Sign Language

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear of falling towers and people dying? Right. Nine-eleven. And looking around on the web I found that even though this is the gospel passage for the third Sunday in Lent of Cycle C of the lectionary, by far the most sermons were written on this topic right after September 11, 2001. Some links are just too obvious to ignore. The connection is obvious. How to fit it into a sermon that is for today instead of for twenty years ago is somewhat less so.

Why us? Why here? Why now? Those questions filled people's minds and troubled their hearts. You may remember that some preachers suggested that this might be evidence of God’s judgment. Of course, the media jumped all over them; that doesn’t fit the journalists’ world view. Geo-political reasons were offered instead, as if removing God from the equation made the event somehow more endurable. The same questions are asked today, in Spanish and French and German. But this time I haven’t heard anyone explain that God is judging the people of Europe for moral decadence. I haven't even heard anyone suggest that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is punishment for corruption.

A couple of years after 9/11 a terrible earthquake hit Iran. The death toll was something like ten times the number of people killed in the Twin Towers bombing, something on the order of 35,000 people dead, not counting the injured. I’m sure there were people who believe that God was judging Iran, though they can’t explain why he hit the relatively innocent folk of Bam instead of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Others said, “God has opened up a window of opportunity for us to minister to the Iranians who have been taught to hate and fear Americans." More recently the earthquake on the border between Syria and Turkey killed around 60,000. But I don’t think either the Iranians or the Turks or the Syrians were crying out “Why?” The Allah of Islam is not the same as the loving God whom we call Father. The Arabic response to tragedy is “inshallah.” God wills it. It is written. Islam means submission. You do not question God.

But Jews and Christians alike have always questioned God, arguing with him since Abraham and Moses and David. Whenever something terrible or tragic happens, there are always two questions asked. The first one is “Why?” “Why, O LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” [Ps 10:1] “Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” [Ps 44:24] Why do the wicked renounce God, and say in their hearts, 'You will not call us to account'?" [Ps 10:13]

Those who have been raised to believe that a loving God would not let this kind of thing happen if he were also in control of everything are especially lost and bewildered when tragedy strikes. So many people wind up with the idea either that God is not all that powerful, or that he really doesn’t love us. That’s part of what lay behind the outrage at the suggestion in 2001 that God might be judging America. In this theory of God, love and judgment are incompatible.

Since this isn’t 9/11, and we’re not asking those same questions with anywhere near like the same kind of urgency, I’m going to answer that first question, “Why?” very briefly, just as Jesus did.

Jesus’ listeners wanted to know if the Galileans who had been massacred by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate while they were visiting the temple, or if the people who had been killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed on them “were worse sinners than all the others.” They figured that God must have been punishing those other people for something. And maybe they hoped that it was a judgment for some terrible sin that they themselves, good people listening to Jesus, couldn’t possibly be guilty of, so they were safe. But Jesus answered, “No, I tell you;” [you’re no better than they are, and] “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” [Lk 13:2,5]

This wasn’t a whole lot of comfort, was it.

But Jesus didn’t give them time to complain about the answer. He moved on to the important question, the one they hadn’t asked. They didn’t ask, “What should we do?” But he told them anyway.

After 9/11, what did we do? Well, on a national level, we went to war. And that’s an important question for a government to answer, and it’s not as easy as it may look in hindsight. Right now, the French and the Swedes have to decide what they're going to do about the violence in their immigrant communities. But remember, there are two kinds of disaster. There’s one kind that’s clearly caused by people, and there’s someone to blame, and someone to punish. But there’s the kind that insurance companies call Acts of God, and there’s no one to blame, and no one to punish. Of course, after an earthquake, it's easy to blame the building codes; after a riot, it's easy to punish the police. Blame and punishment are very comforting.