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Sermon preached at the service for victims of the Bali bombing, by the Rt Revd Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford

[Details of service]

Wednesday 12 February 2003

What we need when tragedy strikes is a friend to sit beside us and listen to us. We don't want someone to do a lot of talking, particularly not from afar. So, forgive me that I am not beside you but up in this pulpit and that I have been asked to speak rather than listen. What I can do however is to register what those of you who have lost loved ones have told your friends and other members of your family: your sense of shock and disbelief, pain, anguish, sadness, grief, anger - and above all a terrible sense of loss, irrecoverable loss. Those who have survived will also have experienced a roller coaster of feelings, shock, relief, perhaps even guilt for having survived when others didn't.

In the bible the most terrible things happened to Job and when someone tried to comfort him he blurted out

My thoughts today are resentful,
For God's hand is heavy on me in my trouble.
If only I knew how to find him,
How to enter his court,
I would state my case before him
And set out my arguments in full;
Then I should learn what answer he would give
And find out what he had to say.
(Job 23, 1-5)

We can understand those feelings. We want to have it out with someone, God or the Government or both and to know why, why, why?

It may be that such feelings will never quite leave us but there comes a time when we know we simply have to get on with the business of living. Here I find great wisdom in a Jewish source. Referring to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem a rabbi said

Not to mourn at all is impossible, for the decree has already been enacted, but to mourn too much is also impossible. Rather the sages said thus: a man should plaster his home with plaster, and leave a small amount unplastered in memory of the temple.

In short, we have to get on with living, with redecorating our house if you like, but we continue to remember, and it is right to do so: therefore we leave a patch undecorated, or in terms of the original imagery, unplastered. We continue to remember, with photos, with memories, with little familiar rituals.

Let me explore with you a little if I may what remembering might involve. First, yes, despite the terrible sadness, there are the happy memories of the one you love and now grieve for. There is the thought of all they have meant to you, the times of shared fun and laughter. To think of such times is particularly poignant, but they are just as much part of our experience as the sense of loss. The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote

By dying young, a person stays that way forever in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time.

For some here the one you remember continues to shine. Yet sometimes memories can be troubled. We remember times of disagreement, arguments, even estrangement. A violent, unexpected death leaves no time for saying the words we now wish we had said before. But in this, especially, God's healing presence can help. We can talk to God. We can tell God the things which we wish we had said. We can bring into his presence even our most painful memories for his acceptance and healing.

The terrorist outrage in Bali brings home to us once again the tragic nature of the world in which we live, the evil which defaces human life. Terrorism remains a threat and it must be defeated. But defeating it involves more than good intelligence and the appropriate use of force. It involves belief in the values for which we stand. It involves confidence in the human spirit. For the human spirit can respond to tragedy in ways which make it yield some good. Indeed God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing, is present at every point of the universe, ceaselessly at work responding constructively to our human destruction and calling us to work with him. He does not step in to stop us from hurting and killing one another. We often wish he did: but he has given us a life of our own, for which we must take responsibility. Nevertheless, he does not stop from trying to inspire us to use that responsibility well by overcoming evil with good. As St Paul put it

"In everything God cooperates for good with those who love him and are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8, 27).

I don't think God sends suffering. It is part of the risk of creation. But God works with us and in us and through us to heal his broken world. And a good part of this work at the present sad time is the support we give one another, the sharing of our grief, the little gestures, the practical actions that can make such a difference. In the reading we heard the words

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. (1 John 4, 7).

And this gives us hope, because as the reading also says

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4, 16)

And this gives us hope. For if we remember in sorrow, as we do, we can also remember that love has its origin and home in God. For if we have been put on this earth with the capacity to love and the purpose of being here is to grow in that love, and that love is grounded in Christ who takes us into the very life of God, then even a tragedy such as this cannot finally frustrate the divine purpose, a purpose which is not limited to space and time. To grow in love is to grow in the life of God; to grow in love is to allow the very life of God to dwell within us.

Those who have survived this awful bombing, with all its shock and trauma, have still the gift of life, a gift which can be used to help others and heal our broken world. Those who grieve will remember in sadness. But to you also comes the call of life. May your grief and sadness somehow work for the blessing of others.

The Orkney poet Edwin Muir wrote a poem in which he contrasts our suffering, tragic world with the apparently perfect conditions of the Garden of Eden. But he concluded

But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love . . .
Strange blessings never in paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

The vision in that poem is not a certainty but it is a possibility. Grief and charity, hope and faith and pity and love - even under our darkened, sombre sky - such qualities can light up our lives and give hope to others.

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