Sermon: Responding Differently

Luke 13:1-9

Responding Differently

James Sledge                                                                                       February 28, 2016

The other night the eleven o’clock news  had a report of another shooting in southeast DC. TV news tends to emphasize such events, but the following morning, it was hard to find anything about it in The Washington Post, just a small paragraph buried deep inside the local section. Such shootings are routine enough that they’re easy to ignore. People might notice if the shooting were in northwest DC or Falls Church or Arlington.

They certainly noticed the terrorist attacks in Paris last November. A lot of people still have the colors of the French flag superimposed on their Facebook pictures, and I added the flag to mine briefly. But I never put a Kenyan flag over my picture, even though they had an attack that killed more than the one in Paris. No Nigerian flag either, and they had two deadlier attacks. In fact, there were six terror attacks in 2015 deadlier than Paris, but I could only remember one of them. I had never even heard of some. Just like I couldn’t tell you the details of any of those shootings in southeast DC.

There are lots of reasons for this. One surely has to do with race. The victims in Southeast DC and in Nigeria were largely black. In Southeast DC, they were often poor, and their deaths didn’t represent any real danger to me or my suburban existence.

We aren’t much surprised by shootings in certain parts of DC, or terror attacks in certain parts of the world. We’ve grown numb by repetition, and it’s not much of a step from numbness to the idea, perhaps a subconscious one, that these deaths matter less, which would mean that their lives mattered less.

There also seems to be a natural human tendency to blame the victim. It makes our lives feel a little more orderly if tragedies happen to other people because of their actions. They got involved with the wrong people. They didn’t work hard enough to live in a safer neighborhood. They got mixed up in drugs and alcohol.

We sometimes do the same thing when it comes to illness or natural disaster. The person smoked or drank too much, didn’t exercise or have a healthy diet. They lived in a flimsy trailer or near a stream that floods. It’s partly their own fault, right?

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Perhaps the people who address Jesus in our gospel reading are not so different from us, hoping for a way to see their world as more orderly or just. Some of their own countrymen have been executed by the Roman governor and their blood mixed with the Temple sacrifices. It was a horrible, brutal tragedy. How could it happen? There must be a reason.

But if they’re  hoping Jesus will help make sense of the tragedy, maybe even explain how the hand of God could be seen in it, they are quickly disappointed. Jesus not only refuses to give a cause, he points out a much more random tragedy where people were killed in a building collapse. In both cases Jesus asks the question, “Did those who suffered somehow deserve it?” To which Jesus answers a categorical “No.”

If he had stopped there his words might seem pastoral, especially to those who’ve lost loved ones to senseless tragedy or disease. But he keeps going, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Thanks, Jesus. You just made this a lot harder to preach.

For those conditioned to think of God as wrathful, itching to punish people who don’t tow the line, able to spare people only because of a gory sacrifice on the cross, Jesus may seem to confirm an exceedingly dire picture of things. But I don’t think that’s actually the case.

It helps to remember that Middle Eastern speech is filled with hyperbole and overstatement. When Jesus says, “But unless you repent, you will all perish as they did,” he may simply be saying, “Don’t think that terrible things happen to people who are different from you. If tragedy happens to those who deserve it, you’re next. What’s critical,” says Jesus, “is that you repent.”

Of course the word “repent” poses its own problems. It’s something sinners are supposed to do… or else. It can be used that way in the Bible, but the word’s basic meaning is “to change one’s mind.” And in the Scriptures used by the Gospel writers, a Greek version of the Old Testament sometimes called the Septuagint, even God occasionally repents.

Based on the parable he tells, the change of mind Jesus expects is somehow connected to bearing fruit. It’s an obvious enough parable in some ways. Fruit trees that produce no fruit aren’t worth much. Better to cut them down and plant something else. Most people would have replaced the tree in the parable long ago. But the owner has waited year after year, and even well past the point to cut it down agrees to an all-out effort to encourage the tree to produce.

Standing alone, this parable might simply mean that Jesus expects us, expects the Church, to bear fruit in the world, but that God is also amazingly patient with us and will do everything possible to help and nurture us.  But this parable doesn’t stand alone. It is directed explicitly at questions about suffering and tragedy, about our response to the pain and hurt and suffering of the world.

“Change your thinking,” says Jesus. “Stop worrying about who does or doesn’t deserve it. Change things. Bear fruit. Live in ways that create new possibilities. Break the old cycles.”
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In the wake of the horrific shooting last summer at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, church members and family members were no doubt asking questions of why and how this could happen. How could they not? The shooting was beyond senseless.

What about that shooting in Charleston, Jesus? Did you hear about that?

I don’t know if Jesus would respond as he does in our gospel, saying, “Repent or perish,” but the people from Emmanuel seemed to have already learned that lesson about changed thinking. In the days following the shooting, they spoke of their gratitude for the outpouring of support, and for how their community had come together.

Even more, the family of Ethel Lance, a 70-year-old grandmother killed in the shooting, spoke directly to the shooter. "You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people, but I forgive you." The members of Emmanuel would not stay caught up in old cycles. They would respond differently.

A lot of people, myself included, believe that this changed way of thinking, this different, Jesus-way of responding, helped bring about change. The witness of those families moved us a bit toward something new. It helped create the climate, the possibility for something that I, who grew up in North and South Carolina, never thought would happen. It broke old patterns and bore incredible fruit. They finally took down that damned flag at the capitol in Columbia.

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We live in a world with too much suffering, too much pain, too much brokenness. And all too often, the question of “Why?” receives no answer. Jesus does not answer it for us today. He does, however, suggest that we are all part of the problem, caught up in cycles of suffering and pain and brokenness. What is truly needed, he says, is changed thinking, different responses, lives that bear fruit for a new day. And his own life shows us the way.