Asking Why and Causal Connection Precision

3 Lent      Cycle C       March 3, 2013      

Ex.3:1-17          Ps. 103:1-11           

1 Cor. 10:1-13     Luke 13:1-9       

 Lectionary Link

   One of the most common questions in the world is “Why?”    An adult can be driven to distraction when a curious child is following and always asking the question “why?”   And the question “why” is a good question. In our naïve realism and commonsense lives it is very important to discern visual and obvious cause and effects relationships.  Young drivers need to know that cars can’t be the same place at the same time.   There is nothing wrong with the question “why?”  And there is nothing wrong with studying the observable relationship between cause and effect.

  There is observable cause and effect and speculative and even prejudicial explanation given for  cause and effect.  How many televangelists have blamed hurricanes and other natural disasters on certain groups of people?   Religious leaders for a long time built their reputations on presuming to know precise causal connection between weather events and other natural disasters and the behaviors of their target groups of disgust.  They literally proclaim them to be acts of God to punish some people, failing to realize that such disasters are not really precise “smart bombs” and they do general collateral damage to everyone.  To presume such precise cause and effect knowledge about the unknowable gives them a sense of religious insight to the suckers who are willing to believe them.   

   We also ask the question “why” about positive or benign events, events of good fortune.  And we can be silly sometimes in our giddy success.  The same God that helped my team win a football game is the same God who let my opponent lose and they were praying to win too.  So why do we get excited and make it seem as though God was picking sides?  To be consistent with this view, one has to make God into Fate and whatever is then, is God’s will.

    Moses ran away from Egypt for 40 years, got married and was working as a shepherd for his father-in-law, a Midian priest.  He encountered a burning bushing that would not be consumed by this strange fire.  And so he must have been seeing things.   And he heard this strange voice speaking to him and asking him to return to the people of Israel whom he had run from 40 years ago.  And Moses was perhaps thinking "Why me?”  And why would anyone believe me and the words of “God?”  How could I convince people that God had spoken to me?

    So Moses was thinking about this unusual call from God, “Why me, God?”

  Some people were speculating to Jesus about some disastrous occurrences.   Some Galileans had been killed by Pilate and he used their blood in the very sacrifice that they themselves had offered.  Also a tower had fallen on some people and they had died.  And so the fatalistic speculation arose: Why did these misfortunes happen to them?  And the common wisdom on the street was that, bad things happen to people because they must have been bad or they had done something wrong.  And Jesus rebuked them for pretending to suggest such a thing.  He suggested that to say that things happen to such people because they were bad, may be simply another away of making twice victims out of people who had suffered the loss of their lives.

   Lent is a good of time as any to look at the state of our lives in how we are asking and answering the question “why?”  Why did this happen to me in this way at this time?  Why am I not meeting the right people, the right friends?  Why did this happen on my job, or in my family or to my health?  But not only the bad stuff;   the good stuff too.  Why did I receive this new insight, this new sense of direction, the discovery of this new friendship or relationship, or why did I get some good news in the very same area where someone else received bad news?

   And what is the wrong answer to the question of why?  The wrong answer is to assume that God is more or less God at anytime in our lives…to assume that God is not constant and ebbs and flows in the divine relationship with us like the whims of a fickle lover.  God remains the same all of the time. 

  God’s creation and people are like the fig tree of the parable.  We as people don’t always achieve the level of performance that is expected of us.  We may be like my tomato plants that get over watered, lots of beautiful green plant but not many tomatoes. The good nature, the hybrid was not enough; the fig tree needs some nurture too…a whole lot of fertilizer or manure was needed to provide the conditions to produce good fruit.

  God is the cosmic gardener who is patient always to give us more time and more nurture so that our natures may come to bear fruit.  The nurture of human experience can some time be as smelly as manure; but it does not mean that God is any more or less present to us.  Our nurturing events are many; sometimes as fascinating as a burning bushes that totally baffle and surprise us; at other times smelly and partaking of some things we’d rather avoid.  And we cannot really know the “answer” to the why a smelly test or why a wonderful surprise or both.

  But the wrong conclusion is to doubt God’s presence and involvement and care in our lives.  And if we can uphold our belief in God’s presence, involvement and care in our lives, we too will become God’s presence and involvement and care in the lives of people who surely need some reassurance.  If we can affirm the constancy of God in the midst of all of the “whys” of life, then we will be less likely to victimize people when bad things happen to them and more willing to help them to know God’s love and care.

  Why did the tower fall on those people?  Why did Pilate use the blood of those Galileans in their sacrifices?  Wrong questions.  These terrible things happened; what can we do to help the families of the victims?  If the question of “why” delays charity in our actions, then it is the wrong question.  Asking and answering the question “why” can help us prevent future mishaps, but we cannot change the past; we can only live and minister in the present.

  I think that the call of God tells us what God told Moses: that God is who God Is and the Divine Being remains no matter what happens in this world in the fullness of real freedom of events.

   And what we need to learn during this Lenten season is that no matter what happens to us, the divine presence and call and care is still towards us, even now and at the hour of our death and in the time of our afterlife.  God  is the Holy Being who Moses was called to obey; this is the Holy Being who promises to be with us.  This is the God of Jesus Christ who does not change amid the ebb and flow of the circumstances of our lives.  Amen.