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August 15, 2010
Pentecost 12 C
Luke 12: 49-56
Pastor Daniel L. Wilfrid
IMAGINATION AND COURAGE
Let us pray:
Grant us, O God, to hear your voice;
and in hearing your voice to love your Word;
and in loving your Word, to do your will;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
As I listened to our candidate for Associate Pastor tell the story of his call to ordained ministry when he came late last month for his interview with our Council (a story which I urge all of you to come and hear for yourself two weeks from today), I was taken back to that same time of wondering about and questioning God’s call in my own life, particularly when he spoke of his journey in a couple of terms that closely resembled my own.
One was the way that God’s call had come to him gradually, more or less nipping at his heals since he was young and getting more insistent as he matured and tried hard to find something else to do with his life that could excite and inspire him as much. The other was the way that when he finally gave in to God’s nudging and enrolled in seminary, he almost instantly upon his arrival knew right down to his socks that this was the place he was supposed to be, and what God was calling him to do.
Again, I’ll let him tell you his story in two weeks, but those two pieces of it sounded so familiar to me and reminded me of how my own call to ministry developed and was grounded in two seemingly opposite and maybe even conflicting understandings and experiences and desires – namely a deep love for the church and for the Christ it proclaimed and for the way it nurtured me in faith, experienced alongside an equally deep disappointment in and disillusionment with a church that was in practice so much less than what it was called and professed itself to be.
Most of you know that I grew up in a family that loved the church, and had already given it a handful of pastors, but in my home church, as a teenager who went every Sunday, I learned the importance of good preaching by listening to what (in all honesty) I could tell even then was truly lousy preaching. And I also learned about the importance of a congregation reaching beyond its walls and being engaged in mission to and with its community, open to and welcoming new ideas and people - by being a part of a church that was so closed in on itself and stuck in its familiar and comfortable patterns (did I say they were mostly Swedes?) that I can’t even remember a new member Sunday while I was growing up, and mostly remember people moving away. My Sunday School class had eight children in it through elementary school. By the time we were confirmed, we were down to four. Nobody new ever joined us along the way.
So what I’m saying is that my sense of call to ordained ministry was grounded as much in frustration as inspiration. I knew that the church could, should, must be better than what I knew it to be, and that for that to happen it needed leaders who both loved and cared for people deeply but who also weren’t afraid to speak up for God and to challenge and push them to be something more than they were, namely what that preacher understood God was calling them to be.
Others have said it this way, that a pastor’s job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable – to honor and respect a congregation for who and what it is and has been, but also to push it toward what God is still calling it to be, even sometimes when the people who called you there begin to push back. It was very clear to me long before I entered seminary that both of those gifts would be needed if I were to become a pastor – the gifts to comfort the afflicted and the courage every now and then to afflict the comfortable, and I wasn’t sure that I had either one of them.
I know now that my early journey of often “learning by yearning” for what I DIDN’T see and experience in the church, and my early wrestling with God’s call and wondering about my own gifts and courage has followed me throughout my ministry, and has given me what I consider to be a healthy suspicion of those times when either I or my congregation seemed overly comfortable with things just as they are and even with one another.
Don’t get me wrong. I really like being comfortable. I love familiar routines and predictable days. But they also can nag at me sometimes and make me ask, “Is this being faithful?” Could God possibly be content with us the way we are? Or is God after something more? And if so, what?
In today’s Gospel, Jesus seems to have decided that as far as his disciples were concerned, it was time to afflict the comfortable. He talks to them in ways we usually don’t hear him talk and with words that must have made them squirm even more than they do us.
“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus says, “and how I wish it were already kindled.” “I may be the Prince of Peace, but I didn’t come to make your life peaceful. I came to change things from what they are into what God intends them to be, and change like that,” Jesus says, “brings stress and division, even in families, even in churches. The peace I bring is a peace that passes understanding, a peace that comes from doing what in your heart you know to be right and God’s will, even if the result is anything but the peaceful assurance that nothing needs to or is ever going to change.”
God’s Word, Jeremiah reminds us, is like fire and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces. And Jesus, that Word made flesh, came to bring that fire to the earth, a fire that burns the dross and refines the gold, the fire that like a pillar leads through the wilderness to a new and better place, the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of the burning bush, the fire of the living God whose mission is still to redeem the world.
And the Letter to the Hebrews today recounts for us the stories of people who felt that fire in their souls and followed it with their lives and who somehow knew a peace beyond understanding even when their lives were anything but peaceful. From Hebrew slaves ankle deep in Red Sea mud, to soldiers encircling the city of Jericho, spies accepting shelter from a prostitute, great leaders and prophets, people facing mocking, ridicule and torture, some imprisoned, some executed, some impoverished, some reduced to living in caves or holes in the ground.
With these examples of what happens to people who are faithful, what could ever make us believe that our comfort is either God’s desire or a sign of God’s pleasure? Hebrews calls them “a great cloud of witnesses,” and people “of whom this world was not worthy.” All of them, and Jesus on the cross ought to be enough evidence of how little earthly peace we should expect from being faithful to Christ.
Last Sunday, from that same Letter to the Hebrews, we were told that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. If that is true, then faith requires of us both imagination and courage: the imagination to see how and in what ways our lives not only could be but need to be more Christlike than they are, or how our church could be a stronger witness to Jesus and a better partner in God’s mission to redeem the world than it is, or how the light of God’s fire could more brightly shine in this place. Imagination is an important ingredient of a faith that lives assured that things hoped for can become reality. It helps us figure out how we might get from here to there.
And along with that imagination must also be the courage to leave what’s been for what could be, the comforts of Haran to head for Canaan, the familiarity of Egypt to step into the Red Sea, the fishing nets of Galilee to set off for Jerusalem and the cross. Faith = Imagination + courage.
I graduated from college with a degree in economics on a Friday and the next Monday I started a summer course in biblical Greek at Princeton Seminary. Ten weeks later I was on the road to Minnesota and not at all sure if that was going to be a one-semester experiment or a four-year preparation for ordination. I fully expected that it would be at least a few months before I knew the answer, but to my great surprise, it was only days if not hours before the answer had burned its way into my consciousness. I was where God wanted me.
That assurance and that conviction was still tentative to be sure, and needed lots of affirmation by teachers, supervisors, psychologists, classmates and a church willing to trust that whole process enough to call me. And every day I still pray for imagination and courage – along with the gifts and compassion to comfort the afflicted and the vision and strength to afflict the too comfortable.
In two weeks, you’ll meet a young man on a similar journey, and two weeks after that, you’ll get to vote on whether you sense God’s call in his coming here and whether you trust his sense of call, his faith, and his imagination and courage, to both comfort and afflict you as well. So while we await that meeting and that decision, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin the clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him set the fire and endured the cross, to save us and the world God loves.
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