SET ABLAZE - A Homily

This homily was delivered at Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, South Dakota on Sunday, August 14, 2022.

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Luke 12:49-56

Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 

From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:  father against son and son against father, mother against daughter
and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" 

(the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA)

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 In the Name of our loving God.  Amen.

We’re not as familiar with the Jesus depicted in this reading - a Jesus who is not peacemaker - a Jesus who causes division.

Christianity has a tendency to distort the image of Jesus; in that, it downplays his being a human like us.  We say Jesus is true man and true God, but let’s face it, of the two descriptions, the one people have been banking on for the past 1800 years is Jesus as true God.  It’s time we reorient ourselves to the true man of that credal equivocation in order to properly understand the power of the Gospels in our lives, because what is true for Jesus is true for us.  He is one of us and we need to be one with him.

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During Jesus’ ministry, the Gospels make it clear he struggled with getting his message about the Kingdom of God across to people. Jesus encountered the difficulties all prophets encounter when speaking truth to those who don’t want to hear it and opening our eyes to the ignored obvious taking place around us. Perhaps the best description of Jesus, the man, is the one the early Church found in the writings of the prophet Isaiah:

He grew up as a tender shoot in a harsh environment.  There was nothing majestic about him; nothing about his appearance that would attract attention.   He was rejected by most.  He experienced suffering and understood grief.  He was despised as someone who didn’t count.  (Isaiah 53:2b-3, paraphrased)

Jesus was not the auburn haired, nordic type we see depicted in paintings and stained glass windows. The Jesus of Jesus’ day would have looked more like the Palestinian of today.  At times, the Gospels depict him looking unkempt from being pressed by the throngs seeking to be healed and looking crazed when passionately preaching about the Kingdom of God;  At one point his mother and brothers even planned an intervention to prevent him from making and spectacle of himself.  What attracted people to Jesus was his passion for healing the incurable, forgiving the unforgivable, and loving the unloveable - his human touch.

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What was a day in the life of this man Jesus like?  Luke 11 and 12 record one day in the life of Jesus’ ministry, the day from which this reading is taken.

 

After teaching his disciples how to pray, Jesus healed a man rendered mute by what was believed to be a demon.  As a result, Jesus was accused of being able to do so because he was in league with the prince of demons, Beelzebub.

Then he was invited to dine at the house of a Pharisee.  Jesus, in state of fatigue and hunger, headed straight to the table without performing the usual washing up ritual before eating which his offended his host.Then there was the man who wanted to use Jesus as his personal agent to Bible-thump his brother into sharing an inheritance he felt entitled to.  It is no wonder that Jesus would take off in the middle of the night to get away from it all and  seek the solace of the night’s silence and pray.

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Jesus was a suspected troublemaker in his day; a threat to the status quo, not only by the religious authorities of his day, but also to the Romans who were all too ready to crucify anyone causing trouble. People were divided over Jesus because they didn’t know what to make of him.  We’re still divided over Jesus.  

Conducting an online search regarding how many Christian denominations exist today, I found there are 45,000 different Christian denominations worldwide. In the US, there are 200 Christian denominations, but If one asks how many non-denominational Christian churches there are in the US alone, the answer, as of 2012, is over 84,000. What I see dividing Christians are the various teachings we have about Jesus; teachings that have largely dispensed with the teachings of Jesus.

Understanding Jesus as one of us prompts us to take a closer look at his teachings, which are vital in dealing with the world of today.  Unless we are immersed in the fiery baptism of Jesus’ passionate ministry and his love for all that God loves, we really can’t claim to know Jesus because we haven’t carried on his work and be like him, the daughters and sons God called us to be at our baptisms.

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At the close of this reading, Jesus challenges us, “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

I’m not so sure we’re good at interpreting the appearance of the earth and sky nowadays; much less, interpreting the present time.  The challenge for us today, as it was in Jesus’ time, is to avoid hypocrisy; acting as if we know the mind of God, thinking that by claiming to be Christian our thoughts must be God’s thoughts on the issues we are confronting today.  Isaiah reminds us, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).  

Nothing makes this more apparent than the table-turning teachings and ministry of our brother Jesus who sheds a new light on our darkening world, who bequeathed us his ministry of healing those who are hurting, forgiving the unforgivable, and loving the unloveable; a visionary ministry that would set our world ablaze with the purgatorial fire of God’s love that would burn away the chaff of our selfish desires to expose the pure grain of our God-made selves. 

May such a fire burn within us today and always.    Amen. 

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm  

CARING FOR ONE'S SOUL - A HOMILY

 This was the homily I prepared for Sunday July 31.

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Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.

(The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA) 

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Jesus’ parable about a rich man, a well-to-do farmer who has experienced an huge bumper crop of grain, that exceeded the capacity of his current grain bins and who is laying in bed thinking  to himself about how he can maximize this harvest to his benefit is a bit odd.

Let’s be honest, could anyone of us sitting here in today’s world blame him for thinking this way?    It’s his grain.  He planted it.  He sowed it and he reaped what he sowed.  Isn’t he entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor, the blessing of such a great harvest?  Why not build better grain bins?  Why not enjoy the thought of being able to sit back, eat, drink, and be merry? 

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Was Jesus just having a bad day?   What got Jesus so riled up that he shouts, “Take care!  Be on your guard against all kinds of greed because one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possession!”

One could say that Jesus was having a bad day, which started back in Luke 11, the chapter that preceded today’s reading, where after healing a man of demon possession was accused of casting out demons by the prince of demons, Beelzebub. Then Jesus was being chastised for not properly washing up before dining by the Pharisee who invited him to dine.  Finally, there is this man who wants Jesus to tell his brother to share the inheritance that was left to his brother, as if  Jesus’ primary role was to fix the mundane issues of the world we created.

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Yes.  Jesus was having a bad day but not as bad as the day the people who were being trite, who were caught up in their self-righteousness, their sense of self importance; who failed to see the goodness of God working through Jesus for them and  who couldn’t see God’s love within their own souls; in that, they were caught up in what Jesus described as every form of greed in which the small self of egoism shaped their limited perspective of life’s meaning and purpose.

To address this limited perspective and to get them and us out of our mundane comfort zone,  Jesus invited them - invites us - into this parable in which he reveals the inner thoughts, the inner dialogue between this rich man and his own soul on the very night this man’s souls, his very life would be required by God.  

In Genesis 2, the soul is described as the totality of our being, shaped by God’s own hands and breathed to life in order to bear the image of God within the world of God’ creating.  The problem that Jesus is addressing in this parable is the failure to recognize what we just recited in the Jubilate; “Know this: The Lord himself is God; he himself has made and we are his….”

The man in the parable had forgotten who made him, whose he was.  He fell victim to that deceptive idea of the self-made person, the person who has pulled oneself up by one’s bootstraps, who owes no one anything, even God.   This becomes apparent when he says to his soul, as if he alone owned it, “`Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” 

It was at that point in the parable that God speaks to the man directly, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

Jesus ends this parable by saying, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”  Through the use of the stark imagery of this parable Jesus is stressing the need to take care of our souls by keeping in mind who made us, whose we are, and  that our life’s purpose is not to make the most of our lives by through the acquisition of things, but to present in our lives the righteous image of God.

Unfortunately, the lectionary left out of today’s reading Jesus’ explanation of the parable and gives us a clue how to be mindful in caring for our souls which I will paraphrase:

After this parable, Jesus said to his disciples, “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will wear.  Life is more than eating well and looking good.  Look at the birds: they don’t sow or reap, they don’t have storage bins. God feeds them.  If God feeds them, God will feed you. 

There really is enough for everyone if we stop being anxious about things that really don’t matter.

Do you think worrying about acquiring more than you need will add a single hour to your life?

If being anxious about such things won’t add an hour to your life, why bother with such things?

Look at the wildflowers that grow in the pastures.  If God clothes the grasslands with such beauty, God will clothe you because you are a child of God, made in the image of God,  

Trust God!  Stop worrying about what you think you need to acquire in order to live a good life in the here and now.  God knows what you need.  Rather, seek God in your life; find the image of God within your soul.  Be the child of God that you are and you will find that your soul’s truest and deepest desires will be met.”  (Compare original text in Luke 12: 22-31)

To which I can only say -  Amen.

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm