Sermon, Sunday 28 Feb: Lent 3 'It's the way you see a thing'

READING Isaiah 55:1-9; 1 Cor 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

SERMON
Let’s pray:
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts,
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

Sometimes, it’s the way you hear a thing:
My much-loved, and much missed, grandmother had a raft of stories
that she’d tell me when I was growing up.
One such story involved ‘a very bad German’.
Over the years, when I’d visit Nan, invariably,
the treasure-trove of family stories would come out,
and at some point, the story about the bad German would be dusted off, and re-told.
And I would listen,
and wonder,
and, truth be told,
puzzle quite a bit over the story of this German –
for you see, according to Nan’s story:
‘once, when you were very little, 
there was this very bad German - nearly killed ya’
I never understood why the German wanted to kill me:
had I done something terrible?
Committed some outrageous act that had driven this German
into a frenzy?
Which, frankly, seemed bizarre, for, as Nan said, I had been ‘very little’.

As I said, for years, I puzzled over this story –
and had a healthy respect of Germans!
And then, one day, over dinner at Nan’s, the story was once again shared.
The story that I’d grown up with all    my    life.
The story about the fearsome German...
And it was as if I were hearing it for the first time,
for what my Nan had actually been telling me down through the years
was not a story about some bad German with murder on his mind,
but something completely different.
You see, my Nan had a habit of running her words together;
what she’d been saying to me, for years and years was that:
‘there was a bad germ...and it nearly killed you’...
Ah.
Well, that certainly changed my perspective on Germans, at least!!
As I said, sometimes, it’s the way you hear a thing.

And sometimes, it can be the way you see or understand a thing:
for my Nan also had a particular saying that, in a nutshell,
showed her understanding of God -
when hard times came, when bad things happened, she’d say:
‘Ah, Nik, God plays funny tricks’.
In our gospel passage for this morning, there’s a wee bit of a
variation of that understanding of God going on.
Jesus is amongst a crowd, teaching, and within the crowd,
there were some who decided to tell Jesus about the latest outrage
that Pilate had committed.
Apparently some Galileans had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem –
to go to the Temple to make their sacrifices.
However, for this band of pilgrims, the visit didn’t end well:
Pilate, wanting to show the locals who was in charge,
had decided to demonstrate his power by not only killing these pilgrims,
but also, compounding this, by tainting the purity of the Temple itself:
the blood of the pilgrims was mingled with their sacrifices.
Basically, Pilate was desecrating the Temple.

We don’t know why the Galileans were killed:
they may have been radicals,
or they may just have happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But, their story was being told to Jesus – by this small group within the crowd...
what would he say?
What would he think?
Would he call for insurrection?
Instead, Jesus calls them out, by picking up, and challenging,
a prevailing attitude - and turning that attitude,
that way of understanding God and of how God worked,
completely on its head.

It’s the way you see a thing:
and the prevailing culture held to the conviction that
if good things were happening in your life –
like being married, having lots of sons, being wealthy –
then all of these were signs that God was pleased with you.
All of these blessings were your well-earned reward for good behaviour.
God’s magic abacus of measuring up was going your way:
Awesome.
But the flip-side to this understanding, this way of thinking about God,
and how God worked in the world,
was that if bad things were happening in your life –
such as being single or widowed, being childless, being ill, or being poor –
then really, you were just reaping what you deserved for obviously living
a bad and unholy life.
God was punishing you because you were clearly not toeing the line.
...And so, when this small group in the crowd almost breathlessly
can’t wait to tell Jesus the story of the murdered pilgrims,
what they’re really doing is pointing their fingers at those same pilgrims and saying to Jesus:
‘so, see those pilgrims: they can’t have been that good or holy then, 
given that God saw fit to kill them. 
So, what do you think they did to be punished eh, Jesus?’

You know, we have a term for this, for what this wee group was trying to do:
we call it ‘victim blaming’ –
and Jesus is having none of it.                                                                
‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners 
than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no!’
And he turns it back to them.
Shows them their focus, their attitude, is all kinds of wrong –
they need to rethink,
refocus,
...repent:
for repentance is just that:
a change of heart, a change of mind –
a change in the way you see God at work
in yourself and in the world –
a change that is so deep and profound,
that you can’t help but be changed.

Jesus is telling these folk, with their view of the God
who gives out milk and cookies and gold stars for good behaviour,
or who mercilessly beats folk down for bad behaviour...
that they’re wrong – and that they need to view God in a decidedly different way:
while victim-blaming may be the way of the world,
it is not the way of God.
He challenges his listeners to see the God who is merciful and compassionate
and who, if he were a gardener,
would be doing his darndest to do all he could for a fig tree that was seemingly
not really up to much.
As Jesus says elsewhere, God did not send him for the righteous,
but for the sinners, for the least, for the ones on the edge, for the marginalised:
to be on the side of the victims...
so much so, that he turned his face towards Jerusalem,
and to the Cross:
to death...
and, to resurrection.

It’s the way you see a thing, the way you understand a thing:
and here, in the midst of what is a very rich passage to be digging into,
we could spend quite some time exploring that great ages-old question:
 ‘why did God allow this bad thing to happen?’
But we see from Jesus’ response, that the question has a faulty premise –
a faulty notion of the nature of God –
It’s less about pointing fingers at others,
it’s less about pointing fingers at God...
What’s happening in this text is that, in a sense,
Jesus is saying ‘yes, bad things happen’ – Pilate is a cruel and tyrannical ruler;
the tower at Siloam may have been built with human error...
[as for natural disasters – tectonic plates move and shift
and happen to send shivers along the earth’s crust where people choose to build.]
Bad stuff happens.
What Jesus is doing in this passage is acknowledging that it does,
and challenging those listening to him about how they respond –
and reminding them, through the story of the fig-tree
that God is there in the midst of the bad stuff,
at work, bringing light, and mercy,
and the grace of another chance –
That, rather than focusing upon the bad,
to look for God, and perhaps,
even to be agents of God through their response to the bad stuff, to tragedy.
As the prophet Isaiah reminds his listeners:
they are 'to seek the Lord while he may be found’
and, that 'the Lord is near.'
It’s in that seeking of the Lord, that we understand that even in the valley of death,
yet he is with us.

Being a Christian is no magic guarantee that we’ll sail through life
untouched by some of the harder things.
It also doesn’t mean we don’t experience joy.
What this particular bible passage teaches us is that we don’t get a free pass –
and, that, bluntly:
‘The idea that only good things happen to good people should have been 
put to rest when Jesus was nailed to the Cross’ [Amy Richter]

Good stuff happens.
Bad stuff happens.
And in all of it,
in the midst of what it is to be human,
God is with us.
In that knowledge, how do we see God,
and how will we respond as those who walk in faith:
by pointing fingers at others, or at God?
Or, by reflecting upon our own relationship with God;
by following the One who showed us that God is nearer to us than breathing;
and responding to others with that same grace, compassion,
mercy and love that God, in Jesus, has shown to us?
Amen.