Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

March 7, 2010

Luke 13:1-9

Read Lessons Here

I’m thinking of two women.

One was standing in a small hospital room staring out the window. The room was filled with monitors and cables and that all had something to do with her baby who was in a little bed at the center of it all. She acknowledged my presence as I came into the room and then turned to continue her staring. It took a little while, but eventually I learned that her child was in some danger and that there was a piece of the story the she didn’t want to have to tell. Fortunately she was in enough distress about the situation that she had to let go of her secret. I was the chaplain, so she might as well tell me what she thought was going on with her child.

She was very young, single, and when she had learned that she was pregnant she had prayed and prayed that God would fix that situation. That somehow maybe she wouldn’t really be pregnant, or …..something. That somehow God would make that baby go away. And now, here she was with the child she wanted desperately to be ok and she was afraid that old prayer had finally caught up with her. “How could I pray such a prayer?” she asked. “Maybe God is punishing me for praying that prayer or for having this baby.”

We made up a new prayer.

The other woman I have in mind had huge hair. Blonde. You may have watched her at some time. I’d give you a name, but there actually have been several big haired women who sing and cry and praise Jesus on television and who give thanks regularly and in public for all the great abundance of wealth that God has poured into their lives. They are purveyors of the prosperity gospel which holds that if you can just get right with Jesus all sort of wonderful blessings will be poured out upon you by the God who rewards the righteous. I’ll never forget hearing Tammy Faye once go on about the beautiful gold faucets God had given her in her new house.

Either of these images might be enough to give me pause about the whole idea of religion, except that I am convinced that both of these understandings of how God works in our lives are distortions of the faith that has been passed on to us. These understandings of how God works with us aren’t new, they are as old as mystery and faith and they are difficult to shake off. Today we hear Jesus weighing in on the old equation that still plagues us in our thinking about God.

Among the ideas about God and God’s relationship with humanity that Jesus challenged was this deeply ingrained idea that human suffering is a result of human sin.

Sickness, disaster, troubles are not the sent by God as punishments on bad people. Similarly, good fortune is not the blessings of God on the good. Those ideas are ancient and they have deep roots in the human mystery of why our lives are the way they are, of why happiness and good fortune seem to come easily to some and are so elusive for others.

The notion of calamity as God’s judgement on sin is explicit in the Old Testament, in the stories, the psalms, the prophets; God will punish the sinful and bless the good. In a surface reading it can appear that simple, but always, beneath the lines about judgement is the story of God’s love for even sinful humanity, God’s desire to be in relationship with even the worst of us.

Time and again Jesus highlights the separation of sin and suffering. Jesus, who in Matthew’s gospel says that God sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, tells his audience today that the disasters they are wondering about had nothing to do with who the sufferers were. Nothing to do with how sinful or righteous they might have been. He does say that actions have consequences, there is warning in today’s lesson, but he makes it clear that the terrible things that have happened were not sent by God as punishment on sinful lives.

In more than one story Jesus forgives the sins of a crippled person and then later in the story heals that person’s infirmity. The separation of those two actions in the stories marks a disconnect between sin and suffering. The people killed by Pilate, the people killed by the falling tower, says Jesus, were no more sinful than anyone else. And still, the old idea about the troubles that afflict us saying something about who we are persist. We just can’t seem to let go of them.

We are often easier on others than we are on ourselves, giving them the benefit of the doubt while still applying the old bad-things-happen-to-bad-people standard to our own lives.

Why is it so hard sometimes to tell of the troubles that keep us awake at night? We do we sometimes carry heavy burdens for great distances without telling anyone what is going on? Too often it has to do with the belief that what is happening to us is a sign of who we are, what kind of people we are. Sometimes, the pains and challenges we face in our lives are made all the more difficult to negotiate because they stir up in us old shame or fears about how we have lived our lives. I can’t tell anyone about the trouble in my marriage because it probably has a lot to do with my being such a bad husband. I can’t tell anyone about how scared I am about my kid because they will wonder about me. It sounds benign but it isn’t. Even Beaver Cleaver’s parents asked, “What would the neighbors think?” And we took it in. I do meet people, of course, who have created problems in their lives and don’t seem to recognize their role in their troubles. I am concerned today though with those who, when confronted by troubles they did not create, assume--even in some small way--that God had a hand in sending those troubles. God does not send troubles to punish us.

When trouble finds you, what does the situation you are in say about you? Maybe it says you are human, living in a world that is not yet what God or we hope it will be. And in that shared hope is our connection with the God who helps us live in the mystery of a life where sometimes things go wrong for no reason we can discern. Where sometimes things go better for us than we might think we deserve. A world where sometimes the one on the cross doesn’t deserve to be there.