By Jeff Brumley
The monstrous twister had barely finished its deadly work in Moore, Okla., on May 20 when the usual voices of judgment and condemnation began echoing across the Internet.
Westboro Baptist Church’s Fred Phelps Jr. tweeted that the tornado, which killed at least 24, was God’s punishment of Oklahoma City Thunder player Kevin Durant for supporting a gay NBA player.
Then evangelical author and speaker John Piper joined in, tweeting verses from the Book of Job, also suggesting God’s wrath was at work in the tornado.
“Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead,” said one tweet quoting Job 1:19.
Piper then tweeted the next verse: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” Piper eventually took down the tweets.
But these and other comments, considered hateful and insensitive by many, are being met online by voices urging sensitivity and understanding for the victims of calamity. And many of those voices are Baptist.
Southern Baptist pastor and blogger Wade Burleson blogged Thursday that Piper and his supporters may be trying to provide religious instruction in the midst of tragedy, but their timing and their approach are off.
They “don’t have a theological problem, they have a relational one,” said Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla.
“I guess I’m saying one of the wisest things a theologian can do in the midst of tragedy is to shut up his teaching until he shows up in mercy,” Burleson wrote. “Calvinists need to start seeing people, not cities.”
That’s a focus Tennessee author and pastor Mike Smith suggested in a commentary he penned for ABPnews May 24.
Victims usually want to know if people remember and care for them, if they will ever feel normal again and where God is at the moment, wrote Smith, the pastor of Central Baptist Church of Fountain City, in Knoxville.
These were lessons Smith said he learned responding to other natural disasters.
“The persons with whom I worked neither wanted nor needed a theological essay at that point in time,” Smith said. “They did need to hear God was present with them and their loved ones.”
Florida pastor Barry Howard blogged today that events like the Oklahoma tornado prove the biblical observation that “it rains on the just and the unjust.”
“We learned emphatically that God doesn’t exempt folks from tragedy just because they have faith,” Howard, senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Pensacola, said.
He added, “There is no place or people group who are given a free pass from natural disasters.”