Krakatoa, East of Johnstone - Sermon 25th November 2007
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
There are lots of misconceptions about Krakatoa. One is that it is called Krakatoa. It's actually called Krakatau - it seems that the spelling that makes it sound like a bottle of squash from New Zealand first appeared in a report of the famous eruption there in 1883 in an English newspaper.
Another - and apologies to fans of the film - is that it is "East of Java". It isn't. It's in the Sunda Straits, west of the north end of Java. And it was a lighthousekeeper in the Sunda Straits who saw one of the most remarkable things connected with the eruption we all connect with Krakatau whenever we hear the word Krakatoa.
There were lots of signs that things were building to a huge eruption; scientists working in what was still, then, the baby field of vulcanology reproached themselves afterwards for not reading them properly, for not being in a position to call for the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. Partly, it was an odd guilt at having disregarded the wisdom of the natives, who had traditions of how the mountain which was the island of Krakatau behaved. And of course, the signs were what we would expect, and have come to know, are associated with waking volcanoes - earthquakes, smoke, loud, terrifying noises. All of them manifestations of colossal power.
It's not surprising that a lot of imaginative reconstructions of early Israel's language about God's power look to volcanoes as source. Smoke, fire, the earth shaking - many people, some of them fine scholars, have been led to think that at a crucial early point, Israel's understanding of her God was coloured by input from people who worshipped the divinities they associated with volcanoes. Just think of Moses on Sinai....
Power. Might. That's how people tend to conceptualize God. Tend to picture him. And in our culture, that's a big problem. Put bluntly, in a world like ours, what kind of power and glory could possibly make God seem relevant to us? People used to be terrified of the idea of God they had, because they believed that God had it in his power to bring about the end of the world. We know now that a comet fragment less than twenty miles across, a dirty snowball the size of Clackmannanshire, could do that.
Our attitude to power and authority now is jaded and cynical, anyway. We don't worship it any more. They used to say that in the baroque splendour of Versailles, while Louis XIV worshipped God, the court worshipped the king. Nowadays, the Most Powerful Man in the World, George W. Bush, can't impose his will on Iraq with the greatest military machine in history -and let's not even think about what 9/11 did to conceptions of power.
And we have a completely different understanding of the scale of the universe we live in, and the prominence of our place in it. We can speak of the end of the world, nowadays, in an event that would barely be noticeable to the naked eye on Mars, the nearest other planet you could see it from. And that, in terms of the universe, is local.
Power doesn't impress us. Well, it does. Krakatau as an eruption was an awesome natural event, of unimaginable power. As was Mount St. Helens, or the Pinatubo eruption of 1991. These things make us feel small, tiny, awestruck. But we understand them as natural processes. By and large, we don't understand them as manifestations of the power of an angry God, ranting and destroying to show us how great he is and how angry that we have forgotten him. And people who do think like that, we have problems with, because we know that, compared with, say, a supernova explosion, which you can see across the space between galaxies, a volcano is pretty much unnoticeable. What kind of a petty God would set off squibs like that in order to get our attention?
Then again, when a star goes supernova, it consumes the last of its nuclear fuel, its hydrogen and helium and other stuff (up to and including iron, by that stage in its life) and for a few days its explosion outshines the whole of the rest of its galaxy, containing a hundred thousand million stars. And this sort of thing happens maybe twenty-five times a night in the billions of galaxies in the visible part of the universe. And we don't know a thing about them.
Maybe there's something odd about us, that we think that Krakataus, and Hurricane Katrinas, are shows put on by a jealous angry god to get our attention...
But there is another way in which these events do maybe make us think of ultimate things. The poet Hugh McDiarmid - among many other things, a self-described "Presbyterian atheist" - talks about a sense of scale... He writes, in his colossal "A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle"
He canna Scotland see wha yet
Canna see the Infinite
And Scotland in true scale to it. ...
But who can "see the infinite"? Maybe the key words are "in true scale"; it's how we measure ourselves, and what we measure ourselves against, that are crucial. And a sense of our smallness before the enormity of a Krakatau, or the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, or a supernova -now that we know what those tiny pinpoints of extra light that the biggest telescopes can see really mean - now that, potentially, is an insight, not into God directly, but into who we are before God. And how small we are.
But there's also maybe more.
Amid all the raging, and rumbling, and exploding, and ash- and pumice-throwing of Krakatau, one event, one warning of what was there, and what was happening, still stands out. And it's so eerily different to what else was going on that it still makes the hairs stand up on the back of the neck.
One night not long before the full eruption, of August 26-27 1883, a lighthousekeeper looked across the straits of Sunda towards the troubled rock, and in the moonlight he saw, for a moment, the sea, which was slightly choppy, become absolutely smooth, like a mirror, so that the reflection of the sky and the land in it was absolutely perfect. As the rather good BBC drama-documentary on "Krakatoa - The Last Days" points out, the power, the force, it would take to make the sea for hundreds of square miles flat calm is absolutely unimaginable.
And that is a fascinating point. It's the point that Elijah had to learn on another mountain often argued to be a volcano - and therefore not the Horeb that most people think it is. There is imaginable power. Earthquake, wind and fire. And there is unimaginable power. Power that can't be symbolized, can't be expressed, in terms of our pictures and understandings of power.
In a sense, that's true of the power of a supernova. Nobody will ever be able to get near enough to a supernova and survive to let its unimaginable power impress them, or give them a new scale for what they can imagine. That's the trouble with sheer power. It can only impress you up to a certain point, and then it has to kill you. And if you're dead, what was the point of trying to impress you?
Which is a clue to the need to find ways of talking of God that don't just soup up his power to the last degree and then shout "Bow down and worship!" to the rest of us. That is a totally human conception of power -and therefore a totally human conception of God. In other words, it's idolatry.
But a power that can express itself by making everything go quiet - now that is Something Else. A power so great that you experience it as Something Beyond Power. Now that is awesome...
I'm not saying that Krakatau was a revelation of God. Krakatau was the first experience modern science had of a gigantic volcanic explosion, one it could study and measure and theorise about.
Krakatau was what happens when magma makes its way up from the earth's mantle, and gathers in a chamber, and erupts through a volcanic vent - and then the whole volcano falls catastrophically into the chamber once the eruption has emptied it. All of that is science. All of that can be explained rigorously until there is nothing left.
But the stilling of the sea - now that's science. But it's also poetry, and eeriness, and a disquieting paradox. All of it is explicable in terms of forces and physics. But an account of it that was confined to forces and physics would be woefully deficient. Because there was awe. And that needs to be storied, to be written into the account. And there was also paradox. A paradox at the heart of the way the world works. Something strange and unexpected that stretches our thinking. A power that shows itself in a strange, imposed stillness. In peace...
So much of what we look to God for is still connected with power. With God's power to transform, to bring about change, The Old Testament was already groping to bring about a new understanding of how God and power are related. Psalm 46 looks out clear-eyed at a world of threat and violence, of anxiety and turmoil, and envisages a strange power that can impose an eerie, ultimately authoritative peace on all this.
Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has wrought desolations in the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, he burns the chariots with fire! "Be still, and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth!"
But - odd, isn't it! That's still power. During the Cold War, America's Strategic Air Command had as its motto "Peace is our profession!" And both sides kept the peace through the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction -the absolute guarantee that if either started a war, both would be destroyed, and the whole world along with them. In a sense, that already takes us beyond Krakatau. What kindof peace depends on mere force? What kind of puny, compromised force or power is it that can only make peace by imposing it?
What kind of authority has a referee, you might ask, who can only keep order in a match by packing heat?
And maybe that takes us beyond Psalm 46 as well.
Jeremiah's prophecy, which we heard today, is a vision of how God will bring goodness out of the compromise, oppression and violence of the present. It's not clear how, but it will centre on a figure who will bring all of this about. Presumably because he has the power...
The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
But at the heart of the New Testament is something that takes all these expectations and stands them on their heads. Something that builds on to all these models of power, and the way each one exhausts itself by not being powerful enough.
At the still centre of the New Testament, in an eerie calm, hangs a young man on a Cross. And here, all of a sudden, is a new model of power. Such power, that it can freely divest itself of power. Such force, that it can change the world by making itself powerless. Such power, again, that it completely subverts everything we thought we knoew about power.
Be still and know that I am God.
Even the Thief on the Cross, who sees something, still thinks in terms of a power to come, which will change all this, which will transform the world at length...
Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." But Jesus,, in his weakness, there on the Cross, is the presence of that transforming power, undermining the power structures of the world. To grasp that is to grasp that the kingdom is arriving.
He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."