JESUS - MEEK, MILD OR MUSCULAR?

PENTECOST 12 19-08-07
Isa 5:1-7
Ps 80:1-2, 8-19
Heb 11:29 – 12:2
Luke 12:49-59

‘Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to him belong;
we are weak, but he is strong.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon this little child.
Pity my simplicity
Suffer me to come to thee.

How many of us learnt such things in Sunday school or at our mother’s knee? Do you remember the pictures of Jesus, illustrating Sunday school material, which depicted him as blonde and blue-eyed, always smiling, looking- well, a bit wet, really! When you were a child, did you ever see a picture of a Jesus who was dark-skinned and semitic-looking? I certainly didn’t!

We all have a sort of picture or image in our minds of Jesus: we imagine him to be a certain way, depending on a number of things, including what we have been taught and what we have read. We might imagine him to be like a big brother or a favourite uncle. Our personal images of Jesus fulfil our own need for someone greater, better, stronger than ourselves who cares about us.

The trouble is, our images of Jesus can get stuck and become unhelpful. If, as adults, we cling to a child-like image of Jesus, we are in danger of worshipping someone who only exists in our imagination.

The real Jesus was not meek and mild; yes, he was gentle with people but he also got angry, sometimes very angry.

It’s the same with our images of God: is God an old man with a big white beard in a white toga who sits on a cloud, smiling benevolently down on the world? I don’t think so.

In our readings today we meet God as a lover who grieves the loss of loved ones. In Isaiah, we read the beginning of a love song that describes how God planted a beautiful vineyard, which in this case represents the land of Judah. God is bitterly disappointed, because this tenderly-nurtured vineyard produces only wild grapes that are sour and useless. The bitter fruit is bloodshed and injustice: God’s chosen people are behaving badly again, and God is pretty cross with them. So God warns them that they will be punished, like a vineyard that is turned into a wasteland.

Psalm 80 is a lament, as the psalmist pleads with God to restore the people of Israel. This was probably written after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, and it also pictures God’s people as a vineyard that has gone to ruin. The invasion and conquest of the Northern Kingdom was seen as God’s punishment for the sin of the people, and the psalmist longs for God to look kindly on the people once again.

In the gospel of Luke we heard Jesus speaking to his disciples as he was on the way to Jerusalem and his death. He says he came to bring fire to the earth and wishes it was already burning, and talks about families being split because of him. Is this the gentle Jesus, meek and mild we know and love? What about the peace on earth the angels promised at his birth?

This is not a weak, tepid, quiet and unassuming Jesus: this is a muscular, angry, powerful Jesus who shouts to the crowds, “Read the signs of the times!” Look around you, look at your world and what you have made of it. What kind of fruit are YOU bearing?

The reading from the letter to the Hebrews that we heard this morning comes at the end of a long list of the heroes and heroines of the faith. The writer is at pains to tell his readers that all these people down the ages, although they suffered for their faith, did great things because they trusted in God and had hope. They lived and died long before the Messiah came, the fulfilment of hope. Therefore, we are told, with the encouragement of their stories, we can run the race and live our lives in faith because we have Jesus at the finish line.

After all, if those great ones of the Old Testament times could live in faith, how much more can we, who know the Saviour? We have the promised Holy Spirit to lead and teach us; we have the promise of eternal life.

Jesus spoke of bringing fire to the earth. Fire can burn and destroy, but it can also purify; and the Holy Spirit is represented by fire.

These readings speak to us of warning and of promise. They speak to us of a God who is angry with us when we are unjust, careless, greedy, selfish and violent. They speak to us of a God who loves us very much, who cares deeply about us and wants us to live in right relationship with one another and with God. They speak to us of the cloud of witnesses, the countless believers who have lived and died faithfully and courageously, whose lives are an example and an encouragement to us.

And they speak to us of Jesus the man, who felt despair and anger, sadness and pain, who longed for people to wake up, look around and start making changes.

Are we ready to listen to him: to put away our cherished images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, and see the real God-Man who so urgently calls us to change?

Are we ready to allow the fire of the Spirit to burn away the rubbish in our lives, leaving us free to live lives of faith? Can we here in Armadale in 2007 produce sweet fruit that makes a difference in the lives of those around us?

Let us pray.
Holy God,
Help us to follow the examples of those who have lived lives of faith, who have gone before us;
Help us to read the signs and hear the urgency in Jesus’ words;
and show us how we can serve you and those to whom you send us: in Jesus’ name.
Amen

Preached by the Rev'd Lorna Green at the Parish of S. Matthew, Armadale

EXTRAORDINARY, GOD

19th August 2007 : Pentecost 12 : Year C
9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 5:1-7 : Hebrews 11:29 – 12:2 : Luke 12:49-59

We live in a world that seems to become more and more extraordinary day by day. This is especially so in the field of medical knowledge and advancement. Often enough I encounter hospital patients who are admitted for heart procedures that have become increasingly more sophisticated, increasingly less invasive, people whose second or third sojourn into the world of cardio-thoracic medicine introduces them to techniques that weren’t available or even dreamt of the first time around.

But we don’t have to look at anything as complex as medical science to see how technology in particular has advanced over the decades and, more commonly now, months. When I were a lad cassette tapes were the pinnacle of musical technology. The Walkman was a breath-taking innovation. (And for the younger folk who may be listening the Walkman I’m talking about played cassettes, not CDs … No one in the general population even dreamed of anything like a compact disc!)

The point is, the extraordinary – at least in the West – surrounds us and fills our thinking almost by default, and it’s tempting to think that we become so used to it that little surprises us any more and that this is one reason the Living God has to work overtime to attract our attention.

Tempting it is – but it is not a modern malaise, not some latter-day obstinacy that carefully, though automatically, cordons off God while we go about our quotidian tasks, accepting technological change with an appropriate, though short-lived wonder that quickly becomes blasé about the extraordinary, while the Living God patiently continues to do what the Living God does, older than history, longer than time.

It’s clear enough from today’s readings that humanity has long-failed to understand, let alone appreciate that extraordinary is not simply a word that defines the Living God’s actions in our world but, so far as we can use the phrase, is, from the human viewpoint, the normal and natural condition of the divine. This shouldn’t surprise us but constantly we are surprised. We could almost say that our failure of appreciation and understanding is equally part of what the philosophers call the “human condition”.

So when we meet God in Isaiah we see divinity wounded by a humanity that ignores the essence of God’s invitation to produce a fruit that God defines in the same terms as God’s own manner of dealing with creation – namely, with respect and care, even love. God tells the recalcitrant people of Israel that their enemies will triumph over them but accepts the responsibility and in doing so maintains control of the situation.

God does not withdraw from the scene and leave Israel to their fate. Extraordinarily, God remains, however great the displeasure.

So what is that God’s people have failed to do? Have they failed in their quota of attendances at church on Sunday? Have they fallen short of the minimum number of sacrifices? Didn’t they give enough money or serve on enough committees or belong to enough groups or organise enough sausage sizzles?

No and no and no. God expected justice, peace and the attempt to encounter God and live as Godly people. Instead, humanity gave God violence, injustice and disregard for the dignity of others. The irony is that how God’s people live – in ignorance of the essential reality and in-built extraordinariness of God – is how they will now live and die, consumed and subsumed in the perversion of everything that God stands for and asks of us.

So their cities and grand homes will lie empty and desolate. Violence, begetting violence, will overtake Israel and the will be sucked into the vortex of that violence simply because they are no different from those around them, even though God DOES call them – and us – to be different.

It’s like adding red paint to a puddle of red paint. We might increase the volume of it but we can no longer tell which bit of red paint is different from the next. Israel’s lack of regard for human dignity and worth makes them no different from their neighbours, who will suck them back into the cauldron of indifference from which their actions emerge.

However cleverly and intricately we may devise our human systems, those systems are meaningless if they do not reflect God’s concerns for creation and humanity. So when Jesus delivers a sober and frightening warning about family division he is deliberately striking at one of the unifying elements of the faith of his time.

Jesus is not denying or attacking the importance of the family. What he’s doing is pointing out that the things God stands for, the things God invites us to participate in, are more important than human constructs. Those constructs serve a useful and worthy purpose, without question, but if they do not reflect the ultimate concerns of the Living God then their usefulness is not only severely diminished but they become actually harmful.

In other words, if our human-defined and –invented structures are not showing God’s love and concern for peace and justice and respect for the poor, then, like the violence of Israel in Isaiah’s time, they simply become another part of the mix that is the whole churning, boiling mess of human despair and violence.

I’ll repeat a brief story I’ve used before: A particular priest gained a reputation for being a great preacher. His church was full every Sunday. On one particular Sunday, as he was greeting parishioners at the door after the Service, one of them somewhat gushingly remarked, “What a great prophet you are!” To which the priest wisely replied, “If I were a great prophet this church would be empty and its windows smashed by rocks and stones …”

We would rather merge into the prevailing culture than stand apart from it speaking of God’s love and Jesus’ compassion. It’s easier for us to tug our collective forelocks at the consumer world than to live in the Spirit of the Living God, seeking God and justice in the knowledge that ultimately they are same thing.

And when God comes near, the world reacts, even if that world has snuck its way into the hearts, minds and souls of the Church. It’s like adding a mere drop of water to a tweezerful of phosphorous: the reaction is loud, bright, violent and immediate!

So this is God’s call to us – to remember God’s ways, to remember how Jesus lived according to those ways, and to follow where Jesus leads us, strengthened and made bold in the power of the Holy Spirit.

As I said last week, we won’t have any trouble finding avenues for doing God’s work here in Westfield – or anywhere else for that matter. What IS hard is throwing out the influence of the world with its caution and fear and half-truths and lies.

But if we are seeking God, day by day, then we too, in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield, can be part of God’s ways and plans for love and justice in our community!