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Our reading today seems to begin with events that were recent in the lives of those who Jesus was talking and listening to, healing and dining with. Folks were talking, asking questions, sharing all the rumors they were hearing. We know how news spreads but I couldn’t help but wonder what the newscasters might have said if there was TV news in the first century.
“Pilate’s soldiers make Galileans the sacrifice to their God.” The Galileans were like the hillbillies to the sophisticated and urban Jerusalemites, so maybe “Galileans prove again to do and to be unworthy sacrifices.” “Crumbling Tower of Siloam sent 20 to healers and 18 to the grave.” [Siloam means sent or sent forth]
I probably don’t have a future in writing for news.
But these events clearly stuck with those around Jesus that seasons. They had questions: Why did it happen? What made them the target of such terrible things? How are they different from me so that it never happens to me?
They wanted to know why
Was it because they were Galilean? No, it certainly couldn’t be that. Then they would be it would be possible that they could meet the same fate. They must have been worse sinners. That’s it. Pilate must have been trying to make a point or send a message to someone else getting good and empire.
Why were they those killed under The collapsing Tower? Are they just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Can’t be that because that means something similar could happen to me. Must have been the fault of the owner, the city, whoever was in charge; they failed to do upkeep or used sub-par materials or decided the unskilled, non-union labor was cheaper. That must be it
And we know about bad things that happen: National traumas, international catastrophes. In the last few decades we’ve had space shuttles explode, and wars, and towers fall, and genocides, and plane crashes, and that doesn’t even approach the personal things; the ones that seem to only affect us. We ask why, we point fingers, we seek answers that make the terrible make sense, that explain God to us
In Peru, there are these mountains and wide canyons. When the Spanish arrived in Peru they were amazed at how the Inca had made these rope bridges across canyons that they would never build with lumber, just too wide. The Inca of course underwent their own tragedies and loss of cultures under the Spanish and over time the bridges fell into disrepair and fell apart.
In 1927, Thornton Wilder imagined one such bridge and wrote the novel The Bridge of San Luis Ray. The bridge of San Luis Rey falls killing the five people who were on it. What follows then is the story the accounting of the lives of the people who had died on the bridge. Brother Juniper, a monk who lived at the monastery where the bridge led to, decided to write the story of these 5 people’s lives, not to try to make sense of God, but to try to justify God’s actions to the people to the survivors, those who were left behind when the bridge fell.
For 6 years he conducted interviews with people who knew those who died, wrote down on their stories, made an accounting of their lives, made an equation out of their lives to make sense to everyone else.
As he reached the conclusion of his study, Brother Juniper sorted out if those who had died–the two children, one servant, a kinda skeezy man, and a twin whose brother had already died–he reduced them to numbers of how good, how pious and how useful they were. Brother Juniper had reduced the mysteries of God to an equation.
His book came to the attention of church leadership, they held a trial for heresy that he made. Any question dogma out of the great mystery of God.
And while Brother Juniper tried to work all of this out. The rest of the community had to just lived there in what seems to be what Jesus was telling the people around him–there aren’t going to be clear answers.
But there is a way to live a life of worth and meaning now.
The translation that we read today says repent. The Common English Bible says change your heart. The First Nations Translation says to walk A New path.
And I know, repent and repentance can be a hard word. It has been weaponized to define a whole person as sin or not enough; to tell a person that they have to change who they are to be loved by God.
But imagine if you were the disciples traveling with Jesus, or someone who reads this story later, straight though, like we have mostly been doing. Imagine that when Jesus said to repent, you thought of sin, and the law, and you remembered when the lawyer asked about eternal like, Jesus answered him to do this and you will live. This: Love God with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. God with all that you are. Love your neighbor. Be a good neighbor. That is the path of you are call to. That is what our heart is supposed to be turned to and we travel any other path, when our heart loves something else, when we aren’t a good neighbor that is what we repent from. It is returning again and again to loving God with your whole self; and loving and being a good neighbor.
And this is not a passive activity. It is something we participate in. It is something that is revealed in our life and our actions. It is the fruit that we grow and the love that we give
And if you’re not growing and living good fruit, that’s okay. And take up the dirt with the spirit and learn, receive nourishment, encouragement, seek the sun, grow. If another isn’t growing and living good fruit, first I guess check your judgment–that you think everyone should be growing apples and they’re producing kumquats and you’re not even sure what a kumquat is. That’s different. Pray in the spirit. give love and nourishment, encouragement and ways to grow, chances and grace to try again.
Because there is a fox out there, who would rather see our destruction, who will wield the weapons of the empire callously crush us. There is a fox out there who will steal people away, stop their growth, will use us and not worry when we are crushed under the machine of the system.
Jesus is always calling us back to the love , into the nourishment and community under his wings. There is safety there, there is comfort there, there is love there, there is an opportunity to grow there, together. Part of our call is to encouraging to be free from the foxes, be in a community of love, to share that love with others.
At the end of the story of the bridge of San Luis Ray, the Abbess who we obviously met earlier in the stories, was left to care for her community. There were still poor, hungry, sick people in Lima who would still need caring for. Some of our characters, seeking their own meaning and understanding find their way to the Abbess and find meaning and purpose working with her caring for their community. She says, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
There will still be bad days. There will be tragedies and losses. We will grieve and fight and scream and cry and question. We may never know the reasons why or the answers we find might never satisfy.
The whole season Lent, and its start, Ash Wednesday, reminds us that we are finite creatures, that in the course of the history of creation, our lives are but a fleeting moment.
I don’t know what is beyond life. And I don’t know why we hurt. But I trust in the God who became incarnate–flesh and blood, who lived among us, who wants to gather us in, and calls us to love in community in this life, to build the beloved community, the kin(g)dom of God, to live, and be part of it now. We invite people in, now. We live in love, now. And always.