Lent 3C
Text: Luke 13:1-9
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 20, 2022
Coming Close to Home
I’ve been thinking a lot about why it is we are affected so deeply by the war in Ukraine. We were not affected this much by the war in Syria and its millions of refugees, or in Congo with its millions of refugees, or the war right now in Ethiopia and Tigray with its millions of refugees. Why is it that pictures of war-torn cities in Ukraine, and refugee families pouring into Poland, seem to hit so close to home?
And the answer to that question is contained in the end of that question: close to home. In our racialized and securely middle-class understanding, when the maimed bodies and the desperate war refugees are Syrian, or Congolese, or Ethiopian, that means that they are safely different from us. But when the victims of war are white Europeans, Christians, themselves middle-class and maybe even professional, then suddenly you feel you can put yourself in their place. It’s happening to people who are not so different from you and me. It’s coming close to home.
In the Gospel lesson this morning some folks in the crowd come to Jesus to tell him about the Galileans that Pilate murdered. Talk about coming close to home: remember that Jesus, and the majority of his apostles, were themselves Galileans. Jesus In response brings up the 18 people killed in the collapse of the Tower of Siloam. Talk about coming close to home: Siloam was in the city of Jerusalem, which is exactly where Jesus and the disciples are heading.
So when these stories are told there is a question on the table that the crowd does not ask, but Jesus answers anyway. No, he says, the murdered Galileans were not worse sinners than anybody else and, no, those killed in the tower were not worse offenders than others in Jerusalem town.
Why does Jesus feel compelled to answer a question that no one has said out loud? Because he knows that we humans, who want to be in control of our own destiny and cannot stand to be subject to power that is greater than ours, we humans when faced with innocent suffering and tragedy, must find a way to blame the victim and by so doing make that victim different from us.
The Christian writer Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way: “Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs.”
I have had people with a cancer diagnosis tell me there is a fear and an ostracism that comes when you use that word around healthy people. One of them told me, First you get cancer, then you get othered.
Another Christian writer named Kate Bowler writes of this phenomenon with great wisdom and humor, out of her own experience. Bowler was 35 years old, a rising-star professor of American church history at Duke University, when she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. “The hardest lessons,” Bowler writes, “come from the solutions people, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. There is always a nutritional supplement, Bible verse or mental process I have not adequately tried. …. [Like it happened because I didn’t eat enough] Brussels sprouts.”
You might remember that the disciples of Jesus themselves fall into this trap on another occasion. Out walking with Jesus one day they pass by a man born blind. And what do they ask? “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
So yeah, the question in today’s Gospel is not asked out loud, but in human experience we know it’s always there. How can we blame the victim, keep innocent suffering and tragedy safely in the realm of the other, lest it come all too close to home?
But contrast this very natural and all-too-human work, with the work of Jesus. The very first public words out of Jesus’ mouth, I submit to you, are a reply to that human question: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Spirit has anointed me preach good news to the poor. The Spirit has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, ….” The poor; the captives; the blind; the oppressed. In other words, all the people that we so want to be other than us and we want to blame and we want push away, with our housing policies and how we want to put them away in our prisons and put them away in institutions and our systemic oppressive structures. Jesus says, oh, no, to all that: far from pushing them into otherness, I have taken human form just so I can be one of them. I have taken human form, just to show they are not the other, but rather we are all in this together. Incarnation is just another word, for it’s all coming close to home.
And that mission of Jesus is what is behind those tough words he directs at the crowd in this morning’s Gospel, and at us: “Unless you repent you will all likewise die.” Don’t be asking the wrong question, he’s saying, about who’s at fault or whether suffering is random or whether God is behind innocent suffering and tragedy. That’s just deflecting you from the main issue: the obligation of every person to live in penitence and trust before God.
It is that repentance, that turning, that Jesus wants for his listeners, and for all of us. Turning back toward God and God’s ways in the world, and turning back toward one another, toward community. In the face of disasters, either government-orchestrated or entirely accidental and innocent, those usual answers that are offered do one thing: those usual, all-too-human answers hold us apart from one another. They separate us – oh, we so dearly hope! – they separate us from one another. Instead of remembering all of the ways we are in this together, questions about who sinned and who’s behind all this strive to push sufferers away.
Pastor Debi Thomas writes it, in a sentence that has really been the theme of this sermon: “When Jesus challenges his listeners’ assumptions and tells them to repent before it’s too late, I think part of what he’s saying is this: any question that allows us to keep a sanitized distance from the mystery and reality of another person’s pain is a question we need to un-ask.”
The suffering of Ukraine has come so very close to home for us all. There is nothing wrong with that. The suffering of people that we more quickly call other does not come as close to home as it should. There is something wrong with that, for Christ has shown us that we need always to repent, to turn toward the pain of another. May the suffering of another always call us so, to turn toward it and not away, even as Jesus turned toward us, to share our lives.