PDA’s solidarity delegation fills a pair of Southern California pulpits
Immanuel Presbyterian Church and First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica hear messages of compassion from guest preachers
SANTA MONICA, California — The people on Presbyterian Disaster Assistance’s solidarity visit to PC(USA) churches and mid councils impacted by the January wildfires were blessed to fan out Sunday morning to worship at PC(USA) churches.
Omar Salinas Chacón, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Mission Specialist for Migration Accompaniment Ministries, spoke in both Spanish and English during worship at Immanuel Presbyterian Church. The Rev. Dr. Laurie Kraus, director of Humanitarian & Global Ecumenical Engagement in the Interim Unified Agency, preached at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica. Others on the solidarity journey worshiped at other nearby PC(USA) churches.
“PDA in this visit has been witness to the damage and heard the stories,” Salinas-Chacón said. “Personally, for me, I have family members who are undocumented, and we are having hard conversations that maybe some of them might need to go back to our home country of El Salvador. If they do that, we might never see each other in person again, and this is a choice we cannot ignore.”
“It can all be despair-inducing,” he said. “I saw a tweet that said: ‘For Lent, I am just giving up,’ and I felt that to my core.”
As a person who often views the glass as half-empty, “I find myself asking, ‘Where is the Lord and why is [God] not delivering us from all this suffering?”
But then he reminds himself of PDA’s motto, “Out of Chaos, Hope.”
“I think that sums up what I learned on this trip,” he said, naming the biblical account of Jesus calming the storm as illustrative and recalling how he used to pass judgment on the disciples for their fearful response.
“We know how the story ends. The disciples did not. They entered survival mode and were locked in on the crisis in front of them,” he said. “Today, we are in that storm in more than one way. We run around and we ask ourselves if God cares whether we drown, have our homes destroyed, or have our family members deported.”
“I was constantly reminded on this trip by people who lost everything in the fires: We find hope through our faith.”
Having faith doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t afraid, he said. We can have our anxiety and harbor questions, as well as grieve. “Find compassion for yourself and forgive yourself,” he suggested. “You are going through a lot.”
Drawing from Psalm 91, Salinas-Chacón said we can rely on God transforming chaos into hope. “We must remember: we are not alone. We will not drown,” he said. “That is the promise [God] has made to us.”
For those in worship at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, Kraus used Exodus 34:27-35 and Luke 4:1-13 as her preaching texts. She immediately turned to the aftermath of the January fires.
“It’s hard to watch everything you have worked for, much of what you have loved, your sense of safety and belonging, crumble into dust,” Kraus said. “You know this, who have stood beside neighbors whose homes, work and neighborhoods have been lost or damaged.”
These “hard seasons and unfinished stories also burden us with difficult, frightening questions, many unanswerable, as we wander the deserts of anger, confusion and grief,” she said.
During the height of the war in Syria, Kraus was invited to spend a week at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon, with 50 pastors from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. “We were there to learn and teach each other about trauma and pastoral resilience, and to try and find refreshment in the desert that years of war in Syria and Iraq had imposed on these leaders and the congregations and communities they serve.”
A friend named Mofid, a young pastor from Homs, Syria, talked about what it means “when the bottom drops out of your faith, the people you love are desperately thirsty, and there is no clear path through the wilderness,” Kraus recalled.
“He said, ‘Some have moved away from God because they are angry. They have a formula in their mind, and they are angry, and some are afraid. We thank God for the good things that happen to us,’ they say, ‘so why don’t we blame God for the evil things?’”
“Now in the crisis we are demanded to answer universal questions, difficult questions,” Mofid said. “We are like Jesus in the garden, praying that God would ‘take this cup away from me.’”
In Luke’s account of Jesus’ testing, “Jesus chose a different path in his dance with the devil in the desert,” according to Kraus. “Hungry and alone, he was offered a life of complete security and self-sufficiency — to turn stones into bread. Imagine! Enough money, insurance and resources to never have to depend on anyone or anything! But Jesus said no.”
“Next, and this one is playing out painfully in our national life at present, Jesus was offered absolute power to control the world and the world around him, and again, he said no,” Kraus said. “Finally, poignantly, he was reminded, as my friend Mofid and his congregation were reminded, that life can be terrible, and sometimes God is silent when we need most to hear and to believe that God cares.”
The devil suggested the Jesus throw himself off the top of the Temple, risking life and limb “to make God prove that God really cared,” Kraus said. But even though God was silent then and later, at the cross, where “Jesus cried to the one he could not hear and who thought had abandoned him … he would not turn his back on the presence and fidelity of God, even when God seemed absent and indifferent.”
In his song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen has these lines: “Ring the bells that can still ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
“What we are invited to practice during Lent is not a denial of self, but a welcoming of our whole selves, our deepest truth,” Kraus said. “Choosing to remain fully human — broken, vulnerable, connected — doesn’t destroy us. Rather, it frees us for becoming agents of God in the world. … It is being willing to believe that if we take off the veil and break our silence and allow others to see both our brokenness and the light trying to shine through the cracks in it, that we will be loved and helped and healed, and we will not be left alone.”
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