Jesus brings fire to the earth (Luke 12)

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled…Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” From today’s Gospel, the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 12, verses 49 and 51.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

     Well! What are we going to do with today’s Gospel? “I came to bring fire to the earth!...Do you think that I have come to bring peace?...from now on, five in one household will be divided…You hypocrites…do you not know how to interpret the present time?” There isn’t much wiggle room in these texts; they are lacking in any kind of comfort or mitigation that we can use to take the edge off them. They are, at the very least, bracing. They demand our attention, and there appear to be no concessions in them, implied or stated, that we can resort to, to find a way out of them.So we must do our best to find out what our Lord means by these remarks.

     There are really two readings here: Jesus the Cause of Division, as our translation titles the first one, and Interpreting the Time, the second part of the reading. The two are connected, and the connection is our ability to understand the present correctly. Everything that Jesus says in the reading is meant to prod us into seeing and understanding “the present time.”

     What is the “fire” that Jesus came to bring to the earth? Physical imagery comes to mind right away; we all think of forest fires and calamities like building fires and so on. And, indeed, we live in a world, thanks to global warming, in which large, catastrophic fires are becoming more frequent. But this is not the fire that Jesus has in mind.

     In the Scriptures, fire is a frequent symbol for God, for the Holy Spirit, for the angels, for the word of God. In Deuteronomy, Moses says “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire.” There are many references to fire, in connection with the wrath of God, the temple sacrifices, the Holy Spirit, and more. In Matthew’s Gospel, John the Baptist says, “One who is more powerful than I is coming after me…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” This “fire” is the presence, the reality of God, which consumes all before it and takes away everything which gets between us and God. Jesus experiences this presence, this reality, and to him it is like a consuming fire, and he wants us to experience the reality of God as directly as he does.  “How I wish it were already kindled!” he says.

     Jesus is being realistic when he says, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No…division!” This is what can happen when the reality of God gets close to us. Perhaps we prefer to keep God at a comfortable distance, as an idea, a word, a hope, a God who doesn’t impinge much on our daily lives, but whom we acknowledge politely in our ceremonies, and, truth to tell, whom we may like to leave there as a ceremonial object. Jesus is saying in plain words what happens when we let God, that consuming fire, get close to our lives. We all know from experience what can happen. Arguments, derision, fear, anger, rejection, and who knows what else. It is interesting how Jesus describes this, entirely in family terms, with family members divided against each other. And we all know from experience that the family is often, maybe usually, the place where division occurs, when God becomes real and present to someone in the group. Jesus is telling us to be ready for this, not to be surprised by it, but to understand it as almost a consequence of making God known, of bringing fire, that is, God, to the earth. Not that I am recommending this kind of division…I certainly am not, but Jesus is being realistic about human nature.

     Jesus is addressing a crowd, all of whom can understand the point he is making. He includes them in his teaching, when he says, “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky.” In other words, they have got some way on the path to awareness of reality, at least as far as correctly interpreting the appearance earth and sky. In our society, this kind of interpretation is, it seems to me, almost the whole of our science, and our way of life depends on it. We, like the people whom Jesus is addressing, are very good at this. And we should be.

     But that is not the whole story. Jesus goes on to say, “Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” In other words, there is more to understanding the world than interpreting the appearance of earth and sky. We must interpret the present as well, the present in which God is real and close at hand, in which we can’t safely box him up and keep him out of the way, a present in which God is not merely another appearance that we can interpret to suit ourselves.

     Today’s reading ends with that question. And Jesus provides no answer, and, as far as we know, no one in the crowd attempts to answer either. The question is rhetorical, as we say, not really intended to be answered, because we already know that we are often reluctant to really face the present, especially when Jesus tells us how difficult the present can actually be. In today’s rather alarming Gospel, we are reminded of the reality of God. The more we pay attention to the present time, the more we become aware of the reality of God. And the more we become aware of the reality, the better we understand the present, and the better we will be able to bring God, that consuming spiritual fire, into the world.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    

    

The Father promises the Kingdom (Luke 12)

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 12, verse 32. 

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen 

     “Do not be afraid, little flock.” When Jesus first speaks these words, the flock is indeed ‘little.’ The 12^th chapter starts off with a ‘crowd gathered by the thousands.’ Jesus calls them ‘my friends.’ Later in the chapter, just before today’s reading, he is speaking to his disciples, so presumably he has stopped speaking to the crowd as a whole, and is addressing the rather smaller group of disciples. They are the ‘little flock’ of the narrative. His message to them, about the certainty of the Father’s pleasure to give them the kingdom, is meant to reassure them (and us), to strengthen them (and us), to push aside any anxiety they, and we, may have about what is happening and the direction that things are going. This is a promise, and there is no qualification attached to it. 

    After reassurance like that, it is not surprising to hear the list of preparations that Jesus gives us. We can summarize them as: 1. Sell your possessions; 2. Make purses for yourselves; and 3. Be dressed for action. The required preparations have the same sense of immediacy and lack of ambiguity that the promise has. They have a bracing quality, a sense of a clearing away of obstacles, a sense of freshness and alertness and readiness for the next thing which the Father will reveal. 

   “Sell your possessions, and give alms.” Whenever I read this text, or hear it, its uncompromising character makes me nervous. It likely makes a lot of people nervous, and in our materially prosperous and comfortable time, it may seem remote and irrelevant and impossible. But there it is, in our text; our Lord does not qualify it, so we must take it on, and find what we can in it, to help us prepare for the kingdom which the Father has promised. 

    “Sell your possessions” means, at the very least, to be able to let go of anything which holds us back from fully believing the promise of the Father. Material wealth and poverty alike can be obstacles to belief. We must see beyond them, beyond their temporary, transitory character, to the eternal reality, the kingdom, which is our real destination. Life is short, and our possessions are on loan, and we surrender them all, we sell them all, in effect, at the end. “Sell your possessions, and give alms,” means, among many other things, to give what we can, in love, in care for the poor, the sick, to the least in the world. Furthermore, possessions and alms are not only money and material things; they are all the desires and talents and concerns and abilities that we have to use and to give away. We are not to hoard the gifts which the Father has given us. We may also think of our possessions as our usual selves, our personalities, strengths, limitations, every conscious and unconscious thing that makes us who we are. We will, in the end, let go of all that as well. We will, in other words, sell our possessions and give alms; or, we will let go of everything that gets between us and the Father, and we will reveal our true nature. 

     “Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven.” Our new purses, evidently, are possessions which we are supposed to keep in good repair, and we do that by continually giving away their contents. This is a metaphor for self-emptying, a steady giving up of everything that can get in the way of the radical freedom which preparation for the kingdom requires, and which the kingdom makes possible. “Unfailing treasure in heaven” is our true nature, our nature as we are meant to be, in the kingdom. We can understand today’s reading as both a summary of how to reach a glimpse of our true nature, and a description of what that true nature looks like. 

    “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet.” Here we have a sense of immediacy, of alertness and readiness. We are to be ready, in preparation for the kingdom. Not only is this a requirement for the kingdom, it also describes what the kingdom is like, again in a picture. Servants are waiting on their master, and a banquet will begin as soon as they open the door to him. There is alertness, as it were, on both sides of the door. The master expects his servants to be attentive and dressed for the occasion, and the servants expect the master to appear at any moment. The Father appears when the servants are ready, and the servants are always ready.

     But notice what happens next. The master will “have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” In this image of the kingdom, the Father does not expect to be waited on. He rather waits on his servants. In other words, our usual notions about who we are, are reversed. In the Father’s kingdom, our usual expectations are upended. The Father has come in through the door, on the same level as his servants, and it turns out that the servants are the guests of honor. They are ready to accept this equality with, and perhaps, dare I say it, a kind of superiority to, the Father, because of their readiness and alertness. Their attentiveness means that they can see themselves and the Father as they are. This picture of the banquet in the kingdom is another glimpse of our true nature, and of the nature of the Father. When the Father comes through the door, reality breaks in, and we have a glimpse of the kingdom. 

     Luke makes clear the unexpectedness of this breaking-in of reality, with his somewhat-out-of-place remark about the thief breaking in to the house. “If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” Clearly, this verse comes from another story, but Luke drops it in here for a reason. “The owner of the house” is anyone of us, any person really, who would resist the arrival of the Father. So far, we’ve taken it for granted that the Father is the owner of the house where the banquet is. But is he? If the “house” is our ordinary state of mind, our usual way of thinking, our usual self, hanging on to our possessions, not too interested in treasure in heaven, not ready to encounter reality, then maybe we don’t think of the Father as the owner, and we might experience him as a thief, come to take our notions of ourselves away from us, because we may think that we are nothing else except our notions. Then we experience the arrival of the Father as a break-in by a thief. But it need not be so. Luke reminds us that this unexpected arrival is also that of the Son of Man. When we open the door to the Father, the Son of Man, our true nature, also arrives. This arrival is always unexpected, and we must always be ready for it. 

     Today’s Gospel is about not fearing the arrival of the kingdom, about being ready for it whenever it arrives, and about being ready to let go of whatever gets between us and the kingdom. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

    In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.