Lent week three year c 11th march 2007

I was speaking with a a friend recently and they shocked me by mentioning in passing: "I worked with one of the men who got killed in that Garuda plane crash in Indonesia" 

 

I was shocked!

 

The man was a federal police officer and he worked with my friend overseas and my friend knew him and his wife . 

 

Tragedies like that are awful yet they seem so unreal.. until the closeness and realness of the tragedy comes too close to home..  

 

It is times like this when we often ask  why lord.  Why does this sort of thing happen…  why is there pain and suffering in the world.   Why couldn’t you make a world where this kind of thing can’t happen.      

 

Why is there illness..  why is their pain..   why do terrible disasters happen..  both natural disasters and human tragedies….  And war…..

 

….. 

 

in the gospel (tonight/today) the exact same question was happening. People were asking Jesus what the meaning of a few recent events could mean….

 

They referred to a terrible accident where a tower had collapsed and killed many people….  And another incident where Pontius pilate had viciously ordered a crowd of worshippers to be put to death in the middle of their religious rituals…..    a terrible act of blasphemy…. 

 

Jesus told them….   These events did not happen because they deserved them…  they didn’t happen as punishment for sins…. Or anything like that….  But they do serve as a reminder that life is short and that we never know what unexpected things might happen… so there is no time like the present for doing what matters in life……

 

I would like to read you a little reflection from a person who was struggling with the reality of sickness and suffering in his family…  and how he was trying to make sense of it in terms of the gospel……. 

 

The writer says……..

 

“I was standing with my sister at the bedside of her son who was dying from cancer. Such a short time before, he had been playing basketball. A tall, cheerful, bright young man. And here, a skeleton covered in skin and sores was dying. It made no sense and I could feel only one emotion – anger.

 

Jay had sung for years in the boys’ choir at his church. And so at his deathbed, we had called his priest, his friend and pastor. And, as the priest came to his bed, I thought, “please don’t try to be helpful. Don’t try to make it right. Because, by God, it is wrong! Pleas don’t say anything helpful.”

 

The man was a priest, but also a friend. He was mourning too. Perhaps also angry. And he did exactly what should be done at such times of anger and pain. – he took his little book and in it found the words we needed. Not little saccharine pieties, but the huge, soul-shaking lamentations of the psalms. With passion and anger in our hearts, he cried to God those vast, eternal, unanswerable questions; he threw at God the anger of our souls; he brought to God the terror in our hearts.

 

And the words he spoke brought peace. Not resolution. Not answers. But peace. A sense that we were part of a community that had known these things before. We were not alone. We were not the first to shout our anger and despair to God.

 

For that moment, it was enough. It took many quiet, sometimes tearful conversations, may prayers, many caring friends and ……. Time, to heal the wounds and make life possible again…..

 

 

The ‘why’ was never really answered. Nor could it be.

 

But God came into my pain to offer hope and healing… It was enough. “

 

 

(reflection by Ralph Milton – ed. Wendy Smallman. Sermon Seasonings – collected stories. Wood Lake Books. Canada. 1997, no.52).

 

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