3rd Sunday in Lent--Year C

Third Sunday in Lent—Year C March 3, 2013 It has been a challenging time in the life of our church. We seem to have been beset by tragedy, disaster, and death in the lives of so many who are connected with our parish. Many of us feel helpless in the face of so much sadness and suffering, and the words of the collect seem to hold especially true this week: “God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves…” In our gospel reading for today, Jesus and his followers are talking about two horrific events that have just happened, probably in Jerusalem: the murder of Galileans by Pilot, possibly while they were in the temple making their sacrifice and the death of 18 people when the tower of Siloam fell on them. Jesus uses this conversation about these two current events to talk about the nature of sin and punishment and especially about the nature of God. And in order to realize just how radical what he is saying is, we need to understand the prevalent religious thought of the time on the issues of sin and suffering. One commentator writes, “That suffering is a punishment for sin is a biblical common place. Deteronomic theology, which had gained wide currency by Jesus’ day, asserted that obedience to the Torah brought blessings, but disobedience brought a curse. Here Jesus clearly rejects that view. A person’s righteousness or lack of it has nothing to do with any evil that may befall that person.” (Feasting on the Word, Exegetical Perspective by Leslie Hoppe p 95). That is a radical idea for Jesus’s time, and for a certain extent, our own time too: “A person’s righteousness or lack of it has nothing to do with any evil that may befall that person.” In the gospel lesson for today, Jesus is saying, “That’s just not how God is.” The other piece of this that I think is especially pertinent to us today can be found our contemporary popular saying which I hear many, many people say whenever they are trying to make sense of suffering in their lives or in the lives of others. They say, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Friends, Jesus is telling us in this gospel today, that also just isn’t how God works. Please, take this moment, right here and right now, to erase that sentence from your brain. Do not ever say that to someone else; and please, for the love of God, do not say it to yourself either. Now, don’t get me wrong. I get why we say this. We see or experience suffering, and we think that there has got to be a reason for it. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “We would rather have a punishing God than an absent or capricious God.” But Jesus shows us that none of those are accurate understandings of God. Strangely enough, in preparing for this sermon today, I used the wrong Old Testament reading—Isaiah 55:1-9, but that reading has much to offer. That Isaiah reading is God speaking to God’s people after they are about to give up home in captivity in Babylon, and God says to God’s people: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” So what do we do? How do we make sense of and survive suffering, if we cannot lay it at the fault of the one who is suffering or lay it on God? Jesus tells us to repent; to turn away from ourselves and to turn back to God. Isaiah says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” And Jesus promises that God is always near. Three different meditations or readings that I read this week, spoke to me on this issue, and so I share them with you. First: Place. “Presume that God’s revelation is happening all along the way, not just in “sacred” moments but in every moment, every day. Practice attentiveness. Saint Columba said, ‘God is everywhere in his immensity, and everywhere close at hand’”(Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of Saint John the Evangelist). Second, Richard Rohr wrote, “If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.” Third, the call of the Christian in repentance is to actively work to abide in God. Repentance isn’t so much about us; it’s about God. In the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book 2013 titled Abiding, the author, Ben Quash, writes, “The true ground of our personal identity is our covenant relationship with God, in which we are not an instrument of God’s will, and God cannot be an instrument of ours; in which a focus on ‘will’ is relativized by ‘trust in a genuinely eccentric ground’ of the reality and value of who we are. This center is beyond ourselves (it is ‘eccentric’), because it is in God. But that is more easily said than learnt, and for as long as history lasts, we will continue at some level to live ‘in Adam’. The Pelagian response to sin…may argue that greater moral effort can remedy the problem, but this is to keep the human will center stage and resist the eccentricity in which human creatures find their real value. Orthodox Christian teaching argues instead that human good works are only ever responses to a prior grace, and are learnt in the context of a radical dependence on such grace” (Chapter 4). Jesus is the face of God, the one who suffers for us and the one who suffers with us. Through his example and presence with us, he teaches us that repentance means turning away from our own will and our own desires, and returning to God. He also teaches us that understanding why bad things happen is less important (and even sometimes irrelevant) than using that moment as an opportunity to return to God and to trust that God’s grace continues to be freely offered. So next time, when you are experiencing suffering—your own or that of someone you love—instead of trying to make sense of it by saying, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” keep that moment in silence and say a prayer for yourself or the other, that you may be recalled to the never-failing Grace of God which is revealed in Jesus to be trust-worthy, loving, and ever present. No matter what.