Speaking Of Earthquakes

אמן אמן אני אומר לך, את אשר אנו יודעים. אנו מדברים. - ישוע המשיח"Truly, truly I say to you, we speak that which we know." - John 3:11When natural or major disasters hit, it is the habit or compulsion of some religious leaders to say something definitive about why the disaster happened. These pronouncements often take the form in which CBN spokesman, Pat Robertson made his January 13th statements on the supposed cause of the recent earthquake in Haiti.I gave a sermon on this religious phenomenon this past Shabbat (January 16th), and offer it into the conversation regarding what religious leaders' roles are - and are not - when disaster strikes.Chiefly, my sermon embarks from the above text from Yochanon, and the stunningly clear, sane, and humanizing rule Yeshua our Messiah gives to us for speaking about anything: "we speak that which we know." Conversely, we strive not to say things we do not know, as if we do know: and there is a vast difference between knowing something (as a certainty) and thinking, feeling, intuiting, or guessing at it.It is my hope this sermon is helpful to anyone in the faith world laboring over the nearly instantaneous death and maiming of 100,000 human beings in a natural disaster in contrast to the "God is good all the time" reductionist epithets rife in certain religious sectors, along with a co-dependent compulsion to "get God off the hook" (as if He is not big enough to take care of Himself), which usually takes the form of blaming the victims of the disaster - along with the presence of certain marketing dynamics motivating religious leaders to assume the role of "the one who knows what God is doing."As a survivor close by the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks here in Manhattan, I still marvel that the only two voices in the world following that disaster who were publicly blaming the victims - rather than the perpetrators - were some Muslim extremists sympathetic to the terrorists, and some fundamentalist Christians in the United States.My sermon, "Earthquake in Haiti" can be found on our shul's website under the Sermons button (http://www.bethelnyc.org/category/sermons), or on iTunes in the Beth El of Manhattan Podcast (http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=261742853).May it be for truth and shalom.Rabbi Bruce Cohen20 January 2010