Interpreting the Present Time
Luke 12:49 "I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!
12:50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!
12:51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!
12:52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;
12:53 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."
12:54 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.
12:55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat,' and it happens.
12:56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret [discern] the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret [discern] the present time [kairos]?
Why do we bother with church?
Better: Why does God want us to bother with church?
To help us align our stories with God’s story. How does church do this?
Worship God: making it clear that God is good and central, celebrate God’s presence. Confidence and inspiration. Acknowledge that core reality and affirm it with energy, gratitude, and joy.
Helping one another clarify what God’s story is by looking at the past and the present and projecting into the future.
Helping one another participate in that story more fully – creating and maintaining structures and practices that invite us into living ourselves into God’s story more fully.
Prayer and other grounding activities
Opportunities for service that widen our circle of compassion
Building relationships of care and trust within our community
Other stuff
One of the principal communal resources we have in figuring out how to align ourselves with God’s story is the Bible. What do we find in the Bible?
The story of the creation of the world and the coming into being of the people of Israel.
Jesus – his teaching and actions, his life and death, his resurrection
The activities and teachings of the post-resurrection communities of Jesus’ followers.
This morning we are looking at a particular moment in Jesus’ life of teaching. It takes place as he is headed toward his crucifixion in Jerusalem.
Maybe you noticed that in this morning’s Gospel Lesson Jesus is profoundly frustrated. I hope you heard that.
First, Jesus is describing division among people as necessary Being nice and getting along is not the goal. Aligning with God’s story is the goal. We’ll come back to this.
Secondly, he scolds his audience for not interpreting the time in which they are living. Jesus is frustrated with the crowd.
What does Jesus mean by “interpreting the time.”
Think of it this way:
Each of our stories are part of a larger story. God’s story. God’s story is playing out in many arenas on many levels:
The human world
Our individual lives: how is within our own minds, hearts, bodies.
Our family and wider social circle: how we are getting along with those around us and how are they getting along with each other.
Our communities: the people we regularly interact with. How things are going in the economic, political, and social institutions which impact us locally.
The community of communities: state, nation, world
The non-human world
The plants and animals and insects and bacteria: all non-human life
The material world
Earth beneath our feet
The air, soil, bodies of water
The weather
The climate
The planets, stars, and galaxies
The Cosmos: all these things, and even what we don’t know about, all interconnected.
It’s actually a bit dizzying when you stop to think about it. There’s a lot going on.
Now, I want to say that our faith, our confidence, our trust, is that God’s story, the story that God is drawing out or drawing in, or living out through all of creation, is directed toward the fulfillment of love. God’s story is directed toward the fulfillment of love.
And while it may be that we have faith, confidence that this story is moving toward the fulfillment of love, it is also true that God’s story is being thwarted at various levels by various forces – some of them human, and sometimes even you and me.
But despite this, it is our faith/confidence/trust that God is continually at work cajoling, seducing, nudging all that is – including us – toward a culmination of divine love.
Now, if we are to align ourselves with God’s story, we need to have some sense of how God’s story is playing out on the levels that touch our lives – and, perhaps more importantly, some sense of how our lives intersect with the ways in which God’s story is playing out around us.
Or, to put this a different way, in the limited amount of time and attention we have, how can we be aligning ourselves – aligning our attention, intention, and action with God’s story – the story God desires to be unfolding?
What do we do to align ourselves with God’s story of the fulfillment of the creation in love? Where do we focus?
We all know that our attention can be pulled in different directions, and we know that sometimes it is not obvious what our priorities need to be at a given time.
Understanding what our priorities should be requires discernment. But to discern wisely, we need to tease out the story of the present time. Interpret the present time.
If we are going to align our stories with God’s story, then we need to interpret the present time. Discern the present time.
This brings us back to the Gospel Lesson from Luke for this morning.
When Jesus scolds the crowd for not interpreting the signs of the times, he reminds them that they are able to interpret the sky to know what the weather will be, and they will plan and act accordingly.
Yet they are unable or unwilling to set their hearts on what is happening in their midst: namely that God is acting in Jesus in their present moment, and that activity of God’s love, mercy, and power is provoking the authorities to put Jesus to death in an attempt to stop him. That is the fire and baptism that Jesus refers to when he says:
"I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!”
And this brings us back to the division that Jesus says he has come to bring. This division emerges because of who he is and the controversy that brings. People will line up as supporters or opponents. People’s take on whether he is a part of God’s story or whether he is thwarting God’s story will divide families and households.
Discerning whether or not Jesus is a part of God’s story or thwarting God’s story puts you on one side of this division or the other. They don’t want to discern because they don’t want to take sides. But Jesus tells them the time is coming when they will have to come down on one side or the other.
Most of us do not want to be at odds with those in our households and families. Most of us do not want to be at odds with those in our church or communities. For most of us, it takes a lot to stake out a position that sets us apart from those with whom we personally interact. It’s stressful. Most of us put a high priority on getting along and being nice to others.
In fact, I suggest that one of the reasons we may be reluctant to interpret the signs of the times or discern the present moment in our households or in our church is because there is a danger of stirring up division. And that’s uncomfortable. Discerning the signs of the clouds or the wind and knowing how they will affect the weather is not going to stir up division….
Except, oh wait. Now it can. And it does. When we begin to link clear changes in weather patterns and hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and forest fires and micro-particle smoke in the air to greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use to climate change we can begin to see a lot of division.
And when it’s reported that the current government in Washington is considering turning off two satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere, that strikes me as a sign of the times that has something to do with whether the government in Washington is thwarting God’s story moving toward the fulfillment of love.
To align ourselves with that story of abandoning the information from those satellites is aligning ourselves against God’s story urging and nourishing all of creation toward the fulfillment of love. Moreover, to cease getting information from these satellites would be a blow against even our capacity to know what the signs of the times are, let alone how to interpret them.
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Now, let me step back from that a moment so the larger point is clear.
In the last minute or so I made or implied several claims that might be wrong. I may be wrong that:
the current administration is really considering turning off two satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere.
those measurements are really as important as many scientists think they are.
ignoring CO2 levels in the atmosphere is a move to thwart God’s story moving toward the fulfillment of the creation in love.
I should direct our attention toward this today.I might have exercised faulty judgment in raising that issue this morning in light of some other priorities.
But even if I’m wrong about all these claims, the larger point I want to make is this: even though the preacher may get it wrong sometimes, if a preacher is to do their job interpreting the signs of the times and discerning how we should respond, that interpreting/discerning has to be a piece of the challenge of preaching. That’s part of what Jesus is telling us in this passage. Part of our task as the church is to help one another interpret the signs of the times so that we can all better align our stories with God’s story.
Even if it raises the possibility of division, we need to take up the task of interpreting the signs of the times and discerning how to respond. Jesus tells us in this passage that being nice and getting along is not the goal. Discerning the signs of the times to help us align with God’s story is the goal.
Yes, divisions may emerge.
But here’s the thing: when divisions emerge we have the opportunity to nurture and strengthen our tools to deal with them: virtues such as humility, kindness, patience, and charity. To cultivate a life in Christ is to cultivate all the capacities for dealing with division in a healthy way.
Of course, divisions may be uncomfortable, but they offer us the opportunity to flex our love muscles, which is another way of aligning our stories with God’s story. I would go so far as to say that God invites division, in part, to enhance our capacity to live out love in difficult circumstances. We align our stories with God’s stories as we work through the divisions that emerge as we interpret the signs of the times and discern how to respond.
And, as I said earlier: the reason we should bother with church is to align ourselves with God’s story. That’s the point.
It would be pleasant to think that we out here in Fairport are somehow isolated from the stories unfolding in the wider world. But we are not. All the stories are connected. They all echo and reverberate around the cosmos.
A couple of weeks ago I went into the Perinton Wegmans to pick up a prescription and wanted to get some fruit. I could scarcely believe my eyes that the produce section was nearly empty. No berries. No melons. Because one Wegmans employee shot another Wegmans employee at the warehouse, shipments to our store were cut off.
Of course, I could have gone elsewhere to get some berries. This was not a real crisis.
At the same time, I saw it as evidence of the vulnerability, precariousness, the fragility of the systems which keep us provisioned with all the things we have come to expect. With climate change and the incarceration and deportation of agricultural workers what I saw at the Perinton Wegmans may simply be a foreshadowing of what is to come. We need to interpret the signs of the times.
Those who live closer to the margins: those who are poor, those with insecure housing, those without proper immigration documents, those with disabilities, our gay and trans neighbors – those closer to the margins live in a more precarious and fragile space. Interpreting / discerning these signs of the times must surely shape in part how we see our stories aligning with God’s story in our world today and inform how we set our priorities and attitudes.
Now some of you may wonder, “but why do we have to hear about this in church? We’ll just watch or read the news.” And that’s a good question.
So let me suggest a good answer: I think we need to raise these matters in church because for some of us, what we have already heard about on the news has alerted us to what we understand to be cruelty, injustice, or incompetence that hurts our neighbors and ourselves. Some of us are called to respond to these situations and it helps to have our grounding and alignment in God’s story reenforced here in our community of faith, in the same way as when we are facing family troubles, illness, personal economic hardship, and struggles with personal sin or grief need so that we have our grounding and alignment in God’s story reenforced here in our community of faith.
Each of our stories are part of a larger story. God’s story. God’s story is playing out on many levels:
Our individual lives.
Our family and wider social circle.
Our communities: the people we regularly interact with.
The community of communities: state, nation, world
Not to mention the wider natural world.
All of these arenas in which God’s story is playing out have their moment in the spotlight in the life of our faith community because each of us has some intersection with each of them at some point in our lives.
And this is why we bother with church: to align our stories with God’s story as it plays out across all the stories in all the dimensions of creation.
Interpreting the signs of the times in all these dimensions gives us a fuller picture of how God is continually at work cajoling, seducing, nudging all that is – including each one of us – toward a culmination/fulfillment of divine love.
I, for one, am grateful for the encouragement and inspiration and opportunity that I receive here to align my story with God’s story in so many dimensions.
I pray that you agree with me that it is consistently worth the bother.
Thanks be to God.