Year C
March 24, 2019
Luke 13:1-9Often, in the wake of disaster, I often hear TV preachers and others claim that the disaster was God’s punishment for our sin. When I was in high school, the Westboro Baptist church came to my part of Pennsylvania. If I remember correctly, they had come to York, PA in order to picket the funeral of a member of the US armed forces, who had been killed in Iraq.. For them US casualties from the Iraq war were part of God’s punishment for the US’s growing acceptance of the LGBTQIA+ community. As a granddaughter of a Korea vet, a and a cousin of an Iraq vet, I was and still am appalled by their stance. When I saw their signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers,” I saw people that I knew and loved. The Westboro Baptist church has built an entire theological system around God hating people (Catholics, atheists, Muslims, Jews, Romani people), but in particular our LGBTQIA+ siblings - and that God punishes all of us for what they call the “sin of homosexuality” - to the point that “God hates” is part of their website URL. The last part of their URL is a slur for our Gay and Lesbian siblings that I cannot bring myself to say from the pulpit. Their view of God is not one of a God that I can praise and worship.
TV evangelists make similar claims. Pat Robertson, of the 700 club, is well known for placing the blame after tragedies on so called “sins” of the people. Famously after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, he blamed the earthquake that killed thousands of people on Haitians making a quote “pact” with the devil as they rebelled against French colonial rule. Hurricane Katrina, AIDS, 9/11, shootings at our schools, (and the list could go on) are all blamed, by some, on the sins of American culture - and thus the disasters are God’s punishment for those sins. The idea is that our suffering is part of divine punishment. While we hopefully clearly see Westboro baptist as extreme, many of these other prominent personalities have a larger following and aren’t seen, at least by society at large, as extreme. Yet these views make my skin crawl. I can’t wrap my head around the God that they preach. I just can’t.
Yet, while hopefully, we can see these attitudes as extreme and harmful, these views trickle into our lives in one way or another. On some level, I think it is natural. We want to find answers to why bad things happen to us, to our loved ones, and to the world. We want to understand why others lose their lives and we keep ours, rationalizing acts of violence - and too often turn to victim blaming - somehow they must have deserved it (they’re a criminal, they shouldn’t have been running alone in the dark, etc.). And, yes, it is easier, sometimes, to pin the blame on God - and if God did it, there must be a reason. I would guess that we all, at some point, in the wake of national or personal tragedy, “why is this happening?” “What did I do to deserve this?” “Where is God in all of this?” We look for explanations that make some sort of sense of whatever had happened. Why is there suffering? And is that suffering connected to our behavior?
When I was going into 6th grade, my Uncle Bruce was nearly killed in a car accident. He was on his way to work. He was stopped on an off-ramp, the last in a line of cars waiting for the light to turn green. A car came up the ramp, and didn’t stop, slamming into the back of my uncle’s car. His car became sandwiched between two cars. They had to use the “jaws of life” tool to get him out. He was left in a coma for a number of months. Injuries included a broken pelvis and severe brain trauma. For several weeks, he teetered between life and death. We didn’t know whether he’d survive. His pain and trauma are still a part of his life over fifteen years later. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Uncle and his accident this week - as some of you who have friended me on Facebook already know, I nearly missed a very similar accident just this past Wednesday. As I was our Gospel reading for this morning, I remembered by own struggle with understanding why this would happen. My Uncle was a “good guy.” He had just taken my brother and I to Knoebles, an amusement park in North-Eastern PA. He didn’t (and doesn’t) deserve what happened to him. I remember asking myself, “why would God let this happen?” I remember coming to some conclusion like: well, God did this to bring our family together after my grandparents’ divorce (because all of a sudden, we were seeing a lot of each other). Today, I can’t find comfort in that view of God or of tragedy.
This morning, Jesus stands firmly against such assessments of tragedy. Jesus mentions two tragedies this morning. Both events are unknown outside of the Gospel of Luke. In the first event, Jesus mentions Galileans who had been killed at the hands of Pilate (while we don’t know of the specific event to which Jesus is referring, it would not be out of character for Pilate to do such a thing). While we don’t know why the Galileans suffered at the hands of Pilate, the question remains “Did they suffer because they were more sinful than their Galilean siblings?” To that Jesus says firmly, “No.” Similarly, a tower fell in Siloam (southwest Jerusalem), and the question remains, “Did they think that the eighteen who were killed were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem.” Again, Jesus answers his own question with a firm, “No.” Today, it is clear that Jesus says that suffering is not part of God’s punishment. God doesn’t cause calamity to rain down on our personal lives, on our nation, nor on our world. If those who experienced such tragedies are no more sinful than anyone else, divine punishment isn’t the cause. This is good news. Thank God that that isn’t how God works. As Luther reminds us, we are all sinners and we all fall short of God’s desire for us. Instead of giving us what we “deserve” for our sin, God gives us love, mercy, and righteousness through the work of Jesus. God doesn’t condemn us but God gives us new life.
Yet Jesus does not avoid the reality of sin and tragedy being connected. While, he rejects the idea of divine punishment, he says “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” What to make of this? If tragedy isn’t God’s punishment for sin, how does repentance prevent us from perishing like they did?
I think if we look at the definition of sin, we might be able to shed some light on this. Sin is our “turned in on self” nature. Then, sins are not “doing bad things” instead sins are actions, beliefs, attitudes that result from our turned-in-on-self self that separate us from God and from neighbor. On one hand, we proclaim that, in Christ, we no longer have to worry about mending the relationship between God and ourselves. That has been mended once and for all. On the other hand, we acknowledge that still permeates our relationships with our neighbors. The extreme example, of course, is murder. Murder separates us from our neighbor by taking life and the possibility of relationship away. Yet, sin breaks relationships in other ways. Hatred and discrimination turn us away from our neighbor. The misuse of power and privilege keep those under the bonds of oppression. The poor stewardship of the earth is leading to its destruction. All of these systems lead to loss of life. If humanity keeps finding ways of dividing itself, we will continue turning to violence against one another. If humanity keeps treating the earth as disposable, the earth will continue to become unstable - and we’ll see the rise of natural disasters.
When Jesus calls for repentance, Jesus calls us to turn away from the ways in which society lures us to dividing ourselves from our neighbor. When Jesus calls for repentance, Jesus calls us to see the ways that we act in and are complicit in the violence that is part of our world. When Jesus calls for repentance, not to fall into the trap of seeing any one person or group of people as something less than human.
In the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther says, “ A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is.” Today, when Jesus calls us to repentance we’re called to call a thing what it actually is. We’re called to see suffering and name it for what it is. We’re called to look at the roots of violence and call it what it is. Repentance calls us to, not only name it, but act to change it. When we see hatred and violence against our siblings of color - we are called to call a thing what it is, naming the evils of racism and white supremacy - and we are called to act against it. When we are told that our LGBTQIA+ siblings are to blame for the ills of the world - we are called to call a thing what it is, naming the evils of homophobia and transphobia - and we are called to stand with them. When we see the attitudes and patterns of our society that lead to violence and to death, we are called to reject them and be part of bringing about a new way of being human, grounded God’s compassion and mercy. There is still opportunity for us to change our patterns - patterns that will build us up instead of tear us apart.
Amen.
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