Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Jer 23:23-29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56
Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” (Luke 12:49)
This week, I was speaking with a friend who is a non-believer. She said to me, “It must be really hard to be in your line of work right now. I mean, terrible things are happening. If God is real, Where is the smiting?”
Where, indeed, is the smiting? As Christians, we’re not supposed to be in favor of that, but I will confess that I have a short-list. Given the times we’re living through, you might have one, too. The Bible is threaded through with it: malefactors swallowed up by the earth or dying of freakish diseases, innocent people vindicated, a world out-of-control put back on its foundations again.
Of course, those are the exceptions to the rule.
For the most part, the Bible is not a fairy tale, and God does not act like a magician. My friend’s question, “Where is God in this?” — and I suspect she is not alone in asking — comes from a deep desire for a world in which things are fair, a child’s world in which God the loving parent ensures that those who are good do not suffer, and those who choose evil are constrained. It’s a deeply good desire, and I will admit that I long for it, too. But the Bible has not retained its sway over human beings for three thousand years by offering a pink-and-white fantasy version of our lives. Its authority comes from its stark ability to show us the truth about ourselves and our choices, the bad as well as the good.
The Scriptures show us poverty, exile, estrangement, and enslavement — all among the people God loves. It shows us power-hungry, self-seeking leaders; acts of astonishing cruelty and venality; times of environmental and political devastation. It does not offer us escape from the realities of our world, but it does show us how to cope with a world in which terrible things are happening, without losing our integrity, our hope, or our desire to love.
In 1970, the International Consultation on English Texts published an updated translation of the Lord’s Prayer. We don’t use it at the Cathedral, but I’d like to draw our attention to one phrase today: The words we know as “lead us not into temptation” became, instead, “save us from the time of trial.” Do you hear the difference? The first version, the one we pray each Sunday, implies that the temptations are personal, intimate choices — and they are. But the modern version hints that, in addition to our individual struggles, there are also “times of trial” — times in which whole societies and cultures struggle to preserve themselves, to adapt or die.
God is not absent in such times. That’s the first thing to remember, the foundation. God is not the author of evil, but when we make choices which lead to suffering on a grand scale, God does not walk away. Rather, he uses the difficulties themselves to help us clarify our values: to learn who we are and what we love. This is the fire of purification, and it is everywhere in Scriptures. The prophet Malachi describes God’s messenger this way: “he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.” (Mal 3:2-3) The image is clear: the times of testing are times in which we can be cleansed of our own tendencies to corruption and consciously choose to embrace a deeper degree of righteousness. But also: gold and silver are precious. Even when they are melted down by the refiner, she takes care to ensure that none of what is valuable is lost. Refining is not about destruction, but about releasing the beauty within.
And that’s the second big thing: where the beauty is to be found — the beauty which counts in the eyes of God. Scripture holds out God’s vision of shalom: a world in balance and at peace, in which each person has enough, is rooted in community, the environment is intact, and each creature is able to thrive. We at the Cathedral lean into this vision; we work for social and ecological justice. But that justice does not come only — or even primarily — from good laws and well-thought policies. It’s not a matter of aligning ourselves with good leaders and eschewing would-be autocrats. Justice comes from the heart.
Alexander Solzhenitysn writes, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” He adds, “And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Both of those are important. We who follow Jesus cannot pretend that we are “the righteous” — pure, unblemished, without spot or stain — because our lives begin and end at the cross. We are clothed in Christ’s death and resurrection at our baptism, and wrapped in his grace at our dying. In between, we struggle to allow that grace to shape our souls and our lives.
If you go to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David, you will find him standing at the end of a long gallery, finished, beautiful, immaculate. But on either side of that gallery are other sculptures: images of slaves struggling to be free. I do not know whether they are unfinished or whether Michelangelo planned them like that, but each figure is a flash of humanity — an arm, a leg, the thrust of a well-muscled torso — still emerging from the thick, unfinished block of stone. And we are like that, even the best of us. Our humanity, the image of God that is deep within us, is buried in so much other stuff: old injuries, festering resentments, opportunities not given or not taken, broken hearts, squandered trust, the mere fact of being overlooked or ignored, over and over again. It takes a skilled master-workman to chisel us into freedom. And we are God’s chisels — our relationships, the way we impinge on one another — we ourselves, and the grace of God we mediate every Sunday in this sanctuary.
One of the primary ways we live into our convictions is by arguing with God. We don’t talk about that nearly enough as Christians: there’s been a deep thread in our piety that takes Jesus’ suffering on the cross as our model. But what preceded it is also important. The night before he died, Jesus went to Gethsemane and prayed, “Father if you are willing, let this cup pass from me, yet not my will but thine be done.” (Luke 22:42) Did you hear it? Jesus’ will and the Father’s were not the same; there was a difference between them, a difference so great that Jesus was in “anguish” and sweat was pouring from him like “great drops of blood.” (Luke 22:44) And then, later, the cry from the cross: “Why have you abandoned me?” In his hour of trial, Jesus struggled with God, not passively accepting death and suffering until the hour when accepting it became the only option.
That distinction — struggling for better and, when necessary, accepting what is worse — runs through the pages of Scripture from God’s first encounters with Abraham. Genesis tells us that three strangers came to Abraham while he was sitting under the oaks at Mamre. And when he runs and gets them a meal, they promise him a child. But as they are leaving, God decides to show Abraham what he is planning for Sodom and Gomorrah, two towns notorious for their abuse of hospitality; he plans to burn them with fire. But Abraham pleads with God to save the city, asking “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” (Gen 18:23) And then he bargains, begging God to save the city if there are fifty righteous, or forty-five, or…again and again, all the way down to ten. None of it changes God’s course of action, but the struggle allowed Abraham to discover who he was and what he cared about. I am not saying that evil does not matter for its own sake, but how we respond to the evil which surrounds us also matters in the eyes of God.
St. Paul put it like this: our lives with one another produce “suffering, and suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:3-5) A Carthusian monk adds, “To give that supreme grace to each one of us, God stops at nothing. There are times in which He will turn the whole world upside-down if thereby one single soul may come to resemble the divine Son more. That’s all He wants, that is all He can want.” (They Speak by Silences, by an anonymous Carthusian)
Nor does God leave us to struggle alone. I’ve been talking a lot about fire in its dangerous aspects: melting things down, burning up whole towns, but fire in Scripture is also Pentecost: new life and grace and the strength to go on. That’s the fire Jesus came to kindle, the one he can hardly wait to see kindled upon the earth. That’s why the author of Hebrews calls out a litany of the people (great and flawed) who led the Hebrews through their times of trial, only to add that “God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” (Heb 11:40) That “something better” is the fire that lives in our souls, so that in our times of trial, we will find we are not alone, but that, if we still our hearts and listen, we will hear the guiding voice of love.
And so, as St. Paul writes, “we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.” (2 Cor 4: 16-18) Thanks be to God.
Amen.