Luke 12:49-56
Our Collect this morning meant that we prayed to be filled with the power of the Spirit to live in peace. We do not live in a peaceful world. You might say, oh, it was ever thus, Rachel. There's always something going on.
Well, sadly, that's true. But we seem to live in a particular season, a particular time where the world has lost its mind. Our readings, taken together, remind us of our responsibility. how easy it is to slip into a kind of simple, easy language which is not of God at all.
Look at our first reading. Oh the prophets speak, but they speak lies they say I have a dream and they talk nonsense. Go to our epistle - we have a picture there of a world in difficulty and Jesus in our gospel, I always take.comfort from this, Jesus, it's nice to know he was stressed too. “How many times have I got to tell you this thing.?”
When we hear in our epistle of all the things that our forebears went through for their faith, and we live in a country where we do not have a cost to our faith, we can say, oh, that's great. They did all that. So I don't need to go through difficulty anymore. I live in a country where I can express my faith. But Jesus in our gospel reading says we are hypocrites if we don't see the signs of the times. There are signs of the times all around us.
In the news this week, it's all over the news about people being arrested. Arrested and about people protesting. We see pictures on the news of people in different parts of the world, all over the world, in absolute crisis. The question we must all ask ourselves as a church and as an individual is how will I respond?
Because to not respond in any way is not an option. And it's not what our faith tells us because our faith is not a private matter.
We live in a world that has become increasingly anxious about things.
The world is full of people on social media telling people about their anxiety. And I'm not saying that is not a genuine thing. But if our faith teaches us anything, it teaches and demands of us that we are brave. That we spot the signs of the times and we act accordingly.
We will all choose to act differently. And that's fine. Because we are made differently. And we are gifted differently. But fundamentally, what we preach and profess here every week, Sunday by Sunday, is what is meant to be a good news. Good news worth sharing.
Good news which is meant to lead to a life transformed. As Christians, our job, our call, and we all have one, they're just different, is to live as if we believe in the promises of Jesus Christ, but also to act, and also to act, as if we take the responsibility for justice and peace seriously.
If we look at the gospel, yes, it's full of beauty, Beautiful stories. It's also full of people taking huge risks for their faith. Not least Jesus. How many times did he get arrested? We talk about it every Good Friday and rightly so.
The danger in the comfortable West, not just in this church, but in many others, is that we compartmentalise what happens on a Sunday from the rest of the world. We can only do that for so long before Jesus is on our shoulder saying, you hypocrite.
So as a church, globally, we need to ask ourselves, what are we going to do? Not just about the big issues of the world, but about what we do here Sunday by Sunday and week by week. Last week our parish room was full of children and families doing beautiful things and it gladdens my heart.
Toddlers gladdens my heart, Place of Welcome gladdens my heart. Coming here Sunday by Sunday gladdens my heart. I'm thrilled to see every single person here. But let us not forget the bigger purpose, the bigger call that Jesus has on our lives. Which is in our own little way, and thank God, and I mean that quite seriously, that we are not called to change the world single-handedly - but if we don't want to change the world, there's something wrong - and to do our bit in whatever way we can, to seek to change the world.
So my prayer is that we will take seriously Jesus's exasperation that he was stressed - I love that that word is in there. “I’m so stressed by all this because I keep telling you”
Jesus is telling us today that we are loved and that we have a responsibility to preach the Gospel. I don't just mean in words, but in action, with every single capacity that we have. To seek to change people's lives, to seek to change our own lives, and to seek to make a difference.
And I pray all of this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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