‘Nature: red in tooth and claw’ Luke 2:22-40

The feast of Candlemas which we celebrate today falls at the end of a disastrous month for the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti. The adage, “it doesn’t rain in Haiti, it pours” is literal as well as metaphorical. Natural and man-made disasters have blighted the history of this beautiful and potentially prosperous corner of Hispaniola, the island it partly occupies. Haiti was the first black-led nation in the western hemisphere having revolted against the French in the early 19th century. The agriculturally disastrous policy of deforestation has led to soil erosion and poverty. But a succession of corrupt leaders has to a succession of coups with resulting political and social instability. These human errors have been compounded by a series of natural disasters including a devastating hurricane in 1996 which flooded large parts of the country and led to major loss of life. But this pales into insignificance against the scale of the most recent disaster, a stupendous earthquake, measuring 7 on the Richter scale, which has left upwards of 100 thousand people dead, the near-complete collapse of Haiti’s social and political structures and anarchy in its streets, not helped by the apparent inefficiency and fecklessness on the international response and of the squabbling aid agencies.

Candlemas is an appropriate occasion on which to remember those in Haiti who have lost loved ones, in particular parents who have lost children and children who have lost parents. In our gospel reading, the aged seer Simeon blesses Mary and then prophesies about Jesus, that ‘he was destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed’ – and then Simeon rounds off enigmatically – ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too’.  Simeon seems to utter it as an aside and yet it seems to go to the heart of the matter. The ‘consolation’ of Israel which Simeon hoped for – that is, the restoration of the people of Israel and the fulfilment of God’s redemptive work – was to be achieved through the suffering of the Messiah in which those who chose to fall and rise with Jesus would be implicated, especially Mary. The redemptive purposes of God’s Messiah could only be achieved through suffering not by trying to effect a redemption is spite of suffering or by evading suffering. The Messiah had to suffer in order to achieve God’s redemptive purposes.

The problem of suffering is perhaps one of the principal objections that people without explicit religious faith level against belief in a loving God. They reject religious faith principally on moral, rather than religious grounds. These people are sometimes called protest atheists. God, they say, if he happens to exist, is morally culpable for creating something less than the best of all possible worlds, that is, the world which we in fact live in. This was the force of Voltaire’s argument in his satirical novella Candide which he wrote in the aftermath of two devastating earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon in the 1740’s and 1750’s. What impressed Voltaire forcibly was that most people had been in Church when the Lisbon earthquake struck on the morning of All Saints’ Day 1755. And when those who had not been crushed by falling debris sought safety on the beaches of Lisbon, they were engulfed by three huge tsunami caused by the earthquake: “Out of the frying pan into the fire”. For Voltaire, a God who creates anything less than the best of all possible worlds is not a god worth believing in and this god clearly hasn’t.

The difficult with this form of atheism is that it is difficult to conceive what a world other than the one we actually live in would look like. The natural subterranean forces by which our world is shaped and renewed do sometimes cause terrible loss of life. The African and European tectonic plates that rubbed up against each other so traumatically in the 18th century were do what tectonic plates naturally do. The evolutionary mechanisms that produce new life forms and thus contribute to the glorious diversity of the animal and plant kingdoms ‘ruthlessly’ weed out life forms which are not naturally favoured through random mutation and natural selection. Nature can be, as Tennyson put it, “red in tooth and claw”. The variety which is the ‘spice of life’ arises out of profligate natural destruction and wastage.  If the world could have been other than it is then it defies the imaginations of human creatures that arose out, and are inescapable part, of precisely this kind of world.

There is currently a rather sterile debate at large about whether science, and particularly evolutionary science, is compatible with religious faith. Richard Dawkins is clear that science and religious are in hopeless and irredeemable conflict. The late Stephen Jay Gould argued that this conflict model was inapplicable because science and religion occupy he called ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA for short, in other words science and religion are both authoritative within their own jointly exhaustive-mutually exclusive spheres, but have nothing to say to each other. There is a more fruitful third way, however, articulated by the Revd Charles Kingsley, who is perhaps best known as the author of The Water Babies. Kingsley passionately believed that science and evolution could co-exist with religion. In the face of the arguments of many of his contemporaries in Victorian England, who believed that God had produced a ready-made creation, Kingsley argued that God had done something much cleverer. He argued that God had created a world “that could make itself”. The due independence of a creation that “makes itself” is a very great gift because it is then free to become something other than a divine puppet theatre. There is, however, a great cost, because creation is also free to go up blind alleys with fruitless outcomes, the appendix, homo floriensis etc..Notwithstanding, the world that God has in fact created is in fact the best of all possible worlds because it is the only sort of world in which the free response of the created order to the Creator becomes possible.

This is the best of all possible worlds because it is impossible to conceive of another kind of world in which love could be possible, the free response of one human creature to another and to God. If the story of Jesus’ presentation teaches us anything it is that love comes at huge cost. It cost Mary her son, and it cost Jesus everything. But the good news is that love does not, and cannot, die. Because love is the power by which the Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead. The sword which pierced Mary’s soul is the sword which has pierced the fabric of creation. But it is into that wound that the life-giving, life-sustaining, life-redeeming power of love can flow thus making the impossible possible. My prayer this Candlemas is that the people of Haiti may experience the consolation of Israel’s Messiah, and that we might too.

AMEN.