Can't Explain It
March 11, 2007
Luke 13:1-9

I cannot prove that a human being can walk across a room.  I know that’s a strange way to open a sermon, so let me back up.  I continue to be fascinated by how much of our faith is a paradox, you know, the first shall be last, the last shall be first, life comes through death, and so on.  So the other day I bought a book on the philosophical history of the paradox.  I know it sounds like I should get a hobby, but the book was actually very interesting. 

And in those pages was the story about a philosopher named Zeno.  Zeno, believe it or not, proved logically that a human being cannot walk across the room.  And I’ve got to tell you, after reading his arguments and thinking about it for over a week, I can’t disprove it.  So logically, I agree with Zeno, a human being cannot walk across a room.

Let me explain.  Zeno asks us to picture a man walking across the room.  At some point, Zeno says, the man will reach the center of the room.  When he reaches the center he will have half the distance to go.  But alas, he will at some point come to the halfway point of the halfway point.  In other words, he has travel 3/4 the total distance of the room.  But when he reaches the halfway point of the halfway point, you can still divide the remaining distance in half.  And you can keep dividing the remaining distance in half to infinity.  For it doesn’t matter how small something is, you can always cut it in half.

Just like I can always add to the biggest number you brain can think of.

So Zeno asks, how is it possible for a man to walk across a room that has an infinite number of points, in a finite amount of time.  Logically you can’t!  If you come to every point it would take an infinity to reach an infinite number of halfway points.  Therefore, we can’t walk across the room!

God that makes my head hurt.  It’s a paradox.  Logically, we can’t argue with the facts that we can’t walk across a room, but we do it every day.  

I think of those infinite halfway points and Zeno’s paradox often when I read the Bible. 

I think of Zeno when I read the book of Job.  Job is one of my favorite books in the Bible mainly because it’s the one that I can never fully understand.  If you read the book with any bit of attention we see God and Satan betting with a person’s life.

Satan tells God, “Of course Job loves you, look what all you’ve given him!”

God responds, “I think Job is deeper than that.”

Satan hits back, “Take all of his riches and his family from him, then see how quickly he worships you.”
God says, “Give it shot, just don’t hurt Job himself.”

And Satan takes away Job’s wealth, his land, and even his family. 

And when Job was at his lowest point, his three friends come walking by telling Job what he ought to do.  You know I can’t stand when people tell me what I ought to do.  But they told Job.  “You know why God’s doing this, don’t you?” they asked.  “You have sinned against God, if you would just repent, God want do this.”  But Job asked God, “What have I done?  Tell me what I have done and I will repent!”  But truth be told, Job hadn’t done anything. 

When I was in high school, one of my friends in the church youth group was killed in a car accident.  He had just left the mall with a friend where they bought baseball caps and they hopped in his red Ford and starting driving to Pizza Hut where they worked.  He took the curve too fast and hit an van head on.  The friend survived, but my friend didn’t. 

Our youth director called all of us together and we drove to his house and when we walked in his parents ran to our youth director and pleaded with him, “Why has God done this?  What have we done?”  But you know they didn’t do anything to deserve that.  

Who deserves to have a child taken away?  Not Job.  Not the mother and father of my friend.  

What about those kids in Alabama that were studying calculus and American history?  They didn’t get up that morning thinking a tornado was going to rip through their school and take them away.

Did you happen to see the young baseball player that spoke to the cameras after his team bus fell over the overpass in Atlanta?  He was standing there, bruised and cut, but alive, answering the question of how does he feel.  How could express how he felt knowing that while he was hurt, he was alive, while his friends next to him didn’t survive?

CNN asked a student at Bluffton College where the baseball team was from about one of the baseball players that died in the crash.  “Bad things don’t happen to people like that,” she said. 

What she meant was, “Bad things shouldn’t happen to people like that.” 

I remember my mother would warm me every time I skirted with doing things I shouldn’t be doing.  “What comes around, goes around,” she said.  Which was nothing less than a warning that if I keep doing what I was doing, bad things were going to happen to me. 

I think at some level, most of us believe in that.  Even though it’s not Christian, I think most of us believe in karma without even realizing it.  Do good and good will come to you.  Do evil and you will get yours in the end. 

How many people said under their breath or out loud when some heinous, evil person was killed or put in jail or endured personal tragedy, “he had it coming”?  

But if we believe in karma, if we believe as did Job’s friends that tragedy and hardship are God’s just punishment for the wicked, how do explain the 8-year-old girl that died in the plane crash when her father rammed his private plane in his mother-in-law’s house? 

Was that 8-year-old wicked?  Was my 16-year-old friend wicked?  A teenager certainly, but wicked enough to deserve death?

St Paul seems to agree with Job’s friends.  He lists the ancestors that were struck down in the wilderness because of their sin.  He mentions the fate of those guilty of sexual immorality.  He speaks of the end of the idolaters.  St Paul says their death was God’s way of setting an example for the rest of us.  And this is where we can really thump our Bibles and pound our chests by saying if we all don’t turn away from gossip and complaining and sexuality immorality, we will all die like our ancestors did. 

But then there’s Jesus.  In John’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples see a blind man and they ask Jesus, who sinned, the blind man or his parents?  Obviously someone had sinned.  Obviously someone was guilty of idolatry or sexual immorality or something!

And Jesus said something that flew in the face of Job’s friends, it flew in the face of his disciples, and it even flew in the face of St Paul.  Jesus said that no one sinned, not the blind man or his parents. 

Jesus was saying that sin is not the cause of naturaly disaster.  It is not the cause of disease or accidents.  When some folks told Jesus about some Galileans who were killed while offering sacrifices in the Temple, Jesus asked them if they thought those killed were worse sinners than any other Galilean. 

He then brought up a tower that fell and killed 18 workers.  Do you think they were wicked and horrible sinners, worse than anyone else?  Jesus asked.

This was radical to suggest that sin was not the direct cause of disease and natural disaster. 

Yet this view is still popular.  After 9/11, there were many people who had spiritual theories as to why America was attacked.  Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both blamed the sorry state of America’s faith and unrighteous living for the attacks.

After Hurricane Katrina, more than a few people blamed the spiritual state of New Orleans as bringing the hurricane upon them. 

But that doesn’t seem just.  There were people who died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11 that were downright holy.  Fr. Mychal Judge, a chaplain for the New York Fire Department, died giving last rites to a fallen firemen when chunks of debris fell on him killing him too.  Fr. Mychal and the hundreds of firefighters that died and the thousands of others that died were surely not all wicked, horrible people. 

But yet, yet on the other hand, the Old Testament is full of people being punished by their wickedness.  Remember the flood?  Only one family survived that one.  Remember Sodom and Gomorrah?  Even Lot’s wife was turned to a pillar of salt.  Remember the plagues that fell on Egypt when Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Hebrews go?  And then we have story after story of Israel and Judah falling to invading kingdoms due to their unfaithfulness.  

Do we just throw those stories out?  Do we just throw the Old Testament out?

Jesus doesn’t try to explain the connection of sin and tragedy in the way I would like.  In fact, he doesn't explain it at all. I can understand and accept tragedy falling on the unrepentant wicked.  But I don’t understand tragedy falling on those who are innocent and godly. 

Jesus doesn’t try to explain sin and tragedy except to say this: our lives are all special and short.  We may never know when our lives end.  We may be praying in church or we may be working on a construction site.  We may die sweetly in our sleep or we may die in a tragic way, but in any event, we are not exempt from death.

Perhaps we shouldn’t worry so much about the cause of tragedy.  Maybe we shouldn’t look for connections between sin and natural disaster and sin and personal tragedy.  Because I’m not sure we are suppose to understand.

So instead of worry, I think we should focus on living.  We should focus on living completely and totally and fully for, in, and with God.  We should take every moment to pray.  We should take every chance to grow and learn through reading the Bible and studying the history of our faith.  We should let nothing keep us from worshipping the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

For we may never be able to explain why tragedy happens to certain people.  But then again, I can’t even explain how a person can walk across a room.

Amen.