There is a guy down in Miami who thinks he is Jesus. His followers call him the Messiah. They also call him daddy or God. He claims to be Jesus of Nazareth reincarnated. Jesus showing up in Miami now that is funny. Sometimes I get confused about who is really God. Especially when I feel that I have to have all the answers. I don’t like living with ambiguity. I don’t like uncertainty. So, I answer for God. I put words in the mouth of God. I know how God would conduct a worship service. I know which songs God would sing. I know which color carpet God likes best. I know that God would never approve of that situation. I know that God likes me better than God likes you. Sound familiar.
We do the same thing when it comes to tragedy. It is easier to attribute a cause and effect to every situation. We don’t have a reason why certain things happen the way they do so we just give them one. I preached a funeral with another minister a few years back. The person who died fought a horrific battle with cancer. The minister that I was working with stood up first and basically said that one thing I can’t stand to hear in funeral sermons, “God needed another rose for his garden!” He went on and on about how death is a part of God’s will. I felt that the minister was reaching for words or something and the most religious word he could find was “it is God’s will.”
It’s hard to let God be God. We long to make sense of senseless tragedies. We search our religious vocabulary for the right words when sometimes there is none. Sometimes life doesn’t make sense. Bad things do happen to good people. Towers fall on the innocent. Ruthless rulers do kill those who don’t deserve death. People get sick. Tornadoes take out one home and leave others. In Luke 13: 1 - 9 (read it) Jesus doesn’t say it was God’s will. That’s what the people believed. For them and for us life only makes sense when we can have answers for every effect. Jesus implies that however sometimes there is no answer. Let God be God and quit trying to make sense out of the senseless.
Because I get confused about whom God is I am afraid that I would answer the crowd differently. I would have read between the lines and said you are exactly right these people didn’t deserve death. It is the government’s fault. They took innocent lives. They committed a tragedy among our people. They must be held accountable. We must judge. We must destroy. Or I might have said they deserve what they got. They knew the hostility that was going on around there. They put themselves in that position. They had it coming to them. I am really glad I am not God and I am really glad you are not God.
Jesus is saying in Luke 13 don’t worry so much about things you don’t understand, focus on what you do know – your own life! He says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish.” We are not to speculate about others. What about your life? Where do you stand? Quit playing God and giving answers about what went wrong in the lives of others and start looking at the real issue: your life before God.
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