Lent 3: Telling the Stories of God

Today’s readings are a catalogue of disasters. As Paul rather casually notes “God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.” We have twenty-three thousand dying in a single day because of sexual immorality, which seems like a lot,  And then there are the deaths by serpents which is quite exotic; In the Gospel we had the Galileans murdered by the authorities and to add insult to injury, their blood mixed with their sacrifices, desecrating the Temple. Before those crushed by the falling tower of Siloam. All in all, that’s quite a range of carnage from arbitrary and accidental, to state-sanctioned violence, to the hazards of nature and divine judgement. Death comes in many forms to God’s people. Plus ce change – you might say.

There is, though, a totally different message at play about the cause of death. I’m not about to start twirling my moustache and prodding your little grey cells. The tower of Siloam didn’t have a butler as far as we know. And, anyway, you shouldn’t trust a Reverend Green who might at any time appear in the conservatory, with the lead piping. But in St Paul’s account which follows the Hebrew Scripture, the deaths in the wilderness are attributed to God. The wages of sin are death. Perhaps more disconcerting, the deaths were also for our instruction – to serve ‘as an example’.

This contrasts directly with the words of Christ.  The Galileans were not worse sinners, nor were those in Siloam. Nor, as we learn in John’s Gospel, was the man born blind because of sin, his or his parents. Jesus pooh poohs – actually rather aggressively if you can pooh pooh aggressively – any perceived connection between sin and suffering. And the parable of the fig tree, if one can take any general meaning from it, points towards mercy and second chances, and away from judgement and retribution. Our suffering is not planned.

It’s impossible not to take life personally. I’ve told the story before about when I was 15, falling asleep on a tram in Zagreb, two weeks before it was bombed by Serbs; Waking up with no phone and no details of where I was staying, but just by chance walking straight into the group of people I was travelling with. I feel like I’ve got lost in half the cities of the world but always had fortune smile on me to bring me home. Even the expression – and whether we say it’s God, or fate, or destiny – people of all faiths and none find meaning in the things that happen to them. More darkly, when tragedy strikes and things really do go wrong, health fails, family deaths, failure and disappointment, when a child is ill – we may recall our misdeeds, we blame ourselves, our pettiness and superficiality; we narrativize our suffering and find its cause in our failings. Jesus – to  be clear – explicitly warns us against this.

Life today has become a bit of a car crash. In previous generations the Church would have called for a time of repentance. Most of the things on are minds are really far out of our hands.  And we are not to blame. But this can leave us feeling powerless, and with it hopeless. We can pray; And for the cynics it’s worth remembering that the person who prays about a situation is more likely to give, more likely to give more, and more likely to volunteer. Part of prayer is recognising our inability to make things better – To give our burdens to God – And our unlikely hope.

But, as Christians, we’re storytellers. Each week we’re hearing together stories from up to three and a half thousand years ago: Stories of trials and wars and sickness; Stories of commitment and hope and courage; Stories of compassion, of death and resurrection. As a church we’re called to keep telling these stories in faith and hope; Seeing darkness and difficulty around us, encouraging one another; Praying for each other and for the world – for that unlikely hope. In doing so we’re keeping faith with former generations, who kept the faith even in the darkest hour; We’re keeping faith with our children, who will know whether we have hope and whether we pray; and will carry that with them; The story we have been given is a story of love sprung from hate; Of life sprung from death; Of a light shining in the darkness. Of unlikely hope and a merciful God.

This week I have been confronted with another tragedy I cannot account for; Cannot explain; Can barely speak about. It’s these personal moments, more than the ongoing clamour of war and disease, that put greater stress on the stories by which we make sense of life. It’s especially hard when we feel it has been left to us to speak a word of care into a situation that is crushed out of hope. Our ability to tell that story, though, in the dark places of the world – To speak of meaning, of kindness, of redemption; Is what may sustain us and those around us. Jesus has made it very clear that there is no connection between sin and suffering. It is our job to build in kindness a connection between suffering and hope. Jesus has taught us to pray –  And has shown us that it takes words and the actions, to tell the story of God’s love. Amen.