TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – 19 August 2007

ST PAUL LUTHERAN CHURCH, ABQ NM – The Rev. P. L. Holman

Jeremiah 23:23-29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

“Fired Up for Life”

Each Sunday during the month of July we asked for input from those gathered for worship. We asked for your favorite hymns, and as many as feasible will be woven into worship during the next two weeks. We also asked for feedback on this summer’s worship. We received many more hymn requests than we did feedback, but what we did get for feedback is helpful…. and surprising. One person commented that she misses the Confession and Forgiveness – the way we usually begin worship. That’s unusual by “church growth” standards. Most planners of worship in that contemporary movement are staying away from confession. The rationale is that it’s too much of a downer. People don’t want to be reminded of their brokenness, their failures. They need to feel happy….

I’ll bet they don’t read the lessons for this morning either.

Yet there is so much HOPE in the heart of the lessons this morning. It is hope born of honesty; hope born of witness; and hope born of the story of God’s presence through the centuries with God’s people, a hope that carries us today. These words remind us that God has and is and will continue to intervene in the world to set things right no matter how consistently we keep messing things up. God will continue to break down the walls of hostility, unravel the webs of deceit and fraud, melt the hearts hardened by fear, to set things right side up. That’s hope for healing that comes from nowhere else. It is a word worth hearing, and a story worth sharing.

The writer of Hebrews gives us a sort of text message/shorthand form of the stories that are our heritage. By faith the people of old persevered: through the Red Sea without benefit amphibious vehicles, the wall of Jericho fell without benefit of scud missiles, and Rahab the prostitute received spies in peace even though she didn’t have access to the internet to verify their character. For those people of the story BCE faith was a source of confidence, not fear. Faith led them to go outside the box of convention and law to pursue the healing God desired. Their faith, which is God’s work, trumped their fear, the work of the devil. The list in Hebrews goes on to list judges, prophets, and unnamed women who suffered and persevered, all falling short of the fulfillment made known in Jesus, the pioneer and “perfecter” of our faith.

As Christians ours is a faith perfected through fire. This is not some warming blaze or candle light glow, though that sort of fire does have its place. This fire Jesus brings is more like the fires raging in Montana, unsettling and upending comfortable seemingly in control lives. Yet unlike those fires, the purpose of the fire Jesus kindles is to change everything right side up. I find Eugene Peterson’s translation of those difficult verses from Luke helpful: “Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I’ve come to disrupt and confront!” After the comments about weather forecasting (is Jesus critiquing the way we tend to revert to trivial talk in urgent times?), the reading concludes: “Frauds! You know how to tell a change in the weather; so don’t tell me you can’t tell a change in the season, the God-season we’re in right now. You don’t have to be a genius to understand these things. Just use your common sense….” [THE MESSAGE, p.1885]

Yeah, you’re right Jesus. We do know something about the changes you bring, and we do know something about the ways we’ve turned from your possibilities. It’s just that, well, we’re scared. We’re afraid to be honest about what we don’t know. We’re afraid to take the unpopular stance lest we be ridiculed or shamed. We’re afraid to fail.

Then the witness of faith comes again to our hearts with strong words of baptismal assurance: it isn’t what you know or don’t know that’ll save you, not your mother or your father or your sister or your brother, not your wisdom or your wealth. Nothing you can do, only what God in Christ has already done. So live -- by faith, live.

Someone said that faith is not belief without proof; faith is TRUST without reservation. Faith is trust without reservation. In these anxious times that’s a precious commodity. Ask those heavily invested in the stock market these days about trust. Ask the mother whose 28 year old son was just deployed to Kuwait and Baghdad, or the 45 year old neighbor diagnosed with MS. Ask the people desperately seeking to survive in the midst of earthquake ravaged Peru, the people of Madagascar overrun six times already this year by cyclones, or the people in Utah washed over with new layers of grief and anger by the turn of events in the mine rescue effort. We can turn to prayer, and do, yet trust in that power must also bear fruit as we share that strength with others. That’s what the cloud of witnesses is all about: our response, in faith, to the cries of a hurting, dying, war-turn world. We have the power to set things right – can we trust beyond our reservations to act?

Studies of children’s faith development consistently point to the faith of their parents as a key shaping influence. According to a recent article on education ministry in the church, the top four factors influencing a child’s faith are what mom does, what dad does, what mom says and what dad says [Marilyn Sharpe, “Youth and Family Ministry,” LUTHERAN PARTNERS January/February 2007, p.15]. Yet many parents don’t have the benefit of life-transforming faith experiences to pass on to their children. There are also many of us who aren’t accustomed to talking about our faith experiences, and the faith that shaped us. That’s where Jesus’ words come in: We have the opportunity, the challenge, and the fire to break that open. As sisters and brothers in faith, through caring conversations and prayer, through family devotions and simple rituals like candle-lighting and remembering, through shared commitment outside the home like volunteer service at school or in the neighborhood – we here who trust the goodness of God and the promise of forgiveness can help one another trust the power of that life-changing fire to open us all up to new possibilities for life. In so doing we carry on the transformation God desires, the Jesus-work in this God-season.

Whose faith has made a difference in your life? Right now, think about it – what person has even in some small way helped you trust enough to see yourself as good, to step out in new life-giving directions? Perhaps it is a teacher, friend, author, or relative. Have a name? Say it aloud…. 

Hear that! This is but one small glimpse of the cloud of witnesses; we are just one small gathering among millions of faithful meeting this day to praise God and draw strength from Christ’s presence in word and sacrament for the journey of faithful living, gathered to be fired up for life!

We can do this. We can be the restlessness for change that Jesus pioneered, that the early church modeled, that our foremothers and forefathers of faith trusted, the ones children today are longing to meet. We are called by the Gospel not to smooth things over and make everything nice – what we’re called to proclaim is not the Nice News after all, but the Good News. We don’t need to have all the answers; we don’t need to wait until we get it all right. Look at Rahab – a prostitute! And Moses – a murderer! And David – the adulterer! All these are part of that great cloud of witnesses. If there is room for them then certainly there’s room for us, too!  Amen