March 11, 2007  Edgewood United Church UCC Rev. Karen E. Gale

Bad  Things Happen
Luke 13:1-9
1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Sermon titles are hard. How to capture the essence of the message in just a few words. Suggestions for titles this week were “Turn from Sin or Die” or “God’s Love Never Ceases.” One pastor commented that the truth of the text is certainly in the eye of the beholder. So where do we find ourselves in the midst of today’s texts which speak to repentance, disaster, productivity and compassion?

It seems there are two very important theological points being made. The first is a question about tragedy and suffering in relation to sin. The second is a deeper reflection on how we (and God) react when faced with non-productivity around us.

In our gospel text, Jesus addresses the questions of the crowd. The crowd is offering up example of the tragedies of the day and asking, “well, how do you explain that, Jesus? What does it mean and whose fault is it?” Their questions read somewhat like the front page of our paper: violence, death, disaster.

The first question is tricky. Pilate has executed some Galileans and their blood became mingled with sacrifices. This would be a truly horrifying event especially if one were a devout Jew who strived to follow the purity laws. This kind of bloodshed was common in Jesus’ day and Pilate was known as a ruthless man who had also slaughtered a large group of Samaritans. The crowd’s question is difficult because Jesus is face with a very delicate political question, one that everyone is curious to see how he answers.

Jesus deftly dodges the political dimension and instead questions the popular notion that calamity is the result of sin, a notion that we must admit has not gone away in the intervening 2000 years.

With the crowd’s second question—what about those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them—we might call it a natural disaster—Jesus again turns the tables. Stop looking to find and pin point the sinful.  These deaths are not a result of sin he tells the crowd. Those who died were the same as you all. You can’t push their tragedy (seen as shame in that society) away from you claiming that they must have deserved what they got. All must repent or perish, says Jesus. There are no simple answers to political violence or natural disasters. But regardless, it is time to repent, to take a look at your own lives and think about how you are acting in the world.

Now the word repent means to turn around. It is a particularly good word for Lent for it asks us to do the hard, soul-deep process of evaluating our actions and turning around from those things that lead us away from God.

Stanely Hauerwas is a Christian ethics professor and he offers this analogy: When a disabled child is born, we should not ask, why has God allowed this to happen ( or worse, why has God punished this family, what sin have they committed). Instead we should be asking what sort of community do we need to become so that disability need not be a barrier to a child enjoying a gratifying, possibility-filled life.

But putting tragedy far away from us, separating ourselves from it, makes it easier to deal with. Thus, those in the crowd want to believe that the victims must have sinned and that is why they come to such a terrible fate. Don’t we sometimes see the same in the tragedies around us? When we hear the story of a family whose son has become a drug addict, we can also hear whispers questioning what kind of parents he had. What must they have done wrong? When the tsunami hit Banda Ache and killed 250,000 people 2 years ago, the Buddhists and the Christians immediately started blaming each other for bring about the wrath of God because of their impure beliefs.

We call events like these an act of God. I mean, how many of us have insurance policies with exceptions for acts of God. But are they really acts of God? Is God creating the tragedy? The temptation is to look for blame, for fault, for sin, in those who suffer. Because the alternative is that life is uncertain and that the God who promises to protect us suddenly seems a lot less powerful.

In our reading from 1 Corinthians, Paul exemplifies this point of view. In Paul’s view God does indeed smite sinners. Folks are “struck down in the wilderness” or “destroyed by serpents” God used them to make a point about sinful living. Paul even says that those who complain were destroyed. Boy that could be useful as a parent! Moreover, Paul believes that God tests people though God will not “let us be tested beyond our strength.”

But in looking at this in light of our gospel text, I think Jesus directly contradicts this. And I strongly disagree with Paul’s point of view as well.

Bad things happen.

Bad things happen to justly living people, to sinful people, to all people. Bad things happen.

Many years ago a popular book by Rabbi Kushner called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People struggled with this issue. Despite my quibble with the title (bad people vs. good people) I agree with Kushner’s main premise. God created a world that has certain causes and effects and God is limited by that and does not have the ability to prevent tragedy.

Think about gravity for a moment. Gravity is what keeps our planet moving around the sun. It keeps us from floating out into space. It is a central part of our natural world, a law of the universe. But gravity also means that planes crash, children fall out of trees and break their legs, and people die because of the effects of gravity.

Gravity is not good or bad; it just is.  The results of gravity are not good or bad, or a sign of sinful behavior, or a sign of how God tests us. Even Paul says to be careful where we stand for we might fall. Bad things happen. We all felt the hard reality of that this past week as we mourned and said good-bye to community leader Robert Busby. Bad things indeed do happen.

I want to move to the second part of the gospel text. This is the parable of the fig tree planted in a vineyard that has not produced fruit in three years. Let’s look at this parable from several perspectives. First, imagine yourself to be the landowner. Many of you are gardeners so imagine your own garden. You have this unfruitful tree taking up space. Maybe you could plant something else. By next year you might have peaches or magnolia blossoms.

How many of you want to get rid of the tree?
How many of you want to let it sit in the garden one more year?
Now, if you are the fig tree, how many of you want another year?

To make this more difficult, there are some things you should know about raising figs, especially in the midst of a vineyard. “Figs are high maintenance. When producing, they produce two crops per year. If pruned after the winter crop, they give a poor yield in the spring. The variety most common in the Holy Land usually does not produce fruit until its third year. They require regular watering (unlike the vineyard), and they deplete soil nutrients rapidly, thereby requiring fertilization (unlike the vineyard). The wood of the tree is hollow and is useless for any kind of carpentry. The bark exudes a caustic latex which irritates human skin. The canopy of the tree provides thick, dark shade under which nothing else can grow (like grapes). The wood is sometimes used for firewood but it burns very hot and fast and must be well ventilated so that the caustic fumes from the latex in the bark don’t asphyxiate anyone one nearby. In short, a fig tree which is not producing figs is worst than useless, it is resource consuming nuisance.” (desperatepreacher.com)

How many of you still want the fig tree in your garden? If you start burning the wood and letting off toxic fumes, how many of your neighbors will want the fig tree in your garden? How quickly would we move to “not in my backyard”?

And so was ask ourselves, ok, this is how it is with figs. What do we do with those difficult, thorny, caustic, even poisonous people in our lives and in our society? What do we do with those people who use up more than their share of resources, those who won’t contribute to the community, those who cheat the system, those who hurt and do violence to other people?

What about when it is really hard. What about those who commit crimes? What about those seemingly beyond our reach? What about them? How do we feel about having them in our garden?

If we are the owner, we pull them out and get rid of them. And hasn’t that often been a solution. We’ll isolate kids in crumbling urban schools without enough funds, warehouse them in juvenile detention centers. Lock up adults—three strikes and you are out. Build prisons instead of rehab centers.

Is there anywhere where together we challenge ourselves and these people to do the hard work of digging around their roots, perhaps roots of racism, poverty, isolation? And do we lavish fertilizer on them—these unproductive trees—fertilizer of love and care and most of call compassion. Or do we just rip them out of the garden and throw them away? Who do we want to be—the owner or the gardener?

Thinking about Robert Busby and his life, I learned this week that he moved to Old Town “to get away from people,” in his own words. But over time he began to rehab this boarded up, abandoned section of Lansing. He fixed up building and invited people from the arts to perform. He organized and gathered folks together. He dug around this roots of this written off section of town. Even when politicians said no, Robert said, let’s give it some time, some fertilizer. And he poured life and compassion and joy into this special gardening project. Will Old Town produce figs now that Robert Busby is gone? Some are ready to give up. But others are willing to get down and dig and fertilize and love with compassion this part of our city, just as Robert, the compassionate gardener did these many years.

Make no mistake—choosing to do the digging, nurturing, caring work is hard. And the caustic, depleting effects will be felt by all of us. But I believe that unless we turn around, repent with compassion, unless we try to do this digging and fertilizing, we shall all feel the pain of perishing.

A few years back I was using the sink at a friend’s house and she had one of those rolls of paper towels printed with flowers and little quotes on it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the quotes and it read, “love the good people.” I thought to myself, well, that is one way to look at it. Then I looked closer and what it actually said was, “love the good in people.” That is a much a harder task. For it requires us to draw on our compassion, to dig and to suffer with those who suffer.

It is true that if we do not repent we will perish. If we do not turn around and love the good in people, we will throw away generation after generation of those who need our compassion and hard work—those on the margins in our community, family, our world. And if we do not exercise compassion for all, that part in our heart will diminish and perish as well.

How many of us are owners, ready to yank out and move on?
How many of us are gardeners opting to till the soil and do the work?
How many of us are prepared to wait for figs in a McDonald’s society?

It is Lent, a time of contemplation. It is a time of repentance, a time to turn around and review where we have been and where we truly want to go. To seek where God would lead us. Are you willing to work for figs? To reach out to a hostile neighbor, to nurture a prickly adolescent, to write letters urging better prison facilities and work against laws that would not allow room to change, repent and come to fruit. To love neighborhood back to life.

Bad things happen. To all of us. But the God of compassion walks with us through the tragedy and asks us to love unconditionally, helping to bring those whom the world has discarded to a place of love where they can bloom and fruit. God, grant us a spirit of repentance and the soul of the gardener. Amen.