Some sad news ...

A good friend died this week: Barney Farnham. He was a very kind man, a priest, a risk-taker, a gentle soul, who did indeed listen for the voice of the Spirit moving among us. Here is his obituary from the Baltimore Sun, which does not mention his summer duties. He served the parish in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, where we worship every summer, where the congregation gives more than half of its income away to folks who struggle to make a living in the Adirondacks. We never got the chance to have our annual summer evening of dinner and drinks and real conversation. He is missed.

I have also missed a couple weeks of sermons to post!! This is the one from August 19. "God expects a lot from us," I begin. Yes, indeed. When God hands us turmoil -- like moving (!) -- like the death of a beloved friend -- like uncertainty about where we are to go next -- not to mention those things which cause us deep despair, like the global climate change we have created, or the war in Iraq we let happen, or the homeless we let sleep on our city streets ... yes, God expects a lot from us.

Proper 15 C 8/19/2007 St. Paul’s Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80 Hebrews11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

God, I am afraid, expects a lot from us.

This passage from Isaiah, for example, is an impassioned plea. Isaiah begs the faithless people (us) to get back with God, God the heart-broken and bereft, God the anguished, feeling abandoned. If God’s anger seems over the top, it’s because God’s investment in the people – in us -- has been so high. God expects, well, those same old things. God expects us to hold up our part of the relationship with God, by showing love, hospitality, generosity, service with all our neighbors. That is the seed God has planted in us, God’s garden, and God expects that seed to flourish.

Jesus, I am afraid, also expects a lot from us.

Today’s gospel is a difficult passage for those of us who look to Jesus for a little peace and quiet in our lives. According to this passage, we won’t get it. This is Jesus as the disturber of the peace, the upsetter of the apple cart, the one who will soon overturn the tables of the money changers and all the business-as-usual that represents. Fire, stress, division, clouds rising, wind blowing, scorching heat: when we pray for Jesus to come among us, this is what we will get. When we ask Jesus to come into our lives, we had better be prepared for change.

Ninety years ago the world was in turmoil, and people in the countries which were engaged in bloody and violent war believed that everything they had come to rely on was shattered. Many thoughtful people were shocked that human beings could behave as barbarically as they were doing on the battlefields of Europe. In this all-out war, towns were destroyed, families shattered, whole populations displaced. The painful irony of the First World War is that it came after an era hailed as one of great progress: for society, for science, for peace and prosperity, for Christianity. The spreading empires of the great European Christian powers, as well as the missionary efforts here, across North America, surely meant the world was becoming a better place, with the dawning of a new, harmonious day.

But with the horror of the First World War, those progressive hopes were gone. Rather than Jesus the bland, pious and optimistic, a new understanding of God in the world had to emerge. "The only safe place for the Christian in this life is in the center of the storm, in the midst of the battle, for that is precisely where Jesus is,” wrote German theologian Karl Barth, who lived through the First World War, and whose theology was a life-long reflection on that experience. God meets us, Barth says, where life is the hardest: where violence and anger erupts in families and among friends; where people are suffering and starving; where the demands of the gospel pit even people who love each other against each other. Barth knew that a Jesus depicted as harmonious and sociable could not sustain people wrenched from all their moorings, a people plunged into a social conflict not of their own making: "To defend the poor,” he wrote, “provokes the anger of the rich; to defend the outcast enrages the in-group; to support a fair wage irritates the robber-barons, to call for peace incites others to war."

The urgency we read in the 2000-year-old gospel, or the 80-year-old writings of Karl Barth is the urgency of a world out of balance. The demands of the prophet Isaiah 800 years before the birth of Christ could be written today, as God cries in anguish over young murder victims on the summer streets of Brockton, or over this seemingly unwinnable-by-any-side war in Iraq. Do we read the signs of the times any better than we predict the weather? Not if the people of New Orleans left vulnerable by the governments they thought were protecting them are any measure – or the people of Haiti, having lost every roll of the dice in the global economy, who fear the next hurricane that will wash their poor soil and poor people into the sea. It’s this world that is out of balance, and we know it, and God knows it, and only heaven can help us now.

Jesus may be expecting extraordinary things from us, but Jesus is not expecting us to go it alone. Jesus, Emmanuel, the God-with-us, also takes us up into God, right into the heart of the divine activity. We are not only following Jesus, doing what Jesus would have us do, but when we are doing God’s work of repairing this broken world, it is Christ working through us.

This gospel passage is about what we do when we see the fractures and terror of the world around us, about what we do when things have gone awry. The number of murders here in Brockton is a sign, pointing to deep social and personal problems, to a lack of well-paying and meaningful work, to a lack of decent, affordable places to live, to a surplus of vital young people with time on their hands and death-dealing drugs and guns too easy to find. What Jesus is saying is when we see those things, when our eyes are opened to the signs of the times and we can measure how far off we have come from the people God created us to be, then there is hope. Then the work of change, of healing, of rebuilding can begin.