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Sermon - March 11th, 2007
Second Chances
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Luke 13:1-9
Today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke is an interesting account of Jesus commenting on the news. These events must have just happened. Everyone was talking about them. And they probably asked Jesus. What do you think they mean? Is there any significance to them? Are these signs that we need to be paying attention to?
“The Galileans, whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices.” That is the way the question was asked. It was about some arbitrary violence on the part of the Roman soldiers under Pilate’s command.
Those Galileans were probably going to worship. They were on their way to the temple. They had prepared their sacrificial offerings. It could have been a very simple offering of grain. Then something happened. Things got out of hand in the ranks of the occupying soldiers. Some Galileans were killed and their blood mixed with their sacrifices. Today, it sometimes happens in the name of crowd control, or because it is suspected that terrorists were making their move. At any rate, some innocent people were killed, religious people, good people from the country. They were going to services. They were following their religious laws. They hadn’t done anything wrong. But the people wondered—were they really innocent victims? Was there a divine reason for this tragedy, Jesus?
There was another incident, too. The Tower at Siloam had fallen on eighteen people. They were just passing by. They just happened to be there. No reason for them to die. Or was there?
That’s the question posed to Jesus. Two events were in the news. What’s the meaning of these tragedies? Why them and not somebody else? Was it because of something they had done? Was it because of their sin? Did they deserve to die?
One day, one of those calls that the chaplain of the hospital dreaded came. She was asked to come sit with a mother while her five year old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, the child could no longer see. At the hospital, the CAT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl’s optic nerve and she was scheduled for surgery as soon as possible.
On the day of the operation, the chaplain came to be with the mother. She found her sitting under the fluorescent lights in the waiting room beside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. She smelled as if she had puffed every one of them, although she was not smoking at the moment the chaplain sat down. The mother was staring at a patch of carpet in front of her, with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look. When she saw the chaplain, she said, “It’s my punishment for smoking these stupid cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.” She started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren. “Now, I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child.”
This was too hard for the chaplain to hear. She decided to forego reflective listening and concentrate on remedial theology instead. “I don’t believe in a God like that,” the chaplain said. “The God I know would do something like that.” I’m sure I would have said the same thing. But there’s a problem. This response messed with the mother’s view of her circumstances the moment she needed it the most. However miserable it made her feel, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or unpredictable one. The chaplain was able to reconcile a loving God with the child’s tumor, but the mother could not. If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. The mother was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.
Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationship, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to explain the effect, in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is that we are less interested in the truth than the consequences. What we crave, above all, is what we can never have—control. We want control over the chaos of life.
>Luke does not explain the motive of those who told Jesus about the Galileans. The implication is that those who died deserved what they got. It is a tempting equation that solves a lot of problems. It answers the riddle of why bad things happen to good people. It punishes sinners right out in the open as a warning to everyone. It gives us a God who obeys the Law of Physics that says for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. It is a tempting equation, but Jesus does not go there.
“No,” he told the crowd, “but, unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” In some places, this is what they call giving with one hand and taking away with the other. No, Jesus said, there is no connection between the suffering and sin. WHEW! But, unless you repent, you are going to lose some blood, too. OH……
There is no sense spending too much time trying to decipher this piece of the good news. As far as I can tell, it was not meant to be logical and reasonable, it was meant to disarm. Jesus touched the panic the people had inside of them about all the awful things that were happening around them. They were terrified by those things, for good reason. They had searched their hearts for anything and everything that might bring disaster sniffing their way. They had lain awake at night making lists of their mistakes.
While Jesus did not honor their illusion that they could protect themselves in this way, he did honor the vulnerability that their fright had opened up. It was not a bad thing to feel the full fragility of life. It was not a bad thing to count their breaths in the dark—not if it turned them toward the light.
It was the turning that Jesus wanted for them, which was why he tweaked their fear. “Don’t worry about Pilate and all the other things that can come crashing down on your heads,” he said. You see, terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing. That torn place inside of you that your fear has opened up is a holy place. Look around while you are there. Pay attention to what you feel. It may hurt you to stay there and it may hurt you to see, but it is not the kind of hurt that leads to death. It is the kind of hurt that can lead to life.
How do I know? Because Jesus doesn’t stop there, he goes on and tells a parable. The parable of the fig tree. The owner discovered it was not bearing fruit and ordered it to be cut down. Sounds like good stewardship to me. But the steward said, “No, give it another chance. I’ll give it some extra care. Don’t cut it down yet.”
It doesn’t make much sense, really. Maybe that’s what Jesus is saying. There are some things in this life that simply do not make sense to us. And they never will. Logic and reason does not explain everything. We do not have all the answers to life’s questions.
We simply can not always assume that consequences fit the cause. Life isn’t that simple. There are somethings we just cannot understand, and tragedy is one of them.
Jesus, those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, those eighteen upon who the tower fell at Siloam, did those things happen because of their sin? No, Jesus said, but let me tell you a parable.
Jesus told us this parable to show us that if tragedy is not always the result of sin, then prosperity is not always the result of virtue. We are like the fig tree. We say, nothing terrible has happened to us, so we must be okay. If it ain’t broke, then why fix it? If we have no obvious problems in our life, why should we repent? There is no need for it. If life is going okay for me, then I must be doing all right. But, Jesus says, not necessarily.
This is the season of Lent, the time of self-examination and repentance, and this is a Lenten text for those of us whose lives are going smoothly. It says, repentance is what you are supposed to do before the tower of bricks falls on you. The fig tree is still standing, not because everything is okay. It is not. The fig tree is still standing because the owner has said, “Don’t give up on it yet, give it one more year.”
I think one of the things this text is about is signs and our ability to read them and have them apply to us. Just before this, at the end of the 12th chapter of Luke, Jesus is talking about signs. It makes sense that what would follow would relate to what has gone before. There in the 12th chapter, Jesus says, “You look to the west, you see the clouds forming, you say, ‘Looks like rain.’ You look to the south, you see the wind blowing, and you say, ‘It’s going to be a scorcher.’ You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the weather signs, why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?”
Signs. They are not there to explain tragedy. The signs are there to prevent tragedy. It’s like the fig tree getting another chance. That’s what signs are for, to tell us that time is getting close. So, don’t give up, turn your life and try again. That’s what repentance means. Start contributing something, don’t just suck up the nutrients in the soil. Bear fruit. You are not here just to keep out of trouble. You are here to do something good, to make a difference. Don’t just consume….give.
We know about signs. We are not strangers to signs. We respond to signs all the time. Our body gives us signs, we go to the doctor. Our marriage relationship gives us a sign, we go to a marriage counselor. Nature gives us signs, we begin to live more ecologically. Global warming is a sign and we start debating the causes and trying to pass laws to slow it down. Signs that say life and our planet, they are fragile and precious, take care of them.
These signs are all about us. They are not here to explain why tragedy happens to somebody else. They are here to allow us to prevent tragedy in our own life. So, pay attention to signs. We know how to read the weather, don’t we? There are also signs concerning our health, our future, and our soul. It is like planting a tree. It bore no fruit, so the owner ordered it cut down. The steward said, “Wait. Don’t give up on it yet. Give it a chance to read the signs. Give it a chance to turn around. And then if it bears no fruit, cut it down.” The signs are not here to explain the tragedy in someone else’s life, they are here to help us in our own life.
Frederick Buechner said, “I came to understand through writing novels, a sense of plot. Then I discovered that life itself has a plot. The events in our life, even though they may seem to be random and witless, they are not really that way. They are seeking to show us something. They are seeking to lead us somewhere.”
The question to ask yourself and God and to talk about or journal about, and pray about is this “What is life trying to teach you and how open are you to learning?”
Amen.