CProp15

Isaiah 5:1-7

Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

Luke 12:49-56

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace?” Jesus asks.

Yes, Lord! Of course we think that you’ve come to bring peace.

The prophets said you would come to guide our feet into the way of peace.

And the angels said that through you God would place peace

upon them whom God favors!

You yourself told a woman who had touched the hem of your garment,

‘Your faith has made you well – go in peace.’

And, you told your disciples, as you sent them out to the villages,

to say to the people in each house they entered, ‘Peace to this house.’

And the crowds said of you,

‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven!

As you were preparing your disciples –

telling them that you would soon have to leave them,

you said to them, ‘Peace I give to you. My peace I leave with you.’

And you stood among your trembling followers

as they hid in the upper room after your death and said, ‘Peace be with you.’

Yes, we think you came to bring peace!

I think Jesus DID come to bring peace.

But he entered the same world, the same human situation you and I live in.

How many times in life have you begun something…

Your intentions are good.

Your imagination of how it will turn out is so clear.

And then, since none of us lives in a vacuum,

The world gets involved.

The weather gets involved.

And then other people, of all things, get involved.

And you begin to see that your idea of the way things would go

is not the way they are going to go at all.

Your dream, no matter how right it is or how meaningful it could be,

or how beneficial it would be for everyone

does not flower into the reality you had intended.

A woman is living her life well.

She loves her husband and they are dedicated to building a good marriage.

Their children are growing and thriving.

There is the daily and weekly schedule that she manages to keep going.

Her job is demanding yet fulfilling.

She takes good care of herself – a healthy diet and exercise at the gym.

And she finds out that she has cancer.

The old familiar, the good familiar, schedule and pace

have to give way as priorities shift dramatically.

And she must say to the cancer,

“You think I have come to bring peace?”

A man has been moving through his life like clockwork.

He has never thought about his drive to succeed.

He has hardly noticed his feet hitting the floor each morning.

His work during the week has gotten done.

The honey-do chores on Saturdays have gotten done.

The family bills have gotten paid. Vacations have been planned.

Kicking back with a cook-out and a football game on Sunday afternoons

has always been an effortless favorite for him.

And he begins to find that it is a battle with his own will

just to place a foot on the floor in the morning and get out of bed,

much less to meet all the demands of the day with enthusiasm.

He is diagnosed with depression and begins to work on coping

with limitations he has never before experienced.

And he says to this dark cloud that surrounds him,

“You think I have come to bring peace?”

My daughter was bouncing through her early teens.

When she was fourteen years old,

she went to school to find that her best friend

had, what seemed like overnight, become a stranger.

And so, morning after morning, she would go to school,

to have her best friend turn her back to her in the hall

where they used to hang out together.

While this kind of behavior is not uncommon among young teenaged girls,

it caused my daughter to have to remake her world.

A priest friend of mine recently retired and had great plans

to do the traveling and reading that he had long put off.

Within six months of his retirement, he had a stroke.

Now, rather than making travel plans,

he is relearning speech and motor skills.

I’m sure he is saying to his sluggish body,

“You think I came to bring peace?”

That’s often the world we live in, isn’t it?

Life doesn’t go the way we had hoped and counted on,

the way we truly believe life is supposed to be.

And we have to change course if we are to keep life is going at all.

Jesus sees his present situation much the same, I think.

He admits such frustration, such stress,

that the course he is on is not going well at all.

He knows what life is supposed to look like.

He knows the way God designed the world to work.

Life has taken a turn and if he is going to continue

to usher in this kingdom of God

to give away what he has in his possession to give…

if it is the will of God that this good news be received and spread,

if he is to keep this kingdom life going at all,

he must take a different course of action

and the people who understand him and stand by him

must do the same

if they are to move through the strong resistance

to the way of God which is peace and life abundant.

Jesus has been teaching his experience of God’s presence.

“Do not worry about your life!

Life is more than food and the body more than clothing!

Consider the lilies, how they grow:

They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you,

even Solomon in all his glory

was not clothed like one of these!

If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,

How much more will he clothe you!

Do not keep worrying.

Do not be afraid, little flock

for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!

And then, in the very same chapter 12 in Luke’s gospel,

Jesus sees that this good news is being rejected.

It’s like cancers or depression or strokes or rejection we experience

that get in the way of the fullness of life.

Yes, he came to bring peace.

But there has been a drastic turn of events.

“what stress I am under, he says, until this message catches on.

It is like a fire that should spread so quickly,

but it struggles even to get kindled!

The same is true of the vineyard from Isaiah and Psalm 80.

The vineyard is planned by God, imagined by God

to be a pleasant planting.

God has done everything right.

He chose a fertile hill and dug it and cleared it of stones.

He planted it with choice vines.

He pruned the vines each year and sent the right amount of rain.

To protect the vineyard, he put a wall and hedges around it

and built a watchtower in the midst of it.

To pruduce the best wine,

he placed a state-of-the-art wine press in the vineyard.

But even with God, things often don’t go as they should.

The vineyard should have yielded plump, sweet grapes.

But instead they tasted like wild, untended grapes.

The Hebrew word we have as ‘wild’ actually means ‘stinky’, sour, gone bad.

Like the vineyard, the people God had tended, protected, corrected

through the seasons, proved to be wild, untrainable, gone bad.

Psalmist says something very interesting – even startling!

In verse 14 –

Turn now, O God of hosts!

Repent, God!

Turn, change your course.

Adapt to this crisis – intervene - DO something!

Things aren’t going like they were supposed to.

Don’t just let the walls tumble down

and the wild beasts come in and devour the grapes.

This is an interesting insight of the psalmist, who understands that

the future life of God’s people will depend not on their repentance

– but rather on God’s repentance!

If they will not change their ways, then God must do something different.

Because God CAN, it is ultimately God who will bear

the burden of human disobedience.

It is God whose gracious turning to humankind makes life possible.

God’s gracious turning is known to us as the cross of Jesus Christ.

Life is so precious that, when we can’t or won’t choose life,

God in Christ will do what it takes, change course, change the status quo,

repent for us, in our stead, so that we might live.

Priest becomes victim.

Our understanding of Just War fits this well.

We want a world of peace. We believe that’s the way the world was designed –

to be a peaceful, life-flourishing existence.

But sometimes, too often, it takes a soldier to establish peace.

It takes conflict, intervention, to build a pleasant vineyard.

A crisis, a drastic turn of events, war happens.

And the peacemaker is turned into a soldier,

and the warrior becomes the victim.

Steps into harm’s way to save someone else’s life –

Steps into harm’s way so that the world might live.

Innocent life is offered because someone else would not repent.

With Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we follow…

Knowing that often time it is God, not we, that has the faith and the grace

to choose life and to turn and make life happen.

And sometimes, because WE can, we are called and will do what it takes

in our lives and for the lives of others to do the turning for them, make life available for them through some sacrifice of our own, so that they might know peace.