As it turns out, the one of the leading causes of preventable death in the United States, second only to cigarette smoking, is obesity.  The problem is, no one can seem to agree on who’s at fault for all this fat.  The federal courts are going to have to actually decide whether or not an individual has the right to sue a restaurant for serving them high-fat food in extra huge portions, even though the patron ordered the food and then ate every last bite.

Anyone who believes that skimming McDonald’s corporate fat will make America leaner must also believe that, when the cigarette companies run the public service announcements telling us that there is no such thing as a safe cigarette, they’re doing so because they genuinely care about our health.

Anytime we refuse to accept responsibility for our own choices and the consequences of those choices we are living in a morally, spiritually and maybe even physically precarious position.  Which is something of what Jesus was announcing as we catch up with him this morning. 

Jesus had just finished laying some pretty heavy stuff on his listeners about how his presence presented those who had heard his message with something of a crisis.  The true test of their moral character would be in how they responded to him, or not (see Luke 12:49-56).  That was when “some present . . . told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”  It would be helpful if we were up to date on 1^st century Galilean current events if we wanted to understand why these folks would make this comment.  We actually know more about the train bombings in Spain this past week than we know about these particular innocent worshippers Pilate murdered in the Temple.  But, while we’re not familiar with the event, we’re very familiar with the tactic.  When things get too personal, like when someone starts talking about how you need to lose weight (which some people do with remarkable regularity) change the subject, like to McDonalds.  Jesus was warning about judgment, the people wanted to talk about some dead Galileans.

Anyone who has sat with teenagers over dinner and tried to turn the conversation to the latest progress report from school knows this tactic.  Anyone who has ever sat on the receiving end of that kind of discomfort with parents who aren’t so easily fooled will also likely recognize Jesus in one of his typical “not-so-fast” responses when he keeps the subject focused in the most uncomfortable way and even steals their next line.  As though they really cared about the fate of these poor people and their spiritual condition, Jesus said, “‘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.’”

It was natural enough that they’d ask.  Jewish faith held that people pretty much got in life what they deserved.  Innocent people who were murdered probably weren’t that innocent after all.  If you’re driving up Stemmons one day and Reunion Tower happens to fall at the precise moment your head is passing underneath, well, no matter what anyone else knew about you publicly, you must have privately been living a very wicked life. 

It’s truly amazing how that kind of thinking still permeates our ways of believing about God today.  Something bad happens to us and we naturally assume we’re getting paid back for some sin we overlooked and failed to confess.  Or, someone escapes some horrible calamity and, with rare exception, as soon as a television reporter shoves a microphone in their face they can’t wait to say, “Someone upstairs must have been looking out for me today!”  We get in life what we earned, good or bad, right?  Of course, that not only fails to explain how some unashamedly immoral people get filthy rich and stay that way until their dying day and why some terribly bad things happen to some very good people.  But, our ways of thinking about God, our theology, is a lot like a vacuum.  If we don’t intentionally fill it with good ways of thinking, bad ways of thinking rush right in and take over. 

It was natural enough that these folks would ask Jesus that day, especially if a good debate about someone else’s moral failings is all you’ve got left to change the subject with, like how badly someone else needs to lose weight, so that, no matter what, you don’t have to face your own.  Jesus wasn’t about to let them off so fast. 

The first thing he did was dismiss the foolishness of that way of thinking.  They asked if these people were worse sinners because of what happened to them.  “‘No,’” Jesus said.  And, without taking another breath he added, “‘but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’”  In fact he said both, twice.  No, it’s not true that bad things necessarily happen to people because they are bad.  We don’t know the ways of God nor should we blame the evil of others or our stupidity on him.  If I smoke three packs a day or eat double quarter pounders with cheese and biggie-sized fries for dinner every night, please don’t ask the preacher at my funeral to explain the nature of evil in trying to comfort my family.  It ought to be obvious why bad things happened to me.  On the other hand, if some very ill person takes the life of an innocent someday, please don’t ask the preacher to explain why God did that.  We assign far too much to a God whose ways we do not understand and we’re too quick to blame him for the evil we do to ourselves and to others.  “‘No,’” Jesus said, “‘but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’”

Here’s something we need to understand about our walk with Jesus.  It’s very important.  If we’re going to stay close to him, if we’re truly going to walk with him day in and day out, we need to prepare ourselves for the fact that he’s going to keep the subject of our conversations with him about sin pretty much focused close to home.  He’s going to draw the circle of our concern about immorality, first, around the place where we’re standing.  Just like he did when the woman was caught in the act of adultery (see John 8:3-11).  Jesus neither allows those who sin nor those who always are quick to blame others in their sin off the hook. 

If your life feels like it is God-cursed today, and you really want to have a conversation with God about that, you need to prepare yourself for some pretty intense work on yourself.  If you’re busy blaming everyone else in your world for how miserable your life is, you husband or wife, your parents, your boss, whoever, and you want God to help you find a way out, he’s almost certainly going to begin the conversation about accepting responsibility for your misery with you.  It’s not that other people can’t make our lives miserable.  But, with rare exception, they do so only with our permission.  At some point, the journey to hope and joy begins with what Jesus called repentance.

That’s not a very popular word in our culture.  It assumes that there is some moral absolute by which our lives are measured.  It assumes that there is a greater standard for measuring how we should live than how others live.  In scripture, whatever it finally looks like, repentance is always defined in terms of how our lives are being lived in relationship to no lower standard than the holiness of God, not in comparison to how others are living or not.  Jesus warned his listeners that day, and anyone else who might ever listen in, that the journey toward living the life God intended them to have begins with a response to his grace initiative in Christ in a spirit of turning away from sin and toward God.  If you and I want to walk with Jesus, we are going to have to learn to make personal acceptance of responsibility that leads to repentance a daily discipline of living.

Just this week, I heard a nationally syndicated conservative talk show host speaking from the pulpit of one of America’s most well known churches.  He was mocking those he considered liberal this way.  He said, “We know that our ideas are superior to theirs.”  How can anyone who claims to trust Christ and Christ alone still comfort himself with the thought that he is better with God because, in his opinion, his ideas are superior to anyone else’s?  Have we made any progress beyond those who thought a tower falling someone’s head was the judgment of God if we’re still using the comparison of one ideology to another as the standard by which God finds us more acceptable.  What arrogance!  What blindness!  What foolishness.  If we think we’re more OK with God because, in our minds, our ideas are superior to those we don’t believe are OK with God, then we are no better off than the people who asked Jesus that day about a tower falling on someone else’s head.

I’m one of those preachers who has always enjoyed psychoanalyzing the prodigal son, probably far more than Jesus ever intended.  But, it is a story that is far more than the sum of all its parts.  It’s kind of like that frog you were assigned to dissect in high school biology.  By the end of the semester, after you’ve picked at it for four months, there are a lot of parts left and not much frog.  We do that to scripture, too.  We dissect it so much, even train our preachers to reduce it to its barest minimum in the name of expository preaching, that we’re so close to the linguistic trees we can’t see the theological forest (yes, I meant it just like that).  So, the other day, in one of my more reflective and “dissective” moods, I was asking Nancy, “Do you know why the prodigal son finally went home?” 

I was thinking she would stop whatever she was doing and, in jaw-dropping awe as she sat at my feet and ask, “No master, please tell me why the prodigal son went home.”  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  I was assigning some deeper meaning to his turning from the pigpen back to the father’s home.  I could hear the tear-jerking music playing in the background as the son wiped the dried slop from his tear-soaked face and turned his face to the rising son, just before he set out on his journey back home.  “Do you know why the prodigal son went back home,” I asked.  And, Nancy said, “Because he ran out of money.”  She’s always been so pragmatic! 

Maybe she’s right.  Jesus may have been telling that story, in part, to announce to us that God will do whatever it takes to get our attention.  Having just rescued the woman at the well from the jaws of certain death by stoning, all he said to her was, “‘Go on your way, and from now on do not sin again (John 8:11).’”  With the prodigal son, Jesus was telling us that sometimes God just lets us come to the natural end of our foolish choices so that we’ll finally wake up.  And, for some, that’s all it takes.  It seems, however, that the closer we think we are to knowing who God is and what he wants, the bigger a stick Jesus has to use.  So, his words with these folks that day were harsh but they struck home, “‘unless you repent, you will all perish . . ..’”

Then, like he tends to do sometimes, he ends his talk with a parable.  In this case, it’s the story about a tree that won’t bear fruit, and a landowner who just wants to cut it down but who decides to give it just one more chance to be what it was meant to be. 

Again, here’s the way it works.  If you want to walk with Jesus, you’re going to have to eventually ask and answer to very specific questions because Jesus is going to keep bringing them back up.  First, right now, today, in this moment, am I willing to turn away from whatever is keeping away from God?  Second, why am I here, what is my life’s purpose?  Holiness is not just about stopping immoral behavior, it’s about living in a relationship with God that is so personal and so real, his life spills out through ours onto everyone around us and into every situation we encounter.

It was about this time in the last year of my high school career that my father had one of those rite of passage conversations with me, just as his father had with him some thirty years before.  Dad pulled me aside one day and told me that, after I graduated, I’d have two choices; I could go to college and he’d do whatever he could to help make that possible or I could get a job.  As long as I was in college, I was still welcome to live at home.  If I ever quit college, I’d still be welcome at home but I’d be expected to pay room and board.  He’d respect either choice I made as long as I understood that the free ride was coming to an end and I’d be responsible for whatever choice I made.

If you had to live forever with the choice you’ve made today about Jesus, could you?