Tuesday 4 December 2007

Strange idea

A well meaning man rang yesterday to tell me about someone who was sick, but that was not really why he rang (so he said)...he was inviting me to go and pray silently on the steps of the SA Parliament this evening.
As he painstakingly explained the rationale he told me this was about praying for rain. This is not an easy idea at the best of times, but his rationale was that today was the 38th anniversary of liberalising abortion laws in South Australia, and such and such a person had developed a belief that the current drought might be connected with that.
This is a difficult view of God, don't you think? A God who visits drought upon a nation because of political policy...to be sure it has a certain Old Testament quality but it seems difficult to sustain.
I think the real problem with this sort of thing is not that God is not capable of this or that, but that we want extraordinarily simple solutions to what are obviously complex situations.
Drought is much more complex (it seems to me) than God just being a bit ticked off at how wayward this or that government is, and we are being invited to much more profound repentance than just turning round the abortion laws...as unsatisfactory as they might be.
To be fair to this humble sort of chap he was struggling about how to give this some sort of rationale, and he did touch me when he said that the problem with abortion was that "This was all we had to offer people in deep distress." which seems to me a fairly important reflection on a lot of social policy....."This was all we had to offer...."

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