SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND NATHAN A. RUGH, CURATE
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT
11 MARCH 2007

 

 

It is traditional for seminarians to spend ten weeks or so in what is called Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE. CPE is a chance to work on one's pastoral skills in a supervised environment with a lot of self and group reflection. It is usually hard work, because it is both emotionally draining to be available to people in a concentrated way and because it involves a lot of self-reflection and soul searching.

 

For my CPE, I was a chaplain at a retirement community in Maryland. I was assigned to provide pastoral care to those who were living in the independent living apartments and cottages of the campus. And so, while some of my friends and classmates were dealing with emergency room traumas, I was visiting people in pretty good health in their living rooms. At first I questioned the need for my presence there, but what I came to discover were the real pastoral needs of the people with whom I met. Generally, what I encountered was not the crisis of unforeseen accidents, but rather a drawn out and prolonged crisis of meaning and purpose.

 

There was an occasion where I met with a woman in her eighties. She had lost her husband and her siblings had also died. She lived alone and was new to the campus without any friends. Her children were either far away or too busy to visit much. And so she was left alone, a lot, and she had a lot of time to think and wonder and despair. She began to believe that God was punishing her. She felt that God was keeping her alive, despite her wishes to the contrary, because of something she had either done or not done. God was punishing her with life.

 

Her belief is sort of opposite of what Jesus encounters and responds to today in the Gospel reading. Opposite, but the premise is the same. In today's reading, Jesus is responding to members of a crowd that are following him to Jerusalem. Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem, which is a significant image in Luke's Gospel. As he heads toward Jerusalem, he is accompanied by both his disciples and by a crowd of curious onlookers. Some of the curious are hostile some are interested some are confused.

 

Several members of the crowd come to tell Jesus about a particularly grisly happening. Apparently, Pilate has order the death of a number of Galileans while they were sacrificing. There is some scholarly disagreement about where these folks were sacrificing, some say at the Temple in Jerusalem others say at the mountain of Gerizim which for Samaritans is the holy mountain for worshiping God. I guess at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter for the story, except it makes more sense to my mind that it would be at Gerizim because if they had been killed in Jerusalem it makes sense that the Galileans would have been considered martyrs.

 

And that is exactly not what they are considered by these members of the crowd who come to recount to Jesus their fate. We have to fill in their half of the content, but it is clear from Jesus' reaction that the Galileans were not considered martyrs. Instead the consideration on the table is whether God had a hand in the killing of the Galileans as punishment. The question appears to be - Was God punishing them for their inappropriate sacrifice?

 

Jesus response is an unequivocal No. He says, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?" The answer is no they were not. And to make his point even further Jesus offers an example tower collapsing in Jerusalem. Here, there is no immoral agent, or moral agent for that matter, to be God's hand and no apparent blasphemous activity that would warrant God's retribution. This is just a seemingly random event. For those who might assume that God was punishing those particular eighteen people for their particular offenses, Jesus again says, "no". Jesus is vigorously breaking with the notion that there is some sort of sacred meaning that should be assigned to the violence of Pilate or the accident of the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem.

 

Jesus rejects a theology of God being particularly present in this event and therefore absent in others. Moreover, he is eliminating the notion that God should be linked to the moral order of this present fallen world with its crime and punishment. God is not judge, jury, and executioner in the way that we envision it and perhaps in the way that we would like to have it. Jesus rejects a vision of God violently handing out retribution for offense.

 

And yet, Jesus does not leave it there. God is not absent here either. God is present, just not present in the way that we think of present. God is acting, but not in the way that we think of action. God is not removed from this situation. When Jesus speaks of this reality, he does so in a way that sounds contradictory. To the question of whether the Galileans were particularly naughty, he says' "No, but unless you repent you will all perish as they did". And he says the same thing of the victims of the tower collapse. This might lead one to say, "Well which one is it?? Is God absent or is God present handing out just deserts?"

 

Here again, like so many places in the Gospels, Jesus is saying something that is meant to break the idols that we call God. In some sense, we can only really come to some understanding of what Jesus means when we stand on the other side of the resurrection. We only begin to comprehend for ourselves what it means that in God there is no death and no darkness, when we see how Jesus conquers death for us by entering into it.

 

If we cling to a notion of God linked to death, it is not at all clear whether we don't make God an agent of death. Death is God's answer to us and as such Death rules and God serves as the triggerman. This is despair. This is the despair I met when I was a chaplain in the words of that lonely woman. And this despair makes Death the true king of our lives and relegates God to the role of either the dealer of death or the absentee landlord.

 

Despair makes God a participant in death or absent from it. The crucifixion shows us otherwise. God is not absent. God in Christ walks the path of death and suffering. God assumes all the violence and all of the hatred and all of the meaninglessness. God is present.

 

But God is not present as one who deals out retribution, despite what bad atonement theology might tell us. God is not the agent of death. Rather God takes on and assumes that death in Christ. And God's response is life - Resurrection life - Transformed life - that now lives in such a way that death no longer has dominion. Christ becomes free of death and in Christ we are also free.

 

And it is in this light that we are called to repentance. It is in this light of freedom that we are called to turn around, to look again, and to regret how we have locked God in the box of death. We are being asked to smash that pitiful idol and enter into relationship with the True God in whom there is no death and in whom there is only life. God is not sitting there waiting for us to make mistakes or to fail so that God can zap us. God response to our mistakes and failures, to our lack of relationship and trust is hope.

 

God's response to our rejection is Jesus Christ in whom we have been restored to relationship, in whom we have redemption, in whom we have hope. God is tilling our soil. God is laying down the manure. God is asking us to bloom and bear fruit. God is not the agent of despair. God is not the agent of death. God does not bring death, instead God responds to death with life and hope.

 

Without this we will perish. Not as some form of retribution. But rather we will be tied to an idol that will drag us down into the sea of death, into the realm of despair, when instead we are being asked to cut free from that idol and to burst forth into fresh air and sunlight of hope and life.

 

So, when Jesus says, "repent or you will perish like them," he is pointing to this reality of an understanding of God being entwined with death. He is inviting us to think again. He is asking us to live in the light of life and truth and hope.

 

Amen