Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading: Isaiah 5:1-7/NRSVUE
Gospel: Luke 12:49-56/NRSVUE
It might be hard to appreciate living in a place that’s as dry as Utah is, but when we lived in the Boston suburbs our house had a serious flaw that we discovered about a year after we moved in: the basement flooded when it rained a lot.
An average storm would leave behind only small puddles in some of the low spots, which didn’t concern us very much; after all, when we bought the house, we knew that it was two hundred years old, had a foundation made of fieldstone, and also had a sump pump. Clearly, the basement had remained unfinished for that long for a reason. But we were caught completely off-guard one weekend when our area of Massachusetts racked-up over six inches of rain in a day.
As the saying goes when it rains, it pours, and that was true on multiple levels that weekend. For starters, it really did pour — that was a lot of rain to get in a short amount of time. Making this bad situation worse was the arrival of the heaviest rain in the wee hours of Saturday morning — while we were trying to sleep. And making that worse situation even worse still was the fact that our overworked pump died at about three a.m.
I remember just standing there, watching the rising water encroach ever closer to the boiler, the water heater, the washer and dryer, knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop it.
A couple of hours later, the pump cooled-off to a point where it suddenly started working again which felt every bit as miraculous as Lazarus rising from the dead. Eventually, the rain stopped, the tide went back out and the remaining water in the basement dried up; but the stress of this experience stayed with me for a long time.
In the aftermath, I did some things to mitigate the effects were such an event to happen again — I fixed the downspouts on the gutters; I raised the washer and dryer off the floor; I installed a second pump; I even got a third pump as a backup in case one of the other two failed. But, as prepared as I tried to be, I knew that I was still at nature’s mercy.
And so I found myself becoming kinda obsessed with the weather. I would spend lots of time online reading forecasts, studying maps and watching radar, trying to figure out when the next deluge would arrive. I didn’t go so far as to build an ark but the thought did cross my mind.
In retrospect, I realize that this was pretty ridiculous; I’d done everything I could to be ready for the next storm, and knowing what the weather was going to be didn’t mean that I could change it. Try though I might, I couldn’t actually alter the course of the clouds through the sheer force of my will.
But perhaps the worst part of all this was that every minute that I spent worrying about things in the future that I couldn’t change was a minute that I wasn’t doing things in the present that I could and probably should have been doing. I could have read more; I could have volunteered more; I could have spent more time with friends and family. But I didn’t because my priorities were kind of messed-up. And this is exactly what Jesus is taking his listeners to task for in today’s reading from Luke.
You might have come to church on this beautiful summer day with an image in your mind of a happy Jesus strolling through a field of wildflowers, surrounded by a halo of bright sunlight, holding hands with some smiling children and being followed by a herd of lambs. And, if you did come here today with that image of Jesus in your mind, I’m really sorry because this Jesus ain’t that Jesus.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Yeah, Jesus, I kinda did think that; after all, you’re known as the “Prince of Peace” aren’t you? Besides, it says right there at the beginning of this very same gospel that you will be the one, and I quote, “to guide our feet into the way of peace,” and the word “peace” (and variants of it) appear twenty seven times in Luke’s version of your life story, so, Jesus, I hope you can understand why people might think that you had, in fact, come to bring peace to the earth.
And yet, today we get angry Jesus, which doesn’t happen all that often in the gospels (especially in Luke’s) and when it does happen, it’s uncomfortable. Because this kind of depiction of Jesus is so unusual, we should probably see it as his (and Luke’s) way grabbing our attention in order to tell us something that we really need to know.
Jesus unloads on the crowd with images of fire and division and conflict that we don’t typically hear coming from his mouth; he resorts to some good, old-fashioned name-calling — “hypocrites” is the one he chooses to hurl at them here.
A few weeks ago, we looked at a parable from earlier in Luke in which Jesus calls a rich man a “fool.” And if he did this as a roundabout way of pointing out that some of his listeners themselves were fools, that was clever because it allowed him to maintain plausible deniability (“No, that was just a story, I wasn’t calling you a fool”). Today, however, Jesus is standing in front of a large group of people and telling them that they’re “hypocrites” right to their faces. It seems that as the gospel unfolds, Jesus’s frustration is increasing — and pretty quickly at that.
He’s a little stressed out, and rightfully so. And I’m not reading too much into things when I say that. In today’s passage, Jesus himself actually tells the crowd, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”
You see, just a few chapters ago Jesus turned his face toward Jerusalem and he’s been steadily making his way there ever since; he’s determined to go and meet whatever fate awaits him there (and we all know what that is). As his time here on earth grows shorter — and as his death looms larger (this is the “baptism” he’s talking about) — Jesus is growing more and more anxious; he has so much left to teach his disciples before he departs, but they don’t ever seem to understand what he’s saying to them. And so today, Jesus, out of frustration, really let’s them have it.
He makes just how challenging it will be for them to be disciples — and that’s definitely true. All that stuff about love of God and neighbor, about care for the poor, about justice and righteousness, sounds nice and simple on paper, but it’s a lot harder in practice.
The world, as we all know, is just not wired to run like that, and so the arrival of God’s reign here on earth is gonna require some pretty significant changes to the way we go about our business. It will alter, among other things, the very nature of our relationships with one another — father and son, mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, so on and so forth — and this will not be an easy process; but meaningful and lasting change is rarely easy.
And because this is true, us humans, as a general rule, don’t like change very much. Jesus is ultimately talking about turning a world of haves and have-nots into a world in which everyone has. And while that might seem great if you’re one of the have-nots, it probably makes you nervous if you’re one of the haves. Heck, you might be a little uneasy even if you’re one of the have-nots: I mean, what if things get worse before they get better? What if things get worse and don’t ever get better? Might the devil you know be better than the devil you don’t?
And therein lies the fundamental problem that Jesus is addressing here: We tend to put such a high value on predictability that we cut ourselves off from possibility. We obsess about knowing what the future will bring instead of thinking about (and working for) a future that could be different from — that could be better than — our past and our present.
And so maybe Jesus refers to the crowd as “hypocrites” not because he’s angry at them, but rather because he wants to point out the contradictions in their behavior. They might be able to predict certain aspects of the future, but they remain passive recipients of that future — they might be able tell you that it’s going to rain tomorrow, but they can’t actually change the fact that it’s going to rain tomorrow. While it might be really helpful or important in some ways to know this information, there are limits to the benefits that this kind of concern about the future can bring.
But the gospel that Jesus is preaching does not have such limits, and the future that Jesus promises is definitely not passive. We can work toward a future where God’s reign becomes reality here on earth for everyone by what we do right here and right now. Indeed, we must work in order to create that kind of future. And Ii we’re truly concerned about what comes next, then this is what we ought to be doing instead worrying about stuff like whether it’s going to rain tomorrow.
And yet, I get why people — both then and now — choose to do things more along the lines of staring up at the sky instead. First, it requires a lot less effort to do that than it does to try and change the world, and second, it means that nothing ever really needs to change. We can simply wait around for what’s happened in the past to happen again. Like Jesus says, when the clouds rise in the west, it generally rains; when the south wind blows, it typically brings scorching heat. With such things there is some discernible link between cause and effect. These demonstrated patterns make sense to us. We know we can rely on them because we have a track record of them being true. But this gospel thing is a whole different story; the outcome of it is so unpredictable, so much less certain, so wild.
Think about it: Into the world walks this strange guy from the wrong side of town proclaiming himself to be the Messiah;
wanting to change the way things are and have always been;
seeking to overthrow our understanding of how everything works;
telling us that peace, and love for God and neighbor, and concern for the poor, and justice for all, are what give life meaning — not wealth and possessions and status.
It just doesn’t make sense. I really want to believe him but there’s no precedent for any of this, no evidence to back it up, no reason to think that it could actually be true. It all sounds so unpredictable, so risky and so difficult.
And so why should I believe him? Why should I go out and try to change the world? The answer is simple, really: it’s because that’s what faith is all about.