Sermons for the Month
The Biggest Tragedy
DATE: September 16, 2001
By: Pr. Deborah
TEXT: Luke 15:1-10“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
A terrible thing has happened on the way from one Sunday to the next -- an unprecedented thing, an awful, horrible, history-altering event that forever has changed the lives of thousands upon thousands of individuals, and has changed our nation and our world in a way that will only unfold in the days, weeks, perhaps years to come. A relative handful of human beings, their minds and hearts distorted by hate, have snuffed out the lives of innocent men, women, and children by the thousands. And so the enormous question that is put to people of faith, what does the Word of God have to say to us, and we then to say to the world in the face of such destruction, such evil? Last Monday, when I read Jesus' two little parables as the evangelist Luke gives them to us, it reminded me of a scene from the old-but-eternally-syndicated television show MASH. While an officer is celebrating a mission which seemed to the doctors to have been reckless and unnecessarily risky, Hawkeye asks him about casualties. The officer replies, "Our losses were insignificant" to which Hawkeye responds, "How many kids in an 'insignificant'?" His point is obvious -- that every casualty is someone's son, or father, or fiancé, or brother; every injury, every death, is terribly significant to that someone or to many "someones". Jesus makes a similar point. The Pharisees, good religious folk that they were, grumbled loudly at Jesus' practice of sitting down in fellowship with not only the "insignificants" of their society, but even with the out-and-out "unworthies." In response to their indignation, Jesus gives us this picture of how God looks at the numbers, which is quite different from our own analysis. A 1% loss of inventory? We factor that into the cost of doing business. A 10% decline in assets? Rather more distressing, but certainly not irreplaceable. Except in the economics of God. What is an acceptable margin of loss to God? There is no such thing! The Lord God who made us and all living things is not satisfied, will not rest, so long as ONE of His human creatures still wanders through the dangerous mountains and crevices of life, or lies alone and seemingly forgotten in the dust. Then came Tuesday morning, and the days that followed, and I was reminded of another saying, this one attributed to Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator who was himself the architect of death for millions of his own people. "One death is a tragedy," Stalin is supposed to have said, "a million deaths is a statistic." The fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends, coworkers, husbands, wives who died on Tuesday appear to have been considered mere "statistics", "collateral damage" to use Timothy McVeigh's words, "insignificant" except as contributions to their attacker's goals of inflicting terror and accumulating power. Now, some people contemplate the greatness of God as they stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and marvel at its awesome beauty; some people gaze into the night sky, with our wonderful 21st century awareness of the vast distances of space and the tremendous energy contained in the fiery stars which our Creator God shaped and molded and tossed into their appointed places. For me, the immensity of our God is most significantly demonstrated in the awesome reality that His is a presence and a compassion wide and deep and eternal enough to embrace each and every individual life that has been touched, battered, or torn apart by in this or any other week. Someone wrote on an Internet message board a few days ago that before the first airliner ripped into the World Trade Center, it already had torn through the heart of God. Within that heart of God was cherished every man, woman, and child inside those twin towers, inside the Pentagon, and inside the four airliners. He knew their names, their stories, their hopes and dreams and joys and sorrows, He loved each one as if they were the ONLY one of His children, loved them, as He loves us, with a love that is stronger than hate, stronger even than death. That is the great good news and the hope that we have to offer, not only that God is bigger than the biggest tragedy, the most profound evil; but that He also is great enough to bear each individual grief, and to carry every human sorrow. The cross of Jesus, from which He cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me??" reminds us that we follow a Lord who knows what it feels like to be vulnerable before human fear and loathing; to die innocently, caught up in the power plays of others; to cry out to the heavens "WHY?" And there is one more thing that needs to be said, a truth that needs to be remembered and proclaimed by those of us who follow Jesus, who loves us and shelters us from the deadly blast of sin and death by throwing His own body in between us and them. I very deliberately said that the heart of God cherished EVERY person inside those four airliners. By the end of the week, a photograph of one of the hijackers was on television and the Internet; and as I stared into that face, trying somehow to comprehend the incomprehensible, it occurred to me that the God who had created that man gazed at his face, too, and with a Father's love. In that moment, it seemed to me that the greatest tragedy of this week perhaps was not the death of those unsuspecting and innocent people, who have been gathered into the arms of the God who loves them, but was instead the horror of human hearts that had grown so icy cold, human souls so terribly devoid of God's gracious presence, God's beloved children who wandered so very far away from His perfect goodness that they could commit such horrible acts, and yet imagine that they were doing His Will. In the great mysteries of God's grace, and His ways that are so unlike our own, we can't know but we can hope that there was an instant in the journey from this life to eternity, perhaps as the loving eyes of Jesus met their own, that this man and those with him echoed the prayer of the dying thief on the cross: "Jesus, remember me…forgive me…" Jesus does seem to say today that that would kick off one incredible celebration in Heaven! And he challenges us to ask ourselves whether we then would be found kicking up our heels with the angels, or pouting with the Pharisees. This Sunday, like every Sunday, is a party; more solemn than many, but still a celebration of the God who welcomes sinners into His presence, who runs to meet us, receives us with delight, eating and drinking with us whoever we are, whatever we have done or failed to do in the past; and asks us to join Him in the search and rescue! Today, Jesus invites us again to join the party, to know that we belong to God and are safely within His care, invites us to worship God with our praise and our thanksgiving, also wiith our tears and our questions and our doubts; with the witness of our loving words and compassionate deeds today, and with our trust and hope for tomorrow.
AMEN