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St. Charles Episcopal Church - Saint Charles, IL

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 15 RCL – Year C

Sunday, August 15, 2010                                                                                                                                                                               

Isaiah 5:1-7 – Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 – Hebrews 11:29-12:2 – Luke 12:49-56

Rev. William R. Nesbit, Jr.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.

            These words of peace fill our Eucharist every Sunday. But when we wrap ourselves in peace like a big comforter, blocking out the coldness of the outside world, like children hiding under the covers of peace, we get it all wrong. We confuse peace and quiet with the peace of God.

            In today’s Gospel Jesus gives us a glimpse of what comes with the peace of God.

It’s not at all like peace and quiet. It is a deeply troubling peace. A peace that demands justice and often makes one more restless than restful. It is a peace that brings fire.

Not the warm fire of comfort, but the hot fires of conviction. A fire that brings light to the dark and hidden corners of our lives. Peace and quiet is as different from the peace of God, as the Perseid meteor shower, that has been lighting up our sky this week, is from the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs here on earth over 65 million years ago. The peace of God changes things. Or at least it would if we would let it.

            One of the things that we often confuse in the church is peace and change. All at the same time, the Church is one of the great institutions of inertia, as well as one of the great engines of change. The problem is, that until the kingdom of God actually comes, inertia should really be anathema to the church. And yet it isn’t. How could the church sit on it’s hands and allow the subjugation of one race by another, and yet it did for hundreds of years, sacrificing justice for a hollow kind of peace. Our history reminds us, convicts us to ask, “Where are we allowing the inertia of the status quo to limit the power and grace of the kingdom of God because we do not have the nerve to even rock the boat?”

            In our reading from Isaiah, we hear the song of the metaphorical vineyard. In this song the prophet tells of all that has been done for God’s beloved and the sad reality of how the beloved have responded. Do you not hear the warning in this song?

What if that song is about us? What if God is expecting us to respond with justice in recompense for all that we have been given? Can we honestly say that justice rolls down like water? That the kingdom of God is even close?

            But still there is reason to hope. If we have the courage to allow it, the peace of God can work in our lives like the hammer of a sculptor or like the refiners fire. In our Gospel this morning, Jesus says, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” These words are so harsh that they grate on us. Can this be the same Jesus that has spoken so often of love? Did he not just weeks ago berate his own disciples for wanting to call in a fire strike of their own? What could he mean by this fire that he wishes were already kindled? Is this the fire of judgement, or might it be a different kind of fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit?

            As often happens when reading scripture, I believe the writer of the Gospel of Luke intended it to be both. The refining fire that Jesus brings will light up the hidden flaws in relationships between people, even within families. The searing light of the truth of that fire will burn away the fabric of lies that surround so many of our interactions with each other. Relationships built around lies will crumble and split. At the same time the fire of the Spirit will inflame our hearts with love, overcoming our own fears and our jealousy of those around us, re-knitting us together in truth. This is the peace of God that is trying to break into our world every day; a peace that we so desperately need and want, while at the same time we fear and hinder. It is a struggle happening within ourselves that is reflected in the struggle between God and the petty idols we raise up instead.

            In spite of this warning we continue to surround ourselves with idols of our own creation; false gods that we pursue and worship with zeal. Wealth, beauty, power, and possessions. We build our little castles in the sand while the tide is running and we don’t even know, or choose not to look. But still there is hope. Though we may be divided, we are, as Paul says, surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.

            Every Sunday morning we gather and exchange the peace of the Lord. Often it is misconstrued as an opportunity to greet friends and strangers with hospitality. In truth it is far more. When we offer the peace of God to each other, we open ourselves in a radical way, inviting God to break into our lives and strike down our false gods, to take hammer and chisel to the extra weight we are carrying. As the Letter to the Hebrews says “Let us.. lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith...” I am saddened that the lectionary stops the reading there because the exhortation continues a little later with “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”

            If exchanging the peace makes you a little more uncomfortable now, makes you restless to be about God’s work, that’s a good thing. There can never be too much justice in the world. If you look around with the eyes of God, it is clear that we’ve got a lot of work to do. Don’t let the inertia of your own sin hold you back. Your sins have been forgiven. Leave them behind. Just because we have been blessed by God in the past, don’t assume that that blessing will continue. Of God’s love we can be assured, but that doesn’t mean that we can be assured of God’s blessing. If we take the vineyard of God’s blessing and return only the wild grapes of injustice, then surely the walls of that vineyard will come down. As followers of Jesus we too must yearn for the holy fire to be kindled. Not the destructive fire of war and intolerance, but the refining fire of the Holy Spirit that burns away the dross of ignorance and indifference, and lights our way out of the darkness of selfishness and vanity.

            Do you see the clouds rising in the west? Our time is growing short. “Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”

Amen.