A sermon on the time when Jesus says that he's come to set fire to the earth and bring division (Luke 12.49-56).
As I canvassed the neighborhood on Monday morning, I was confronted with signs of this prophecy being fulfilled. With the return of students, moving truck upon moving truck was stacked in the streets. Concerned parents prepared for battle as they marched with mops and brooms and industrial strength cleaners into well lived-in University Hill residences. As parents gave their parting hugs and handshakes, I saw this prophecy coming to pass. I saw God’s people divided; fathers leaving sons and sons leaving fathers; mothers leaving daughters and daughters leaving mothers.
The charred remains of furniture deemed too dilapidated for college life, left in alleyways and on street corners, appear to be indicators that returning students are also aware of this week’s prophetic readings and are embracing Christ’s mission to bring fire to the earth.
How are we to interpret the appearance of these signs? Are they signs of doom? Are they signs that we are preparing to enter into another nine months marked by division, of students turned against community members, undergrads vs grad students, Buffs against Rams and Huskers? Is the present time a time of late night parties, litter in the church parking lot and a time and world in which student driven traffic congestion adds an extra five minutes to our commutes?
Or do Christ’s stern words this morning carry some measure hope, some good news, through which we might interpret the signs of this time?
While I cannot help but to be excited by the newly arrived student’s misguided pyrotechnical excitement for this week’s gospel, it does appear that our renewed neighbors are not particularly familiar with the customs and norms of the ancient near east. Jesus’ assertion that he has come to set fire to the earth is not the announcement of a scorched earth policy or an endorsement of collegiate furniture conflagrations. Rather the earth to which Jesus has come to set fire is the same earth that Jesus speaks of when he tells us that when salt has lost its taste it is fit neither for the soil, for the earth, nor for the manure pile. This earth is, in fact, a reference to an outdoor earthen oven that would have been contained by the walled courtyard of the average home in the ancient near east.
It turns out that Jesus’ words this morning are not a promise of destruction, but a promise of creation. It’s the promise that back in the days of earthen ovens and even now Jesus comes to get things cooking, to set into motion a new life-filled world that will change everything.
Even with the benefit of historical context this text, this promise of change is not easy to hear. As student’s return, I confess that I enjoy my summer routine. In the summer I get home at a decent hour almost everyday. With reduced programming my morning runs are much more leisurely. And without the traffic I seldom worry about being late.
But the life God is cooking up right now is so complete that it is enough to change my comfortable routines, and more than enough to change everything, even pulling apart the the familial ties that hold us and our society together.
And that is scary and it tempts me with contentment with the world around us and with myself. John Polkinghorne convicts me when he writes about this false hope:
“Much of what counts for hope in the current social context is “in a negative form-as a desire that certain things not occur.” I hope the stock market doesn’t crash, I hope I don’t go into a vegetative state and die in a nursing home, I hope that we don’t have another 9/11. This is ultimately a secular hope, a hope that the party will go on forever, which Kirkegaard recognized as the despair that doesn’t even know it is despairing, the “sickness unto death.” Thy kingdom come, thy will be done? - Oh, I hope not.”
We might expect that students would delight in this week’s promise, to rejoice as parents depart, to celebrate in the streets the advent of something so incredibly new and vital. But know that they, too, tremble at the power of Christ. At a time when everything is changing, whether they’re ready for it or not, students are in search of stability. For every rabble rouser on the Hill there is a student wrestling with the perpetual changes of life that continue while they are away; siblings growing up, parents separating, grandparents dying.
As anxious as these texts might make us, the hope they proclaim is the reason that we, that campus ministry and Grace, are here.
You see, we are not here to recruit future members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We are not here to exist in a parasitic relationship with the university, in which we hope to convert as many discombobulated freshmen as possible to the gospel of jello salads and personal relationships with Jesus.
We are here because this is a sacred place. This is the place where the promise that ‘this is not it,’ that God is not continent with the world as it is, is boldly proclaimed. We are here to worship, to work, to study, and research in the faith that while the fullness of God’s love for us (as individuals, as a congregation and as a society) has not yet reached its zenith it shall come to pass. We are here at the edge of the present and the future because this is a place, like an ancient earthen oven, where God is bringing the kingdom into the world. The hope of this gospel is the hope of the academy. It’s why we do campus ministry and I think it’s the particular ministry to which Grace is called in this place and time.
This moment is our new year. Again, we stand again on the edge of the coming of something unknown and new and that threatens to change us and all that we are. The discarded furniture in alleys, the disruption of moving trucks blocking the street, our neighborhood literally turning over is the turning over of the soil, of the earth, to which God sets fire and from which God brings life.
It starts today. Today, the fullness of God’s kingdom comes in this place. The soil, the earth, that Greek word at the heart of this week’s gospel, is also the place from which bread comes, from the oven and from the soil. As we prepare to immerse ourselves in a new year of discerning where and how God is bringing such unexpected and new life on campus there is a measure of stability. Today at this table, as God does every week, as seasons and semesters pass, God has lit the flame and bread and life come up from the earth.
Fed by the fruits of the earth inflamed, let us go forth into the unknown, into a new academic year, into a new epoch in this congregation’s history, with the boldness and the urgency with which Christ moves this morning. This place is God’s earth. This is God’s oven. May Christ light the fires of Bunsen burners and the souls of poets and musicians, students and staff, faculty and community members and get this kingdom cooking. Amen.
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