Many times, when we read a contemporary book, we pass right over the short quotation many writers include in the very beginning to sum up the meaning or theme of their book. However, one novel that sits on my shelf has a great opening quotation that’s impossible to ignore: “Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig. ”
This strong citation from John Irving kept creeping into my mind as I read these scriptures for today. They are all full of hard sayings, of demands for faithfulness, and of the promise of judgment. In Jeremiah and the Psalm, God is basically saying that behavior is important, that God has some very real expectations of us, and that what we do matters. So we hear all that talk of discipline and of Judgment. Then there are Jesus’ words about division, and about fire, about what he must undergo and his impatience to get on with it.
All in all, not our usual Sunday fare. No gentle Jesus, meek and mild, no easy yokes or light burdens, no kind words about love and forgiveness. This is the other side of the Gospel, the other side of the faith; the side that we don’t embrace quite so willingly. Another quick quote, though. This from Graham Greene, “"The world is not black and white." There it is. And this strong, hard message is very much a part of the whole Christian message. While we might not like to hear it, it too is a message of God’s love. Sometimes there are more paths than the one we seem to tread.
And we need to hear it. We simply cannot ignore or overlook the reality that God offers us a vision of what human life can be, and what it should be. We pretty much know what that vision is. It has to do with shaping ourselves as people by living faithfully with God at the absolute center of our lives.
It has to do with telling the truth; and with living not for ourselves alone, but for another. It has to do with holiness of life, with a passionate concern for the poor, with seeking justice to all who are oppressed. It has to do with the way we take care of the stuff and the people God gives us.
It has to do with all of those things the people in the lessons today were being challenged to do, or more to the point to do better. What it all really comes down to is the imitation of Christ—the mission of Christ Jesus living again in us and through us. The scriptures remind us of how serious God is about this vision of life. God expects us to strive to conform our lives to it.
When Jesus talks about fire, and about his baptism, and about division and conflict, he is talking about what it looks like and what it feels like to struggle to live this way—to be faithful to the vision. A vision of a world in which God’s reign is realized; a place where peace, justice, and love rules the harts of humankind. How can such a place be a land of division? Let’s take a moment on that division.
Remember the Gospel of a few weeks back when James and John were mad at a village in Samaria and wanted to wipe it out by calling down fire from heaven? Jesus said, “No.” Now, the very next time fire is talked about in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Yes.” But this time, the fire of God’s presence is not aimed at the punishing the bad guys. Instead, the first one to feel that fire is Jesus himself. That’s the way it works. The fire that Jesus casts upon the earth is the fire that he first embraced. Then this fire—this passion and Spirit—comes to us.
It is the fire of transformation and faithfulness; the fire that comes, not to destroy, but to refine and purify. It is a fire that helps us see clearly all that we have been called to do, all that we have accepted as our costs and joy of discipleship. It is after we hear and struggle with this call that we will have something to say, and (much more importantly) something to show, to a world that definitely needs to clean up its act.
“The world is not black and white.” There is enough truth in that quote to drive each one of us to action.
But from where do we get the push to act, the energy to stand and challenge what we feel is wrong? The Hammer of Jeremiah was written long ago. And while it speaks to us, we struggle against its relevance in this time and place. For there is no word from God except the word which is spoken now. How can we get such a word that is spoken now and is spoken to us?
There is only one answer: By keeping ourselves open when it comes to us! This is not easy. We try to resist it, and if it is too strong for us we try to falsify it. We may be in a situation out of which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is too late for this. So the word from the God sound like a word of judgment and we cannot take it.
Or the word which comes to us requests a radical change in our ways of life and thought. But this we cannot achieve, and we back into our habits of thinking in only good and evil, of right and wrong. There can be no love where there is not grey.
Or we are in doubt and guilt and despair, and the word comes to us and tells us that we can say yes to ourselves because an eternal yes has been said to us and of us. But we resist the word which demands of us the courage to say yes to ourselves because we are in love with our doubt and our guilt and our despair.
It says in my manuscript that it’s time to tell a bad joke. These scriptures are hard to hear! With all this heavy hammer of God, we need a break.
These words may all sound like we are doomed, or that we have no choice in the matter. We are set to a path of this negative response, almost as if we had no choice.
Predestination? No, that was doomed from the start. Okay, that was the bad joke.
Now, it is important that we keep clear about something here. God does not give us this vision of how we should live so that God can sit up there with a checklist keeping score on how we do and gleefully sending us to hell if we get too many wrong answers. And none of these warnings about behavior and discipline have to do with whether or not God will continue to love us. That is a given, that is never at issue. Instead, there are at least two other reasons why God tells us these things about how our lives should look.
The first reason is that God loves us, and God wants for us the fullest and the richest and the deepest life we can have. We are created in such a way that life is available to us most fully when we try to live God’s vision of what it means to be a human being. It’s a little bit like the old simile which points out that cars are made to run on a certain kind of fuel. There are other sorts of fuel you can put in them that will work for a little while; and that can make for a very interesting ride, for a little while. But then it doesn’t work any more. And it will wreck the car. So it is with God’s vision for our lives. We just run better, for the long haul, when that is what we are using. We are made that way.
Now, living as we are called to live is not as easy as putting gas into the tank. It is sometimes very hard; and there are a lot of options out there. At the same time, the way we are created to live is not always the way the world around us says we should live. The values are different. And if we choose to hold to the values and the vision of our faith, then we will know very well what Jesus means when he talks about division, and conflict, and fire.
Nonetheless, in that direction lies life, at its fullest, and its most abundant. God loves us, and God wants that life for us, and God has made us for that life. That is one of the reasons God gives us God’s vision of how human beings should live—for our own sake.
The other reason has to do with our mission, with our calling to be the body of Christ, to carry out the work and the ministry of Jesus Christ in this place, and in our generation. Part of our witness to the world is offering a real option, a different way to live. Jesus did that. The way Jesus lived forced a choice upon everyone who met him. Remember, Jesus did not grab people by the throat and say, “You’re a jerk—and if you don’t get fixed you are in deep trouble.” Instead, he offered himself; he spoke of the Father; he told the truth; he lived with absolute integrity. People saw in Jesus something that has caused in them a crisis—and they had to choose.
And for the world to see Jesus today, it must look at us.
It does no good for us, or for the church, to sit on the sidelines and shout to the world out there that it is “bad, bad, bad.” Even, indeed especially, when it really is bad, bad, bad. Nor does it do much good to tell “them,” the folks out there, exactly what they should do to clean up their act. Even if, indeed especially, if we know. Instead, we are called, as was Jesus himself, to transform ourselves. To show and to tell the world what the Reign of God looks like, and how it is different. To live as we are created to live, by a God who loves us, and wants for us the best that can be. To see the beauty of the grey, and to embrace the message of extravagant welcome to all of God’s family.
That is what is behind all of these tough lessons. It is the call to that wholeness and completeness and new life that living as we are created to live can bring. And it is the call to share, not good advice, but new lives, with a world that is dying for the lack of exactly that. It is a challenge, and it is hard. But it is the way of life, and the way of hope.
Today, and every day, remember this: you are called. You are chosen to be the messengers and prophets of God’s love to all the world. Rejoice in this, and let’s get to work! Amen.
John irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany—quotation attributed to Leon Bloy