses in recent months and years. But as we focus on the cross of Christ, as we should do regularly and as is especially appropriate on Good Friday, we discover that God does not abandon us to suffering, but rather he chooses to enter into the darkness and to share it with us.

As Evangelicals, when we look to the cross we usually emphasise Christ’s atoning work, in which he brings forgiveness and freedom to us by bearing our shame and the consequences of our Sin. It was the greatest exchange in history when God the Son took our filthy rags and in exchange gave us his royal robes. As the apostle Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

I do not want to lose that emphasis on the forgiveness and freedom brought to us by God in Christ through the cross, but there is even more to his death than that. There is God’s solidarity with suffering. He chooses to stand with us, even when that involves being betrayed and abandoned by friends, being falsely accused, being whipped and beaten, being misunderstood and ridiculed, and being nailed to a cross to die. God is not indifferent to our suffering. He is not above it all. He has entered into it and experienced it for himself.

Even the risen and ascended Jesus bears the nail marks on his hands and feet. He is not above suffering, but rather has taken our suffering into the very heart of God. So when tragedy comes, as indeed it will to all of us at one time or another, and when we experience pain, suffering, loss and bewilderment these things can be places of God’s presence rather than of his absence. He walks with us, not only as a heavenly Father who cares, but as one who has known and experienced what we are going through first hand. This is a wonderful aspect of the good news we have in Jesus. Thanks be to God!