Taylor found this mother sitting by a large ash tray full of cigarette butts. She said that the woman smelled like she had smoked every one of them.

"It's my punishment," she said, "for smoking these damn cigarettes, God couldn't get my attention any other way so he made my baby sick. Now I'm supposed to stop but I can't stop." She then began to weep. "I'm going to kill my own child," she said.

Taylor said that she spoke up then -- "I don't believe in a God like that," she said. "The God I know wouldn't do something like that."

"The only problem with my response was that it was messing with the mother's world view at the very moment she needed it most. However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or capricious one."

This woman wasn't interested in reconciling a loving God with her daughter's brain tumor. If there was something wrong with her daughter, there had to be a reason; one that she had some modicum of control over.

Yep, there had to be a reason for it and this chain-smoking young mother was even willing to be the reason herself if that was the only way to get a handle on the tragedy.

How odd, how irrational, and yet we all think this way sometimes, don't we, especially under excruciating stress. Calamity strikes and we all scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our habits, our beliefs.

What this tells us, of course is that we are less interested in truth than in consequences. In fact, if life were a game show that would be a good name for it. What we crave above everything else is control over the apparent chaos of our own lives.

Jesus was a great student of human nature; maybe the best.

One day he comes upon a man born blind. Jesus heals him and then as they are walking away his disciples ask a penetrating question that says oodles about the reigning philosophy of the day. "Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents that he should have this calamity?" And Jesus says, "Neither. Come on, get a life.”

Well , not exactly. He tells them to think again and then takes them to the outskirts of the village where they can get a good look at the surrounding farmer's fields, and he says, "The rain falls on the just and unjust alike."

Jesus is saying simply, wake up: nature itself will tell you that God doesn’t go around zapping people for their behavior.

In this morning’s text he takes it from the realm of physical infirmity to political turmoil and then natural disaster: Pontius Pilate who was known for his brutal reprisals had killed a bunch of Galileans (maybe by sword, maybe by crucifixion) as an example to other Galileans for, perhaps, killing a Roman soldier.

Terrorism and reprisals for terrorism are as old as the world, you know.

The second matter comes right out of the newspaper – the Jerusalem Sun Times has run a piece about a tower that fell over in a little town of Siloam as a result of an earthquake. It happens during a work day and nearly a score are killed:

Jesus says, “Do you remember that tower at Siloam that fell over and 18 people were killed -- do you think they were any worse sinners than anyone else living in Jerusalem?” Think again.

So here we have the gamut of tragedies that can befall humankind. A man born blind, Galileans killed by an oppressive government that won’t accept criticism, and eighteen Jerusalemites who die as a result of natural disaster.
And for Jesus it’s all the same. Don’t chalk any of it up to God’s will. If you do you’re only kidding yourself. Jesus lumps all illness, and violence, and suffering together -- pain is pain. It’s part of life.

Some babies are born whole, a few are born with disability. When Pilate's soldiers swing their swords, the person closest gets cut. When the earth heaves and a tower falls anyone underneath, good or bad or in between, perishes.

That's life When a tower starts to fall for whatever reason earthquake or faulty construction. God does not defy the law of gravity that keep us ALL glued to this planet to save 18 innocent folks selling their pots, or macrame beneath it.

Jesus is out to expose any illusion we might have about keeping ourselves free of the contingencies of life.

It’s great to begin every morning with prayer – but don’t think that that alone is going to insulate you from all that humans fall heir to in a lifetime. It’s all just part of the curriculum of living. Still, we all have our little deluded coping mechanisms for dealing with a life that remains stubbornly impossible to control.

Take the story of woman named Nancy from California. At 11:00pm the phone rings. My husband, Pete, and I are in bed but he answers it. It‘s my sister Valerie. Naturally. This is the pattern: Valerie and her husband have a fight, he leaves, and she calls and asks me to come over. Sometimes I end up sleeping on her couch. “Are you coming back this time or staying the night?” Pete asks with a frown as I get dressed. “I’ll just stay and hour,” I tell him, irritated that he isn’t more sympathetic. Before I leave, I put my son’s soccer gear in the foyer, just in case I’m not there in the morning.

As the older sister, I was taught to lookout for Val. If someone teased her, I made sure they never did it a second time. If she got in trouble, I defend her. As we got older, I continued to rescue her, picking her up when she got a flat tire at the mall. Lending her money, baby-sitting her kids, listening to her problems about men.

Tonight my sister falls asleep exhausted after three hours of talking about her marriage. I lie on the couch and make a mental note to take her trash out in the morning and set up a dental appointment for her daughter.

Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me why I do this over and over. That maybe I think by being responsible nothing bad or troubling will ever happen to me.

Yes, crazy things happen to innocent people somewhere every day, but Jesus says, be careful about letting that drive you to inventing ways to control your fear.

That torn place your fear has opened up inside of you is a holy place. Stay there a while, don't run away. Pay attention to what you are feeling. Let it communicate to you as nothing else can what you love, and why, and how very much. That kind of "knowledge" is exquisite, priceless

It may hurt you to focus there on that, but it is not the kind of hurt that leads to death; on the contrary, it is the kind of hurt that leads to life.

The wonderful writer, Reynolds Price, tells a story about a man he knew who had suffered through an automobile accident. The man was a distinguished psychiatrist. He was left a paraplegic, utterly dependent upon his family, at first. He was depressed. He became suicidal. He told a group about his first days when he returned home and could find no reason to go on living.

In great desperation one day he wheeled himself into a bedroom and locked the door. He held a revolver in his hand and was ready to take his life. For the first time in years he prayed: He said, “God, I can’t go on like this. Okay, God, I’ll make a deal with you. I am willing to go on living, for the sake of my family if you will only do two things for me: give me some relief from this pain and help me to better control my bladder. The psychiatrist said that in a few moments after praying that prayer that it was as if he heard a thunderous reply: "No deal. You either take life as it is, or die."

If life were a game show it would NOT be called, “Let’s Make A Deal.”

“It scared me half to death,” he said. It wasn’t what I expected to hear from God at all. I put away the revolver and never considered suicide again.” Price says that the man went on to live life as it was given him, living many prosperous years, living to tell of his encounter with a demanding, living God whose ways are not always our ways, and whose thoughts are higher than our own.

Yet, the parable Jesus offers here tells us of God’s patience with us. A man complains that a fig tree ought to be cut down because it has born no fruit. For three years. When the owner demurs and says, “Hey, give me one more year and I will put manure on it and then lets see.” The parable ends there. We all have our own fig trees that don’t bear fruit. These little coping mechanisms. They don’t bear fruit for us but we don’t want to have them rooted out either. We say, “Give me another year. Let me hold on to my guilt because it’s the only handle I have to try to control what (okay, it’s dawning on me) is uncontrollable.” God says, “Okay. I won’t take it away from you. You keep it until you’re ready to give it up.”

So, two questions hang in the air: can you love a life that comes with no guarantees; and can you love the creator who put you here without linking your life entirely to the kind of cards you were dealt?

As I understand it the Biblical witness tells us that IF you can, THAT is where the REAL blessings in life are available.

The mythology expert, Joseph Campbell, is best remembered for telling us to follow our bliss. But following your bliss is not always peaches and ice cream...Sometimes it involves dwelling in the shadows for a while.

He says that "it is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for."

I believe that with all my heart. That’s good news, if you can take it to heart. And there is one other piece of good news that is just as important. You don’t have to go through the shadows alone. God is there. And, I don’t say this glibly. God is always there. As Reynold’s Price’s psychiatrist friend knew, you can pray.
You never know how God will answer but it is always good to pray. Especially when you feel the most alone, and we all know, you never feel so alone as when you are facing something dire. Prayer is the best psychic place for life to be sorted out.

A wise Catholic, Father Richard Rohr asks, "Are your control needs, your fears, your guilt, your worries in charge? . . .if you're obsessed with a thought all afternoon [why not give that thought] to God. ' Lord, why am I so caught up in this fantasy. . .this preoccupation? Why am I so worried about this bill or this mortgage or whatever it might be? Make that the subject of your prayer instead of trying to avoid it . . .That's the meaning of incarnational prayer.. . .Prayer is seeing what is in front of us in all it's fullness . . .It's responding to life in a holistic way in the ways it comes to us.. Instead of our life being a self-centered monologue, our life becomes a God centered dialogue."

Barbara Brown Taylor says the following: “Nothing we do is going to guarantee us an entirely safe existence, Nothing we do or believe is going to make God tame. We can only choose to face the light, not the darkness so that if we get hit and fall, we will fall the right way.” That’s sobering, but here’s the good news about it from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth) –

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; : always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. (2Cor 4:1)

Amen.