I found myself wondering on the Sunday after the devastation in Haiti, how many preachers in our NC Baptist churches abandoned planned sermons or series to preach on the natural disaster. I wasn’t wondering out of judgment. I am not sure there is sufficient reason to abandon something one feels called to preach even in the event of such an event. But I am also not sure there isn’t, and so I was (and am) curious.

Of those who did, how many chose tackle the difference between “caused” and “allowed.” As in, “Did God cause the earthquake or did He merely allow it?” That one has far too many perils in it for me, though I think I would find the treatments of both, in the context of worship, interesting at minimum. But for those who dealt with the quake, but preferred not to go all theological on us, was this a “call-to-action” sermon? Maybe some used this time to remind folks that we have a Christian responsibility to help the needy?

My preaching mentor told me once that “occasion” sermons were the hardest to preach. He said, “You know there are only so many ways to preach the Christmas story.” I think my limited experience in the pulpit is proving him right (as usual.) I think that “emergency sermons” - and by this I mean sermons that are preached in response to unplanned things that happen like terrorist attacks, mass murders and shootings, and natural disasters - might be the next hardest to preach. What does one say? How do we explain the unexplainable?

The trite explanations, by blaming the “victims” or calling out “sin in the camp,” bother me more than I can express. Using those occasions as a call-to-action bothers me because many times the tragedy only brings to light already bad circumstances. That is certainly the case with this one in Haiti. We should have been helping LONG before the earthquake.

I plan to call my aforementioned mentor and ask him what he would have said, what he did say, in times like this.

There is only one thing I am sure of. The church can not afford to be silent in the face of such tragic circumstances. We must say something. We must do something.

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