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Turning Toward Life
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland on March 11, 2007
Do you ever wonder why bad things happen? Do you ever wonder why bad things happen to good people? I’m sure you do. I do. I don’t have a good answer for why good people get bad news, why decent people who’ve never done an indecent thing in life get a brain tumor. I don’t have an adequate response to why murderers and rapists go free.
There are some who say that bad things are God’s punishment. We’ve heard it said that AIDs is God’s punishment for being gay or sexually promiscuous. But tell that to the women in Africa who has AIDs or better yet tell that to the child she holds who is dying from that disease.
Terrible, unspeakably sad things happen in life and we don’t know why. We don’t know who or what to blame but we sure want to hang it all on someone or at least something.
The question of why bad things happen has dogged us forever. This question drives much of what is written in testaments new and old. One of the answers that are given is that God is to blame for whatever plagues us. Or we are plagued because God is just and this is God’s just punishment for what we’ve done or left undone.
When bad things happen we look for the reason. We want to identify a cause. We need to put our anguish, our anger, our anxiety somewhere. “It must be God’s will” - that’s a rationale that works for some people when terrible things happen, and often when the terrible is inconceivable; when some person in the prime of his or her life crosses the street and gets hit by a bus; when an earthquake destroys; when cancer kills.
We know that the “God’s will” defense is not defendable. No God, who claims to love us, could do such unspeakable harm. But where shall we pin the blame when terrible things happen. And if we can’t point our fingers at God then we’re left to the capriciousness of life – and that is unbearable.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this after sitting with a mother whose child is in surgery, being operated on for a brain tumor. The mother blames herself. “It’s my punishment for smoking” she says. “God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.”
Taylor defends God telling the mother God doesn’t work that way. But she’s too late. The mother needs that view of God. She needs a reason. [1]
It must be God’s will or this is God’s punishment for my evil ways is a place to pin what we can’t understand or hold on to by our selves. This is a particular world view that is strangely helpful to us in times of great stress. We may not like this world view. We may not agree. But at least in this world God, for better or worse, is present, is engaged, is anything but absent in the wake of catastrophe. [2]
This is the conversation Jesus is having with those around him when Jesus is asked about the fate of the Galileans. We aren’t told what the Galileans had done to end up on the wrong side of Pilate. In a way it doesn’t really matter. From the conversation with Jesus it’s clear that the implication is made that surely they deserved what they got.
Jesus hears the age old question – why do bad things happen and who’s to blame? And he responds, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?”
We are tempted to go to that kind of answer because if that is true it solves a lot of problems for us. Bad things happen to bad people and sinners get punished and God obeys our laws – our sense of how God should be. [3]
Jesus’ response is not what we’re looking for. It’s the old slap and tickle response that gets us to pay attention but doesn’t allow us to revel in our justification of what is right or wrong. Jesus tells them that the Galileans were not punished for their sins – bad things just happen. And then he chucks us under the chin and says, “Unless you repent you will all perish as they did”. That’s the slap and tickle. It’s not a very satisfying answer.
And maybe that’s all he is trying to accomplish. Maybe all Jesus is trying to do is shake us up, get us out of our blame game and get us to thinking about what it is we really want to be and do in this life. Maybe he is just trying to use our blame and fear as a way to greater faith. Something in our lives has blown a hole through our hearts and instead of closing that hole up Jesus uses it to help us reach in and grab onto our faith.
Jesus is often like that – presenting the paradox, the irony, the riddle, the answer that is no answer to move us forward, to get us moving, to advance us toward kingdom thinking, kingdom living.
Awful thing happen around us every day and we are often terrified – even when we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we are often deeply scared and fearful. We fear what’s happening in our individual lives. We fear for the future of our children, our relationships, and our environment. We fear for our church. We fear that we are not enough, or doing enough, or being good enough. We have lain awake at night making a list of our mistakes and the mistakes of those around us. We may have awakened at night listening for the footfall of disaster coming our way.
When I was a kid there was a plaster of paris lamb on the wall directly across from my bed. I would dream that if I stared at it too long a monster would come out of the closet. Usually in my dream I did just that and the monster would come. Life feels that way a little. If we look at it too long we will see the chaos and the chaos will overtake us.
Jesus doesn’t give us false reassurance. He as much as says bad things happen. Life can be chaotic and capricious. Bad things happen not because of our sin but because we are human beings. Human beings are vulnerable. We are fragile.
Our lives are like a beautiful crystal container. Beautiful and sturdy and yet easily broken. We can lock that crystal away and never use if for fear that it will be smashed. Or we can put it out on the table, use it frequently and let its beauty show.
That is what Jesus is asking us to do, to take our lives off the shelf and let them show. That’s true repentance, to honor and delight in being the fragile, vulnerable beings that we are.
Repentance is to turn around and embrace the life we are given, to live it full out and fully in love with its mystery and its unpredictability. That’s the repentance Jesus is calling us to. Not the repentance of feeling bad about what we’ve done or who we are. He’s not looking for us to go over our list of mistakes and be satisfied with a sack cloth and ashes response. A repentance of guilt is underwhelming.
Jesus invites those gathered around him and us to a great repentance. He’s inviting us to turn around and take a good, long look at our lives so that we can really savor each and every day we are given.
Bad things will happen. God is not to blame. You are not always to blame. Sometimes no one is to blame. Terrible things happen. Life isn’t as safe as we would like it to be. But don’t let that stop us. We can use hard times to help us find the holy. We can feel the hurt and horror but we can use what is awful to see what fills us with awe.
You know it’s true. You’ve known it in your own life when you’ve looked through the darkness and found the light. You’ve had times when you’ve looked up from a dark hole, found your way out and up to a path that leads to a life better than you could have asked for or imagined. You’ve had times when you were hurt so bad you thought you were going to die. Sometimes pain and hurt lead to life. Sometimes being lost is how we find our way. And sometimes death brings a new day. Just ask Jesus.
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor “Life Giving Fear” The Christian Century, 1998. (back to article)
[2] Taylor (back to article)
[3] Taylor (back to article)
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