The Wrong Question

1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

Every time I get in an airplane, I pray.

I pray during takeoff, landing, and any turbulence at all, because I worry. (Panic is a better word.) I can conjure up a pretty clear vision of plummeting 35,000 feet or so, and praying makes me feel – sort of – like I’m helping to keep the plane in the air.

Of course, that’s totally irrational. Airplanes don’t crash from the perfectly normal turbulence that triggers my anxious prayers.  Flying across the country is statistically safer than driving home from church, or climbing up a ladder to change a light bulb.

But air disasters grab more headlines and fuel more speculation than commuting or home repair.

We want – even need – to put reasons to the things that scare us, that seem beyond our control, so that we can hope to avoid them. When bad things happen to people, we want – need – to explain them, pin down a reason that’s within our reach, because that feels like keeping ourselves safe.

That’s what Jesus is responding to today, with this talk about Galileans slain by the Romans, and others killed in a building collapse.

If we lived in first-century Palestine, the answer to what happened to Malaysia Air 370 would be easy, and CNN would have lost a year’s worth of programming hype.

They sinned. They made God angry.

So they died.

Look at Paul’s exhortations to his Corinthian friends:

Be careful not to stray from the true path of faith, commit sexual immorality, or grumble. Because that kills people.  He’s serious. Idolatry, religious screw-ups, even complaining, are deadly, because it messes with your relationship with God, and people – he means communities – who get in trouble with God die.

Two thousand years later, you and I are much more likely to ask, Why would God let such a tragedy happen? than What did they do to make God so mad?

but the impulse to explain, to get right with God or get God right, is exactly the same.

Which is – subconsciously – why I pray on airplanes. To somehow keep the whole plane from falling out of the air by temporarily organizing my relationship with God.

It doesn’t work, by the way. Physics works a lot better than rote panic prayer. So does Xanax.

And Jesus might – just might – endorse the same solution as my doctor, because when people come to him speculating and demanding answers about why God made the walls fall and the Romans rampage, Jesus’ answer is, more or less:
“It happens.”

It just happens. Disaster has nothing to do with sin, and you can’t stop the walls and planes from falling, the Romans or the Uber drivers from turning deadly, by praying and living right.

And, for the record, the good life isn’t proof that you’re right with God.

That’s the flip side of the “God did it,” theory of disaster: that health, success, comfort, and safety prove God’s love, or your own spiritual virtue.

It’s the subtle flip side of “why would God let that happen?” too. The vague but powerful sense that our own actions and merits – our virtues – can keep us safe, but God is responsible for tragedy and trauma.

That’s where Paul’s comments on disaster intersect with Jesus’ teachings. “Just because you’re standing” – because you haven’t been killed, don’t imagine you’re in perfect spiritual shape – watch out that you do not fall,” he says.

And Jesus is pretty clear that those explanatory attitudes are nonsense. Those attitudes, every side of them, are about us; about our own anxieties, self-image, fears and security.

instead of asking “why?” he says, “repent!” Turn your hearts and eyes and ears completely toward God.

When disaster happens, when we are afraid, when we don’t understand, ask not “Why is this happening?” but “What is God doing, in the world, right now?”

When things are going beautifully, when we’re standing on our own two feet, not “Why am I so blessed?” but “What does God desire us to do? What am I doing, right now?”

Asking “Why?” leads us to invent the mind of God – not to trust God and turn to God.

“Why?” is the question we ask to prove to ourselves that we will be okay. 

Jesus suggests that it’s better, instead to ask, “What?”

“What?” is the question that turns our ears and eyes and hearts to God, instead of toward ourselves.   “What?” is a question that trusts God’s action, and inspires us to join in.

Jesus illustrates that with an odd little parable; about a fig tree, fruitless for three straight years. A gardened and tended tree – healthy, normal, safe – that might think itself blessed by God and nature’s care, but bearing no fruit.

“Cut it down!” says the landowner.

“Wait!” says the gardener.  “Let me nurture it, let me be gentle and patient, and merciful, and if it bears, well and good. If not, cut it down.”

It’s an inconclusive story,

a story that, like life, leaves us asking questions.

“Why?” lets us explain the landowner’s actions: Sin and fruitlessness are easy reasons to cut something down. But “why?” doesn’t explain the gardener, or the tree itself.

Asking “What?” points our eyes and hearts toward the gardener’s actions: toward the tending, and nourishing, and patience. And “what?” points also toward the tree’s own nature,

created to bear fruit, to be rich in gifts and nourish others in its turn.

That parable probably didn’t satisfy the crowds asking Jesus to explain which recently slain Galileans were the real sinners, why God killed them, but it’s God’s serious answer to the anxious fear behind the questions.

Instead of trying to save ourselves by guessing the mind of God, Jesus invites us to confront our fears – our little anxieties, deeper terrors, and our comfortable bulwarks of safety and satisfaction – with repentance, with a turn of our hearts, and ears and eyes, completely toward the heart and the action of God.

And we do that by asking not “why,” but “what?”

When last weekend’s random shootings in Michigan are followed by another random spree in Kansas,

when cancers come and when they go,

when planes fall from the sky, or land one after another in safe and orderly patterns,

explanations that focus on human sin or mental health, on the rampant availability of deadly weapons or the utility of “a good guy with a gun,” on security screening and cockpit design,

or even explanations based on God’s protective favor and the power of prayer

will eventually fail us. 

Any explanation will eventually fail, because, as Jesus tells us,

it happens.

So in those times and places when we confront disaster, fear, or worry, it’s time to look for what God is doing in the world.

Sometimes God is weeping with those who weep.

Sometimes God is working for transformation of systems and hearts that have nothing at all to do with cancer and weapons.

Sometimes God is revealing breathtaking beauty just outside the airplane window.

And most of the time, God is digging around the roots – of our hearts and of our culture –

putting down more manure and fertilizer, practicing mercy, asking for patience, looking for fruit, for us to do what we were created to do, to join in God’s work of reconciliation, even – or especially – when that work has nothing to do with our interests or fears.

“What is God doing?” always has an answer,

when “Why does this happen?” does not.

So, when I’m face to face with fears I can’t control, I’ll pray in the airplane, still. But when I’m listening to Jesus, I’ll stop praying to keep the plane in the air and instead, I’ll pray to see what God is doing, and what I can do, even there, in the plane, to join in God’s fruitful work of joy and transformation.

And you, the next time you're called to face fear you can't explain?
What will you do?