Turning everything Rightside up

19 August 2013 | 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 12:49-56

 “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? {Luke 12:49-56)

Violence in Egypt

All day today the newscasts were full of the turmoil in Cairo, Alexandria, and the rest of Egypt – the demonstrations, the deaths, the destruction of Christian churches, the threats, the Muslim brotherhood, the generals, issues of American military aid.  I listened to a touching interview on the BBC world service: A young Egyptian woman named Fatima said that some of her friends had been in the city and seen the soldiers fire unprovoked on peaceful demonstrators.  She said that the Muslim Brotherhood people needed to be a part of the society, and not be pushed underground, and that the army should not be killing people.  Her mother then said that she disagreed with Fatima – that the Brotherhood were terrorists and that they could not be tolerated, and that friends of hers had said the soldiers were justified in responding to violence from demonstrators.  The mother and daughter argued strongly.  Then the BBC interviewer in London inserted into the dialogue a woman who was the wife of the Deputy Foreign Minister in the Morsi regime.  In excellent English, she said that her husband had been taken the day that Morsi was overthrown, and that neither she nor her four small children knew where their father was.  She then argued with the mother.

Just 265 miles away and 2000 years ago, in Jerusalem, Jesus may have been describing what we are seeing:

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” he said, “and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!”

What happens in the streets will be happening in families as well: “From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

It isn’t just a matter of violence and disruption, Jesus said.  The problem is also that people who should be paying attention are clueless:

“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

Is what is happening in Egypt now what Jesus was talking about then?  Certainly it affects both Jews and Christians, as well as all the rest of the population of the Arab world and Egypt.  The American military aid to Egypt is a part of the Camp David accords – part of the guarantee from Egypt of the safety and sovereignty of Israel. Christians in Egypt hasten to say that their lives have been protected by Muslim friends, even while violent mobs have burned their churches, but the followers of Jesus have certainly not been exempt from the impact of the violence.

How do you understand this teaching from Jesus?  What happened to his words of peace?  I thought he was a teacher of peace.  Is it possible that this teaching of peace can in some way be a cause of violence, or at least an occasion for it?

The world upside down

Yesterday I had the privilege of being celebrant for the Eucharist at St. Paul’s Church in downtown Richmond, and of hearing a sermon by the Director of Christian Education, the Rev. Claudia Merritt.  Claudia asked this question, “What happened to the Jesus who taught peace?” and then she pulled out a paraphrase of Jesus’ words by the Presbyterian scholar Eugene Petersen: “I’ve come to change everything, turn everything rightside up – how I long for it to be finished!  Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I’ve come to disrupt and confront!”[1]

The suggestion here – the radical suggestion – is not that Jesus was bringing violence to Jerusalem and the Middle East, but rather that he was upsetting the phony peace of violent and oppressive men and women.  The violence was in the structure of things, in the habits of oppression and prejudice, in the maldistribution of resources, and in the phony religion which supported it.

Jesus’ picture of the world was of one which was locked into its sinfulness.   Priests and Pharisees did exactly what they thought the Divine Law told them and it justified the oppression of other people.  Rulers in Jerusalem made the deals with the Romans which they told themselves would bring peace, and they brought misery and oppression.  It reminds you of the great folk tale about “The Emperor who had No Clothes” [And if you don’t know that one, I’ll get Annie to tell it when she gets back into town.]  It isn’t rocket science, Jesus said — “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. – people know how to tell the weather from the clouds.  Do you think they can’t read the signs of the times?

But they can’t.  We can’t.  Why that is, and what’s involved, is the question of human blindness and sin.  We are like the young boy who grew up on a steep hillside, and was told by his family that he was living on level ground.  When he finally came down to the town in the valley, he thought the ground slanted.

We have been brought up to call good evil and to call evil good.  It is not just the agitators who bring upset to the human scene.  It is the people who maintain order that is generations-full of self-serving and injustice.

Who is right in Egypt?  When will this ever be over?  The order is unjust.  The revolution has a lot of viciousness and bigotry in it.

The great American social and religious critic H. L. Mencken may have been closer to Jesus’ teaching than many of his opponents when he said these words: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

Pope Paul VI picked up these words and used them as the title of his Message for the Celebration of the Day of Peace on January 1, 1972.  They have become emblematic of modern Catholic social teaching.

They are, of course, a lot harder to practice than to preach.  It’s not that Jesus came to turn the social order or the world upside down.  It’s already upside down.  He came “to change everything, turn everything rightside up.”

Upside down In Richmond

You couldn’t find a better example of how wrong has been called right than we have in metropolitan Richmond – although my guess is you can find this in its particularity in any city of the world.

But here it’s so obvious, so egregious.  And it’s that way because we have here our own documents, our own Torah, our own Divine Law which we worship.  Two of its tenets stand as monuments on the two hills which border Shockoe Valley.  Here on this one we have the tenet of Patrick Henry, enshrined in St. John’s Church:

“Give me Liberty, or Give me Death.”  We believe in personal liberty and say we are prepared to die for it.  On the other hill, enshrined in the Temple of Democracy which Thomas Jefferson copied from a Roman temple in Nimes, France, we have the tenet of the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal.”

And in between, on October 10, 1800, the Commonwealth of Virginia hanged Gabriel Prosser for believing that the American Torah applied to the entire population, and not only to half of it.

Just 237 years ago, the American Revolution established freedom for half the population and a totalitarian state of slavery for the other half.  Yet the words we were taught then and the words we are taught today are the words of freedom.  We have established a crooked society and called it justice.  The deliberate oppression of half of the population is barely a footnote to our grand hymn of freedom.

Today’s battle is for public transportation in our city.  We are fighting the same kind of denial and hypocrisy that has been here for centuries.  The Commonwealth of Virginia uses the word “city” for only a small portion of the city, and calls on that impoverished portion to finance itself and its citizens without the revenue of the last 50 years’ extensive business development.  It has established a system whereby persons of higher income have access to all the city’s jobs, but persons of lower income or skill have access to only one-quarter of the jobs.  This is done by restricting public transportation to the center city.

If you question this, are you turning things upside down, or are you turning them rightside up?

Who is Jesus in this?

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”

In his words, you can hear the agony Jesus feels.  The only thing worse than disorder is an order which makes oppression and evil permanently in charge.  The only thing worse than fighting in a family is the oppression of members of the family, holding one another in bondage.

It is not that Jesus does not seek reconciliation.  He does, and he gives his life for it.  But there cannot be reconciliation without an acknowledgement of distress.  True reconciliation must be based on truth.

I doubt that there has been a revolutionary movement since the time of Jesus that has made everything right – today’s revolutionary is too often tomorrow’s oppressor.  But this I know: justice is the only stable situation in God’s world.  And it is the Messiah’s intention – that is, it is the intention of Messiah Jesus, and of his holy spirit in his followers to bring justice.  He came to change everything, to turn everything rightside up – and how deeply he longs for it to be finished!

AMEN.