The news is shocking. Entire families swept away, villages devastated. One person surviving, the person standing a step away washed to sea. Parents feeling their children ripped from their arms by the force of the wave. Families with no certainty and no bodies to bury. A priest one minute distributing Communion during worship, the next telling parishioners to run.
And what lies ahead? Starvation, grief, homelessness, disease.
When natural disasters — the forces of wind and land and fire and water — shake the earth and torment its occupants, be it through tornadoes or floods or hurricanes or wildfires, so many permutations of chaos, God’s people are there to respond.
The tsunami that stunned many nations in Southeast Asia on Dec. 26 has grabbed the attention and the hearts of the world. The loss of life and suffering is catastrophic, and across the earth people are digging into their pockets to help.
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, the agency of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that responds to disasters around the globe, already has sent $300,000 in emergency assistance, taken from One Great Hour of Sharing Funds. And Presbyterians are being challenged to raise at least $2.5 million more in relief funds.
Church World Service, one of the PC(USA)’s partners in international relief work, also is asking for donations for “Gift of the Heart” health kits and for Interchurch Medical Assistance medicine boxes, both of which contain basic medical and hygiene supplies. Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has promised to provide $100,000 for two shipments of medical boxes. Each shipment will hold 100 boxes — that’s 200 boxes altogether. Each box costs $350 and is expected to provide supplies for a village of 1,000 people for a month.
Presbyterian leaders have released a letter encouraging Presbyterians to search their hearts and give generously. “It is a disaster of unparalleled proportions, affecting the lives of literally millions of people and thousands of villages and towns,” said the letter, from Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly; PC(USA) Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, who’s also president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches; and John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council. “It is difficult for us to imagine how areas of that vast region will ever be the same.”
Locally, Presbyterians are responding too, often with money and prayer.
Some congregations have organized prayer vigils — compelled by the enormity of the suffering and their need to join together to pray. Among them: Deer Creek Harmony Presbyterian in Darlington, Maryland, a small congregation of just under 50 people, whose pastor, Barbara Stumpf, drew on her previous career as a piano teacher to create “A Service of Scripture, Prayer and Music in the Aftermath of the Great Tsunami.”
One of the first readings, from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”
And the opening prayer states: “To God we offer our full human response — including disbelief, questioning, anger, sorrow — asking God’s Spirit to pray for us even when we do not know how to pray.”
Stumpf, stated supply pastor for the congregation, said that when the news broke, “I felt I needed to do it for myself and for the parishioners to make sense of what was going on . . . We needed to bring our sorting out and our turmoil to God.”
The Dec. 30 service included silent prayer, and recorded music chosen to help guide people through their grief (because of the holidays, the organist was away and the choir dispersed on vacation, Stumpf said). So a passage from the 54th chapter of Isaiah — “For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love will not depart from you” — was followed by a recording from “O Magnum Mysterium.”
When she heard that, “the tears started to come,” Stumpf said. “I felt my anger at God dissolve at that moment.”
First Presbyterian church in Metuchen, New Jersey has for more than a dozen years had a ministry to Indonesian immigrants, and it has offered prayer vigils as well — a chance for people to come and share their sorrow in Bahasa Indonesia, the language of their homeland.
Some see the tsunami as punishment, but “I believe God still watches over the people,” said Mercy Assa Rumengan, who emigrated from Indonesia 14 years ago, and has been in touch with many in her homeland by phone and e-mail.
“God loves everyone,” she said. “As human beings we have to help other.”
TO DONATE TO TSUNAMI RELIEF: Donations to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance can be made:
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Online, through the PC(USA) website, at www.pcusa.org/pda/response/asia/tsunami-materialaid
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By check, made payable to Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Indicate that the contribution is for #DR000167 and send to:
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)
Remittance Processing
P.O. Box 643700
Pittsburgh, PA 15264-3700
