Read the Gospel here.
Well – this is quite the Gospel reading for my first Sunday at St. Helen’s – a stressed out Jesus talking about fire and division and destruction. Nothing quite like diving in at the deep end, I guess. And this is very much a deep end sort of Gospel reading, challenging any notions we might cherish about Jesus as some sort of always gentle, always nice hero and the Gospel as an uncomplicated good news story.
Neither of those pictures is true. The Good News of the Gospel is decidedly complicated – even as it is profoundly good – and Jesus, though certainly compassionate, was not so much “nice”.
He was too driven to be nice; too focused on his responsibility to proclaim God’s kingdom and call people to repentance and readiness; too complete in his devotion to God. These are not traits that make people easy to live with – I don’t think they are traits that make much of anything easy. Which is why we, much if not most of the time, find ourselves settling for “nice”; for a kind of peacekeeping that does not dig deep into why there might be conflict; a kind of justice seeking that relies on compromise rather than transformation; a kind of faith that turns fires of purification into comfortable campfires and pretends the signs of the present time are impossible to read.
We know what happens when we do otherwise. Conflict and division and trouble.
Jesus knew it. He is very clear about that truth. But Jesus didn’t let that stop him and he challenged those who followed him to not let it stop them, either. “If you would follow me,” he warns elsewhere, “you will have to carry your own cross.” You will have to recognize that your true family is the family of those who seek to do God’s will and not the family into which you were born. You will have to give up ideas about property and power and propriety in order to embrace a radical kind of love for God and for neighbour. The astonishing thing is that so many people followed Jesus anyways. They looked at the world around them with open eyes and broken hearts and they heard the words of hope and justice that Jesus spoke, saw the acts of healing and forgiveness, and they chose the hard path of truth.
These aren’t the people Jesus is speaking to in today’s Gospel reading – these people who were able to interpret the time and respond with such faith. He’s speaking to the others. To people who aren’t really prepared to create so much trouble for ourselves; for our families; for our friends. People who aren’t really prepared to see what’s going on in the world because that would require us to do something about it. People who are looking for safer, tamer ways to do God’s will.
He’s speaking to me, most of the time. I suspect he’s speaking to you, too – at least most of the time. The temptation to turn the Gospel into something safe and comfortable; into the good news of niceness and social decency, is very hard to resist. Especially so when we live in a world where niceness and social decency already do a pretty impressive job of hiding reality, creating a sort of feedback loop of false comfort. But, even so, we know that things aren’t so simple. We know there is profound injustice in our world; profound suffering. We even know that it exists right here, under the comfortable veneer our own communities. We know there is violence and hatefulness; isolation and oppression; hunger and sorrow and conflict. We know it is raining; know that the south wind is bringing scorching heat. We know how to interpret the present time. We would just rather not.
Let’s do it anyways. Even though we don’t really want to. Even though it is costly. Even though it is scary. Let’s do it anyways.
Just a few weeks ago in the lectionary and just a few moments ago in the Bible, Jesus told the same crowd that they didn’t need to worry about their own security and comfort. “Do not be afraid, little flock” he said, “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourself that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
“Do not be afraid, little flock”. That’s us – we’re the little flock that needn’t be afraid to see what’s really going on and live with the passion and faithfulness and disruptiveness of Jesus in the face of it.
So where do we start?
If you read my little introductory note on the website or in the parish email (which you should definitely subscribe to if you haven’t already!), you know that I am in my first year of a doctoral program in practical theology. One of my major assignments, which has already begun, it to conduct a study of my ministry context and one of the analytical tools we’ve been given is a set of four deceptively simple questions[1]:
- what is going on?
- why is it going on?
- what ought to be going on?
- how should we respond?
I think this is where we start. We start by really looking at what is going on – here at St. Helen’s, in the wider church, in the community, in the world, in our own hearts. We have to name the truth; the good parts and the bad parts and the confusing parts – all the parts. Where is there division? Where is there life? Where is there hypocrisy? What is really and truly going on?
Only once we know at least some of the answers to that, can we move on to the next questions. Why do we do what we do? Why do we not do what we do not do? What ought we do? What ought we stop doing? And how might we work towards those changes, as individuals and as a church?
Periods of transition can be enormous gifts, to parishes and priests alike, because they offer a natural opportunity to ask these kinds of questions of ourselves and of one another. I don’t already know your answers and you don’t already know mine, which is very exciting and a little nerve-wracking. And while I do want us to be nice to each other, I want even more for us to be brave together; to choose the hard path of truth; to follow the One who leads us to the cross -and to Resurrection.
“Do not be afraid, little flock. It is our Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom”
[1] Richard Osmer, Practical Theology, 2008