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!