Preventing A Spiritual Tragedy Series

How many of you here have been associated with a preventable tragedy?

What I'm talking about here are bad things that happened to people you knew or know which could have been prevented. These bad things would not have happened if someone hadn't been ignorant or naïve, or unprepared, or careless or if someone had not failed to heed warnings or had taken proper precautions.

I began asking myself this question after thoroughly contemplating this passage last week.

And it's funny how often the earliest memory that came to mind of a preventable tragedy was the first in my experience. I was probably seven years old, and my little sister Kim was four when we were playing in the backyard, near the garage one Saturday afternoon in Southern California. My dad was repairing something in the garage, and he had opened a pocketknife to help him with some repair, and he had left it open on the lawn. My sister, who apparently had not been forewarned of the danger of playing with sharp knives found it and began playing with it. She began throwing it at the grass, enjoying seeing how the sharp blade would penetrate the lawn. However, she was not aware of how the sharp blade might penetrate her own flesh. Very quickly, her hand began bleeding, and my mother rushed to the rescue only to find she had lacerated her little finger all the way to the bone. Despite many trips to many specialists through the years, that little finger would never function normally again. When she closed her had it remained largely straight and stiff, because the nerve had been cut, as it does so to this day now some 65 years later. A minor tragedy which could have been prevented had someone been less careless, if someone had been watching, if only somehow precautions had been taken that weren't on that fateful afternoon 65 years ago.

The next memory--they came chronologically--was when I was about 10 years old and there was a terrible accident about three houses up on our street in our neighborhood. We live at the end of a long residential street, and across the way was a neighbor who owned a 1961 Black Lincoln Continental, one of those old heavy muscle cars of the 1960s, who drove it like a race car. Every afternoon he would come speeding by our house at about 35-40 miles an hour in a neighborhood full of kids riding their bikes and trikes. And we all thought to ourselves that this was likely an accident waiting to happen. And finally, that tragic day did come. It happened when a three-year-old little boy up the street on his tricycle happened to venture out into the street as the careless driver of the Continental. And there was a collision. I don't need to tell you whether the Lincoln or the tricycle won. I happened to be outside when it happened, ran down the street to see a hysterical mother frantically run out into the street, grab her little boy off the bike and convulse his little body like a rag doll in her panic before cooler heads prevailed. Miraculously, the baby boy survived. It was a preventable tragedy. If only somebody had said something, if only someone had called the man on his reckless driving, his speed. If only the mother had been out there with her son that afternoon, if only.

And on a national and international scale, we've all been exposed to preventable tragedies. Take 9/11 for instance. The CIA and the FBI had all been warning of terrorist plots to fly passenger planes into skyscrapers for a few years before it actually happened. I'm sure one could argue whether it was absolutely preventable or not at the time. It only took the loss of 3,000 lives, but we sure do everything we possibly can today to prevent a repeat of 9/11--what with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA--the Transportation Security Administration requiring that every one of us and our luggage be X-rayed, patted-down, examined for any possible signs of a bomb, or a knife, or a gun, or box-cutter, or whatever a would-be terrorist might use to commandeer a plane for ignoble purposes.

The point is that when it comes to tragedies, we do well to do whatever we can to prevent them from happening. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure as the old saying goes.

And just as there are physical tragedies that are worth preventing, there are spiritual tragedies that are worth preventing, spiritual tragedies of eternal consequence that are, if anything, even more serious than the physical tragedies I've spoken of. And that is that is the major purpose of Paul’s second letter to the Church Corinth, especially in chapter 11—to prevent a spiritual tragedy, the deception and eternal destruction of the Corinthian church. .