Given at Church of the Redeemer, Cairo, IL on Saturday, March 10, 2007; and at St. Mark’s Church, West Frankfort, IL, and St. James’ Memorial Church, Marion, IL; Sunday, March 11, 2007
On April 14th, we will remember the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the steamship, the “HRMS Titanic”. Perhaps no other tragedy has captivated people’s imaginations as this event has: there have been several movies made about it, books have been written, and a traveling exhibit has been making the rounds of this country, attracting large crowds.
The significance of the sinking of this magnificent ship on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England extends far beyond the enormous loss of life involved[1]….for the sinking was one of the “wakeup calls” that came to a complacent humanity that placed far too much faith in technology. Along with the horrors of World War I, another “wakeup call”, people began to awake to the reality that progress was not the automatically assured result of human creativity and ingenuity.
The Titanic was widely believed to be “unsinkable”….No doubt, its captain thought it was impervious to the dangers of sailing the North Atlantic during the winter season, that dangers that lesser vessels would do well to be wary of surely wouldn’t affect his mighty vessel. Perhaps that’s why he ordered the engines to be opened up fully, so as to allow his ship to arrive in New York ahead of schedule.
But the Titanic proved to be very vulnerable to the dangers of sailing in the fields of ice that had formed as chunks broke off from the glaciers in Greenland. And, the danger wasn’t just from the visible mountains of ice that could be seen from the crow’s nest at the front of the ship, but from the 90% of the ice that lay below the water, out of sight.
Ultimately, it was that 90% of the ice’s mass, the part that couldn’t be seen, that proved to be Titanic’s undoing.
The Titanic’s story provides a good entryway into Jesus’ teaching for today. This sermon will extract two aspects of the Titanic’s sinking, and apply them to today’s Gospel:
- An attitude of superiority, of invulnerability and imperviousness to danger
- A belief that what can be seen represents the extent of the dangers we face.
Taking these two aspects, let’s look at today’s Gospel account, as Jesus makes His way toward Jerusalem, toward His face-off with the authorities of His day, and His eventual death and resurrection….
Though we know nothing about the incidents that the onlookers present to Jesus today, Pilate’s slaughter of some Galileans and the collapse of a tower in Siloam that Jesus mentions,[2] Jesus cuts to the heart of an attitude He surely must have detected in their conversation: that the people’s deaths were attributable to some grave sin in their lives. Such an attitude must’ve been common in Jesus’ day, for we read in John 9: 2 this question from Jesus’ disciples: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Don’t we share that same sort of an attitude? How long has it been since we’ve heard someone say, “oh, I’d better not say or do thus-and-so, because I’ll really get punished for it”? Or, when have we last heard this comment, “boy, that person surely must’ve done something really bad, to be in that situation.”
Boil both of these comments down, and what’s left is this attitude: really bad, visible sin leads to really severe and visible punishment.
Our beliefs are quite similar to the ones that circulated in Jesus’ time.
But we share another belief with those first century Jews: that we, by virtue of our superior conduct/knowledge/ abilities/luck (pick one or more than fit) are exempt from such serious sin and therefore, from the equally serious punishment for sin. We are impervious, like the Titanic, to the misfortunes that befall lesser beings. Our spiritual ship is unsinkable, impervious to the dangers of sin.[3]
Jesus, in His response, guts both attitudes completely: “do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
We are all vulnerable to the dangers of sin, lurking, unseen, like icebergs on the sea of life.
Sin’s dangers, often lying mostly hidden and out-of-sight, threaten to cut us off from God, and in the process, from life itself, which comes from God.
Sin’s dangers threaten all of us together, both the great and the small. We are all vulnerable and none of us is exempt, invincible or impervious to those dangers.
Are we destined, then, to sail into hidden spiritual dangers, blinded either by the things we can see, or the things we cannot see which lurk beneath the surface of our lives? Are we doomed to the loss of our lives, spiritually?
No!
Jesus offers His hearers in our Gospel reading, and us today, a chance to turn around, to alter course, to be responsive to the warnings about the presence of spiritual icebergs in our lives….
Jesus appends the parable of the fig tree onto today’s reading….Instead of an inevitable spiritual death due to invisible sin, which can kill us just as surely as the sin we can see, Jesus offers another chance and another choice:
If we will be responsive, allowing the soil of our hardened hearts to be softened, then we can change course, and remain open to the resources God gives us to be alive to Him.
Disaster can be averted.
How about us?
Doesn’t today’s Gospel demand a careful inquest into our attitudes and beliefs?
Doesn’t today’s Gospel demand a careful examination of our ability to discern the dangers of sin, both the visible and the invisible kind?
May God’s Holy Spirit enable us to see our own vulnerability clearly, and to change course!
[1] Of the 2,228 persons on board, only 705 survived.
[2] The Siloam area of Jerusalem was located in the southern part of the city, south of the Temple area.
[3] This superior attitude will show up again in Luke’s recounting of Jesus’ parable of the “Pharisee and the Tax Collector” (Luke 18: 9 – 14). In this parable, the Pharisee recounts his spiritual superiority, based on his scrupulous adherence to the ritual requirements of the Torah.
