SERMON Headlines

Lent 3C: Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

In the words of my favorite television show, what we just heard was "ripped from the headlines." Headlines, then, and headlines, now.

Headlines, then: Sometime around the year 30, had there been a Jerusalem Post, its first century readers would have awakened one morning to a headline reading something to the effect:

"PILATE ORDERS SLAUGHTER OF GALILEAN PILGRIMS

WITH ANIMAL SACRIFICES AT JEWISH TEMPLE"

Those readers would also have seen another headline, also involving the Jerusalem Temple, appearing around the same time:

"SILOAM TOWER TOPPLES KILLING EIGHTEEN"

These headlines are not just headlines ripped from first century editions of the Jerusalem Post. They are contemporary headlines as well. The headline announcing the Pilate massacre sounds a lot like the headline in yesterday's New York Times:

"CAR BOMB STRIKES SHIITE HOLY CITY"

or the headline a months ago:

"SCORES KILLED IN ATTACK ON SHIITE PILGRIMS IN IRAQ"

About that attack, The Times reported:

A woman who veiled her explosives in a black robe struck a column of Shiite pilgrims on the outskirts of Baghdad on Monday in a suicide attack . . . .

The attack -- coming a week after four enormous bombings in Baghdad using vehicles driven by suicide bombers -- killed at least 38 people and wounded scores more along a major roadway in an industrial district on the northern edge of Baghdad . . . .

            . . . .

Two more attacks -- one with a grenade, another with a roadside bomb -- later struck still more pilgrims in southern Baghdad, wounding 16. (NYTimes 2/1/2010)

And then there are the toppling towers. Not 9/11 toppling towers caused by terrorist attacks but the kind of toppling towers that First Bethlehem Lutheran on Paulina experienced a few years ago when lightening struck its tower. The kind of toppling towers that are either caused by natural disasters (like First Bethlehem's) or (like our own towers before they were rebuilt and probably the Siloam towers that killed 18 2,000 years ago) potential natural disasters all by themselves.

A week ago yesterday, there was a massive toppling tower natural disaster of horrifying proportions in Chile. A week ago today we awoke to the headline (NY Times 2/28/2010):

"CHILE IN 'STATE OF CATASTROPHE' AFTER VAST QUAKE"

And as large and as strong as the earthquakes in Chile this past week, the current death toll of 700 pales in comparison to the over 200,000 killed in the Haitian earthquake in January -- a number likely to overtake the 250,000 killed by the tsunami at Christmas in 2005. Hard to fathom, isn't it?

And, along with the natural disasters, there are the accidents. Like the explosion triggered by Lunar New Year fireworks in southern China a week ago Friday that killed 21 people and injured 48. Or the tragic death two weeks ago of the Sea World trainer who was dragged by her pony tail into the water by a killer whale.

And in all of these cases, the ones involving the deliberate taking of human life -- the slaughters, the bombings, the massacres -- not to mention the holocausts, and ethnic cleansings -- as well as the natural disasters and the accidents, human beings were killed. Human beings were killed who, like the Galileans massacred by Pilate, never anticipated their deaths or, like the victims of the toppling tower, did not expect to die. They were in the right places at the wrong times.

Which brings us back to those first century headlines and Jesus' discussion of them.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem when he is told about Pilate's slaughter of the Galilean Jews who were preparing animals that they had brought to the Temple for sacrifice.

Now, in way of background, this account of Pilate's slaughter as well as the report of the toppling tower are unique to Luke's gospel. They are an account and report that are not independently verified by other sources. Even so, such an act of cruelty by Pilate was totally consistent with his character And if towers were capable of crumbling and falling at the corner of Hoyne and LeMoyne in Chicago just a few years ago, towers certainly could have done the same in first century Jerusalem.

So Jesus learns from "some present" that Pilate has randomly and gratuitously killed not only Jews but fellow Galileans. There is something of a trap here. How will Jesus react? If he criticizes Pilate, his trip to Jerusalem could be over before it starts. But even more than the political risks in criticizing Roman authority is the issue of dealing with the firmly held religious belief that bad things do not happen to good people. Suffering and death are God's punishment for wrongs committed.

This is not, of course, a religious view confined to the first century. It could not be more contemporary. Pat Robertson wasted no time in ascribing the Haitian earthquake as God's punishment for Haiti's having made a pack with the Devil in 1791 to get rid of the French. In a similar vein, Louis Farrakhan wasted no time last week in pronouncing the Chilean earthquake as God's warning to the United States. The irony of ascribing particular natural disasters as acts of God was highlighted by Neil Steinberg in the Sun-Times in response to lightening striking the First Bethlehem tower:

Religion [he writes] doesn't play fair.

Say the lightning bolt that damaged a Wicker Park building Friday had blown out the windows at a Planned Parenthood office.

Or set fire to a gay bathhouse.

Or melted the front doorknob of a dirty bookstore.

Wouldn't any number of ministers give in to temptation Sunday and thump their pulpits, expounding on this warning, this note of divine displeasure, a reminder that those who sin condemn themselves to the fiery pit? Probably.

But the bolt of lightning did not hit any of those places. Rather, it blew a dozen bricks out of the tower of the First Bethlehem Lutheran Church, 1649 W. Le Moyne.

Thus it is allowed to be a mere phenomenon, a meaningless natural electrical discharge.

Now tell me, is that fair?

Well, is it? Or, more to the point, is it right?

How Jesus deals with the suffering and death as punishment issue is by rhetorically asking: "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?" And he asks another question,"Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them-- do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?"

And to both the questions that Jesus asks, he answers, "No, I tell you." It is not fair. The victims are not to blame. But is that really what he is saying?

Yes and No. You'll notice that Jesus doesn't stop there. Nor does he expand on his answers. Instead, he shifts gears after each answer, and tells those present, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did." Which doesn't make much sense if the victims are not to blame. This seeming inconsistency has never stopped the church from using this text as a stick during Lent to demand individual repentance.

Now, individual amendment of one's life through the disciplines of Lent is good and beneficial and heathy and important. But it is not something that is based on this text. And it is not what Jesus is taking about.

Jesus here is not taking about individual faults and failings. Nor is he talking about perishing after death in hell (Neil Steinberg's "fiery pit"). He is speaking to those Jews who have brought up the slaughter of the Gallleans by Pilate. Jesus is a prophet and, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, he is warning God's people to return to God. In the words of N. T. Wright, Jesus' call to repentance is an eschatological call and a political call, "summoning Israel as a nation to replace one set of agendas and embrace another" (Wright 1996, 251).

As explained by Bishop Wright, what Jesus is saying this morning is that

[u]nless Israel repents of her headlong rush into destruction, she will suffer the same fate as those whom Pilate killed, or who were crushed by the tower of Siloam: in other words, Roman swords and falling masonry will be their fate if they persist in going the way of idolatrous nationalism (13.1-5) The warnings are at once reinforced with a parable: the fig tree had better bear fruit soon because otherwise it is to be cut down (13.22-30). Jerusalem is about to face the equivalent of a devastating farmyard fire, seen from the point of view of the livestock; Jesus has longed to do what mother hens do in such circumstances, but the chicks are refusing to come under his wings. As a result, the Temple is abandoned by its rightful inhabitant, left to its oncoming fate, just as in the prophecies of Ezekiel (13.34-5). (Wright 1996, 331)

As Jesus (as well as Ezekiel) had predicted, the Temple was destroyed by the Romans. And, through the death and resurrection of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, gentiles were graphed onto the people of God -- so graphed on that Paul, writing to his gentile congregation in Corinth, can speak of the Israelites as "our [his and the gentiles] ancestors under the cloud."

But even though the glorious Kingdom of God so beautifully described by Second Isaiah this morning has been ushered in, it is not here. And although, in the words of Bishop Wright, "the End came forward in to the present in Jesus the Messiah," and we"live in the bright interval between Easter and the final consummation," we live with headlines that have not changed.

Live in an interval and with headlines where sectarian violence and terrorism become a way of life and human life becomes expendable. Where endemic poverty magnifies the suffering of natural disasters. Where shoddy construction and deferred maintenance amplify the destruction. Where issues of equity and safety are sacrificed to greed and the profit margin.

In all of this kind of suffering and death -- in all this Evil -- there is human agency involved: free will in action. God is not pulling the strings here, and the victims are not being punished.

There is no question that this is a time for repentance. But it is time for the very kind of repentance that Jesus is speaking about this morning. About communal repentance that is focused on doing. On changing course. On addressing the sources of Evil in our immediate and larger communities. On making a difference. And this repentance is possible and is ours to do because, even though God is not pulling the strings, God is with us, an incarnate God made known in Jesus. The Hebrew word is "Immanuel." "God with us." Always. In Word and Sacrament. As we do God's will and work in the world. Amen

March 7, 2010

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago