"The God With No Kodak"
Nine year old Kim is running down the street. You can hear her screams. The pain is unbearable. Kim's back is on fire, the napalm is doing its work. The year is 1972. Nick Ut, an AP photojournalist in Nam, points his camera and clicks.
A girl lies down to die in rain-starved Sudan. Too weak to get up, she awaits death's harvesting hand. In the background two are also waiting -- one a vulture, perched and ready, sensing its coming largess; the other is Kevin Carter, camera in hand. Click. The picture is taken, the girl who can't get up, she's in the foreground, the waiting bird is in the back. For this picture, Kevin Carter will go down in history. He gets the Pulitzer Prize, 1994's big winner. He also gets something else: criticism with which he cannot live. Three months later, Kevin kills himself, going down in history as a man who saw intense human suffering only as grist for a shutter, film, and a developing room somewhere.
One in the presence of a girl on fire, the other watching a girl in the last throes of starvation. Neither drops their camera and runs to help. Neither grabs a bucket of water or a blanket, neither shoos the black bird away.
Humanity goes about life. They work, sleep, eat, have some weekend fun, watch some TV, go to some movies, read a few good books, raise a family. There, lurking in the little-or-no-thought-of distance is the bird of prey, waiting, biding his time, sharpening his beak. There, had we the special lenses, we could also see flames in the distance, flames approaching those readers of books and watchers of TV, and seers of movies and workers of industry.
We look again and we see something amazing -- God, God with no camera, God with feet soon to be transfixed, God with hands soon to be torn into, God with a body elevated on a cross somewhere outside Jerusalem, God with a heart come to the rescue. This God has no camera, wants none. This God, this Jesus, we put in a tomb where He lies dead for three days. This God we see come out of the tomb on a Sunday morning.
To Jesus, mankind's sin-soaked misery isn't for film, for a Pulitzer. To Jesus, mankind is so valuable; it's to be rendered savable, not photographable, by His death. The question becomes one of a person's believing in that death as being sufficient or not to pay the price for his sin-saturated situation. The question becomes does he believe that Jesus died and rose again for him, personally?
The spiritually starving walk before me and I see in the distance the vulture of death and the fires of judgement. They sit in desks in my office; they sit by me at football games, they mow their yards next to mine. They sit in desks in my classes; they stand in lines with me at the grocery store and the bank. They sit with me in doctors' offices; they cut my hair when it needs a trim. Sometimes they sit with me at lunch, for sometimes they're my friends, sometimes my relatives. Just back a ways, I see the flames, I hear the sound of rustling feathers perched, but with an itch to fly.
I make myself think, "They're not subjects for our discussion, nor for a polite clucking of our tongues at their latest sin-soaked escapade. They're not subjects for our minds to photograph for some Pulitzer Prize of the mind's eye. No, they're people for whom we drop our cameras, our comfort. They're people toward whom God moved in Christ. They're people who need to know and be persuaded to believe that. They're people we move toward as the bird waits, as the fire nears."
God holds no Kodak. Do we?
--Mike Halsey, Pastor
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