Journey Through The Hail Storms

Dr. James L. Mayfield
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

August 15, 2010

Text: Luke 12:49-53

A couple of years ago, Rita and I were driving home from San Angelo and we were caught in a hail storm. There was nowhere to go for shelter. Marble size hail was pounding the car and it sounded like we were inside a snare drum. The noise was so great we had to yell to communicate. We did not know whether to stop or keep going; we tried both and decided to keep moving. For more than 50 miles we were pounded.

That experience is a metaphor for the way life can be at times. We are pounded by hail stones of problems and worries and some of them seem huge -- anxious concerns about children, parents, the marriage, job security, job search, finances, issues in the state and nation such as the complex immigration issue, the mess in Afghanistan, the national debt, the multifaceted implications of the oil spill, the apparent unwillingness of politicians in all parties to cooperate with one another for the good of the country or state. On and on the list can go.

Our journey through life is all too frequently like driving through an unending hail storm. The noise made by the storms of life can be so great communication is difficult and wherever communication is difficult, relationships are strained.

Because this is the way life is so much of the time, I do not want to have to deal with passages of Scripture such as the one we read this morning.
I have come to bring fire to the earth,
   and how I wish it were already kindled. (Jesus said)
I have a baptism with which to be baptized
           (the crucifixion-resurrection)
and what stress I am under until it is completed!
     Do you think that I have come
           to bring peace on earth?
    No, I tell you, rather division!

This is not what I want to read in the Bible. This is not what I want to hear from Jesus. This is not what I want to hear read in worship. As I live in the midst of the hail storms of problems, crises, and anxieties, I want to hear about peace on earth, not about division, not about conflict, discord and hostility within our families or within the family of humanity. But this tough message is in the Bible. Luke tells us it is part of Jesus’ message. Across the centuries, the life experiences of wise men and women of faith have discovered that the wisdom this passage points toward is wisdom we who are the church need to grasp.

So, how are we to understand this passage Luke has placed at the very center  of his story about Jesus – and I do not think that is an accident.  I think it is Luke’s way of pointing to the importance of these verses.

As I see it, the concern of this passage has to do with both the passion and purpose of Jesus and the consequences of that way of life and also the passion and purpose that Jesus longs to awaken in us and all humanity and the consequences for us. “I’ve come to start a fire on this earth ... .” Jesus said,

What is this fire?  What is this passion?   ... this purpose? I am convinced, that as Luke tells the story, the passion and purpose of Jesus’ life and ministry is most clearly stated at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. When Jesus’ ministry was just getting started  (as Luke tells the story), Jesus went to his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath -- the one he had been going to for years, the one in which he had grown from being a child to becoming an adult.

Listen to the way Eugene Peterson has translated that part of Luke’s story about Jesus.
He came to Nazareth where he had been reared.
  As he always did on the Sabbath,
        he went to the meeting place.
When he stood up to read,
   he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
Unrolling the scroll,
         he found the place where it was written,
“God’s spirit is on me;
      he’s chose me
         to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
     Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners
            and recovery of sight to the blind,
    To set the burdened and battered free,
          to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” (4:16-19)

In this reading Jesus identified the passion and purpose that would drive his ministry. I am convinced Jesus reading this passage from Isaiah is the key to understanding the verses we read today.

In the passage we read today, Jesus talked about his ministry bringing division. Jesus was clearly aware that that the passion and purpose that drove his ministry were in conflict with much of the political and religious leadership of his day. He was aware that when our daily living is shaped by the passion and purpose expressed in the reading from Isaiah that drove his life, we also, from time to time, will find ourselves in the midst of conflict and controversy. This is why he told us that to follow him requires us to pick up our cross daily. The passion and purpose we see in Christ leads to conflict and division in a world of imperfect and sinful people. Yet if the world is to be the world God intends it to be, if we are to be the persons God intends us to be, the passion and purpose that drove Jesus are to be what shape our daily living also.

In the passage we read today, Jesus was saying (in effect): “Oh, that I could set you folks on fire with the compassion of God’s grace, God’s tough and tender love as expressed in Isaiah.

“Oh, that I could set you on fire with the passion and purpose of so loving God with all you are and all you have so that all that shapes your daily living is the kind of life redeeming, life giving compassion that really is good news to the poor, good news to those all around us who have the least power and the weakest voices.
      
“Oh, that I could set the whole world on fire with the passion and purpose of saying and doing and doing and saying what God wants said and done to announce pardon, hope and new possibility to those incarcerated in all kinds of prisons -- be they the prisons society constructs with steel, concrete and razor wire, or the other kinds of prisons society constructs with social pressures that are in conflict with the command to love our neighbor as ourselves, or the kinds of prisons we build for ourselves and for one another out of old hurts, old fears, distorted perspectives, and hand me down prejudices.”

I am convinced Jesus is saying in the passage we read: “Oh, that I could set the world, that is, all the people on earth, set them on fire with the healing, redeeming, life transforming grace of God.
Oh, that I could set each of you on fire  with the passion and purpose of healing the blindness of those who are unable to recognize the love of God that is already at work in their lives, with the passion and purpose of healing those blinded by cynicism and fear, blinded by the mistaken notion that revenge is the kind of justice that brings lasting peace.”

Jesus was saying (in effect):  “Oh, how I long for the whole world to be ablaze with the passion and purpose that has directed my life and ministry. I know it will not be easy,” he tells us. “I know there will be misunderstanding and conflict, even persecution and suffering. I realize what I am longing for is not what most people long for.”

But for life to be as God intends life to be, love of God and love of neighbor must be the driving force in our daily living. And this love of God and neighbor is about much more than having warm feelings. It is love that is incompatible with self-centeredness. It is in losing our self-centeredness in God-centered living, that we finally discover who we are really meant to be. It is only in this kind of losing of our lives -- losing ourselves in the passion and purpose of Christ, that we really find ourselves and discover life as God intends our lives to be.
  
In the passage that was read this morning, Jesus is longing for us to be on fire with the passion and purpose of loving God with all we are and have and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus came dispensing the kind of amazing grace that reached out to the outcast, to those most of us look down on all too often. He offered as much to those who joined his work party at the end of the day as he did to those who had labored in the vineyards of God’s grace all day. He came not only telling us we are loved but also telling us to love one another -- even those we call our enemies.

Jesus was so passionate in his effort to embody and reveal the tough and tender love God that some of the so-called “better people” of his day -- the real power brokers of the time – wanted him not only out of the way but discredited, humiliated and done away with. And just as those who followed him then discovered that allowing the passion and purpose of Christ to shape their daily living, brought them persecution, when we follow him today  it is not unusual to find ourselves in the midst of controversy and conflict.

Eugene Peterson’s translation of the passage we read this morning is part translation and part interpretation. Listen:
“I’ve come to start a fire on earth,” Jesus said,
     “—how I wish it were blazing right now!
I’ve come to change everything,
          to turn everything right side up
                -- how I long for it to be finished!
Do you think I come to smooth things over,
                and make everything nice?
  Not so.
         I’ve come to disrupt and confront.”

Where is the good news in all this? The good news of the Gospel is that God has not abandoned us to the mess we humans have made. God has given us more than a pain killer. In the midst of the mess we humans have made God continues to love us -- not only love us with  a love that cares enough to be tough and tender but also with a love that empowers us to be servants of God in the world – to be instruments of God’s tough and tender love.

Does being loved by God and empowered by that love to serve God bring us smooth sailing in our daily living?  Does God’s love rescue us from living our lives in an ongoing hail storm of issues and problems? Of course not.
 
The strange peace of the Gospel is not the kind of peace the world tries to obtain with power – be it military power or financial power or any other such power.  Nor is it the peace we seek in  various kinds of escapisms. Rather it is the inner peace that allows one not merely to survive the storms of life but to walk across the tumultuous waves. It is the kind of inner peace that enables us to experience the joy of having purpose and meaning as we daily pick up our cross and follow Jesus through life.

In that hail storm Rita and I were in, as we drove with hail pounding our car we found ourselves accompanied by the most beautiful rainbow either of us had ever seen. It was the only time in either of our lives that we have seen a complete rainbow that seemed to touch ground in the farm fields on both sides of the road. It was not a dim rainbow but one that was the most brilliant I have ever seen and it traveled with us, seeming to be only a few hundred yards in front of the car,
leading us mile after mile after mile through the storm.

As we drove, we talked about it reminding us of the story in Genesis in which God declared to Noah and to all of us: “I am putting my rainbow in the clouds, a sign of the covenant between me and the Earth.”  As we drove through that hail storm that was loudly pounding our car, we experienced  awe rather than fear.  We discovered ourselves comforted by that rainbow.

This too, is a metaphor for life, especially when we are caught in the storms -- be they storms caused by human sin and error or the storms we set loose when the passion and purpose of Christ causes us to confront and be in conflict with the sin of humans and sinful injustices of society.
             
Let us pray:
God, may the passion and purpose of Christ shape our daily living, and as we travel through the storms of life, help us never to lose sight of the rainbow’s declaration that you are with us and for us as we travel on.   Amen.