Sermon:  “People & Prophets”

When my Aunt Zella was diagnosed with lung cancer, you know the first question everyone had to ask her?  Yes. “Did you smoke?”  “No,” she’d have to say, over and over. “No, I never smoked.  And I never drank alcohol, and I ate right, and I exercised every day.”  She was lifelong military, in the Public Health Service, and she was one of the healthiest 90-year-olds anyone knew.  And still, it happened – cancer.

People always have to try to make sense out of suffering – it’s human nature – but unfortunately, that often leads to people attributing tragedy to God’s punishment.  It makes sense.  I mean, it’s hard to avoid the wrath of God in the Bible – even Jesus seems to take a harsh tone in this passage from Luke, when he says, not once but twice, “unless you repent, you will all perish.”[1] And we still affirm belief in God’s judgment in our UCC Statement of Faith, in the passage we’ve highlighted in your bulletins today:

You judge people and nations by your righteous will
declared through prophets and apostles.

Besides that, Lent is the church season when we take time to look at how we might have fallen short of God’s “righteous will” for us.  We wonder how God might judge us.  So I want to start with what Jesus has to say to the people and prophets of his day, here in our Gospel text from Luke, about God’s ways.  He uses two of the top news stories of his day – Pilate’s massacre of those Galileans whose blood was mingled with their sacrifices and the collapse of the Tower of Siloam – to help his people make sense of their suffering. 

We have no independent sources to confirm that these events happened just as Luke tells it – but Jesus using them to teach means they must’ve been good topics for theological debate at the time.  We do know from the historian Josephus that in the 10-year reign of Pontius Pilate, between the years 26 and 36, there were no less than 32 riots among the Jewish people – many to protest Pilate’s attempts to take money from the Temple treasury for public works projects, like a new Jerusalem water system.  And Pilate was notorious for sending his “plainclothes” storm troopers into the crowds to randomly beat and stab protesters to death.[2]  So just as in our world today, there was injustice, civic unrest, and police brutality.  There were also tragic building collapses, like this tower that fell and crushed 18 people.  We don’t know if that happened in a great earthquake or just in a construction accident.  The point was that people then, like people today, try very hard to make sense of tragedy – often using theology.  But Jesus warns us about how dangerous it can be when we claim to speak for God like that.

God’s judgment is too often abused as a political weapon.  Most recently, the world cringed in horror as one of the loudest and most confident TV prophets of our times – Pat Robertson – tried to explain away the tragic Port-Au-Prince earthquake as God’s judgment on the Haitian people.[3]  Even his own Christian Broadcasting Network had to apologize for his insensitivity.  But remember how he did the same thing back when Hurricane Katrina struck?  He managed to insinuate in a September 2005 broadcast of The 700 Club that God might’ve sent that storm and flood to punish our nation for legalizing abortion.  And after 9/11, Robertson agreed with the late Jerry Falwell’s claim that the ACLU, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the People For the American Way were responsible for the fall of the Twin Towers.[4]  The Kansas hate group that’s coming to town next Saturday to protest “The Laramie Project,” a play about the lynching of gay college student, takes its theology from the same angry playbook.

Even today’s comforting scripture lesson from First Corinthians can be abused: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength,” Paul says, to comfort Christians who were being persecuted for their faith.  I’ve visited people who were suffering or terminally ill, even domestic violence victims, who’ve complained that some form of that quote was dumped on them as a kind of Hallmark card platitude of comfort, as in “the good Lord never gives us more than we can bear.”  We shouldn’t leave out the last part of the sentence, that “with the testing [God] will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” 

Jesus doesn’t pretend to have a simple answer when bad things happen.  He always takes a stand against the simplistic theology of the Pharisees in his day – their belief that God rewards good people with good things and punishes bad people with bad things.  This was just one strand of Hebrew theology, just as it remains only one strand of Christian theology.  It’s always been much easier for rich and successful and healthy people to endorse that belief.  The Good News that Jesus preached to the blind, the lame, the poor, and the outcast still offers comfort to people today who suffer. Jesus promises that God’s loving presence is offered to all – not just to all who deserve it.  Jesus calls even to us sinners to walk with him through “the valley of the shadow of death,” in the awful mystery of evil and suffering, to a table of grace set with a banquet of love in the midst of our enemies.  True prophets point God’s people to hope and not hatred.

So let’s look at what Jesus has to say in Luke 13, in his “Parable of the Fig Tree.”  The parable expresses what God, as the master gardener, must feel sometimes about people of faith who talk and pray more than we do or produce.  How frustrated God must be when churches provide a lot of pretty shade and shelter for members without bearing much fruit to feed the hungry or minister to the sick.  God doesn’t want us to ask, “What did THEY do to deserve their suffering (as Pat Robertson did) but instead, “How can we bear witness to God’s love in the world, with the fruits of our labors?”

One way churches continue to bear fruit is through our offerings – whether in our everyday pledges that support the ongoing mission of the church or through special offerings like the more than $1,000 we have sent to Haiti so far.  Let us hope that this disaster, as well as the latest earthquake in Chile, inspires us all to give more generously than ever not only to our church (because we try to give at least 10 percent of our pledges to mission outside our own congregation) but also to next Sunday’s One Great Hour of Sharing offering. That will help to fund our outreach in future disasters – just as the money we gave in March 2009 got to Haiti immediately after this January quake.  

We can give thanks that, through Christ’s church, prophets and apostles continue to call us to bear fruit for the nurture of the world.  Just as the great prophet Isaiah said, as he offered hopeful images of springtime, with its fertile new growth, to his people amid the manure of their years of slavery and exile in Babylon:  ^“13Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”  Like the people who lived in the times of Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul, we are still called to be people of remembrance and prophets who plant seeds of hope, because the world needs us to disrupt its complacency and reach out to those who are suffering, in Christ’s name. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.