disaster — Andy James

a sermon on Luke 13:1-9
preached on February 28, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It seems that most every generation experiences some sort of tragedy that makes us aware of the fragility of life. For some people here, I suspect this moment was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For an earlier generation, this moment might have been the attack on Pearl Harbor. For another, later generation, it might have been the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. For my generation, though, it was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

By that time, launches of the space shuttle were becoming more routine, as had been hoped, but that launch was special for many because it included the first teacher-astronaut, who was scheduled to present a live lesson from space to schools across the country. That teacher never made it to space—she and her six fellow astronauts were killed 73 seconds after launch in a massive explosion. I was in first grade at the time, and while we were not watching the launch on TV at school, I vividly remember hearing about the disaster in the van on my way from school to my after-school program.

It was a strangely important moment in my life. I don’t recall having much interest in space exploration before that time, but I know that afterward I started to pay much more attention to such things, and some of my favorite family and school trips throughout my younger years were to space-themed spots. But even more than this, I think it was the first moment that I realized that something bad could happen in the world. While I don’t recall being particularly traumatized, I certainly left that moment of my life recognizing that something was different—and that my view of the world would never be the same.

Our reading from the gospel of Luke this morning recounts Jesus’ response to two of these sorts of tragic moments in New Testament times. First, some people in the crowd told Jesus about some Galileans who had been killed in the temple by Pilate, then had their blood mingled with the sacrifices that they had brought with them. Then, Jesus himself brought up another incident in which the tower of Siloam had fallen on a crowd and killed eighteen people. Both of these horrible incidents provoked Jesus to ask if the crowd thought that these terrible disasters were caused by the sinfulness of the persons who had been killed.

This sort of mindset was pretty common in Jesus’ time—although plenty of people today offer similar explanations for bad things, too. Blaming the sinfulness of the victim when bad things happen is deeply rooted in some parts of the Bible, but Jesus was not comfortable with such a simple answer to this longstanding human conundrum. Rather than blaming the victim, he insisted that the victims’ sinfulness was not to blame for their deaths in these moments, yet he also refused to make this a moment of comfort for those who would listen to him. While these people did not die because of their sinfulness, Jesus still told the crowd that their actions mattered. After recounting each of these incidents, Jesus offered the same words to the crowd: “Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did.” This had to be a stark realization. As one commentator puts it, “The arbitrary cases of tragic death, while not owing to any particular wrongdoing by the victims, should alert all to the necessary destructive consequences of universal human sinfulness.” (F. Scott Spencer, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 13:1-9,” Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Volume 2, p. 29)

But Jesus did not let this strange realization stand on its own—as he did so frequently, he offered them even deeper meaning for it by sharing a parable about God’s approach to repentance. In the parable, a man approaches his gardener after finding a fig tree empty of fruit for a third consecutive year. The man is ready to have the tree cut down, assuming that it is doing nothing more than wasting space in the ground. The gardener, though, is not quite ready to do this. He knows that this tree may still bear fruit again if it is only given the attention and care that it needs, so he suggests that they turn the soil over around it and add some manure to it, then give it another season to start bearing fruit again before cutting it down. In telling this parable, Jesus seemed to make it clear that the need for repentance is always balanced with an extra dose of mercy, that the connection between sinfulness and suffering is best seen not at the individual level but rather through a much larger lens, that the bad things that happen to us are clearly not a direct result of our sinfulness along the way and yet we need to change those things, too.

As much as Jesus tried to shift the crowd’s understanding of the impact of sinfulness on the tragedies of our world, so much of this mindset carries over to our world today. After every tragedy, some televangelist or street preacher or other similar eccentric will inevitably place the blame for this terrible event on some group of sinful people. But even beyond this, people closer in to these difficult situations get sucked in to a mindset that their errors make them personally responsible for such horrors.

In the recent looks back at the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster I mentioned earlier, NPR interviewed engineer Bob Ebeling, who worked for a NASA contractor at the time of the disaster. Ebeling and several of his colleagues had told NASA back in 1986 that it would not be safe to launch the shuttle that day, that the cold temperatures the night before the launch would render the o-ring seals in the rocket boosters ineffective and allow flammable gases to escape, resulting in a massive explosion, but higher-level management at their company and at NASA overruled their advice. On the day of the launch, they watched the launch and subsequent explosion unfold from their offices in Utah, and they immediately knew what an investigation would soon reveal about the cause of this disaster.

For 30 years, Ebeling felt deep pain and guilt for not doing more to stop the launch of Challenger. He told NPR last month, “I think that was one of the mistakes that God made. He shouldn’t have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I’m gonna ask him, ‘Why me? You picked a loser.’” The record of this story is clear, though: Ebeling could not have stopped the launch himself. His superiors and NASA managers heard these warnings from the engineers’ lips, then ignored their safety recommendations. Still Ebeling carried guilt and grief over his role in this disaster—not all that unlike what was being expressed around Jesus about the victims of these tragedies in New Testament times.

Thankfully for Bob Ebeling, though, the anniversary of this terrible incident brought an outpouring of support for him. He had retired soon after the Challenger disaster and suffered from deep depression from this memory over the last 30 years, caught up in guilt and grief that he could have done more to prevent the death of those seven astronauts. When his current situation came to light, though, people started to reach out with words of support, insisting that his long-held feelings of guilt were misplaced and that he should not blame himself for this tragedy as he had.

He was only somewhat comforted, though. He appreciated these good, well-meaning words but insisted that he needed to hear something from NASA or his employer before he could shift his mindset. Soon he received a call from his boss at the time, a letter from a former NASA official who had argued with him at the time, and an official statement from the press spokesperson for the current NASA administrator. All of them insisted that Ebeling had spoken up with courage and done everything that he could to protect the safety of the astronauts, and his guilt and grief began to ease. NASA had changed dramatically in the 30 years since Challenger, and their recognition that problems could not be blamed on any one person and yet needed a real and systemic fix was an important reminder of the importance of the kind of change that repentance requires.

So often, repentance is not so much some sort of personally-focused cataloging of individual moral missteps but rather a deeper accounting of the ways in which we prop up systems and structures that get in the way of God’s intentions for the world. Bob Ebeling’s story reminds us that blame is an incredibly potent weapon, that Jesus’ insistence that sinfulness has consequences that may be far beyond our control sometimes doesn’t sink in very well in our lives, that systemic change comes only from the real examination not of personal flaws but rather of our participation in injustice.

So as we live in a world filled with plenty of tragedy and just as much sinfulness, may God guide us to this kind of repentance not so that we can insulate ourselves from the next disaster or overcome our guilt from the last one but so that we can be ready for God’s completion of the transformation of our world begun in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

a sermon on Revelation 21:1-6a and Isaiah 25:6-9 for All Saints’ Sunday
preached on November 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

We’ve spent so much of this past week waiting: waiting for the storm to come, waiting for the winds to die down, waiting for the waters to recede, waiting for the lights to come back on, waiting for the bus and subway to start up again, waiting for heat, waiting for food, waiting for water, waiting for gas, waiting for word from our friends and family, waiting to get word to our friends and family, waiting for some sense of normal to return, waiting and waiting and waiting some more. In the midst of all that we have experienced this week, we’ve all spent some time waiting. To someone immersed in the life of the church like me, this is not the right time to wait—Advent, the season of waiting, is still a month away! But here we have it—Sandy made us wait, and we still have more waiting to do.

Then our texts today, two of the texts appointed in the lectionary for All Saints’ Day, also confront us with the challenge of waiting. All Saints’ Day this year comes at a perfect time—amidst everything that we’ve seen this week, a remembrance of the faithful who have died seems so very appropriate. But these texts don’t point us to a remembrance of the dead—rather, they talk about the things ahead for all of us, about the things we are all really waiting for.

They tell us of a new heaven and a new earth—not the reconstruction of a familiar place to its former glory, not the rebuilding of a flood-torn and fire-touched land, not the rebirth of a water-scarred world—but a new and different way of life and living, a changed world where God’s presence never goes away, where sorrow and pain are changed forever, where God steps in to wipe away all the tears from our eyes, where all things are made new. Our texts today tell us of a world where all people have everything that they need, where a great feast fills every emptiness, where the weariness of death and destruction itself will be destroyed, where all disgrace will be removed and every place will be made new.

But at the core of all these new things is what we have seen so well in our own world of late: waiting. There is no promise here that these things will come immediately, no guarantee that they will emerge on our timetable, no insistence that the pain at dusk today will be eased by dawn tomorrow. Instead, the promise is that the waiting will give God all the more glory!

It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God,
we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

But on this All Saints’ Sunday, on this Sunday after Superstorm Sandy, we have the right to be ready to be done with our waiting. We’ve waited more than enough this past week, and we shouldn’t have to wait anymore. Those without power shouldn’t have to wait any more to get lights and heat and refrigerators and phone and television and internet. Those who haven’t been able to get to work because the trains weren’t running or work wasn’t open shouldn’t have to wait any more. Those who can’t yet get back home to see the damage and destruction of their neighborhoods shouldn’t have to wait any more. Those who don’t yet know if their friends and family survived the storm shouldn’t have to wait any more.

And yet we must wait. There’s nothing we can do at this point to get our lights on or the trains running or the islands made safe. So much of what must be done in these days is best left to those with the training, skills, and gifts to do it safely and efficiently. But even as we wait, there is something incredible going on. People are stepping up and saying that they want to help. Neighbors are stepping in to care for those in need, carrying water and fuel up many flights of stairs, opening their homes to those who have none, shouldering a bit of the burden in the midst of the storm. Women and men around the world are moved by what they have seen and want to respond—and by doing more than giving money to relief efforts. I suspect that one of the biggest unanticipated challenges for our civic leadership amidst this unprecedented disaster has been what to do with all those who are wanting to step in and help now, and I hope and pray that this spirit isn’t quashed by the necessary professional work of these days or the bureaucracy inherent in dealing with anything on a New York City scale!

But amidst the promises of something new and glorious ahead and the necessary pain and suffering of waiting, what are we to do? I think the waiting of these days calls us to do two things. First, we are called to put our trust in God, who waits with us. Not only is God preparing the new thing that is coming, God is waiting for it with us now. God is waiting with us in the presence of friends and family who listen to our complaints and hear our cries and remind us that we are not alone. God is waiting with us in neighbors who open their homes and clear the debris and share their tools and bear our burdens. God is waiting with us in strangers who show up in unexpected moments to offer us even a brief vision of grace. God is waiting with us in those who are working tirelessly to restore the networks of support that keep our community and our world running. God is waiting with us in the women and men who have gone before us and beside us and still bear witness to the way of life in faith. God is waiting with us in the communities that know us and love us and share the feast of faith with us. And so we have waited for God, with God, so that God might save us.

But also in the midst of our waiting, we are called to step up and act, to be the presence of God for others in the face of crisis, to journey with those who are also waiting, to support those who have the gifts and talents to step in all the more, to contribute to the well-being of all people who wait for the things of these days and more. The necessity of waiting, you see, is no excuse for inaction or complacency, for letting those who struggle every day struggle all the more, for allowing the usual order of things that prefers the powerful to go unquestioned, for suggesting that we can only help those who are able to help themselves.

I am glad to say that we as the church have already done some things to step up in the waiting of these days. Our church building was open this past week during the day for those who did not have power to have a warm place to sit and talk or work, charge their phones, and just get out of the house. But even before the storm, our annual offerings to the One Great Hour of Sharing collection helped pave the way for the very current response of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, who are on the ground in New York and New Jersey right now assessing the damage and planning their next steps over the long term recovery. And every Sunday this month, we’ll be receiving a special collection to assist with this important work of meeting the needs of those in greatest need and who have the most to wait for.

So in these days of waiting, may we ourselves embody the witness of the saints, trusting that God is waiting with us, giving thanks for the faithful presence of brave and heroic friends, neighbors, family, civic leaders, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, doctors, transit workers, ConEd line workers, and countless others, even as we ourselves offer the presence of God in the midst of the waiting of this recovery and the hope and promise that all things will be made new, once and for all.

May we know God’s presence in the midst of all our waiting until we share the great feast of heaven and earth with all people everywhere and the day of peace that now shines so dimly shines brightly everywhere forevermore. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Tragedy, Repentance, and New Life

Waiting for God