"A Lenten Story"  Luke 13:1-9

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Third Sunday in Lent,  March 14, 2004

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  315-446-0960

                                                                                    phillchu@twcny.rr.com

A few years ago, while on call as a community chaplain, I was called in the middle of the night to respond to a pastoral situation at one of our hospitals. There was a little girl, I was told, about 2 years old, who was on life support. They were going to be taking her off life supports, and the family wanted to see a chaplain before they did. That’s all the information I had going in.

It is always toughest with children. They are the calls you most dread. You can anticipate the agonizing questions, because inside you are asking them yourself.

I arrived and the little girl’s mother, not much more than a child herself, and her grandmother were waiting outside the room. The nurse told me as we went in that the father and mother didn’t get along. He and the woman he was now with, with whom the little girl had been living when the "accident" happened (she had "fallen down the steps") would be coming later, after the mother and grandmother had left. It was all pretty complicated, and mostly irrelevant at this point, except that it added to the aura of grief and senselessness that filled the room - how this little girl laying on the bed before us had been surrounded by anger and brokenness and alienation for her entire brief life. And yet her grandmother told me how funny she was, the words she had just learned to speak, the delight she took in discovering things.

What complicated things further for me was the anger and rage I was feeling inside myself at these people for not having their lives together enough to care for this precious gift of God who lay lifeless in front of us, except for the machine that was breathing for her - and not just at them, but at a system and a society where these things happen, night after dark night, as the conditions that make for them go unaddressed in any serious way, year after year, election after election.

But this wasn’t about me or my feelings.

Shortly after we went into the room it started pouring out, the guilt, the grief, and the questions. "Why is God taking my little girl away from me?" her mother said over and over. And then, "It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault." I muttered something about how God doesn’t do that, that God doesn’t punish people that way, that God was with her and with her daughter. Maybe I could reconcile a loving God with what had happened to her daughter, but she couldn’t. Right now, even if it made her miserable, she preferred a punishing God to an absent one. There had to be a reason for what happened to her daughter, and she was willing to be the reason. Maybe this could at least help her get a grip on this catastrophe.

It is a common response, when calamity strikes, even if we claim to know different, or know better, we wonder what we have done wrong. We examine and evaluate our beliefs, our habits, our relationships - to see what we have done to cause it - anything to try to control the chaos in our lives.

We don’t know if this is what motivated those who told Jesus about the Galileans whom Pilate murdered while they offered their sacrifices, or the death of 18 people when a tower fell on them in the Siloam district of Jerusalem. There is a haunting, contemporary ring to this image for us, isn’t there? The proposal behind these examples of misfortune that are brought to Jesus seems to be that such tragedies occur because the victims themselves are wicked and their misfortune is God’s punishment. "Do you think," Jesus asked them, "that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?" It is not difficult for us to dismiss such an equation out of hand. But there are only slightly more sophisticated versions of it utilized by those who after 9/11 who concluded that those catastrophes were the result of our society’s permissiveness and immorality, which isn’t really very different from the justification used by terrorists themselves who feel justified in their murderous activities because, they claim, their victims participate in systems, or live in societies, that in their view oppress others. It’s essentially the same equation, and it is obviously a tempting one because it ties up a lot of the loose ends. For one thing, it answers the riddle of why bad things happen to good people: they don’t. Bad things happen to bad people, or people who are part of sinful or evil systems. Secondly, it punishes sinners right out there in the open as a warning to everyone. And third, it gives us a god who obeys the laws of physics - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Of course Jesus didn’t bite. Instead he informs them that all people are equally human, and in need of repentance, that all will stand before the judgment of God. There is no connection between the suffering and the sin - but, he adds, unless you repent you’ll lose some blood too. It doesn’t really explain things; it leaves a lot of loose ends. But there’s no sense trying to decipher it because Jesus was aiming below their heads. His response was not meant as an aid to reason, but to disarm reason, and to touch the fears and panic inside them. Even if we could explain these senseless things, would that resolve them for us? It would not touch what is in our hearts.

Jesus did not honor their illusion that they can protect themselves in this way, preventing chaos and tragedy through right understanding, right behavior. But he did honor the vulnerability that their fear had opened up in them. As difficult as it is for us to feel how fragile our lives are, it is not a bad thing to do so. It isn’t a bad thing to be brought up against the limitations of our own mortality, to be brought up against the evil that strikes with no warning and for no obvious reason. It isn’t a bad thing to be brought up against the dark. Painful, yes. From the perspective of human reason, senseless, perhaps. Tragic, no doubt about that. But it is not a bad thing if it turns us toward the light.

This is the turning - which is what "repentance" means - that Jesus wants for them. His words to his listeners are not particularly reassuring ones - but they are true. Terrible things happen. Sometimes you are to blame, and sometimes you are not. But don’t worry about all the things that can come crashing down on you. Don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing. Sometimes our lives are torn open by fear, by pain, by grief. None of us wants it, and none of us can avoid it. But what these things open up inside us is a holy place. We shouldn’t shrink back, or deny, or otherwise run away from it - but instead roam around in it and get to know it. Listen to it, and pay attention to what you feel. It may hurt to stay there and hurt to see it, but it’s not the kind of hurt that leads to death. It’s the kind of hurt that leads to life. By that I don’t mean life that is "better" in the sense that we often mean that, or even life that is "happier" as we often mean that - but life that is deeper, life that, though scarred, touches the deeper recesses of joy.

A few years before his death from a heart attack my teacher Henri Nouwen was hit by a car while walking down a street one early misty morning. He nearly died from the injuries, and he wrote about this experience in a little book entitled Beyond the Mirror. As he faced surgery and the real possibility of death he said that he felt an amazing peace and comfort that God was preparing him to be welcomed home. But he also felt resistance to that call. What most prevented him from dying, he wrote, "was the sense of unfinished business, unresolved conflicts" with people with whom he lived or had lived. It wasn’t love that kept him clinging to life, he realized, but unresolved anger. The real struggle was not a matter of leaving loved ones, but leaving behind people he had not forgiven and had not forgiven him.

Henri realized that all the people with whom he was angry, who were angry with him represented a host of opinions and judgments and condemnations that had enslaved him to this world, and as he felt his life weakening what he desired most was to forgive and be forgiven, to let go of all opinions, to be freed from the burden of judgments. This is what he discovered in the holiness opened by the deep physical wounds of his accident.

I call the story of the little girl in the hospital a Lenten story, because like Henri’s story, and like so many others we know or have experienced, they are the kind of stories and experiences that plumb the depths of meaninglessness - and while not "explaining" them - somehow open us to holiness. Like the cross, they are stories and experiences of powerlessness and vulnerability, stories and experiences of the road we travel if we choose to live in faith.

This may not sound like Good News to those who want something different than this from God. But for those who have discovered that we cannot make life safe or God tame, it is gospel enough. What we can do, what is in our power to do by God’s grace, is turn our faces to the light, and no matter what should fall down on us, we will fall into the arms of God.

The grandmother and I left the room while the nurse helped to put the little girl on the mother’s lap. We went back in, and when I saw her lifeless body stretched across her mother’s lap I thought of the image of Mary holding the lifeless form of Jesus her son across her own. The mother asked me if we could pray now. I knelt down beside her, and in the frightening holiness of that moment I asked Jesus to be with us all - and I have not doubt that he was.

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