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Hard Times and Falling Towers
“He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’"
Luke 13:2-5
This passage from today’s Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer is important to help us understand how God is at work in hard times. For the last several Sundays, I’ve been working through the Old Testament prophets and the hard times they spoke into. We need both their witness and what Jesus tells us here to make headway on the problem.
First, we see again and again in the prophets that God sends hard times to Israel on purpose. This isn’t because the so-called “Old Testament God” (always a misnomer) wants to destroy them; far from it. Rather, God’s anger is part of His love, intended to rescue Israel from their self-destructive patterns. When Jonah runs away from God in a boat, God sends a great storm to overtake him. But the storm doesn’t destroy Jonah or his shipmates. In the storm and at the bottom of the sea, Jonah and his shipmates repent.
More often than not, that’s what it takes for us to turn back to God. Only in the storm, only when we’ve hit bottom, do we reach out our hands in repentance and need.
The prophets teach us to see hard times, the storms of our lives, as opportunities to examine whether we’ve had a hand in what’s become of us and need to turn back. God created the world in such a way that there are consequences for sin, sooner or later. Many have turned back to God when they realized their lives had become unmanageable and miserable.
Yet, we shouldn’t think that every storm that comes is God’s direct action. As Jesus says in this passage, sometimes towers just fall. Don’t think that the people it killed were worse than anyone else. Some will remember Pat Robertson’s claim that Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on America for certain social ills. We should be wary of such claims, given what Jesus says here.
Nevertheless, we do live in a world in which towers fall. Hard times come. Tragedies happen. God has ordered our world so that, on this side of Eden, storms can and will come. Sometimes, they are the result of our own bad choices, but other times, they aren’t. Either way, when they do, they are always opportunities for us to reach out to God once more, to find anew what we may otherwise have forgotten: that our every breath is from God, our creator and our redeemer. Thanks be to God.
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