The Real Disaster

Ranald Macaulay

When I opened my e-mails this morning I saw that one of them was titled ‘Ken’s passing’. Could it be true? Yes, it was: news of Ken Phoenix’s death in Canada. After treatment for leukaemia over several weeks he suddenly fell into a coma and died on Sunday. Many of you won’t know him directly, but most of you, I think, know his widow, Sally. She has been one of Christian Heritage’s most faithful ‘doorkeepers’ since we started four years ago. She came each summer for several years at her own expense from France and was, and is, one of our ‘praying always’ supporters abroad. Both she and Ken were booked to come to Cambridge next month to help with the redecoration.

This is now the second death that has affected our tiny community in Christian Heritage recently. After an arduous six month struggle with cancer Geoff Watts, too, passed away in November as you already know. With that in mind – and with the tsunami not far from our thoughts these days – I want to share a verse from Psalm 57 which has meant a lot to me ever since I went through a low period about 20 years ago and a friend pointed it out to me:
“Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me,
For in you my soul takes refuge.
I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings
Until the disaster is passed….”

What are we to make of this word ‘disaster’? Clearly the Psalmist has something in mind which is less than death for he anticipates it ‘passing’ and then life returning to normal. It could be losing one’s job could, or being plunged into war, or becoming psychologically stressed and disorientated, feeling as if life isn’t worth living. All of us know something of this sort of experience.

Disasters have always occurred. Jesus referred to one in Palestine when a tower collapsed killing a number of people and he made it clear, too, that there would always be disasters. Only at the end of the age, he said, will things change dramatically. Why? Because he will then introduce a kingdom free of disaster in which human experience begins to thrive: just as we all become expansive in spring when the cold and dark recedes and, on a warm still day, the countryside bursts with colour and light.

For the present, though, we have to learn the secret of ‘hiding in the shadow of his wings’. We have individual ‘disasters’ to cope with year by year, some bearable, some seemingly unbearable. However, the scale of the current disaster in the Indian Ocean reminds us that there is in fact a far larger disaster of which all ‘smaller’ ones are simply symptomatic. Biblically speaking, the disaster which overarches all human history is the disaster of sin with its bitter, bitter fruit of universal death. In this view – and I think its the only adequate one for the present turmoil we find ourselves in globally - is that the whole of history since the Fall represents a ‘disaster’, a disaster of such magnitude that nothing but the Son of God’s coming and dying and rising from death could offset. Taken in this larger perspective the storms of life are seen to be literally overwhelming – i.e. they ‘whelm-over’ us, they carry us away – whether in the form of a toppling tower or a tsunami or just plain old age. For ultimately death is unavoidable.

In such a setting the image of God’s wings to take shelter beneath is truly poignant. Where otherwise we are helpless, now we have a real and everlasting shelter. From the worst that this abnormal planet can throw at us we can be sustained by the ‘living hope’ we have now, and then arise to be with him eternally at the Last Day.
(Author: Ranald Macaulay)

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