That's our lesson from Jeremiah, in part. I engaged it through gritted teeth, tearing my hair to find my present story in it, in the face of my question: How can a broken, bruised body, tortured to death, bring salvation?

You will engage this God story from Jeremiah, and the experience of sharing Holy Communion, and even my unhappy question, in your own way. But let me share with you some of my struggle to engage. My struggle isn't over. I'm not satisfied with God this week, and I'm not satisfied with my sermon. But I'm engaging, and I invite you, too, to seek meaning, that is more than a nihilistic dead end, in disaster.

I should start with what, for me, are some givens. Interestingly enough, it's been easier for me to formulate what I don't believe, so they are my first "givens":

I definitely don't believe that the tsunami and its deadly consequences were the will of God. I other words, I do not believe that God sent the tsunami as punishment for the wickedness of the victims. I do not believe that God sent it to teach them something, or to teach the rest of us something, like to warn us, or to make us grateful for our blessings. And I absolutely do not believe that so many desperately poor people, already living a hand-to-mouth existence under primitive conditions and with little expectation of better for themselves or their children, were sent mercifully to heaven by God so they could be relieved of their earthly burdens. Let me just get all that out of the way. You're welcome to question me, but that's on my table.

That being said - and now I can begin to say what I do believe, and not just be negative - I have absolutely no doubt that God is able to use even the most overwhelming human tragedy to offer us an opportunity to experience grace. Grace, by definition, is completely unexpected, and could not happen under any normal human condition. The Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka cannot trust each other, cannot talk to each other, cannot operate in each others' proximity. Together, they have laid down weapons and are bringing relief to survivors in the small, bitterly divided country second-hardest hit by the tsunami. The New York Times editorialized on December 30: "Before Sunday, it would have been hard to imagine a natural disaster that affected both aboriginal Andaman Islanders and northern Europeans. Now we know what it looks like. .... It is not merely a symbol that the civil war going on in western Sumatra has been suspended in the wake of the disaster. It is a sober setting-aside of differences for a more important, more immediate cause." Ain't gonna study war no more, at least for a while. Something more important has come up. A taste of the Kingdom of Heaven? Might other warring nations of the world open themselves to just such an opportunity?

An opportunity for community -- Dr. Dhyanchand Carr, whose teaching position at Christian Theological Seminary in Jaffna, Sri Lanka is supported by our United Church of Christ Global Ministries, is taking a group of his Sri Lankan seminary students to the worst affected area on the east coast for relief work. Classrooms and exams are left behind, so that energies can go to emergency aid. But I can imagine these theological students will also encounter a pastoral care fieldwork experience no seminary could ever set up.

And reading about that opportunity for community got me thinking about pastoral care in disaster, and my search for meaning took an interesting step in another direction. A friend and clergywoman colleague, the Rev. Donna Schaper, pointed out in an exchange of e-mails that there isn't meaning in disaster. Trying to explain it will only lead to guilt, arrogance, headaches, or avoidance of the real priority, which is human need. In other words, the meaning is made after the disaster, in what actually is done about it, among those who set aside their own concerns and begin to nurture life. And the beginnings of God's New World are glimpsed in moments of help and healing. Lives touch lives, and the meaning of life is shared.

The theologian Jurgen Moltmann was extremely popular when I was in seminary, his book The Theology of Hope having been recently published, and was all the rage. A student of Moltmann's recently wrote in the journal The Christian Century, that

Hope can spring up even in the valley of the shadow of death; indeed, it is there that it becomes truly manifest.... Hope thrives even in situations which, for extrapolative cause-and-effect thinking, can elicit only utter hopelessness. Why? Because hope is based on God's coming into the darkness to dispel it with divine light. .... This is what Christmas is all about‹something radically new that cannot be generated out of the conditions of this world.

So, in the end, my meaning in the face of disaster can only come by my faith in a God who makes good on promises. That is not something I know from my daily life in the contentious, political, power-struggling, self-aggrandizing world. It is something I believe. The prophet Jeremiah did not know it from his daily life in the contentious, political, power-struggling, self-aggrandizing world of the seventh century before Christ. In fact, he was in prison for, presumably, preaching treason when his country was facing war. He was in despair for his own life, and the life of his nation. But his vision was of restoration, healing and joy - not by human making, but in God's time, and of God's making.

I found my own opportunity for community this week. You know, "community" and "communion" have the same root, and that's not an accident . I received e-mails, calls and personal inquiries from a number of you about the safety of Max's family, and I cannot tell you how important it was. Not just because you are kind, and showed your concern, but - I'm making a confession here -- because I was shocked out of my self-centered sense that I was somehow alone. Because my husband and in-laws are Indonesians, and because my guest and adopted family member Ezky lost an enormous number of her friends and former co-workers there - and, of course, it all happened on a holiday, when we could stay home, glued to the TV, phone and computer screen - I could wallow in a self-inflicted sense that "no one really knows. I'm alone, surrounded by a morass of loss." I began collecting stories from Ezky to use for my sermon this morning, horror stories, to give you a sense of the impact. Then I came back to work after Christmas to realize the obvious -- that you already appreciate the impact, and are over-horrified already. Everyone who's ever been in a 12-step program, or a support group of any kind, or loving congregation can tell you what I forgot: we are not alone.

And that's where God, with whom I've been so angry and disappointed this week, finally began to re-emerge for me, in a hopeful shape. The God I experience in Jesus is not a God who either inflicts, or removes, the pain of tragedy in our lives. The God I experience in Jesus is the God who is with us, and who does not fail to love us, no matter what is happening to us, or around us. We do not have to go through this alone. The broken and bleeding body of Christ is also our body. It suffers. It dies. It continues to live, and to live toward hope, in the community that tenaciously refuses to stop loving.
Amen.