God is faithful

February 28, 2016

The Third Sunday of Lent

From libraries of learned books down to the rather more succinct medium of bumper stickers, there is no shortage of commentary about the presence of suffering in the world and, in particular, the seemingly very unjust way in which suffering often happens. The Bible itself attempts to deal with this issue more than once, most famously, perhaps, in the book of Job. And people of all faith traditions and none have wrestled again and again in each generation with the implications of the truth that bad things happen, and quite often that bad things happen to good people, and even that bad things happen to good people in a way that nobody could predict or do anything to prevent.

The news media make us aware day by day by day of injustice, inhumanity and suffering, much of it the result of human design, and some of it the result of natural disasters or unforeseen accidents. And all of this suffering raises the question, again and again, that God is somehow either to blame for it all, or that, at the very least, God is some unpleasant mixture of fickle, partial, or just plain powerless. And yet this morning we are told that God is faithful.

That's quite a statement, perhaps, when we look at the state of the world. I do not have the precise figures with me this morning but you and I both know that almost on our doorsteps, young black people will have lost their lives this weekend in parts of our city riven by the poisonous cocktail of gang violence, poverty, drugs and illegally owned guns. And you and I continue to raise money during our Lenten journey for the work of Refugee One, responding as much as it can to those affected by the horrors of the situation in Syria and Iraq.

And on my recent brief visit to the Holy Land, as I heard yet again more and more tales of horror and woe about the devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip, and witnessed with my own eyes the ever–worsening lot of the Palestinian people suffering under the longest military occupation in modern history, I saw a book of photographs in a Jerusalem bookshop entitled, What did we do to deserve this? And that cry of the Palestinian people is a cry shared by the world in each generation, as we turn – turn towards each other, or turn towards a brick wall, or even turn towards God – and utter those words: What did we do to deserve this? And yet we are told, God is faithful.

God is faithful. That is, incredibly, the over–arching message of our Scriptures and of a religious tradition that stretches over 2,000 years of Christianity and back into the times of the Old Testament. But that can be so hard to believe. There are times when we look at the latest natural disaster, or the latest instance of inhumanity, greed and downright evil on the part of our fellow human beings, and we wonder what God is up to when he allows such things to happen. There are times when we hear personal bad news – a medical diagnosis, a redundancy, a failed relationship – and we wonder where on earth God is and what on earth he is about. There are times when it gets personal, and we want to yell out on our own account, What did we do to deserve this?

Something of all this is going on in the encounter we have just heard read from Luke's gospel. Jesus, who by this time has certainly acquired a reputation of being godly and wise, even if he is beginning to infuriate the religious authorities – Jesus is being tackled by some bystanders who want his opinion about a couple of shocking events:

Some Galileans get slaughtered by the Roman occupiers on their way to make religious sacrifices at the Temple. Did they deserve it? No! says Jesus. A tower collapses and kills another 18 people – did they deserve it? No! says Jesus. Evil happens; accidents happen; natural disasters happen – and they happen to good and bad alike? Were they worse offenders; were they worse sinners than anyone else? Were they worse sinners than you? Were they worse sinners than me? Did they deserve it? No! And yet, God is faithful.

And it isn't just Jesus who is convinced that, despite all the suffering and evil you can name, somehow we are on a level playing field – this morning we also find Paul contemplating how life in the real world is a life of what he calls "testing". And he is also convinced that, despite such testing, God is constant – and, indeed, God is constant throughout history. Indeed, that rather extraordinary passage from 1 Corinthians makes a remarkable claim about God.

For Paul is thinking about the Hebrews and the Exodus, and he is recalling that 40-year journey in the wilderness to get to the Promised Land. And recalling how Moses was able to strike a rock to provide fresh water for God's people, Paul looks deeply at that miracle and makes this incredible claim. For, in Paul's far-sighted eyes, he sees a pre-figuring of the new life that baptism brings present in the suffering and the wanderings of the Israelites, and he sees in the food that Moses provides for his people a pre-figuring of the Eucharist. And as the Israelites on their long wilderness journey drank from a stream of living water that poured from a stricken rock, Paul asserts the most amazing fact: they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, he says, and the rock was Christ.

Yes, says Paul, God is faithful. In fact, God is so faithful, that he is faithful even over vast centuries of time, uniting the people of the Exodus journey with the people who lived to witness Christ in their own lives, and uniting them, again, with you and me, and with generations yet to come. God is faithful. But...

And that is the problem. There is a but. There will, I fear, always be a but. And the 'but' is about the fact that although God is faithful, we are not. In so many ways, and at so many times, we are anything but faithful. And in all sorts of ways, you know that and I know that. If we cataloged out our sins – yes, even your petty sins and my petty sins – it would be a sad and miserable catalog of just how unfaithful we are: unfaithful to ourselves, unfaithful to our friends and loved ones, unfaithful to our communities, unfaithful to our fellow human beings both near and far, and unfaithful most of all to God.

But this morning I think our readings are pointing us above and beyond our petty sins – and I think they are pointing us beyond even the more shocking sins and sinners the world has to show us – beyond the horrors of human behavior that we see whether on our doorstep in Chicago, or in the Middle East, or in any of the other gross examples we could find of human greed and misery. I think our readings are pointing us to the sins that come from the very act of failing to recognize that God is faithful.

For in their way, these can be the most insidious sins of all, for they are the sins of despair and mistrust. They are the sins that caused the Israelites to be so constantly back-sliding, failing to recognize God's hand providing for their needs as they journeyed through the wilderness, casting golden calves rather than thanking God for his constant presence.

And these are the sins that caused the people to cross-question Jesus about the Galileans slaughtered by Pilate and the others killed by the falling tower. These are the sins that make us behave as if we think God is absent, unjust, or unfaithful. These are the sins that make Jesus turn to us and ask:

'Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you... And then comes the but.... but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

Jesus and Paul have a clear message to us in our Scriptures this morning. God is not unfaithful, and God is not unjust. God does not cause the Pilates of this world to carry out random acts of violence, but they are still going to happen, in Galilee 2000 years ago, and just as much today in the evil places of this world. God does not cause towers to collapse but collapse they will. And like the rain, it will happen to the just and to the unjust because the bumper sticker is correct, and it happens.

But only one thing is going to prove fatal for us, and it has nothing to do with the Pilates of this world, or its water towers. The only thing that is going to prove fatal is if we – and that little word means me, and it means you – the only thing that is going to prove fatal is if we fail to repent. Paul reckons there was a vast amount of unrepenting going on in the wilderness – that extraordinary catalog of idolaters, of sexually unrestrained people, of those who even merely dared to complain – whom he reckons were struck down. Jesus, perhaps thankfully, seems less interested in the numbers game but his message is, if anything, even clearer than Paul's: repent, or perish.

And this is when it is so important to understand the full implications of that powerful word repent. It's not, principally, about grovelling around in your sins or mine, and it's certainly not about trying to rank them as being great or small. God is the truly living proof that size is unimportant, for God sees all sin as being a turning away that is regrettable.

Repentance is about having a change of heart – a real, fundamental, change of heart. For it is when (and I hope and pray not 'if') – it is when we have a real change of heart that we can see God more clearly, for we are looking at him face to face (which is the whole point of the Incarnation). And it is in that change of heart that, like Paul, we can recognize just how faithful God has been, how faithful God is, and, indeed, how faithful God will be at each and every step of our lives.

We can recognize that in the most unlikely places, God is there alongside us, even in a wilderness that can last 40 years. With a change of heart, we can see that God is there in the most unlikely places, as stricken rock with streaming side – the stricken rock that gave the water of life as the Israelites struggled in the wilderness, and the streaming side that shed the last drops of water and blood as an innocent man died on the cross and changed the world – your world and my world – for ever. For we have a God who gets dust and debris, we have a God who does Incarnation and involvement, we have a God who sees wickedness and tragedy and who weeps alongside us. For we have a God who shares our pain and is faithful to death – and it is that kind of God, and only that kind of God, who can change the meaning of death, and thus the meaning of life – of real, unending, abundant life.

And so this Lent, and onwards through that long pilgrimage of earthly life with all its complexity and horror, when you hear a fateful diagnosis that rings terribly in your ears, or when you read of the next terrible injustice by self-serving rulers and governments that should know better, or when the next gangland killing hits the headlines, or when the next earthquake or tsunami destroys vast cities, or when there are shootings in Kansas or Kalamazoo, or when Pilate slaughters the Galileans going to sacrifice, or the tower of Siloam collapses and kills the next eighteen innocent people, don't ask if anyone deserved anything, and don't doubt God's faithfulness, and God's presence, right in the thick of it.

For none of them were worse sinners than me and you – so have a change of heart, and recognize God's saving presence right there, alongside them, and alongside me and you. For, as Paul is quick to point out, No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. But God is faithful. God is so faithful that if we journey with God through Lent, we will understand properly how it is that Easter Sunday can follow Good Friday, and we can open our mouths again to sing those well-known words: great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me. Amen.