Why Me? Us? Them?

Why Me? Them? Us? Luke 13:1-9

You may remember that I promised you that I wanted to continue another couple of weeks focused in sermons on the issue of community building. If you do not remember that at all—my promise—then I am going to consider running for political office. Integrity suggests to me that I disclaim the prior promise. Here is what I would rather do; go back to the lectionary passages which are seasonal and move through the rest of the season of Lent.

In my reading of the Gospel for today, there is a powerful partial addressing of issues that are before us in many ways. Jesus is talking to people who somehow have the belief that some folks are better than others. They are pretty convinced that because no terrible evil has befallen them, God must favor them.

I am not even sure whether the message is comforting for anyone that Jesus then teaches. “So folks”, he says, “you remember those rebels up in Galilee? You know the ones that the Romans came and brutally suppressed? Do you think they were worse or better than anyone else?”

About 20 years before this time, A.D. 10 or so, there was an abortive tax revolt in the north. A number of folks were running around with their version of the Tea Party agenda. “You don’t owe money to Rome, don’t pay it.” So Rome, as they were often want to do, decided to make an example of some of them. A number of them were ambushed and slaughtered on the altar that they used for animal sacrifices. The point was for Pilate to make a horrible and bloody example of these randomly chosen victims and intimidate the rest of the citizenry back into compliance. It was an act of terror, but the victims were random. The people killed might or might not have even been ones who were involved in the revolt. It didn’t matter to Pilate.

Reaching for another example Jesus reminds his listeners that a tower in the south side of Jerusalem (the Tower of Siloam) had fallen and killed 18 men. This, again, was a relatively recent lesson from the History of Jesus’ time. There were probably people in the crowd who remembered this event. “Do you think these people were worse than others?” Jesus asks. “No”.

There are two points in these illustrations that Jesus used. One is actually his primary lesson to the listeners. That is he is telling them to change their minds lest they fall victim to some disaster and not be “prepared” by having joined the Kingdom.

But now the secondary lesson that Jesus is teaching. That lesson is “the catastrophe is random, indiscriminate, and capricious.” The lesson is not that the catastrophe is a punishment, but rather that it has no relationship to a Godly punishment. It is an accident of this world.

Now why would I want to look at that lesson? Maybe…..just maybe…..it is because so called religious leaders want us to see events of random nature very much like people wanted to look at that sort of thing in New Testament times. And Jesus, by the way, says NO to both.

You have heard them…..The earthquake in Haiti is a result of some deal with the Devil. God needs to get even for something we don’t like, therefore there is untold human suffering. Therefore innocents die.

By biblical standards it is sometimes hard to demonstrate that God doesn’t like whatever it is, but Pat Robertson doesn’t. The disaster itself is supposed to be the proof of God’s contempt for something. Well God’s aim isn’t so good a lot of the time if that is all correct. Or maybe it is just not timely. If a deal with Satan were made, the disaster struck 206 years late, missed all the people in France and the United States who were involved and butchered a devastated island. I am not sure whether some of these folks are giving God, the Devil or organized religion a bad name—maybe it is all three.

Leaving my tirade, I am troubled by how much we do, theologically, the same sort of thing at least on the upside of things. Someone escapes an accident, a deadly diagnosis, powerful harm of some sort. Our solution to that is so often, “God delivered, healed or otherwise fixed it.” My problem is with the flip side of the coin. An equally deserving person did not escape. I am good with God getting credit. But I am a logic creature and wonder about the blame.

What does the God whom we identify as totally good have to do with disaster? Why do bad things happen to some people? ( I am going to take Jesus’ lesson to heart and avoid saying bad things to good people. )

It isn’t about deserving good or bad. That was Jesus’ lesson and it works for me. It isn’t about praying for better things and having a magical God intervene sometimes and not on others. That is something that experience teaches us all.

We all testify to the notion that God does indeed care. And, at the same time, we all know that God doesn’t always fix everything. How do we live with those beliefs? Assuming they are correct, is it possible that we believe some other things that just are not correct? After all lots of what Christian’s say about God was written by Pagan Greek philosophers and was never written in the Bible. Maybe some of that isn’t right.

So we are stuck in the middle of an incredible paradox. In the midst of a world declared completely good we must face and deal with undeserved evil and pain. There appears no way to make logical sense of that reality. Maybe we are not supposed to.

Instead we are called on to live life in the middle of this paradox—affirming at one and the same time God’s love and compassion, and a world filled with bad things. In the midst of that complicated and contradictory environment we make affirmations with our voices and with our actions.

God’s good world and the bad things in it call for us to affirm “hope as a lasting value”. This last few days have seen an iconic photo from Chile. The man with the national flag that was pulled from the muddy remains of the family home has been posted many places. In the middle of disaster and catastrophe we know the lesson of hope. Pandora’s box told the story. When she opened the box, everything flew into the innocent world. Then she looked inside. The one remaining item was hope. The man in Chile found it in his national flag. We find it many places, but we find it as we live in the paradox.

In the middle of God’s good world and the bad things in it we seek and find community. In late December of 2005, I found myself in the middle of a physical health crisis. It was a shock to my thought process. The first day in the hospital the chaplain came into the room. She was kind enough, but I had enough Presbyterians in the room to make a quorum for a presbytery meeting. I could tolerate the paradox and the evils of this world with my sisters and brothers around me. Sunday morning I woke up exhausted. It was New Year’s day. I had been home 12 hours. The kids were headed back to their homes. Deb and I headed off to Church. Community in the midst of the paradox of this life—that is what life is about.

I can sit and brood about the paradox or try to live within it with integrity. When I choose the first, the second calls to me and says, “Hey real life is over here.” Watch the news footage on any day. In the middle of the bad things of this life, people are reaching out and embracing one another. What good people do in the middle of bad things, is not stop and read a book. What they do is love each other. That doesn’t make sense of anything, but is sure makes life, in the real world, worthwhile. Love for each other is our value in the middle of the paradoxical reality of this life.

Love for God in the midst of the real world is the way believing people of integrity live. Job’s story means that, and that alone. In the end, God. There is a beaten up and used term in Church. It is Lord. The archaic meaning of that word—the one from biblical time is worth our thinking about sometimes. Watch an old Robin Hood movie and think about the religious term Lord. The word means just what it did in the Robin Hood movie. It means. “You are the one who directs my life. What you ask, I do.” It does not mean (never has) that I will be spared all consequences or hurt or pain. It means, “I love you and I am listening for your instruction”.

That is the Lord we need to find in the midst of our paradoxical world. Where bad happens in this world, I believe that God is saying, “Get off your duff and help.”