Sin and suffering have been with us from the beginning of time. Long, long ago in a time when stories were told and not published, there was a story people told of a man called Job. Even now we remember his story and tell it because it touches a central life question...why do bad things happen to good people. Job's friends were so certain that this righteous man had some secret sin that God was punishing. They had no sympathy for him and offered him no support. He must deserve it they whispered.

Rabbi Harold Kushner's best selling book addressed the same question in our time…why do bad things happen to good people…the Job question. There are many who continue to believe in some way that suffering comes as punishment for sin. But that is naïve thinking once you have looked at life a while. Sin and suffering are connected…true. But suffering is not always a punishment for sin…look around you. When sin causes suffering, the victims.may be innocents.

Linking human suffering to sin as punishment became holy writ with the Prophets of Israel who called Israel to repent, to return to their covenant with God. If you will only return to the Lord, the prophets said, Persia and Babylonia and Assyria and Egypt will no longer overrun you, burn down your homes, take your lands. The prophets were trying to make some sense out of generations of suffering for God's Chosen People. They thought God had abandoned them. The prophets assured the people by saying God is still with you, but you deserved to be punished for being unfaithful to your covenant with God.

Explaining suffering as punishment for sin can be an ingenious way of trying to understand and control human suffering….If I could only be a better person, I would not have to suffer…this is the kind of magical thinking that comes from seeing suffering as punishment…and it doesn't work like that. The tower of Siloam in this morning's lesson fell on eighteen good enough people and crushed them.

In today's Gospel, Jesus tells us that one may not assume that the murdered Galileans or those crushed by the falling tower of Siloam were bigger sinners than the rest of us. We all suffer. We all sin, but there is more we can do, I expect, about our sin than our suffering. Suffering is part of the human portion, but we can repent of our sins..

Lent is about repentance. We have forty days to ponder if we will be take the time. Lent is a little like my annual visit to the doctor for a checkup. I hate being weighed in…even with shoes off the nurse continues to nudge the balance up the scale. Usually I don't like what I see. I may even feel guilt and shame, but there IS something I can do about it if I will. There is a remedy. Pass the chocolate by.

Just like my annual visit to the doctor, Lent is annual, inevitable and important for my well being…my spiritual well being. But weighing in on God's scale is no easier because the weight is serious business…things I have done to myself and to others..things I have left undone. You know the litany. But unless I weigh in at Lent, my life can well get out of control. Lent is our annual spiritual exam, not to be overlooked.

One thing I notice as I grow older….I see things in myself that I didn't used to notice…With growing self awareness, we get a new perspective on our weaknesses and strengths. From time to time, a sin I hadn't recognized surfaces…comes on my screen. Sometimes our seeing is triggered by confrontation, or therapy or a life experience. "If we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us"…..

We need that weekly reminder in our liturgy. It's easy enough to just let it go…easy to dismiss what we might call bad choices…how few choices CAN be perfect? Rationalizing becomes an art. But good and faithful people sin too.

There are times when I am called to see sin in a structure rather than a person…the club with an admission policy that is restrictive….I admire the member who drops out for that reason. Yes, structures and organizations and governments can have sin built in. And sin like the bad stain it is has even found its way into a distortion of Christian theology with devastating results.

My own personal sin is one thing, but is it possible to consider there may be sin in what has been taught me as a Christian? It's the last place I would look, and yet the time has come for me to see it, and having seen it, allow me to share my understandings and go on record with what I have seen.

Our faith as Lutheran Christians carries within it three principle teachings…Law and Gospel; promise and fulfillment and supersessionism. You may not know all those names nor what they mean and how they could possibly be sin. All our lives we have been absorbing these basic teachings and accepted their truth. But where the sin has come in is that these teachings have been skewed to convey a theology of contempt for the Jews. In the case of our Law and Gospel tradition, Law has been considered a burden and represents the Jewish faith. Gospel is full of grace and good and belongs to us. The fact is that the Jews have long looked on God's gift of law as an act of love and a sign of their covenant relationship.

In last Monday's Tribune it read: Jedwabne, Poland: The rough stone monument in this farming village shocks with its terse language. "Site of a massacre of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi soldiers burned l,600 people."

The Tribune article continues: "Poland is awakening to an awful reality: the Jews of Jedwabne were locked in a barn and burned to death on July l0, l94l, not by Nazis but by their neighbors, fellow Poles." And those Poles in all probability were practicing Christians.

It has always been easy to blame such atrocities on the faceless Nazi, but here it was that hate burned its next door neighbor. Christians, not Nazis, burned their neighbors.

Since the emperor Constantine gave the Christian Church some muscle, the struggle going on between Christians and Jews since the first century heated up. New power added fuel to the flame and what has followed are the ghettoes, pogroms, ridicule and within living memory the Holocaust.

The fact that the Jews are still a living faith community is a rebuke to some Christians…so much so that five years ago the Southern Baptist Convention set out in mission to convert God's Chosen People. Why didn't the Jews convert if we are right about Jesus?

Kill or convert…answers to the reality that God's children, the people of his first covenant, continue to be a living faith community. Like children, do we need to be Daddy's favorite? Do we begrudge God's love for all his children?

I first encountered this problem in a book, "Faith and Fratricide" written in l979 by a Catholic theologian, Rosemary Reuther. Faith and Fratricide was an appraisal of the effect of Christianity's teachings on the Jews. Our teachings and our texts have been hurtful. Watch those Lenten texts that speak repeatedly of : for fear of the Jews which in fact meant for fear of the Jewish authorities, the establishment.

In l994 some of you may know that the Lutheran Church issued a Declaration to the Jewish People in which the church repudiated Luther's vitriolic writings on the Jews. But even though we repudiated Luther's scurrilous writings, the underlying teaching of contempt that fired them continues to make its way into present day understandings.

As children we learned that God promised a Messiah to save us. The Old Testament was full of this beautiful promise, and the New Testament proclaimed its fulfillment in Jesus the Christ. It came to be interpreted as if the Jews had the promise, but it was the Christians who got the fulfillment. Christianity came to see itself as superseding Judaism...trumping it...declaring it null and void, while the Jews were foolishly left holding an empty bag. Supersessionism….Promise and Fulfillment.

It is true that Jesus has fulfilled God's promise, certainly to us a people who did not yet know God….in Jesus Christ God the creator reached out to us too. But it is not true that Christianity superseded Judaism, made it null and void. God can and does love us both. As people of God's New Covenant we do not need the dubious satisfaction of questioning the validity of God's relationship to other peoples. All we need to know as Christians is that we are called to love our neighbor as ourself.

This is what I have come to truly understand in this Lenten time, and what I now go on public record as repenting…that the age-old interpretation of our beloved Christian beliefs has been for centuries skewed into a teaching of contempt of the Jews. Sin and suffering have been with us for a long time. Jesus came to redeem us from sin, but not to cause our neighbor to suffer