Sermon for Lent III Year C 2013 Facing Our Worldliness Bad Things, Bad Times, Good God! While I was compiling the oral history documentary I made a few years ago on the experiences of eight people of the events of 9/11, an acquaintance told me about a conversation she had with a woman who identified herself as a born again Christian. This conversation happened a few weeks or months following those terrible events. While traveling together on a NYC subway, the born again Christian told my friend, Well, I know that if I had been in the towers on 9/ll, nothing would have happened to me! I just know that God would protect me because I am a Christian it would be as if I were in a bubble or pocket nothing would have happened to me! My friend told me she was completely horrified by this woman s statement and didn t know what to say to her. I found myself saying to my friend that she could have reminded her of Jesus own words Do you think those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Well, it was probably a good thing I wasn t the one sitting next to this woman on the subway. As one of my favorite theologians says Some biblical passages, (like some flammable materials), should probably carry a warning label: handle with care. 1 This is a story that asks a question that has long plagued humankind why do bad things happen? Humanity has long struggled with the question of evil where does it come from and why? 1 David Lose. http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=671 1
These questions come in the wake of events that seem random, beyond the ability of the human beings caught up in such random events with little or no ability to change the outcome with any real impact. Think earthquakes in Haiti, hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, planes exploding over oceans, innocent people massacred in shooting rampages, sky scrapers reduced to rubble You get the idea. Over the course of human history, even still today, some have sought to explain such events by drawing the conclusion that the victims themselves must have had a hand in their own fate. (Think our born again Christian friend on the subway.) The tragedy that so suddenly claimed their life must have been, so the theory goes, divine payback for some sin, some wrong, done or left undone in their life. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the September 11th attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, there were comments made by certain televangelist preachers that suggested that somehow the victims were paying the price, enduring God s wrath for sins previously committed, yada yada yada (or as my daughter puts it, blappity blah ) You get the idea. This is the judgmental (you could even say perverse) kind of thinking Jesus encountered in this morning s gospel. We are not told who the people are who are doing the asking or making the accusation about the victims, but it is safe to say that they are not friends of Jesus nor do they have his best interests at heart. Getting Jesus to comment on these events (which by the way we have no other historical record of) could have put him at odds with Pilate and the powers that be. 2
Then again, those questioning Jesus could have simply been common everyday people (like you and me), wondering about the tragedy of the Galileans and how such a tragedy fits in with the image of a loving God who cares for our every need. And, if we are honest, we might have a lot of sympathy for these questions and for those asking such questions. Who hasn t asked how bad things, bad times, and a good God fit together. Are the bad things that happen to us our fault? Do we deserve them? Are they, in fact, at least the consequence of, if not punishment for, our sinful deeds? We may ask that question in a kind of every day, even superstitious way, when something relatively minor goes wrong and we wonder, What did I do to deserve that? (How many times a week do we say that?) Or we may echo this question in a much deeper, more heart-wrenching way when disaster or tragedy strikes. Most of us have, no doubt, had the experience of sitting with someone at the hospital or in a funeral parlor who attributes grave illness or death to God as some form of punishment. Such thinking may help some to have a sense of stability in such unstable, chaotic times and yet... Jesus states that tragedy is not a punishment for sin. Good news, right? Well... sort of. Because, the thing is, that some calamity is the result of sin. What if the wall Jesus references was built by a fraudulent contractor? (My guess is they had those back in the first century just as we have some now.) We all know that there are all kinds of bad behaviors, in fact, that contribute to much of the misery in the world. But notice that Jesus doesn t disconnect entirely the relationship between sin and calamity. What he does disconnect is the cause and effect relationship between calamity and punishment. His response could be stated this way: Do you think they were worse sinners than all the others? No. No worse than you. That, at least, should be good news. Right? Well,... sort of. 3
Because Jesus next statement stops me in my tracks (and maybe gave some of you a pause as well) But unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. No one knows for sure, what Jesus precisely means when he says as they did. Does it mean that they we! will be struck dead by sudden calamity, or whether we will be separated from God, or whether we will just die at some unknown future point still mired in our sin? We don t know. We do know, however, that Jesus words call into question some favorite Christian assumptions like thinking and saying that one knows categorically that they would have been spared from tragic events because they are a Christian. Jesus leaves us in a rather gray place, forcing us to walk a rather narrow line If we are to take his words seriously to heart We can neither lean to far to the left and remove or disregard any impending divine judgment but neither can we lean to far to the right and pronounce God s judgment on others or on ourselves for that matter. This is a good thing Divine judgment is a manifestation of God s goodness just as God s mercy and compassion are manifestations of God s goodness. How so? Because the flip side of judgment is justice. We know that God cares about how we live our lives and how we treat one another. We also know that God is forgiving and merciful and does not desire the death of anyone. Jesus seems to want to have it both ways-- He never says that God is in the business of vengeful behavior, but doesn t exactly say God is not. All Jesus says is, unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. And the operative or key words here are repent and as they did. That Jesus called the people of God to repent is no secret. (In fact, if you remember, in the gospel of Mark it is among the first words that Jesus says when appears in the gospel Repent and believe the good news.) Nevertheless it is perhaps less known or unrecognized (even by the people of God!) that repentance is intimately connected with matters of life and death. 4
We have no way of knowing whether or not the Galileans killed by Pilate or the victims of the tower of Siloam tragedy were unrepentant at the time of their deaths. Although Jesus apparently made some kind of connection between their deaths and the state of their repentance before God. In other words, the idea of perishing just as they did, was not so much about dieing in some sort of cataclysmic divine act of retribution for sins, as it was about perishing in a state of un-repentance. In particular the kind of unrepentant state that allows one to spend more time worrying about everybody else s standing before God, and less time looking in the mirror. This was clearly what Jesus saw at work in his questioners and, as is so often the case when people are busy judging others and not themselves, Jesus is having nothing to do with it and wants to encourage us also not have anything to do with it. All of this might serve to leave us confused and bewildered. After all, who among us has the repentance thing down to a science? Who among us has not spent some amount of time worrying about our neighbors sin and not our own? However, Jesus is not through. He gives us the parable of the fig tree and we are left with an image of God that is less about wrath and destruction by way of judgment, and more the image of God that is about patience and mercy by way of grace. To paraphrase theologian Fred Craddock God s severity and God s grace co-exist. God s mercy is and always will be in serious conversation with God s judgment. Because of the tension and paradox in Jesus answer to the question of why bad things happen, I tend to think that Jesus entire response is a parable. Remember that Jesus spoke in parables because these stories have a way of shifting responsibility from the narrator (or the one telling the story) to the one listening. Perhaps the question for this morning really is: what did you hear? Why do bad things happen to good and sometimes not-so-good, people? Jesus doesn t say and neither can we. Sometimes misfortune is of our own making and sometimes it is tragically unlucky. But Jesus, son of the all-loving God, isn t beneath using such occasions to invite us to wake up or in this case, turn around (repent!) so that we might look differently at our life and world. 5
The flip side (or the repenting side) of all this is asking the question what did I do to deserve this? in the face of all the good things and good times we have and experience. Jesus isn t beneath taking the daily news of his day (or ours) and using it to jar us into recognizing that life is a gift, that God is seeking us out, and that there is so much good we can do with the time we are given. We do not know how long that time is or how or when it will come to a close, but we do know it is a gift, not to be squandered but rather spent in the pursuit of good things for God s people. Yes, bad times and bad things occur and yet, we will be blessed if by faith we can say God is good all the time and all the time God is good. Amen. 6