Be ignited…
A sermon by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 5:1-7 and Luke 12:49-56.
Once again we’re working with some rather challenging texts, perhaps longing for some of Jesus’ gentler teachings on these August days. But no, this sounds as if we’re in the lead-up to Advent, when typically our scripture readings do come with a very real urgency. One of the things about the lectionary is that it keeps the preacher from simply hunting down texts that he or she would like to be preaching, instead pressing us into the biblical story as a whole. That’s actually a gift, if not always of the most comfortable sort.
The reading from the prophet Isaiah begins gently enough, with the line, “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” This is meant by Isaiah to be heard as the voice of God, addressing the beloved people of Jerusalem and Judah. Those opening couple of verses are full of promise for the nation, and then a rather foreboding line, “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”
Remember, these opening thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah are largely addressing the people of Judah and Jerusalem at a time when the northern Kingdom of Israel has been conquered by Assyria, and the southern Kingdom of Judah is existing as a kind of vassal state. The times are dire, in other words, and the prophet wants to call that southern kingdom back to first things. But before that deep call can be heard, the prophet needs to convince the people that their house is in a mess. Oh, a good deal of their attention is yet being paid to a rigid adherence to the portions of the torah dealing with the observance of festivals, fast days, and sacrifice, yet the deeper call to make sure the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land are not forgotten has been… well, forgotten. Neglected. Set aside as unimportant or inconvenient or problematic. And so our section today concluded:
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;
The Lord expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry!
The cry heard when the Lord expected righteousness is a cry for help by those who have been abandoned in that society. The deep peace and equity intended for a torah people has been abandoned in favour of narrowly “religious” practices, and so God is letting the natural course of politics take place. Assyria has already taken down the northern kingdom, and now the life of the southern kingdom is hanging by a thread. Get the nation back in order, Isaiah is saying, or we will continue to swirl down into chaos.
So that’s the context for that first reading: it is critical time, crisis time, decision time. In a very real sense the Gospel reading for today also arises from crisis time, and oddly it has some real parallels to the crisis Isaiah was seeing in that very same region several hundred years earlier. In the case of the Gospel context, Judea and Jerusalem are as much a vassal state as was that same region in Isaiah’s time, and perhaps even more so. Jesus had begun his public ministry up in the region of Galilee, well north of Judea, but now his face has been turned toward Jerusalem and the long winding path to that city is underway. He can see what it will mean for him to enter that city with his gospel message calling for a return to God; he knows “how to interpret the present time,” to borrow a line from his teaching, and he knows this road will not be an easy one.
And so as this section begins, Jesus addresses his followers:
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!
He’s come to bring fire and division? Is that true? What of the gentleness with which he has greeted children, lepers, status-less people, the outcasts? What of his compassion for the hungry crowds, the lost sheep, the blind and the lame?
Yet as Matt Skinner comments, “The fire Jesus wants to kindle is a fire of change, the fire of God’s active presence in the world,” adding “No wonder he is so eager to strike the match.” In so many ways that fire of change will be, to cite Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, “a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Opposition will be mounted both by the temple leaders and by Rome itself, and even when someone does catch his vision and choose to follow his way—as tens of thousands would in the opening years of the church’s life—that was no guarantee against opposition. Families will be divided, Jesus warns, because while you may hear to power of this call, members of your own household will not accept your decision to follow my way. “[T]hey 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.’
That’s not figurative language, you see, for it is precisely what happened when someone caught the vision and made the decision to follow the Jesus Way. As Jerusha Matsen Neal comments,
[C]ertainly Luke’s readers, living in a time of persecution and oppression, would have recognized that there is a cost to following Christ. The Prince of Peace places them at odds with the Pax Romana which divides them from family members who would prefer to “keep the peace” with the powers that be. Within both the context of the text and the context of the text’s reception, peace has always meant more than getting along.
So now we can hear why Jesus sounded so urgent and uncompromising in these texts, much as Isaiah sounded in his own day. But you do know that this isn’t simply about what happened way back then, which we wrestle with, understand, and then set aside with some relief that it was all about “way back then.” The claim is being placed on those who hear this message is to actually follow, and while our day is clearly very different from the days of Isaiah or the days of Jesus, our world and our context is not without challenges. Oh sure, there’s not an equivalent of Assyria or the Roman Empire marching its soldiers in our streets, but consider with me some observations made by Jerusha Matsen Neal, who serves as an Assistant Professor of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina. She begins, “How does the fire of Jesus’ teaching and the piercing of his word reveal the hearts of one’s congregation?” Now just pause there for a moment, and ask yourself what is the heart of this particular congregation.
Are there conflicts that are doing damage?
Is there a level of exhaustion in the bones of the community, perhaps thanks to the struggle that has been COVID?
Has it become a closed system that doesn’t make room for new ideas, new people, and fresh energy?
Or maybe too much has been left on the shoulders of a very few?
To return to Jerusha Matsen Neal’s reflections, she asks,
Has “unity” become a synonym for complacency and avoidance? Or has “division” been co-opted for the same ends? Some congregations avoid the difficult work of justice by ignoring that divisions exist. Others avoid the same work by cutting off from one another. Neither approach is consistent with the baptism that Jesus connects to his fiery witness.
What is consistent with his fiery witness is, I believe, a willingness to press forward in honesty, daring, compassion, and truthfulness. To dare to speak as truthfully as one can, and then to listen as openly to the perspective of the other. And to do that always in the light of the gospel because the light of the gospel will always draw us forward in faith and in action. As Mary Oliver writes in the conclusion of her poem “What I Have Learned so Far,”
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of —indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
And because Christ wants none of us to “be gone,” we must now and again and ever be ignited.
