Sermon. St Michael and
All Angels, Little Ilford. 18 August 2019
Trinity 9
Jeremiah 23.23-29
Luke 12.49-56
Rabbi Lionel Blue of Blessed
and Righteous Memory used to say: Any synagogue that isn’t trying to get rid
of its rabbi, isn’t really Jewish, and any rabbi that lets them get away with
it, isn’t really a rabbi.
You get the point? It’s a
call for some godly realism. Yes, we may think that any faith community will be
always only sweetness and light. All will be united in the faith, committed to
the common good, each deferring to the other. But in the real world, it is not
quite like that. Conflict - disagreement, even radical disagreement, and,
with that, yes, even people not liking other people who are just too different
from them – conflict is a natural part of life. It is part of what happens when
human beings gather together for some serious purpose.
It is strange for me to
say this precisely here. As, of all the church communities I have known, you
(we/you) are among the most harmonious. You are not a community riddled with
conflict. Anything but. Heavens, PCC meetings can even be enjoyable here, as they
are (at least sometimes) about the shared task of working out the best thing for
our community and parish and wider Church. Conflict is something of an alien
theme for this time and place. And yet it is today’s theme.
Jesus says: "I
came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I
have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it
is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household
will be divided, three against two and two against three.”
And the Greek of the
Gospel is even stronger than the English. The Greek does not say Jesus is to “bring”
fire, but to “cast down” fire, to “throw” fire onto the earth; there is violence
in the rhetoric.
Now, some of us were
doubtless brought up singing
Gentle Jesus, meek
and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity;
Suffer me to come to
thee.
And I don’t say that’s
wrong. We do have reason to think that Jesus was at times gentle, and in
particular in his exceptional welcome for children, for the little ones. But!
But clearly it is not enough; it doesn’t say all that we need to say about Jesus.
What, then, are we to make of this, not-so-gentle Jesus? Some have called him “Angry
Jesus Bleak and Wild”.
Well, in the first place,
notice that at no point does Jesus bring literal fire. Just as when he says elsewhere
he came to bring not peace but a sword [Matt 10.34], he never does anything with
a sword. It’s more like when Mary is told that a sword is to pierce her own
heart [Luke 2.35], and this does not happen. So we can confidently and truthfully
say that all of these images are metaphorical. This isn’t about actual violence.
Fire and sword stand for something else.
Fire and sword stand for
the truth that, while Jesus may be gentle, meek and mild in the ways he treats
us as persons, he is fierce and ready for conflict when it comes to ideas,
to things that are not true. Against untruths and lies, he can be fierce, and
oppositional.
To speak plainly, in the
gospels, there is something about how people respond to Jesus which makes all
the difference. Respond freely and well, and you will hear “your faith has
saved you” [passim]. Respond freely and badly, and you may have to walk away shocked
and grieving, like the rich young man attached to his many possessions [Mark
10.22]. How you are in an encounter with Jesus will be a way of you judging
yourself. There will be a moment of crisis. I mean this in the original Greek
sense: a “krisis”, a time of decision-making. We may as well say
this.
Jesus does not come to
make us comfortable as we are, but to help us chose to be more ourselves.
If Jesus is ready for
conflict, then the Church must be as well. We must be prepared to speak words
which will not please everybody. We must stand for what is good and wholesome
and true and generous and merciful in the world, and against the opposite of
these things.
The problem is that the “signs
of the times” are surely clear about this: there is going to be more conflict
and anger in our society, not less, in the time ahead. Nationalism versus
internationalism. More versus less immigration. More celebration of difference
versus less. Economic growth (and how to get it) versus modest living for the sake
of the environment. Different ideas about how to deal with crime. And, yes, whether
and how to be involved in wars. And more. All of these debates are going to be raw,
more fierce. Fiercer, both because that is the way leading politicians are
taking things (they are less and less into rational debate), and also because that
strange new creature, social media, evidently somehow encourages us to be angry
and rude.
So I say this. Jesus was
not afraid of conflict when conflict was called for. When peace is false, is built
on lies and oppression, Jesus does not call it “peace”, any more than the prophet
Jeremiah did before him. The Church also must be unafraid of conflict, when it
can speak with godly clarity into a situation. But! But, here and now, in these
raw days, the Church has first to model a different, a better way of
handling its own conflicts than the world. Angry words alone will just make
for more angry words in the world.
So, in a world were anger
and conflict abound, I am going to propose a virtue you may not have heard of. A
monastic virtue. It is apatheia. Apatheia. You may recoil
from the very word; indeed you will do, if you think it means apathy. It does
not mean apathy. It means rather detachment, detachment from your own
passions, in particular (in this context) detachment from your own anger. If
conflicts in the Church or world are making us angry, we must be disciplined,
and be able to take a step back from our own anger, to be, yes, a little bit
suspicious of it, to interrogate it. What use is this anger? – is
a good question to ask. Then, if we do this, if we are in the habit of doing
this (it is, I say, a discipline, and I don’t say I am advanced in it), then we
may well be able to speak the words which count, into the conflict, words which
have the power of fire, the power of a sword.
I pray that we go on, getting
on with each other as well as we do, and I am confident about that. May it
never be with apathy (for there is nothing Christian about apathy), but always with
the discipline of apatheia.
Amen.
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