Not peace, but division

If you were paying attention on Sunday, you'll know that I spoke at length about the passage where Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace to the world, but division.

This passage is actually key in understanding the general cultural unfamiliarity with Jesus, and where that leads us.  Allow me to explain, because I didn't understand this for a long time either.  The idea that the larger culture has, is that Jesus, when he came to earth, had a totally great message all about peace and love, man, which his disciples then turned around and promptly ruined.

The notion is that Jesus existed and was a real guy, and he had a lot to say about a lot of things, but over the course of time, they all got twisted up and messed around, to the extent that the only thing that the church ever held on to was the angry mean vicious and twisted things that Jesus never even said.

There's only one problem with that idea, though.  It's absolutely not true.

Not that I'm going to tell you what Jesus did or did not say.  If you're here and you're a Christian, you probably believe he said all of it.  If you're not a Christian, you may very well not care.  But go to your local church for a moment, and have a look around.  Have a peek at the artwork of Jesus Christ.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  Odds are, it falls into three categories.

1 - Jesus with long hair looking off into the distance looking dreamy.

2 - Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of all mankind.

3 - Jesus cuddling sheep or children or looking like a consumptive girl.

In all these images, where is the one of Jesus looking mad?  He may look hurt, he may look introspective, but he sure isn't angry.  Now, in the time that the church has been in operation, it has presented a lot of moments in which Jesus Christ cuddles sheep.  Or cuddles children.  Or goes out of his way to be blandly and generally inoffensive as much as possible.  To my mind ,there exists no statues of Jesus with his brow furrowed in rage at the Pharisees.  There are no statues of Jesus flipping over tables in the temple, driving everyone out with a whip.  I have never been into a church in which the art has featured prominently a Jesus, face twisted in rage at the brood of vipers crowding around him, or giving Peter the look that caused Peter to break into tears.

And this is actually to our detriment.  Because guess what, the world still feels as though Christians are awfully judgmental, no problem there, right?  And here's the deal.  Because the church has done such a good job of promoting nice Jesus, and yet still talks about sin and shame, people have the quite reasonably opinion that Jesus had nothing to do with all that angry talk, and that this was all something the church had added later.  We are, I suppose, a victim of our own success on that one.  So it's no wonder, I suppose, when Jesus says stuff like he said on Sunday, that he did not come to bring peace but division, that people would get a little bit strange about it.  It seems normal that if people went to Sunday School or VBS for the first few years of their lives and then never again, that they might get the notion that Jesus is just a super cool guy who loves to hang out.  And then the church talks about sin and wrath, which seems to go against what Jesus talked about in VBS.

The point I'm trying to get at here, in a roundabout way, is that the whole story is consistent.  Part of the trouble is that we're teaching only the super nice super stuff, and not about the need for that stuff to begin with.  The trouble is that Jesus is nice, and God and the clergy are mad.  But that's not how it works in the Bible.  Jesus did not come to earth to be nice.  He wasn't, as Douglas Adams theorized, nailed to a piece of wood for saying we should be nice to each other.  He was nailed to a piece of wood for daring to claim that we're not as nice to each other as we believe we should be.  He was nailed to a piece of wood for saying to the world that would listen that they had a gnawing hunger in them that they weren't who they wanted to be, and that saying 'God is love' wasn't fixing that.

And so Jesus came not to bring peace, but division.  Not to be nice, but to be good.  Not to tell people that they were okay, not to be the muzak of the theological world, but to tell people the truth about themselves, about God, about all that.  And this is big.  This is big huge.  Here's the at issue, superfriends, is that Jesus is Good.  Not nice, not pleasant, but good.  And good divides right from wrong.

You wouldn't think a doctor was a good doctor if she was just nice, would you?  If she just gave you polite compliments about your hair while ignoring the incredibly serious possibly fatal health problems you've got.  You wouldn't think much of a dentist who said how pretty you were while your teeth rotted out of your head.  No, to be good is to be more than nice.  To be good is to be good.  It is to divide good from evil, the wheat from the chaff, the silver from the slag, and to dispense with the waste, and gather the greatness.  If you sit down and think long and hard enough, isn't this exactly what you want Jesus Christ to do?  Not to bring peace to your life the way it is, but to divide you from all the junk you have crawling all over everything you do.  And this is what Jesus is actually for.

If you think that Jesus agrees with you on everything, then you've only gotten as far as Sunday School, friends.  But if you believe that Jesus forgives you, even for the stuff he hates, then you're right on the money.

PJ.

Do not be anxious

If you're familiar with rap music at all, you should know this:  I've got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.

And why wouldn't you?   That's the thing about money that I learned from Garfield's ME book, back in the eighties.  It was a great book, and it styled itself as a guide to superiority, how to know it, get it, and keep it.  And in that book, it detailed a list of superiorities.  Intellectual superiority, royal superiority, physical superiority, etc.  But the last in the list was financial superiority, and that was listed as the best superiority you could have.  Why?  Because it let you purchase any of the other sub-superiorities.

That's the deal with cash, is that it's nothing on its own.  Yes, it's useful, but only if you want to buy things.  The crushing thing about not having much money is that it limits your ability to do absolutely anything else.  And although you may not be thinking or dreaming about Scrooge McDuck levels of excessive wealth, there's a good chance that you're dreaming about something you might like to purchase.  And that's, ultimately, thinking about money.

Here's the deal.  Becasue money is the mechanism through which everything operates, then you need it to do basically anything.  And that by itself, is fine.  But the problem, as I have mentioned before, is not that you buy things.  Check out the gulf between where you are now, and where the people of Jesus' time were when Christ was speaking to them.  Look at what's asked of the good people from Jesus' time, that they not worry about what they eat or drink or wear.

Do Not Worry

22 Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. 24 Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 25 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life[a]? 26 Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

27 “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 28 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! 29 And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. 30 For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Luke 12-22-34

Are any of you out there seriously so hard up on your luck that you are obsessing over where your next meal is going to come from?  No, you're not.  Everyone who is reading this likely has it together enough to pay for food and clothing.  No problem there.  So if all your necesseties are met, if there is nothing that you need to get by, then what is it possibly that you're obsessing over?

Well, from the moment you're born, you're presented with a vast wealth of things you can buy.  And things that you might want to buy.  And if you've been paying attention to the advertising industry, you should have noticed something very important - very few advertisments talk about the product in question.  All they're designed to do is to make you dissatisfied with who you are and your station in life.  The models will be holding the beers, to be sure, but nobody's drinking them.  They're selling you the party, but all you'll get is the beer.  Party not included.

But that lifestyle, that precious lifestyle, that's what's presented for you as the carrot dangled before your eyes.  It's what you want and what you crave, and as discussed last week, it's always out of range.


And you know that.  You should, at least, know that by now.  And then comes Jesus Christ, and he tells you something big.  Something really big.  Something of such monumental size that you couldn't possibly imagine the ramifications.  He advocates communism.  Really.

Now, this isn't to say that he advocates modern communism with all the bells and whistles of the Soviet system.  I think that we can all agree that that experiment failed, and is never going to work.  But what he does advocate, if you're listening, is redistribution of wealth.  That is, if you have an excess, which we all do, you are requested by Jesus to sell what you have, and give to the poor.

Now, how do I propose that this is to work without turning our great nation into the new Soviet Union?  Simple.  What the United States was based on, and to a less extent, Canada too, is the separation of church and state.  Put simply, we are to be living in Canada, under Canadian laws, but acting as little tiny individual communists.  Even in a capitalist system.

How on earth am I advocating communism?  Well, I'm advocating a system in which we, as individual

Christians, as the body of Christ, take seriously the directives given to us by our Lord, and decide to do the right thing with them.  As Tony Campolo once said, 'whatever your branch of Christianity, can we at least agree that the teachings of Jesus are normative.' We are saved by grace through faith, indeed, but then the inevitable question is 'now what?'  What are we to do then?  Just recede into the background, just disappear, just sit on our laurels as saved people, or are we to do something?

The best parts of the Bible are typically going to be the parts you don't like.  The best bits are the bits in which Jesus shows up, and tells you what you don't want to hear.  And guess what:  It's a lot like contemporary vs traditional music.  If half the hymns are in the style you don't like, then odds are you'll only remember the ones you hated.  You won't remember the half you liked.  It's the same way with the scriptures.  If the Bible seems to be talking a lot about sex, it's probably because you're doing something sexual that you shouldn't be.  If all the Bible seems to do is to bang on about social justice, it's probably because you're not very just.  And if the Bible seems to drone on and on about giving to the poor, so that it overshadows everything else, well, that probably means that you should be doing more of that now, doesn't it.

Again, to be abundantly clear, this has nothing whatsoever to do with salvation.  Don't get confused.  You are not granted admission to heaven based on the number of poor people you fed, but by grace,

the grace of God.  Having said that, the Bible does talk at great length about a lot of issues, and if you yourself are not real up on the social issues that the Bible talks about, odds are that's all you'll hear.

And these days, well, this last couple of weeks, it seems like Jesus Christ is all about the social justice, the feeding of the poor, and all that.  And if you end up thinking to yourself that that's all he seems to talk about anymore, well, then 'let he who has ears, let him hear.'  And this is something that we need to hear.  Badly.

The trouble with the Lutheran church, or the Christian church in general, is that we tend to get a little, well, lazy with the way we approach the words of Christ.  That is, we tend to feel as though he promises us grace (which he does), and that saves us (which it does), so we're all good.  But salvation, it's not a dead end.  It's not enough as Christians, and it never has been, for us to say 'got mine, forget the rest of you.'  That's why there's evangelism, and weirdly enough, charity.

Abraham prayed and was given a promise by God.  Noah, likewise.  They did what they did by faith.  And now, it's time for you and I.  Not to ask about our salvation, that's the one thing that our faith is

good at, but time for us to look at the monumental problems before us in the world and say 'we need to have faith to tackle this.'  I have faith in God to enact powerful miracles, but do I have faith sufficient to listen to his word?  That's a big question.  It's a big question with a big answer.  The Gospel reading tells us that we need to be more than faithful based on what we should eat or drink or wear, but that we should be the means through which that is done for others.   The poor of this world are expected to have faith that God will provide for them, and then in the same breath, God has said that he is going to use us to do that.  He told us to sell what we have, give it to the poor so that his words may be realized.

Once again, we need to remember that, though this is not a matter of salvation, it's incredibly important.  We are God's workmanship, made for good works, which he has prepared in advance for us to do.  If you don't want to feed the poor, and clothe the naked, and through that realize Luke 12:22-31, then what do you actually believe in?  A God who will reach through time and space and create clothing out of nothing for the naked of the world?  Or a God who will take clothing away from someone who has far too much, and use that to clothe the naked.  Every hill will be made low, and every valley raised up.

The choice is yours; not in terms of will you or will you not be saved, but will you listen to Jesus?  The calls that went to Abraham and Noah, as mentioned in the epistle reading, they were notable becasue the men who heard them had faith, and listened.  You were already called to faith through the Gospel, and to salvation by the Holy Spirit.  Now, friends, prepare yourselves to listen to what Jesus says:

Sell your possessions, and give to the needy.

That's what he says.  Do you have faith enough to listen?

PJ.

Where do you find a pair of sailors?

It's a passable joke.  Where do you find a pair of sailors?  A paradox.  Say it fast and it works.  But paradoxes can be fun!  Especially, for the purposes of this week's readings, Zeno's paradox.  If you're not familiar, I'd like to paint you a picture, because it's really important.  And to talk about Zeno's paradox, I'd like to talk about the way Kari's father taught it to her.  It's a little more straightforward than the method I used on Sunday morning.

Let's say you shoot an arrow at a target.  Given that your aim is reasonably good, you may be very well able to hit said target.  But how long is it going to take the arrow to get to the target.  Well, Let's say it takes one second to get half of the way there.  No problem so far.  And then it takes half a second to get half of the remaining way there.  And then a quarter of a second to get half of that remaining distance.  And then an eighth of a second to get half of the remaining distance after that.  And do you know what happens eventually?  The arrow never gets to the target.  Why not?  Because the space is infinitely divisible.  That may seem like a strange thing to be talking about, but that's what makes it a paradox, isn't it?  Yes, if you shoot an arrow it will get to the target, obviously, but if you subdivide the distances for an eternity, the space between you and the target is infinitely divisible.

It always reminds me of the wildly philosophical ending of 'the incredible shrinking man.'  Great movie about a guy who shrinks.  You wouldn't think that a movie about a guy who gets smaller would have a whole lot of stuff to say, especially given [spoiler alert] he doesn't get better.  He just keeps shrinking.  Please to humor me and watch the closing monologue of this film, don't worry, it's only two and a half minutes.

Okay, do you see what's going on here?  The guy is shrinking, yes, he is getting perpetually smaller.  But he himself is infinitely divisible.  There is no limit to how small he can get, but even as he shrinks down to smaller than you or I could possibly imagine, he is still him, and to God there is no zero.

Why am I bringing all this up? Mainly because the Gospel reading was one about coveting, and it included on the cover of the bulleting the most egregious of all possible images for the purposes of discussing the topic, which is an image very much like this one over here:

Sorry for the stock photo, but here we are.  And this is a great image, because for you and me, average joe Christians, we end up thinking about us as the 99% being kept down by the awful 1% of corporate fat cats, with their private planes, their convertibles, their sliced bread, and goodness knows whatever else.  That's the problem over there somewhere, and we, we with our three bedroom homes, our two cars, our two dogs, our three televisions, we're struggling vainly to get by, while the fat cats take it all.

That's the way the story is supposed to go.  And we desperately want Jesus to rail against the fat cats, and to call them out for their avarice, and to give them the business while you and I in the pew get to relax, and get comfy that Jesus is coming to put to right on the earth, which usually means in our heads that he is coming to redistribute the resources to make sure we get a bigger piece of the pie.

But hold on there, campers.  If Jesus really came to raise the valleys and to bring low the hills, the great levelling, where do you think you'd actually factor into it?  My guess?  Not as favourably as you might like.  I know it's typically the 99% vs the 1%, heck the entire occupy movement was predicated on that, but globally, who is the 1%?  Just the fat cats?  You wish.

Globally, anyone who earns over $35000 a year is in the 1%.  Is that you?  Very likely.  It might not be, but there's a good chance that it is.  What does that mean?  It means that the avarice and greed and coveting and love for possessions of the 1% isn't someone else's problem.  It's your problem.

As I said on Sunday, realistically, when you covet, what do you think about?  Is it the sports car with a private plane?  I doubt it.  I'd be much more likely to believe that you covet the same things that I do.  If you've got a 1000 square foot house, you probably want a 1200 square foot house.  Nothing crazy like a mansion in the hills, but just a little bigger, just a little nicer, just a little newer than the one you've got.  It's the same thing with  your cars.  Odds are none of you lie awake at night and seriously contemplate the purchase of a Ferrari.  But you might have a few sleepless nights contemplating the purchase of a 2012 civic to replace your 2006 Focus.  Sure, it was great then, but now it's starting to show its age, and who needs that.

But that gnawing hole of your coveting, it doesn't ever go away.  It's never satisfied.  It's a funny thing about coveting is that it's never full.  You can't sort of complete the set, then take in a big deep breath and say 'whew, I made it.  I have everything I want.'  At some time you've probably wondered why the richest men in the world, the Gates, the Buffets, the whoevers, why they don't just stop one day and say 'that's enough, I have enough money.'  Well, why don't you?

The fact is, like Zeno's paradox, there's never an end to your coveting.  You want and you want and you want.  No matter what you buy, no matter how great it is at first, the luster will wear off eventually.  Heck, most of what we buy is only good until you bring it home and unwrap it.  And then you sigh, and get on to what you want next.  Zeno's paradox.  Just when you think you've bought the one thing that'll make you happy, then you are disappointed when you get it home.

Why is this?  Because you, like everyone else, has eternity stamped on your hearts.  You want things to last forver, you crave it.  And more than that, you feel as though that is the way things should be.  You want that rest, that satisfaction, that comfort, we all do.  It's built into us.  Because behind everything else, we crave paradise again.

That's why the target moves so rapidly, that's why we can never keep up, because the weak frail breakable things we buy here are never going to satisfy, because they're not perfect, they're dust, one way or another.  They will break down, they will wear out, they will fall apart, eventually.  This is what Augustine means when he says that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.

So, let's say that you're a Christian and your heart is satisfied in God.  Are you 'done?'  Will you be satisfied?  Well, get ready, because I'm about to blow your minds, because you're never supposed to be done.  Not this side of heaven.  You are never finished.

Zeno's paradox applies to two more things.  First of all, to your sin and shame.  You come to church, confess your sins, get forgiven, partake in the body and blood of Christ for your salvation, and then what happens?  You gotta come back again.  Think of it like Zeno's paradox, in that no matter how completely you are forgiven, you are still a sinner.  That part, your sinful nature, your brokenness, that's what is indivisible.  Not that you're not totally forgiven in church, which you absolutely are.  But think of it like needing kidney dialysis.  If you go, you get your blood cleaned, so to speak, but that doesn't mean that your kidneys are fixed. You're healthy, but not repaired. There's still a flaw in you, that is going to require constant care.

But there's another paradox that's good for us to know.  Jesus, when someone had dumped a lot of expensive perfume on him, said that we would always have the poor with us.  And believe it or not, that's true.  No matter how many people you feed, no matter how many people you house or clothe or look after, you will always have the poor with you.  Jesus talks about how there are hundreds and thousands of opportunities to do service, not just to the poor, but also to Jesus himself, by looking after those who are disenfranchised, or less fortunate than ourselves.  Jesus is clear when he says that when we feed or clothe or visit or minister to any of those, we do it for him too.  And that work is never ending.

Don't use the never-ending-Zeno's-paradox nature of that task as an excuse to never start.  That's our initial thought, to say 'since there will always be the poor, and we're never going to make a dent in it, we'd better just do nothing.

Okay, but if that's how you approach interminable tasks, how is God supposed to approach you?  You continue to be a backslider, you continue to be a mess, you continue to make the same mistakes, commit the same sins, week after week.  If that's you, and you expect God to continue to forgive you and continue to work on your paradox, how can you look at an interminable task he's placed before you, and decline to do it?  Believe it or not, having the poor with us is a good thing.  It means we will always be able to serve God and serve others.  It means we will always be able to respond to our salvation with joy, and use our gifts wisely. You're never 'done.'  You're never all finished with your work that God has given you to do.  The rivers flow to the sea, as says Ecclesiastes, but the sea is not full.

PJ.