Division

Luke 12:49-56

Well, that’s just what we need today, isn’t it?

Division!

More rupture, polarization, friction, disunity.

In church.

As if we didn’t have enough division anywhere else.

 

I’m sorry, Jesus, could we maybe have a do-over, and this time you do come to bring peace?
And unity and cooperation and healing and, well, more of the things many of us probably came looking for this morning? More of the goodwill among all people that the angels promised when you were born?

 

No.

Jesus knows we need peace and unity and healing. And he also knows we need to take seriously what he’s saying today.

Probably at least in part because if we don’t listen to the uncomfortable parts of what he came to say, our unity and peace and cooperation won’t last through too many of the uncomfortable or divisive parts of our actual lives.

 

The thing is, when Jesus tells us that he came to bring not peace, but division, he’s not calling for civil war. He’s not stating intentions.  He’s talking about the predictable, everyday consequences of taking his call to healing and repentance and transformation and love seriously in the middle of a world that doesn’t take that seriously.

Fire and friction, opposition between children and parents, households and families divided from each other are not God’s desire, not Jesus’ intent. They’re the consequences to the culture we live in when we embrace the full reality of Jesus’ preaching and miracles; his incarnation, death and resurrection.

 

Because you and I, like the disciples or onlookers who first heard Jesus say this, live in a world that prioritizes self-interested gain and marks of status, self-protection and being on the winning team, security and comfort and success.

That generates plenty of conflict, competition, and division among us individually, but we can also all be united in wanting a rising economy that will lift everyone’s standard of living, or the success of our group projects (whether that’s building a family or sustaining a business), or safe communities to live in and friendly neighborhoods.

We might disagree about the political or practical ways to achieve these things, but we do have cultural values in common.

 

And Jesus challenges those cultural values, right at their roots.

Take up your cross. Sacrifice yourself.

Put others – especially the people who don’t seem to have earned success and respect, people with disabilities, differences, disadvantages – ahead of yourself because God loves them.

Love your enemies. Yes, those enemies.

Love, honor, respect, support your neighbor as much as, and in the same way as, you would care for yourself.

Call out systems of injustice or oppression, in public as well as private, even when you’re talking to the big boss. Work constantly for justice and freedom and human dignity in small and private ways as well as public and powerful ways.

Forgive others. Seek forgiveness – admitting your wrongs and honestly trying to change the things that draw you into evil or error or hatred.

 

So much of those teachings of Jesus is what many of us want to do. Want to be people of love and generosity and forgiveness and transformation.

And many of us – when we try to live that love and generosity and justice and care like Jesus – get pushback and division from the culture around us.

 

When we spend serious money on paying down a stranger’s unjust medical debt, or feeding and supporting people who are homeless, we can get subtle or blatant messages from the culture around us that we should be saving that money to protect us against some unspecified future need, or that it’s a waste to help people who will still be poor or ill or on the street tomorrow. That the smart thing is to leave people who must have gotten into their mess themselves to get out of it themselves
(spoiler alert, most of the time people did not get into that trouble by themselves. It’s just a lot easier on our hearts and social systems to act as if they did).

 

When we try to vote or protest or advocate or write policies to protect the dignity of all, to keep justice from always sliding toward the side of the big boss or the best connections, to make our politics and business and educational worlds more generous – when we try to shape the world and society we live in according to Jesus’ teachings, we make enemies.

 

Or discover divisions in our families, find ourselves on the “other side” from friends we’ve always liked.

 

And let’s be clear, regardless of where we stand in the US political party system, we will always find people in our social networks – in our church even – who are convinced we’re wrong about the best way to legislate, or pay for, healing, peace, human dignity, freedom, cooperation, and justice.

 

The teachings, healings, transformation, holiness, and forgiveness that Jesus brings into our world are just fundamentally so different from the way that our social and economic world is structured that they will inevitably bring division.

Because our cultural norms are fundamentally rooted in human self-interest.

And Jesus is fundamentally rooted in God’s creativity and radical, fierce, love.

 

Jesus isn’t telling us today that he wants to destroy us.

He’s warning us that loving like God loves is hard. Is going to put us out of step with the world we actually live in. And will shatter our assumptions about what’s right, and about how we belong.

 

Not for division’s own sake.

But so that the world as we know it can be transformed, from the roots, into the world as God desires it to be. The world that God loves us to be.

 

And if we don’t know it’s hard, if we don’t listen to Jesus’ warning today, if we only look for universal peace and goodwill that comes in some great swoop and yet doesn’t change anything we’re comfortable with, we’re never going to be able to recognize the real shape and effects of God’s peace and unity and love, and receive it.

 

When we know that the glory, transformation, abundance, freedom and radical love of the world God is working to reveal is going to disrupt all we know and are used to, we, too, will have the anchor that holds us secure through the storms.

When we know it’s not easy, we’ll be ready to persist.

And we’ll find ourselves joining the “great cloud of witnesses” described in the Letter to the Hebrews today. Those who made it through the division and derision and fire of their own cultures, their own lives, generation after generation, and whose stories and work support us in our own embrace of Jesus’ radical love here and now.
Those generations of “witnesses” who join us in waiting for the full, fierce, transformative accomplishment of God’s promises of a vibrant, living, active peace among all people. The cloud of witnesses, this crowd of siblings in God’s family, long ago and here and now, who make sure that we are never doing the hard work of Jesus’ love alone.

How Did It Get So Bad?

Hosea 11:1-11; Colossians 3:1-11

Do you ever find yourself shaking your head at the state of the world?

Wondering how on earth people, communities, or nations can be so lost, misguided, even malicious?

Fearing the consequences of all that?

 

Well, you’re not alone.

That’s how we hear that God is feeling, today, as we listen to the prophet Hosea.

 

“How has this mess emerged from my beloved people?” God is saying.

This people that I have cherished as an infant, held and nurtured. I held their hands as they learned to walk, scooped them up and made it better, fed them, cuddled them in love.

 

How is it possible that they have gotten themselves in such a mess, forgetting all that I have taught them, turning to the latest shiny gods and ignoring me?

Gotten themselves into fights and bad company, so that Assyria is beating them up. How have they gotten on this road to utter destruction?

 

You can actually feel the heartache as God remembers all that tender care, and wonders how it could have gone so wrong.

 

Hosea, channeling God’s distress, first told all this to a kingdom on the edge of collapse – they’re in trouble with the empire of Assyria, about to gobble them up.

Fear and anxiety are everywhere; the leaders are making political accommodation with questionable neighbors,; social, cultural and religious patterns and institutions are unraveling as everyone struggles, fearing for their own security, their own survival.

 

It's a stew of uncertainty and distress that plays to our human tendency to grasp at straws, leap after idols that promise a quick fix, forget our past, forget our tenderness and the roots of love, and become short-sighted in our anxiety for the near-term future. 

It’s just the sort of situation where we humans have far too much tendency to forget our trust in God.

 

And God grieves.

And God is angry.

And as Hosea tells us, in anger and grief, God’s compassion boils over. God refuses to lose God’s beloved people, and declares that we will return. That God will call us home, fiercely and firmly and conclusively.

 

This isn’t the only time when the depictions of God in the the stories of Israel or words of the prophets sound a lot like an angry mama bear whose cubs are threatened – whether that threat comes from the world around us, or from our own mistakes, or both.

But it’s incredibly poignant, God’s heart on full display, as Hosea shares these divine recollections of nurture and tender care, and even snuggling close, in love.

 

It’s a heartbreak many of us may feel part of, as we look around our world; as we turn off the daily news filled with the drumbeat of economic uncertainty, the shocks of people shooting up office buildings and local pools, the pain of seeing infants in Gaza starving before our eyes.

 

How did it get so bad?

We can still find God’s love in our lives, yes, but how has our world, our humanity, gotten this disconnected and lost from compassion and care and holding out supportive hands?

 

There’s no actual answer to that in Hosea’s words.

No actual answer to “why have things gone so wrong?” in God’s lament.

Just swift, fierce turn to God’s insistence that we will be restored; returned to God’s compassion and tender care.

 

Which is, at least, a promise of hope when things are going wrong.

Because returned and rooted in compassion, tender care, and wise nurture, we – humanity – have a chance to become the people we are meant to be, again. To become individuals, communities, nations of goodwill, of mercy, of fierce mutual support and understanding.

To be the people – the world – that God nurtured and raised us to be.

 

I need that promise.
I need that assurance of God’s fierce determination not to lose us, but to bring us home and re-root us, all of us, in God’s own generous, tender care.

And when I can tap those roots, that promise, I can face the distressing world of the daily news and the scrolling alerts, and respond to it with my own compassion for all of us; can seize opportunities to offer care, to speak out in love.

 

But I also feel the pain of how God’s promise to bring us all home to compassion and love isn’t done yet. The pain of how the world stays messed up, waiting for God’s promises to be completed, day after day after year after century.

 

Which is what Paul is talking about today.

Paul – or quite possibly a student of Paul, trying to carry on the work of the teacher – is writing to a community in Colossae who have put their faith in God’s promises, who have immersed their lives in the expectation of heaven coming to heal this messed up earth. Soon.

And who are very likely quite frustrated by waiting for God to complete those promises to heal the world and bring us home.

 

Eyes on the prize, Paul insists.

Paul – or Paul Junior – tells the waiting community not to get dragged down by the waiting, by the things that are messed up and broken day after day after day.

We don’t know how God’s promises will unfold – our life is “hidden”, he says – but we know it unfolds with Christ, in God. So focus on that, and don’t get dragged down into what has kept us separated from God.

Don’t get dragged down into anger, slander, lies; don’t lean into old habits of malice, wrath, abusive language, just because that’s all so common, expected in the unhealed, unfulfilled world around us.  Even if it feels like we need just a little dishonesty and bitterness to navigate the mess of the world around us.

That is not who you are, he reminds us.

 

Waiting – like the stew of anxiety and uncertainty Hosea’s people are facing – can often bring out the worst in us.
(Think about how you feel (what you say) when you’ve had to call customer service and you’re being told for the 47^th time in 30 minutes that your call is important to us – with no indication that your call ever will be answered.)

 

And my personal experience suggests that waiting for God’s promises to heal all the world’s troubles to be completed takes a lot longer than getting a person on the phone who can actually resolve one problem.

 

It’s easy, again, to turn to shiny short term “fixes” – or to vent our anger, grief, impatience, rage, or despair on any handy person or community.

Even if we don’t want to be that sort of person.

 

So Paul – or Paul Junior – is reminding his community to resist.

It requires intention and effort to set aside anger and impatience, to set aside the anxious greed that makes us snatch at self-interest and cheap promises of relief, even when we don’t want to live like that.

To refuse malice in venting our distress, and to keep our eyes on the prize.

But that’s Paul’s answer:

To keep our minds and hearts and habits focused on the healing of the world and our trust in God’s promises, so that we can respond, wholeheartedly, to God calling us back into the center of God’s love and care.

 

That's not the answer I want to “how can things go so wrong?”

It’s not the divine rescue I’m wishing for.

But it is the antidote to despair.

The antidote to apathy and resentment and to many of our anxious fears.

 

And we find the courage to embrace it, to act on trust in God’s promises when the distress of waiting and upheaval pulls and pushes us, because God’s fierce and tender love has already roared into the world to call us home. To bring us back to our roots in God’s unshakeable nurturing care.

 

And while we return to God’s love, while God is in the far-reaching process of bringing us home, we keep our eyes on the prize, by acting as God longs to act in every instance.

With compassion.

Tenderness.

Fierce and unyielding love that will not permit injustice to stand.

Will not permit greed to rule, or fear to conquer God’s people; will not permit evil to win.

Will not let go until we all are home, restored in the heart of God.

 

Taught To Pray

Luke 11:1-13

Do you remember being taught to pray?

 

Who remembers being taught to pray, “Our Father in heaven…”?

 

I don’t actually remember being taught that. I feel rather as if I absorbed it out of the atmosphere and the services of the church. But there’s a good chance one of my parents, or a chapel leader, made a point of helping me learn the words, from before I remember.

 

And then as a young adult I wanted to “learn to pray”, so I learned about prayer.

This was before you asked google everything, so I read books, and went to adult education classes and learned mnemonics, like ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication) and something else that used five fingers and separated “intercession” – praying for others – from “petition” – praying for your own needs.
I learned that the forms for morning and evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer were meant for individuals as well as congregations.

I learned the Prayer of St Francis, and “the Sinner’s Prayer” and a nifty night prayer from the Anglican Church in New Zealand.

 

When I set out to learn to pray, I learned forms and formulas.

And so I assumed that that’s what Jesus is teaching, today.

 

That Jesus is demonstrating a specific set of words beginning “Our Father, hallowed be your name…” that we should repeat, in that same form.

In other words, that Jesus taught his earliest disciples, and eventually us, a prayer.

 

Or perhaps Jesus was teaching not specific words, but a formula: Greet God, praise God’s glory and God’s will for the world, ask for basic daily needs, for forgiveness, and for the protection of our faith. Amen.

That Jesus was teaching the disciples, us, how to pray.

 

And then this week I noticed that Jesus’ early disciples, watching him pray, don’t ask him to teach them a prayer, or ask him how to pray, but say teach us to pray.

To pray is action, not structure. In the way that learning “to walk” isn’t about a repeating pattern of specific steps, or a formula about putting one foot in front of the other in the same direction, but a fundamental skill, a deep habit, a capacity we use almost constantly.

 

Jesus has been modeling this praying life for them, for us, and now they ask – on their own behalf, and ours – teach us to pray.

 

And Jesus does.

The form and the formula are important. They are gifts and tools we need.

Praying “the Lord’s Prayer” – a specific set of words in any language, repeated over centuries in every possible circumstance on earth, has made “Our Father…” rich, and layered, and holy.
A short form of words that can carry every possible emotion and need from our lips and hearts to the heart and ears of God. A form of words that unites us with God and God’s people throughout the centuries – just as prayer is always supposed to do.

 

And the formula works, too. A pattern of greeting God, praising God, aligning with God’s will, trusting God for our necessities, seeking forgiveness – received and given, and requesting protection and guidance is a pattern that prompts us into helpful conversation with God in many different words, whether we pray on our own, or in communities.

 

But Jesus doesn’t stop there.

He begins to try to explain to his listeners what it means to pray – to be in relationship and conversation with God. In more dimensions than words, or even thoughts.

In our fundamental daily attitude, our deep habits, our nearly constant actions.

 

And, well, that gets a little complicated to describe.

Forms and formulas are much easier to convey in words than the attitude, the continuous relationship of prayer; a particular quality of trust, or friendship, or the habits of body and soul.

(It would be just as messy to try to teach the capacity and unconscious habits of walking with only words – just try explaining it!!)

 

So Jesus tells stories.

Stories which, to be honest, feel pretty awkward two thousand years and some significant cultural and linguistic leaps since Jesus first told them.

 

In twenty-first century New Jersey, few of us would text a friend at midnight to say “hey, my old neighbor from middle school just turned up to stay and I need your help to feed them”.
But for the folks Jesus first told this story to, life depended on being able to trust neighbors, old or current, to offer immediate and unstinting hospitality. No hotels, no Wawa, no way for a traveler to provide for themselves other than trusting the neighbors, wherever you are.

 

To convey the same sense of shock and reversed expectations here and now, Jesus might say to us, “imagine your home is on fire, and you call the fire department and they say ‘Yeah, sorry, can’t come. It’s been a day and we’re just about to take a nap.’”

 

Jesus is setting us up to respond, “What?! That’s crazy?”

Of course your neighbor is going to help you with the sacred obligation of hospitality.

Of course the fire department will come.

So of course God responds to us when we call upon the one we trust more than a friend.

 

Praying is a life in which we turn to God immediately and naturally, as to a friend, when something unexpected happens.

And also when something entirely expected happens, when our needs are ordinary, just as much as when our needs or hopes are extraordinary.

Ask, look, knock, as a matter of course, not afraid of doing it wrong, or asking for the wrong thing, or at the wrong time.

Turn naturally to God, knowing that God is going to respond.

Though not necessarily with precisely the thing we ask for, when we declare our wants and needs.

 

You might have noticed that in the “if your child asks for this, you’d give it to them, right?” examples, none of the kids cited are asking their parents for alllll the LEGO, now.

None are asking to have an entire case of Tastykake for dinner.

Jesus is not telling us that God gives us everything we have a whim or desire for.

Jesus is telling us that God is eager to give beneficial gifts, to give what will keep us whole, and healthy, and strong, and close to God.

And Jesus is encouraging us to never doubt that we should ask God for what is good.

That we don’t need to be pre-qualified, in any way, to ask God for the forgiveness, wholeness, health, life, love we need.

That we don’t need to be adult, or ordained, or special, or clean of conscience, or already holy to ask God to draw us closer; to invite God’s love, and generosity, and holiness to pour over us.

Because that is exactly what God is eager for us to do.

 

Jesus has taught us the form and the formula – a specific set of words, or a pattern of intentions – to help us convey our needs and hearts to God.

And Jesus modeled and lived and taught us to pray, invites us to live in the deep habit of relationship with God, rooted in trust, in friendship, in love.

And waits, in love, through the days and centuries, to see how we will take up that invitation.

To hear how we will pray.