Now There Were Some Present...

Sometimes an idea overflows what will fit in a sermon.
So this morning, I've got my sermon in the book and ready for tomorrow, but there's this little snip from the Gospel lesson that is stuck in my craw.  Some of what sticks probably isn't going to make it into the sermon, this blog is like the deleted scenes on a DVD.
The inciting incident in Luke 13: 1-9 is the fact that the Romans had "mingled the blood" of some Galileans with their sacrifices to their pagan gods.  This probably means that they had put some captured revolutionaries to death in a religious rite.  The Romans had a reputation for this sort of terror, not only killing people but making a statement while doing so, kind of like Kevin Spacey's character in Seven, but on a much larger scale.  As a matter of fact, crucifixion was their favorite form of brutal, humiliating execution, but they probably got bored with that sometimes.  Also, being pagans, human sacrifice holds a certain grim promise of favor with blood thirsty deities.
Luke 13 begins with "some" people telling Jesus about Pilate and the Romans, probably expecting that he would get a good righteous head of steam and start really laying into the Roman Empire.  There are always "some" people who really seem to enjoy hearing about how the wrath of God is finally going to come down on "the world," meaning all those other humans who are not us.
Jesus does rather the opposite.  Instead of railing against those wicked Romans, he starts talking about how being slaughtered by Rome or having a tower collapse on your head is really not a sign that God is angry with you.  Things like this are going to happen, it's just how the fallen world works.
Jesus somehow manages to turn the whole conversation around on those "some" who were present, telling them that THEY should repent.
Now, this is not the kind of thing that wrath of God types usually enjoy very much.  The next time someone starts talking to you about how the world is really going down the tubes, how morals are shot, how God has forsaken us because we (insert favorite categorical moral failing here).  Try telling them that none of that really matters and what really needs to happen is that they need to repent of making God as fickle, stupid and narrow-minded as they are.  Yeah, because that's what Jesus did.  I don't imagine he made too many new friends that day.
I suppose it goes right along with the whole: take the log out of your own eye, before worrying about the speck in your neighbor's eye, dynamic.  However, this seems to kick it up a notch.  Jesus seems to accept that Rome will always be around.  He equates Pilate's brutality to the random tragedy of a tower collapsing.  He calls people to see a reality where God can help us all rise above that sort of mess.
The idea that, if you're faithful, God will be "on your side," is attractive, but it's ultimately an idol.  The reality of this world is that bad stuff happens to good people, the rain falls on the fields of the just and the unjust alike.  The reality of this world is that deranged people walk into elementary schools and start shooting, they fly planes into buildings, they kill their own children.  We might cry out to God for justice, but we need to learn to see how clearly, firmly and infuriatingly God refuses to take vengeance.  Instead God takes his place with the victims.  We find God under the rubble of the collapsed towers, we find the blood of Christ poured out on a Roman cross.
Strangely enough, I find that much more comforting and useful in dealing with the reality of the world, than the vain hope that someday God is going to stand up to all the bullies and dictators and put an end to all the tragedy in the world.  I find much more hope in the reality that God wants to be known by me, than in the ultimately pagan presumption that I can figure God out.  I can trust a God who loves me much more fully than I can trust a God who is only concerned with winning some cosmic duel with evil and chaos.

Maybe some of that will make it in the sermon after all.