Some clerics see it as yet another sign that the Apocalypse is nearing. Others, that December’s great earthquake and tsunamis are nothing more than natural disasters.

“Why would God allow that to happen?” asks the Rev. Jerry Begin rhetorically. “It’s a very mysterious thing that people have asked about for centuries.”

Begin is pastor of Lewiston’s Spirit of Fire Evangelistic Church. He’s also president of the Evangelical Pastors Prayer Fellowship, a group of clerics in Androscoggin and Oxford counties.

“God did not kill anyone,” Begin says. “It’s a natural disaster.”

It’s a disaster, however, that humans may have provoked, he adds.

“We’re doing a lot of things to the Earth,” Begin says. He cited atomic weapons testing – something France did for years in the Pacific – as one of those things.

In that sense, Begin lines up in a way with Buddhists and Hindus who believe in karma – that what we do will come back to visit us.

There’s more, though, to this particular disaster, Begin says. Scientists, he says, have determined that the power of the earthquake that spawned the tsunamis rocked the Earth on its axis, causing the planet “to lose time.”

That, he says, “is in keeping with the prophecies” that foretell the last days.

“War, famine, disease, great storms, earthquakes and floods – all of these things are happening,” notes Begin.

With one possible exception, Begin says the tsunamis shouldn’t be viewed as God exacting his wrath on man.

Washing away sin

For Begin, that exception is: Sri Lanka and Thailand are known as places that draw foreigners to engage in sex with child prostitutes. With the waves, Begin said, “God washed it” – the sin – from those lands.

People should look at the tsunamis as God’s warning that they need to clean up their acts, to prepare for his second coming.

“We’re living in the times of Noah,” he says.

Not all religious leaders in the region see it that way.

“My God would never do that,” says the Rev. Joy Gasta, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist churches in Norway and West Paris.

“I think God has better ways of getting people to do differently.”

Of the tsunami disaster, she says, “It’s a force of nature. It’s like other natural disasters.”

Gasta continues, “It’s very frightening and troublesome to those involved and an opportunity to others to help them – and also feel grateful that we were not directly affected by it.”

Rabbi Hillel Katzir of Auburn’s Temple Shalom Synagogue-Center says the earthquake and the resulting tsunamis are “not something that God did to us, (and) not punishment for something.”

Following rules

Yes, the rabbi notes, “God put the world into being, created the world, created nature to operate under certain rules.”

And yes, the rabbi continues, God “could suspend those rules, but then there’d be no predictability. We’d always be wondering if God will step in and suspend the rules.”

As others do, Katzir sees some good coming from this event of enormous death and destruction.

“It’s not so much about what happens to us as to how we deal with what happens to us,” he says. “God is also the source of the courage, the strength to deal with the aftermath, to assist the survivors.”

And in that vein, he says, the world has been coming together as never before. He’s hopeful that will continue.

The Rev. David Willhoite tends to share Begin’s viewpoint.

“Everything we face in life is because of sin,” maintains Willhoite, pastor of the Apostolic Church of Rumford. “Sin brought on chaos, and sin brought this (disaster) to us.”

Not that the people of Indonesia or other South Asian nations were particularly sinful, he explains. But, for some reason, they were chosen to pay the price for a sinful world.

It’s God’s way of getting attention, he said, of having people turn back to God “to be saved.”

“God did not do this,” he said, “but obviously, God allowed it.”

Prophecy

Willhoite also sees the earthquake that spawned the tsunamis as being particularly relevant to the Bible’s revelations.

The Bible speaks of great earthquakes when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, he said, and again when Jesus died on the cross and then when he was resurrected.

“I do see any major event as a part of the end times,” he says. “We don’t know the day.”

Mark Schlotterbeck, the inner-city missionary for Calvary United Methodist Church in Lewiston, doesn’t connect God’s will with the tsunami.”I’m hesitant to see the divine hand in all things that happen,” he says.

“It’s too easy to interpret such things from an individual point of view,” he adds. “It all – human and tsunami – is part of the created world. Things happen like this in nature.”

Schlotterbeck notes that people tend to think more of God during times of great disasters, just as they do at life’s benchmarks: births, marriages and deaths.

“It’s good to ask questions about God and to wonder where faith fits in,” he says.

“I haven’t had a single person say to me, Why did God do this?'” notes the Rev. Frank Murray, pastor of Auburn’s Roman Catholic community.

And if he had?

“From my Catholic perspective, God does not directly will a catastrophe on anyone,” he said. “This was nature, and though God created it, nature is alive and things happen – things that can be destructive. … Sometimes people get hurt.”