Lectionary citations for Sunday, August 19, 2007

Lectionary citations for Sunday, August 19, 2007

Isaiah 5:1-7 with Psalm 80:1-2,8-19 or
Jeremiah 23:23-29 with Psalm 82 and
Hebrews 11:29-12:2 and
Luke 12:49-56

Life has a language.
And Scripture has a word for us.

These Lectionary reflections are based on those two thoughts.

Today's reading catches me off guard and puts me on edge.
The life it describes, and the life around me, is one of ferocious
intensity. As I write on this August evening the sky is a blanket of
smoke. Yet another fire "blew up" this afternoon in a drainage that
was spared last summer. Four church camps were evacuated, among them
the Methodist Camp on the Boulder and the camp of my own
denomination, the United Church of Christ.

When Jesus says, "I came to bring fire to the earth," I
cannot help but be taken aback. I would so much prefer a text that
speaks of healing rivers, of storms that are calmed, of rain that
ends the drought. But this week's Gospel is wrapped in fire as life
itself is sometimes wrapped in fire.

I recall carrying one of our twins under each arm as we fled
a burning house a quarter century ago. I recall the words of a
professor who survived the fire bombing of Tokyo when he gently spoke
to a group in seminary who decided to ritually burn some texts they
found unacceptable. "Be careful of fire," he said. "Handle it
carefully. You must be aware of what you are doing." To believe we
control fire is a mistake. It controls us. The small campfire, the
gas burner, the match and the forest fire lit by a streak of dry
lightening--they all organize our actions.

So does baptism.

The new life it proclaims necessitates the end of one order
and the birth of something new. Jesus minces no words in his
proclamation. He will not let us be distracted by preferable
scripture. He will not allow us to shy away from the forest fires
his baptism kindled.

Will the baptism that organized his life also organize our
lives? And so the terse text begins:




Luke 12:49-56

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were
already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what
stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have
come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather
division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three
against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.'

He also said to the crowds, 'When you see a cloud rising in
the west, you immediately say, "It is going to rain"; and so it
happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, "There
will be scorching heat"; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how
to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know
how to interpret the present time?


Calm down, I want to say. Those of us whose lives depend on
the rain are not hypocrites when we learn what the clouds and the
winds portend. But we confess we have often talked more about the
weather than we have searched out and spoken the language of life.
We confess we have been preoccupied with our own affairs more than we
have allowed baptism to order those affairs.

Calm down, I want to say to the arguing family. I confess I
often wish to end the argument more than I want to actually follow
the arduous route that would reconcile the Prodigal and his older
brother.

The hypocrite says one thing and does another. How often do
we acknowledge baptism but fail to live it? How often do we become
fluent in the language of complaint and fail to learn he verbs of
life that demand reconciliation before false agreement; that call for
genuine hope instead of wishful thinking; that require a stream of
blessings that we cannot give ourselves?

How often do we shy away from life? How often is it too raw,
too visceral, too hot to approach? How often will we let it be too
kind to defend itself, too forgiving to hold a grudge, too beautiful
to own?

And so fire sweeps across the landscape of our soul. We know
we should not be afraid. We know it is heat that turns mere flour
into bread. We know it is heat that refines precious metals. We
know ashes are a sign of rebirth. And we know that when we are burnt
by fire there is, after the conflagration, a blessing.

Next June the mountains will reveal their true lines without
the trees to cover the slopes. Next June wild flowers will erupt in
profusions of color just as they did this June where the fires
exploded last summer.

"Don't you know things change?" Jesus seems to say. And so
we have a scripture devoted to agency, the carrying out of mission,
the doing and the receiving of life. Funny thing about agency.
Sometimes we are the actors, and sometimes life happens to us.

Either way change is in the wind.