Who Is to Blame?

So … does God send disasters to punish people?  Here’s what Jesus had to say about that …

Who Is to Blame?

Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9 

Jesus is asked a great many questions in the book of Luke. Most of the time he answers with a story or a parable or another question. But in the passage we just heard this morning, he twice answers clearly and succinctly: “No.”

(These are, by the way, the only time in Luke’s gospel where he answers a question this way.)

The two questions are good ones – the kind of questions that we raise ourselves (though perhaps we don’t always voice them). Both ask this: does suffering come to people who are sinners as punishment for their sins? Did they bring it on themselves? And the hidden question, of course, is more personal: Am I at risk for some kind of disaster because of my behavior? The people asking the question have two different examples that they bring to Jesus: first, about some Galileans who were slain by Pilate while they were making sacrifices; and second, about eighteen people who died when a tower fell in Siloam. We don’t know anything else about these two events – but we have plenty of experience with unexpected tragedies where the loss of life seems arbitrary and capricious. So – were the Galileans and people of Siloam (or the people of Haiti or Chile or New Orleans …) more sinful than everyone else?

“No,” says Jesus. Twice he says it: “no.”

That’s the part we want to hear, especially when we are people who are suffering – when it is our loved one who was killed in a random shooting or our friend who died in a freak accident. We want to be reassured that they are not responsible – that we are not responsible – for the suffering that takes place.

Or do we? Because there is another part of us that wants very very much to have an explanation for the suffering. We want there to be meaning for us in terrible events – even if it is difficult or unpleasant meaning. We want to be in control, or at least partly in control, of the dangers that are around us. We want to be able to fend off those dangers, but if we can’t do that, we want at least one a clear explanation. We would rather be guilty (or know who is guilty) than live with an unexplained tragedy.

That tension between wanting to know that “it is not my fault,” on the one hand, and wanting to believe that “it is somebody’s fault” on the other hand is a recurring and confusing one in the bible as well as in our own lives. We hear the observations of the prophets that the people of Israel have been defeated and exiled because of their disobedience. We hear (in the psalms) the troubling truth that often the wicked do just fine and the responsible people are left wanting. And we hear Jesus saying, “No,” the ones who suffered and died were no worse than the rest of you.

Jesus doesn’t stop with his “No.” He goes on (twice): “…but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” [Luke 13:3 and 13:5] That sounds – at least the first time you hear it – like a seriously mixed message, something like “it’s not their fault, but if you don’t shape up, you’re going to get it.”

I think this is a complicated message – but not about fault or guilt or responsibility. I believe that the “No” of Jesus is terribly important. It is the text with which we refute the religious leaders who blame the people of Haiti and the people of Chile for the terrible tragedies that have overtaken them. It is the text we turn to when someone is the victim of a violent crime or a terrible disease. it is the text we remember when we are tempted – like Job’s friends – to believe that we must have done something wrong to “deserve” the suffering in our lives.

It is the text we should remember because it says more than just “no.” It says “No” while at the same time reminding us that our lives are full of opportunities to repent. We are, in many ways, headed in the wrong direction and need desperately to turn around, to repent, to change our hearts and go in a new direction. Put more colloquially, “you aren’t responsible for all your own suffering, but there are a lot of things you could be doing more virtuously and faithfully than you are now.”

We would really rather not hear that word of judgment. Not that we don’t know the ways our lives fall short of our own aspirations, let along God’s aspirations for us. We are not as generous, not as kind, not as forgiving as we might be. We tolerate all kinds of injustices – some out of our own self-interest and others out of distraction or exhaustion. We ignore God more often than we intend to. We act out of attitudes that are biased, selfish, and narrow, and we resist changing those attitudes, even when the evidence of our own lives contradicts them. We are, in short, something of a mess.

At the same time, we don’t want Jesus – or anyone else – to be judgmental about all of those shortcomings and sins. We don’t want to be told that we are “bad people,” even if we suspect that might be true; we don’t want to be told that we should be doing a lot better, even if we secretly know that we should.

I believe that this warning, this “but” in the words of Jesus, is not so much judgmental as it is prophetic. Jesus does not sentence us to punishment, he proclaims the truth of what is in plain view: if we live in ways that exploit, destroy, and separate, we are perishing. We are spending our lives in the ways of death and not in the ways of life.

All of this leaves us with our first question unanswered though: why did those terrible things happen to the Galileans and the people of Siloam? And why do terrible things happen to people today? There is no single answer, of course. Some tragedies are caused by poor judgment and selfish choices, by human emotional frailty and human intellectual limitations. But there are great many tragedies for which we cannot answer this question at all. Earthquakes happen, and tsunamis and hurricanes and avalanches. Diseases exist, and so do disabilities and chronic conditions and mental illnesses. Disasters and accidents are often mysteries that will not yield answers to our queries or comfort to our laments.

The simple truth is that God doesn’t have to send tragedies and disasters to teach us about the consequences of our broken and sinful behavior. The natural consequences are perfectly obvious all around us: corrupt organizations, disordered relationships with both persons and substances, economic exploitation, anger and resentment and bigotry and hate. If we listen to the voices of prophets – both ancient and modern – we know what we have to do; we have to repent.

Repentance is not always easy; it requires that we turn our spiritual faces in a new direction. It means turning away from habits and behaviors that are familiar and towards actions that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It means letting go of ideas and convictions we have held for a long time, and which may have served us well in the past. It means opening our hearts to new possibilities.

Here’s the cross-stitch version of repentance – an adage that I embroidered many years ago, before I realized it was really a theological statement: “The only way to change is to do something different.” The clear “no” that we hear from Jesus frees us to stop trying to blame disasters on other people’s sin, and to start preventing the pain and suffering that results from our own.

Prayer for March 7, 2010

Almighty and everlasting God, creator of all things seen and unseen, hear now our silent prayers, as we open our hearts to you in the sacred quietness.

God of faith and hope, we bring before you our prayers for those we have named this morning – we especially remember … Bring to each of them the gifts of mercy and grace that are most needed, according to your wisdom and love.

God of strength and resilience, we are weary as we pray, and so today we pray about our weariness

We are weary in our bodies: tired from doing too much, moving too fast, resting too little. We have forgotten your gift of Sabbath, of the day to renew and refresh ourselves. Even our relaxation seems to take a lot of planning and energy. Help us, we pray, to return to the Sabbath, to take time where we set aside our responsibilities, our work, our busyness. Let us find the holy time where we can enjoy one another and rest in you.

We are weary also in our minds. The technology that brings us information also overloads our ability to understand and assimilate that information. We are tired of hearing so much news, exhausted by the complexity of the world, overwhelmed by too many ideas, too many faces, too many choices. And so we pray this morning for a mental Sabbath as well as a physical one. Let us find the holy time where we can stop the whirling in our heads and ponder the things that invite wonder and appreciation more than understanding.

Our hearts, too, are weary, O God of compassion. Our eyes are filled with the images of people in need: the lonely and the homeless, the addicted and the hungry, the despairing and the confused, the sick and the wounded. Our capacity to respond feels so inadequate to all those needs, and we tire under the weight of our own limitations. Strengthen us, we pray; give us the discipline to choose where we shall invest our energies and our gifts, and the humility to know when we have done all we can.

We confess, O Holy One, that even our spirits are sometimes weary. We ask you to build up this community of faith so that we can nourish and refresh one another. Weave us together with threads of encouragement, wisdom, good humor, and understanding, into a fabric of strength, resiliency, and beauty. Then let this fabric bedeck and protect us in all that we do.

These prayers we offer in the name of the one who calls the weary and offers us rest and the sharing of our burdens, even Jesus the Christ, and we pray together in the words that he taught us ….