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| In the Law of Nature (Luke 13:1-9) |
| Written by Pastor Fausel | |
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of The Holy Spirit. Amen. Grace, mercy and peace be to you … The verses we have from the Gospel of Luke today in Chapter 13 … are what might be called the Bible’s natural disaster verses. They speak of innocent blood being spilt … first by a political enemy …and then, particularly, about people being killed by a tower that falls on them; a true, first-century natural disaster. As Jesus is brought this news, we hear Him turn around and ask that searching human question about those who died. …what He asks is: “Do you think that their deaths were a punishment from God because of these peoples’ particular, individual sins?... that they were worse sinners than you?” “I tell you, no!” Jesus says. And … he goes on to tell those gathered … “And, unless you repent, you all likewise will perish.” Now, That’s not what the people wanted to hear. Did you ever notice the curiosity about a death when it’s in the news? Some might call it morbid curiosity, but there is part of us that wants to know the circumstances. Why? So we can at least mentally assure ourselves that the same fate won’t happen to us… We often take comfort in the fact that we’ve never gotten ourselves into the situation that person was in when they died… Like we don’t regularly fly in small, non-commercial airplanes, … We don’t text while trying to negotiate heavy traffic, we don’t use drugs … we don’t travel at night in those particularly dangerous parts of town … we don’t live where earthquakes or tsunami’s are likely to happen. To some extent, we all do that. We’ve all given out a secret sigh of relief when we find out we have nothing in common with the deceased … like we’ve never had a quad-bypass … or that we’ve never stood on the very the rim of Mt. St. Helen’s… In Jesus’ day calamities, especially death due to a calamity, was seen as punishment from God for a particular sin. This audience must have been aghast when Jesus said, “No, I tell you. (That’s not what happened here.)” Because, you know what that means? … that means that there was no rhyme or reason WHY this happened to those who died. … Which implies … that even if you keep your nose clean before God (in other words, God’s not out to get you)… something like this could STILL happen to you! What did that do to the people’s belief that calamities only befall wicked people? Or, like, like Jonah, that the tower was meant to fall on just him … and all the others killed were just what we would call today collateral damage. But, Jesus pulled no punches, there’s no two ways about it … Death is mankind’s punishment for sin. “Yes, these were sinners,” Jesus tells them … But, no these sinners weren’t any worse than you”… “and so, you too could just as easily have suffered their fate!” And then Jesus drives the nail in the coffin. He says, “And YOU will all perish just like them … if you do not repent!” Those in the crowd very well might have been thinking: “But Jesus … I thought I was righteous … and so I didn’t need to worry about perishing like they did!” So …“Why do you say I have to repent?” Well, let’s talk about righteousness. In whose righteousness, in whose right-standing before God… were they trusting? Obviously, their own … They were trying to model their lives after the mode of life of the Pharisees … living according to the Law. But the Law only accuses … it never, ever saves. Repentance means recognizing our own lack of righteousness, putting ourselves under the mercy of God and seeking His strength to live in His grace. And so we find truism here … when we see deaths like we witnessed most recently in Haiti … we cannot, we must not, interpret those deaths as punishment from God for those peoples’ particular sins … but we CAN see such a disaster as a sign of the brokenness of creation, ever since sin came into the world. Or, in other words, like it or not … the wages of sin is death. Those are words from Scripture … but for those who haven’t read it or won’t hear it … the message is the same: Death is the lot of mankind. And unless you repent and come under the Gospel of Jesus Christ … you will perish … meaning you will die the eternal death. We see from natural disasters that Nature can proclaim the LAW … but it cannot proclaim the Mercy of God. Only God’s Word reveals His Love in Christ Jesus. Nature does reveal God’s existence … and nature does tell us that Death comes to all, which is the starkest reality of the Law. It is the Law of Nature. Taken over time, nature can also show us that manner of our death and the timing of it is not something we have a lot of control over. Disasters occur in nature … and disasters occur due to the nature of human beings. (Like, we sometimes cheat on the materials and make flimsy towers that fall down on people.) But disasters make it clear there is no safe place you can go on earth … and there is no safe age in life, either. Ask the IRS folks who were safely in their offices a few weeks ago when sin struck their building in the form of an airplane. Or the Jr. High students in Littleton, Colorado who came face-to-face with a gunman in the security of their school. Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley… famous, able to afford the best medical treatment in the world …but still, losing their lives not by trauma, not by old age, but by things beyond even their control. People in well made and engineered cars that suddenly without warning malfunction … or they lost control. Why?... because we are human beings. We are not perfect … and nothing we make or do is perfect. So, call it what it is … sin. So. God’s word, nature itself and even human nature do what God told Ezekiel to do … they all warn us sinners that our path leads only to one place. Death. Eternal death. But God has provided an answer. THE answer. A Politically Correct answer … an answer available to anyone without discrimination by age, gender, nationality or language. The God who made this world, and the universe in which it is sustained … became one of His creations … a human being … and in the place of all human beings who ever were… or will be … He died. Died. Murdered, if you prefer. Horribly treated first, if you want to be graphic … and then tortured to death. For one purpose. To deal with that issue of death, once and for all. To make death not the end … not the final statement. But the beginning. To finally make sense out of what would be otherwise a worthless existence: You live, you die, that’s it, end of story. You see … nature keeps telling us we are mortal, physical beings. But God wants us to see that we are more than that. That unique consciousness that you have … that spark in you separates you from all other life, and from all other human beings… IS some ONE that God loves deeply and desires to have real relationship with! So. You think Jesus’ words to the crowd in our Gospel were harsh, up ending their apple cart about their relationship with God? Let’s pray that it got their attention. Because then Jesus expanded on what He had been saying about repentance by relating a parable about a fig tree, a tree that had been barren. Fig trees and vineyards had often been used by God as figures for His children of Israel. In the parable, the owner is God … Jesus himself is the vinedresser … He is one who cares for Israel … like the mother hen for her chicks. Jesus intercedes on behalf of the tree … “Let me encourage the tree to bear fruit in the next season … and then … if it is still barren … then … let it be uprooted and thrown into the fire.” The message of the Parable is for Israel and for us: … God’s call to repentance has a time limit … neither you or I know when our time could be up. Those folks that got buried by the tower… Their time was up. God is gracious and slow to anger … but His grace is like the owner’s grace for the fig tree … it has a limit. Or the implication is … NOW, not later … is the time to swallow our pride and come back to God. The fig tree is given time to respond. The Fig tree is given everything it needs to help it respond … but there ends the parable. There’s where individuality come in. We are condemned as sinners, in general … but we are saved by grace in particular … one at a time. We are saved by God’s gift of faith … which manifests itself in us by the fruits it produces. The most important one … is repentance. Which is the life of a Christian. And so, that life and that assurance of God’s love in Christ be yours … so that nothing in all creation… no calamity, no disaster might shake your faith in the promise of God’s love and care for you. In Him, Amen. |