Repent: Who, Me? Luke 13: 1-5

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. 

“Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” -Luke 13:5

It has been a month of tragedy. A few weeks ago, an Ethiopian Air jet with 153 souls on board mysteriously crashed. Last week, a gunman went on a racial tirade against two mosques in New Zealand, killing 50 worshippers. A freak blizzard dumps historic flooding on the upper Midwest, impacting the vast majority of Nebraska as well as large parts of Kansas and Iowa. A little closer to home, a terrible car accident in Victoria claimed the lives of travelers who were passing by.

What do you do when you hear of tragedies like this? How do you try to square in your own mind what happened? 

Some look at the tragedies and try to resolve them by presuming guilt – a deep, intrinsic guilt that demands God’s immediate action. This was the mindset in Jesus’ time: if something bad happened to you, it was because you or your parents had done something to deserve it. A modern take on this is the eastern religion of Buddhism and it’s teaching of karma. Famously, some TV preachers thundered that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath against the sins of the city of New Orleans or that Hurricane Ike, or even Harvey, was God’s wrath against Houston’s capitalistic greed. 

But this isn’t always satisfactory. For example, the couple who was killed in the car wreck – they were running Saturday errands; or the people in the plane – they were just trying to get from A to B; the Nebraska farmers…they’re part of America’s breadbasket who feed the world. What did they do wrong?

So, some demand answers of God, insisting to know “why” God allowed such things to happen. Victims are described as innocent and not worthy of such an abrupt, sudden, and violent end. Obviously, God is in the wrong in this instance. He should let tragedy pass over them. The danger here is that they put themselves over and against God, second-guessing Him while setting themselves up as being superior to God. 

Others argue that Jesus should have done something. After all, He is God – He could have let the pilots know what to do, or struck the shooter lame, or held back the waters of the Elkhorn River. The danger here is either that one neuters God’s power or dilutes His love – either he was unable to do these miraculous and intercessory actions or He simply didn’t care about the victims. An early American Puritan preacher, Jonathan Edwards, famously described God as a spider who is watching creation dangle from a single thread, waiting to see when will break.

There’s a third temptation, I suppose – to become fatalistic. I suspect this idea isn’t helped by describing freak accidents as “acts of God.” In a mild case, people shrug their shoulders and make comments like, “I guess it was his time,” or “It happens,” or “Such is life” – c’est la vie, if you prefer French, or asi est la vida, if you prefer Spanish. In an extreme case, it causes anxiety, depression and despair. It produces hopelessness and leaves one with the feeling that it really doesn’t matter what they do. 

I can understand why people try to rationalize these tragedies. It is the human condition: in the midst of things that are out of control, when the boredom of the average trip is shattered by massive loss, when one man violently takes the life of another man, when creation rises up as if it is seeking to get even with mankind, when God doesn’t seem to act like, well, like God, we ask “why?”  

I can understand, and to a great degree I can even empathize. But that doesn’t make any of these things right. There is a difference between asking “why,” and, in faith, trying to comprehend the loss verses demanding answers of God as if we were equal to God. We can’t demand “why” of God because He hasn’t revealed that answer to us - at least not in a way we expect, or in a way that we find satisfactory in our grief, pain and loss. Further, it isn’t our place to demand anything of God: we are creation, He is creator. He owes us nothing other than what He has promised to us, and He has not promised to answer “why” – at least not this side of heaven. Do you remember, when Job was demanding answers of God, God answered him (please pardon the paraphrase – you can read this in the second to last chapter of Job this afternoon) saying even if I wanted to explain this, how can you mortals understand the mind of the infinite God? 

In times of tragedy and loss, we must stand before our Lord and humble ourselves to the very Word of God where He reveals Himself to us – in the person and work of His Son, Jesus Christ. Instead of guessing – and guessing badly – at what we don’t know of the hidden will of God, instead, in the times of tragedy – whether it happens to us, to our neighbors, or to people whom we will never meet on the other side of the world - we turn to what we know. We know the cross; we know the message of Jesus: repent. 

Repent doesn’t mean that we walk around like Eeyore, sad, with hang-dog looks on our faces, moping around as if everything is wrong and nothing is good. Repentance acknowledges our place before God, as sinners, who we are in the presence of the holy God, and what our condition deserves. Repentance acknowledges our sins, as Luther writes, that we indeed daily sin much in thought, word and deed. We confess that while we may not have sinned against the worshippers in New Zealand, we have sinned against Muslims by speaking disparagingly of them. We confess, not that we caused the plane crash or the car accident, but that we sin against our fellow travelers by becoming impatient or by a moment of recklessness on the road. We confess, not that we caused the flood, but we acknowledge our part in this fallen world in abusing creation. And, repentance acknowledges as well that we deserve death - physical, spiritual and eternal death – for each of these sins, and so many more.

Yes, there is a measure of sadness in our repentance, for it is admitting our sins against God. But it is not the sadness of despair. Repentance is different than despair. Despair would leave us staring at ourselves and our condition and see it as hopeless. Repentance, while fully and freely confessing our sins, also finds joy in knowing, believing, trusting and relying that God, in His mercy, does not deliver to us what we deserve. Rather, in His grace, He forgives us and rescues us through the blood of Jesus. Repentance leads us through tears of pain to joy. Repentance lifts our eyes from ourselves and the fallen world in which we live and, through faith, looks to the cross of Jesus. And in the midst of things we don’t know and understand, we see what God has done for us in Christ, what He continues to do for us in Christ, and what He will do for us, resurrecting us to be with Christ into eternity. 

One of my Seminary profs is fond of saying, “When in doubt, repent.” It’s his spin on Luther’s statement that the entire Christian life is one of repentance. When you see or hear of tragedies, whether you or your friends or a family member, or someone you’ve never met are involved, repent. Repent, and in faith, see what took place at the cross: an innocent Man, suffering and dying to redeem the World, carrying to His tree the fallenness that resulted from feasting at the tree in the Garden, His groans overwhelming the groans of creation in its birth-pains, Him dying the world’s death, being separated from God, so that the world is perfectly restored to God and soon, when Jesus returns, there will be perfect, true peace. 

Repent and pray, “Come Lord Jesus, come.” Amen.