Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
August 26, 2001
The 12th Sunday After Pentecost

The Lord of Hosts is with Us.
The God of Jacob is our Stronghold.
The Rev. G. LaRue Downing

Gospel:Luke 13:10-17
(This sermon is also available in audio.)

Someone once said to me, much wiser than I would ever hope to be: "You'll find that it is the hard things--the hard words of the Gospel and the hard things in life--that will become our greatest teacher. Scott Peck's famous line in the phenomenally popular and successful book The Road Less Traveled, captures this same wisdom with his own memorable opening words, "Life is difficult."

Both the Gospel reading last week and this morning's reading, bear the wisdom of that truth. Life can be and is often difficult. Yet, it is these hard times, these hard words, that can take us to a level of truth and wisdom far beyond our imagining. We were shocked to hear these words from Jesus last week:

I came to bring fire to the Earth… Do you think that I have come to bring peace? No, I tell you, but rather, division!

Then he makes his words even more personal:

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 … 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?

How true it is that we can sometimes not see the forest for the trees. In Luke 13:23-30, the writer of Luke continues to both confront and assault our good senses:

"Lord, will only a few be saved?" He said to them, "Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able. When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, 'Lord, open to us.' then in reply he will say to you, 'I do not know where you come from.'...There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all of the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out...Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

Those are probably not words that we relish hearing this morning, but before we dismiss them or become uncomfortably preoccupied with our bulletins, let's consider the following: The reason I believe Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled, was on the best seller list for hundreds of weeks is because he spoke the truth about so many of our life issues. Life can be hard. Life's issues at times can overwhelm us--the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a dreaded diagnosis, the breach of a trust, an overwhelming sadness that can threaten to swamp our lives. Many of us sitting here this morning have faced just those kinds of issues. The truth is many of us have not only faced difficult issues, we have in fact, created them. I certainly know that I have. I have caused painful hurt to others. I do not like it, but it is the truth, and so Scott Peck sells millions of copies of books based on the truth: "Life is difficult."

And these hard words of Luke spoken last week and this week by Jesus point to what has become a deep and abiding insight for me, that Jesus speaks the truth--the truth as he has known it in his life, in his tradition, from the Torah, from his life as a religious person. Words are not true because Jesus said them, but Jesus said them because they are true. He knows the truth of our living because he lived much of the same truth, and yet, we are so persistent in trying to paint Jesus with soft brush strokes--what I call the stained glass view of Jesus, kind of a Matisse-like quality. But that is only part of the picture of the Jesus of the Gospel. We spiritualize this Gospel Jesus in ways that not only sanitizes him and his life, but it dehumanizes him just as we are dehumanized--made less than human--when we try to paint our life with Matisse-like soft hues.

These are hard sayings of Jesus--this realist Jesus, this one who has lived hard things and has known hard truths-- because he too, experienced separation and loss and persecution and discrimination for his religious views. Jesus knows the truth of opposites, of contradictions. These opposites find themselves throughout the whole of the Biblical narrative.

Last week I put a piece of paper on my desk and tried to list some of the opposites as they came to mind: chaos/order, light/darkness, Heaven/Earth, male/female, rational/mystical, linear/paradoxical, individual/communal, doing and being, forgiving/holding accountable, rich/poor, believing/skeptic, healing/disease, good/evil, losing/winning, coming in last/first, division and healing, life and death.

These are but a few of the opposites of Scripture and the contradictions we find in our own lives, and it is the cross that holds these opposites in perfect proportion. If we try to diminish one side for the other, then we move into something less than Christian theology, for what makes these hard words and these hard sayings so difficult is that they are so true. The fact is, Jesus knows there is pain and sorrow, just as there is hope and joy. Jesus speaks into real life issues.

None of us is omniscient, and ordination does not bestow upon any of us omniscience--all-knowing. We are open. We are not so open. We are honest. We are deceitful. We are closed and secretive, just as we are inclusive. So be it that we are exclusive. We have love for others and contempt for others.

What I want to suggest this morning is in one sense very simple. Let none of us be so arrogant as to embrace only one side of the opposite. Not one of us here in this place today, or even those not here, holds the truth in all of its fullness. We, each one of us, depend on the other to see and know those things that we cannot know alone in their fullness. We need each other. We need each other to know the truth, but even more than that, we need a faith that is bold enough and courageous enough and rooted enough to know the truth when we hear it.

Three times today we sang this refrain, "The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold." Whatever tension of opposites you experience this day, I invite you to the wisdom of those words. "The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold."

I close with a quote from Eyes Remade for Wonder by Lawrence Kushner, Rabbi in Sudbury, Massachusetts:

Entrances to holinesses are everywhere. The possibility of ascent is all the time. Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places. There is no place on earth without the Presence. (Bamidbar Rabb 12:4, Eyes Remade for Wonder by Lawrence Kushner, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998)

"Entrances, doors to holiness, are everywhere, and there is no place on Earth without God's presence." "The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold." Even when we may be divided, but paradoxically held together by the mystery of opposites, opposites that Jesus knows about every day of his life and ours. "The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold."

Amen.

Copyright 2001 Calvary Episcopal Church

Gospel: Luke 13:10-17
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.
And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. NRSV