Quick info
Services:
Sundays
8:15 & 10 am
Child care provided
Office hours:
Tuesday - Friday
9 am - noon
Location:
5705 Lacy Rd.
Fitchburg WI 53711
View map
Phone:
608-273-1008
Calendar
Our events
Contact info
Names, e-mails
"Like" us
| Hanging on in the midst of divisions |
|
By
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
(please respond by email with questions or comments) Aug. 15, 2010 Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12: 49-56 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. There’s not really a very big market for greeting cards based on today’s Gospel reading. We don’t tend to send our friends cards reminding them that Jesus’ words don’t always bring peace. We don’t tend to send our kids’ cards reminding them that religious beliefs sometimes break up families. We don’t send out “the end is near” cards to those we love. Yet those are the messages in the Gospel that we get to wrestle with today. It’s a good thing we also had that reading from the letter to the Hebrews, because ultimately, I think it will help us make sense of how all of this might affect our lives. Jesus’ words today may seem at odds with the images of Jesus we carry around with us. There is nothing very tender when he says, “I came to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it had already been kindled. I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed.” A bit of context might help. In Luke’s telling of the story of Jesus, there comes a point when Jesus start his journey toward Jerusalem with an awareness that this journey is going to have a painful ending before new life breaks through. Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth includes angels singing about peace on earth. Luke’s story about Jesus’ teaching includes the idea of loving one’s enemies. But as Jesus’ own enemies plot against him, you can hear the anxiety rise in Jesus’ words to his followers. A few chapters before our reading today, Luke tells us that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” There’s a grim determination in those words. Now he is talking about bringing fire to the earth, waiting for a baptism, anticipating divisions. Think about that fire not necessarily as destructive – although that is certainly one plausible interpretation – but as passion. Jesus was so passionate about his message he was willing to die for it. The baptism is not the cleansing baptism of water he experienced with John at the Jordan River, but a baptism of fire, of suffering that will come at his death. As much as he dreads it, you can understand why he might be anxious to get it over with, why he is feeling under stress until it is completed. I’d like to turn to that great scripture scholar Garth Brooks for a moment to offer a bit of insight in to this. You may think of Garth more as a great country singer, but listen to these words from his song “Standing Outside the Fire” and see if they might connect to what Jesus was talking about: We call them cool Those hearts that have no scars to show The ones that never do let go And risk the tables being turned We call them fools Who have to dance within the flame Who chance the sorrow and the shame That always comes with getting burned But you've got to be tough when consumed by desire 'Cause it's not enough just to stand outside the fire And then there is the chorus: Standing outside the fire Standing outside the fire Life is not tried, it is merely survived If you're standing outside the fire The first thing we can take away from this Gospel, then, is a call to be willing to join Jesus in standing within the fire, to be passionate about being on the way with Jesus. Here’s a problem with that. Passions cause divisions. They can cause divisions within families – “father against son, mother against daughter.” They can cause divisions within communities, within the world. It’s hardly news that religious beliefs divide people, sometimes violently. Jesus knew that. He knew that people were rejecting – and would reject -- his message. It’s not that he was rejoicing in the divisions of the world. He was simply recognizing them as a fact. That’s why it’s important to pair that call to passion and that awareness of divisions with his earlier words about loving enemies. If our passion for the way of Jesus and our recognition of the divisions that come with that morphs into hatred for others, then we are really missing the whole point of what Jesus was talking about. It seems to me that our identity as Christians ought to be marked by our ability to recognize that there are differences among the faith traditions in our world and even among Christians, but that we never let those divisions cause us to forget that we are all created in God’s image and that we all share a common humanity. One of our tasks is to find ways to bridge the divisions, not to exacerbate them. Some of you may have been following the controversy around plans by some Muslims to build a cultural center and mosque in New York City a couple of blocks from Ground Zero where the World Trade Center stood until Sept. 11, 2001. Because the people who attacked the World Trade Center appropriated a distorted version of Islam to justify their actions, you can understand the sensitivity around the location of this Islamic center. But Muslims were also working in the World Trade Center and nearby buildings that day. They were also killed in that horrific act by people who were trying to hijack their religion. The people hoping to build this center want it to be an interfaith gathering place. The opposition to it has gone well beyond the pain of families of 9/11 victims to an all-out assault on a rich religious tradition. That has extended to opposition to Islamic Centers from Tennessee to California, even to Sheboygan, Wisconsin – places nowhere close to Ground Zero. It has led to plans at a church in Gainesville, Florida that claims to be Christian to call for an “International Burn a Koran Day” this Sept. 11. Yes, it’s also true that there are countries where Muslims are dominant in which Christians feel threatened. Certainly Jewish people know how vulnerable they were over the centuries in countries that were ruled by Christians. Yes, religious belief has a way of dividing people. And it’s not just across faith traditions. It’s within religions as well. We Christians know that very well. It started with the earliest Christians and continues to our own day. Just a few weeks ago, superstar novelist Anne Rice announced on her Facebook page that she was leaving Christianity, but that was not exactly what she was doing. She was leaving one expression of Christianity that she found did not reflect her understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. She wrote: “It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed.” It would be easy for us to say she just picked the wrong group of Christians to hang out with, that she should have joined the UCC, that she should have come to Memorial. Yes, we hope that we are less quarrelsome, not hostile, not unwelcoming to the wide spectrum of people who come from different races, ethnicities, marital statuses, sexual orientations, socio-economic levels. But we’re not perfect either. And we live with a progressive theology that others who follow Christ find too flexible, even offensive. Remember earlier when I said one interpretation of Jesus’ use of the word “fire” is more destructive that the one I adopted? Well, sincere people have wrestled throughout time with what the words of Jesus mean. And so we have divisions. With those divisions, with the animosity that comes with them, we can wind up feeling pretty discouraged. This does not seem like the realm of God we heard Jesus talking about. We seem to stumble an awful lot as human beings along the way. That’s why the reading from the letter to the Hebrews is so important today. The author – and we don’t really know who the author of this letter was – has been recounting the decisive moments and Biblical heroes of Judaism. The author is making the point how their faith in God carried them through both triumphs and hard times. Then there is this line which I think is critical to everything we are talking about today: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” Eugene Peterson, whose translation of the Bible called The Message we use here sometimes, gives that even more impact. Here’s how he put it: “God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.” The events and heroes cited in the letter to the Hebrews each took the Jewish people a bit closer to the world they understood God envisioned for them. But they were just steps along the way and sometimes they seemed like steps backwards. They did not totally receive what God had promised, because there were others coming after them who had work to do as well. Think about the Civil Rights movement in this country. A young man from Louisiana said in 1988: “Booker T. Washington started to teach so Rosa Parks could take her seat. Rosa Parks took her seat so Fannie Lou Hammer could take her stand. Fannie Lou Hammer took her stand so Martin Luther King Jr. could march. Martin Luther King marched to Jesse Jackson could run.” And we could add 20 years later that Jesse Jackson ran so that Barak Obama could be elected. And yet the struggle for racial equality goes on. Likewise the movement for women’s equality. We celebrate this month the fact that 90 yeas ago, women in the United States got the right to vote. It was not a quick process. Susan B. Anthony, who as much as anyone, embodied that struggle, died well before it came to pass. Yet in 1895, she said with confidence, “It’s coming sooner than most people think.” It was not until 1920 that it arrived, after 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses and battles in state legislatures all across the nation. And still the movement for women’s equality goes on. One more example. This month, we are grieving the shocking deaths of the ten medical aid workers in Afghanistan, workers who were there because of their passion for their faith, a faith that called them to serve, not to try to convince others that their way was the only way. They spent years doing work they knew was risky in a war-torn country. They could not heal every eye, fix every toothache, attend to every sick person. Still, their passion made a difference in the lives of so many people, even as their lives were lost to the divisions that haunt our world. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews understood that we all rely on that great cloud of witnesses that came before us to be with us as we continue to work to live as we believe God wants us to live. Let me add another song here, one that is probably familiar to many of you. It comes from a musical that originated in the 1940s, but this song has long been used to remind us that none of us stands alone, even in what seems like hard times. The musical is Carousel. The song is “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Walk on through the wind, Walk on through the rain, Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown. Walk on, walk on With hope in your heart And you'll never walk alone, You'll never walk alone. We don’t walk alone. We have the cloud of witnesses with us and we have each other as we strive to bring the world closer to what God intended. But the writer of the letter to the Hebrews not only looked back. The writer also saw Jesus – the pioneer and perfecter of our faith – out there ahead of us. Jesus went through the fire and the baptismal immersion of suffering and death, but that was not the end. Jesus transformation into new life offers hope for us. When we are touched by the stories of those who came before us, it is one way God’s grace enters our lives. When we let the words of Jesus soak into our beings, when we wrestle with them and let them transform us as individuals and as a community, it is one of the ways God’s grace enters our lives. We rely on that grace to energize us, to sustain us, to comfort us. It’s an amazing thing, that grace. So as we move into the next portion of our service, please join in singing the first three verses of one of the most familiar hymns around, “Amazing Grace.” It’s number 547 in your hymnals. |