Delivered Ladera Community Church, August 2019
Building Community
Luke 12:49-56 New International Version (NIV)
49 “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!50 But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. 52 From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
54 He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. 55 And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. 56 Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?
Is anyone as confounded by the scripture as I am? To be honest, it makes me a bit ill. I’m so unsettled by Jesus. Is he really saying he’s here to cast fire? To divide not only people but families? And what does he mean that we’re hypocrites?
I would rather have not considered it. But in the end I picked this lesson from this week’s scripture choices because it somehow resonates with the great horror I have been feeling in my soul based on what’s going on in our country these days.
As I began to ruminate on what I would say, however, I found myself lost. I found I was simply a cauldron of the something dire that’s held in this scripture, and I had no idea how to provide anything of value in the face of it.
Because the fact is, in our country, we are divided. It’s happening. Parent against child, brother against brother. Deep, deep division. Hate.
It feels like fire, doesn’t it? When we can’t reach each other, when our most fundamental values feel like they’re being spat on; it feels like fire. Ironically, I think everyone in this country feels this way right now, though I don’t agree at my most
visceral level with half of them as to why. No matter, this division is turning into fire. Environmental fire. Fire of bullets. Fire of hate and all that it brings.
Over and over again, I feel so lost it’s like I fall down. And I cry out in my heart, What can I do?
Because here is what I see:
People looking for evidence to support their beliefs rather than struggling to find the surest truth.
I see the type of name calling that causes people to not only stop listening to one another, but to stop seeing one another as human.
I see children at our borders put in prisons, not given the essentials, separated from their parents.
I see parents having children yanked from them, and then placed somewhere they cannot find them.
I see people surprise arrested at work, shipped off, and their children left alone to discover their parents gone and, alone, cope with how to survive.
I see the people who chose to employ those parents free, even holding job fairs to fill empty positions after the raids.
I see young white men, and old, being told that they are victims and endangered, and despite evidence to the contrary, believing it.
I see young white men filled with hate, carrying weapons into crowds, killing without remorse.
I see law after law -- created to protect our increasingly fragile environment and its creatures -- undone.
I see corporations not held accountable for the products they produce, the way they (literally or figuratively) mine the earth, or the money they make.
I see women losing the right to decide what their bodies and their lives can handle, and instead the government deciding it for them.
I see the rich getting richer and the poor receiving increasingly less help.
I see prisons turned into profit centers with humans as their currency.
I see the rich and the powerful being excused from everything, including straight
up lying in the face of the facts.
I see any color but white being in danger, and any sexuality but heterosexual
being in danger, and any gender but traditional male and female being in danger, and any way of worshipping God besides Christianity being in danger. Danger of arrest. Danger of abuse. Danger of deportation. Danger of death.
You see it, too, I know. I’m sorry to say it all out loud, but it’s real, and for me the feel of it is held in the scripture, in Jesus’ angry words. I want to say in this room, with you here, that this list, this division over what is right and wrong, hurts like fire. It not only makes it too hard at times to turn on the news, it can make it too hard to even look, and so we get angry, afraid, and for moments or longer, walk away--with no idea what to do.
At this point you may want to whisper to Wilma, Can she please sit down? But today, in all this messiness, I won’t, because this is real and it’s ours, and in the face of it, I stared at this scripture and I thought, what in the world does this mean? Why would Jesus say this? Why would he say this was his role? Can’t he hear our hearts are
breaking? Can’t he see: people are being hurt? Can’t he feel that we are lost and don’t know what to do?
In this place of feeling so lost, frozen really, all I could do was return to his two central commandments.
To love God, love, with all our heart and soul.
And to love our neighbor as ourselves.
If we do only two things, he said, these are the two. When we are frozen,
these are the two things to do.
So, the first is to love God with everything we have. It’s a tall order, and in addition to being very flawed at executing this commandment, I had to wonder, ok, so how does loving God even help things as they stand now?
Serendipitously, the past couple weeks I’ve been reading a book called The Power of Meaning, by Emily Eshafani Smith. The book addresses our nation’s current crisis in finding meaning in our lives by first covering the core building blocks a life with meaning requires-- Belonging, Purpose, Storytelling, and the fourth, Transcendence.
The word transcend means “to go beyond” or “to climb,” and Smith writes that “a transcendent, or mystical, experience is one in which we feel that we have risen above the everyday world to experience a higher reality” (131). William James said that in this state we are able to penetrate what we are parted from by the ‘filmiest of screens’ to find ‘a potential form of consciousness entirely different.” I got to thinking that to love God is to seek God, and to be reached through that filmy screen and feel God, even the tiniest bit, is to experience transcendence.
Transcendence is not limited to Christianity, of course, and like God, it comes in many forms. No matter the form, the experience of transcendence is profoundly life changing. Psychologist David Yaden, says that in the experience “first (ones) sense of self washes away along with all of its petty concerns and desires. (One) then feels deeply connected to other people and everything else that exists in the world” (133).
Emerson, John Muir, and Vincent Van Gogh each experienced transcendence in nature--for in nature they saw God. Muir said he did “not just see mountains, streams and meadows, he saw the face of God and was humbled by it. (as a result,)“Why,” he
asked, “should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?” In his piece, “Nature,” Emerson wrote that the woods lifted him into ‘infinite space,” that there he “was nothing...the currents of the Universal Being circulate(d) through (him); He was part and particle of God.” And Van Gogh saw nature shimmering with the life of God and his driving goal was to share that aliveness with other people.
Meeting God is equated with awe. And Smith writes that researchers found that ‘awe-inspired people ... felt a diminished sense of their own importance compared to others, and that likely led them to be more generous. As with Emerson, ‘their mean egotism vanished. They abandoned the conceit, which many of us have, that they were the center of the world. Instead, they stepped outside of themselves to connect with and focus on others” (148).
The meditation in the bulletin is from a poet after he first saw the first image of earth from space. It echoes the experience of transcendence that astronauts report after a space flight. They go from necessarily ambitious, driven people to wanting to make a difference in the world. There’s even a term for this, scientists call it “The overview
effect.” Astronaut’s values, “according to one study, shift from self-focused ones like achievement, enjoyment, and self-direction to self-transcendent ones, like unity with nature, belief in God, and world peace” (144)
Transcendence can happen in a magnificent space, but it can also happen in an ordinary one. Practiced meditators describe similar experiences to the naturalists and the astronauts, as “at the peak mystical moment, they sense the boundaries of their selves dissolve and, as a result, feel no more separation between themselves and the world around them. One meditator expressed it as...’a sense of timelessness and infinity. It feels like I am part of everyone and everything in existence.’”
Al Williams, our last interim minister, believed strongly in the power of prayerful meditation. He studied Merton and encouraged us to consider and employ Merton’s practice. Prayer invites God.
So think about that. If we work to love God with all our heart and soul, if we allow ourselves to love love in that way, to look for God everywhere, we open to the possibility of touching a moment of transcendence. A moment we realize we are all joined. What would the impact of that be for the world?
And then there is Jesus’ next commandment, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In Smith’s book, she says the research shows that we all want and need to belong. She writes that “social exclusion is a threat to meaning...that those who were made to feel rejected and left out--made to believe they did not belong--were significantly more likely to say that life in general was meaningless.” Meaningless comes from no sense of purpose. It is in this vacuum that people can become vulnerable to others trying to exploit them, for a person can also be made to feel they belong, and be
given a sense of purpose, by those who propose anger, fear, violence. This is where the power of supremacist and terrorist groups comes; they use the four principles of meaning to rope people in. And we are seeing today, over and over, the power of those ropes.
This summer I took a class through Stanford called Compassion Cultivation Training. Developed by a neurosurgeon and the English translator for the Dalai Lama, and funded in part by the Dalai Lama, its purpose is to teach a practice of compassion. At its heart is meditation. And at the heart of the meditation is the cultivation of compassion. Compassion is the courage to be with suffering, our own or someone else’s, and not turn away from it. And suffering is any time things aren’t going the way we want. I want to be very clear that compassion does not mean agreeing or supporting something you do not agree with, it means simply that you wish others were free from suffering. I did not read Smith’s Meaning book as part of the class, but there was the link in her work.
“Compassion,” she writes, “is at the center of the pillar of belonging. When we open our hearts to others and approach them with love and kindness, we ennoble both those around us and ourselves--and the ripples of our compassionate acts persist, even long after we’re gone.”
Isn’t that what the second commandment is about? Wishing for our neighbors that they be free from suffering just as we wish that for ourselves? If you genuinely wish, with love and kindness, these things for other people, they exist in your eyes, in the way you word your sentences (no matter how fierce), in the interactions both long-term and one time that populate your day. The impact of living this second commandment as a part of the way you walk through the world touches people in ways you will never know
In “Building Community," Pablo Neruda illustrates this through a story from his childhood.
“One time, investigating in the backyard of our house in Temuco (Chile) the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I came upon a hole in one of the boards of the fence. I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared — a tiny hand of a child about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.
The sheep's wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole but the child had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pinecone opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down through the hole and went off with the sheep.
I never saw either the hand or the child again.
I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”
Perhaps Jesus, and his call for great love, does divide. A call for great love, after all, is an ask to step away from comfort, and people’s reaction to that can be extreme.
But as I consider the scripture, he isn’t asking us to bring the fire he’s promising. He is asking us to seek God and the perspective of our interconnectedness this brings. And he’s asking us to love, the hard kind of love when we simply do not want to. But he’s asking us just the same. As I listen to the news and engage in conversations, I think, is this enough? Really, I still don’t know. But Theologian Frederick Buechner said, your vocation lies ‘where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” And I wonder, what if one of the world’s deepest hungers is to be loved?
Hate is darkness. And the only thing that dispels darkness is light. Even the tiniest of light has total power over the darkness it touches. Love is the surest light. When we feel lost and when we feel found, at the heart of it all lies these two great calls. Perhaps they are the way to navigate this present time. May God be with us as we hear them.