how to interpret the present time?

Luke 12:49-56

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice shows us England in the 1700s. It was a stable society. People knew their place in society’s pecking order. People accepted who they were, which was determined by birth. Because of the bartering of money and titles, marriage was the only possible way out of your pre-assigned place. Families were everything and, along with family came their heritage, their own particular history.

The capitalist class was made of emergent successful merchants without a noble history or name. On the other hand, bankrupt nobles may have had more history than money. Stability in society means there is clarity on the rules of engagement. In 18th Century England, there was a cohesive – perhaps even suffocating— web of meaning.

I have said before that we all live within webs of meaning. Values like Pride or Prejudice, Freedom or Homeland are part of that web we have spun and from which we all hang. (Weber/Geertz). On my recent trip to Rome, I was staying in a 16th century palazzo fitted as a hostel for clergy, frequently getting lost in that old quarter of the city. There were churches and trattorias on every corner, and I would read how many times the properties, be that churches, palazzos or hotels changed hands since the 16th century, and the influence needed to do so.

Our webs of meaning are like an old city: they took a considerable amount of time to lie down. Properties have changed hands many times and have been reshaped. The palazzo is now a clergy hostel. The hospital for lepers is now a hotel, though I am not going to tell you the name. The layout makes sense for the locals and appears chaotic to the outsider, just like you who came from orderly subdivisions in suburbia may think when faced with NY City. In order to navigate the old city of Rome, you need a map, or better yet, a GPS giving you directions, or you need to stop and ask. However, a need for internal cohesion amidst the chaos of accumulated meaning is always a necessity, as it is at the same time the opportunity for renewal and rebuilding and creating new in an old city.

I was watching on YouTube a video clip of Tim Lahaye, who co-wrote the Left Behind series of best-selling novels about the end times. There is a movie and a controversial video game. The core belief is that the saved will be taken out to heaven by God -without clothing- in the blink of an eye, regardless of whatever they were doing (piloting a plane, doing surgery, driving a 16 wheeler truck in the highway). The movie, the novel and the video game are all about the tribulations that will be visited upon those who are Left Behind, the unsaved, not necessarily godless criminals, but Joe Blow’s who were not with the program.

He said something that for me is critical. “People need certainty, and I provide that.” The need for certainty, for something that is indisputably right and true, against the other possibilities and variances of meaning that have been at the heart of the humanity since we learned to speak to communicate. Together with language emerged the possibility of deception and lies, and ever since we have been in the search for certainty.

Science – at least after the 17th century, and perhaps until this day – for some provides that element of certainty. For others, especially religious people, the revealed word, especially revealed texts, provide an alternative source for certainty.

There are times when the old city of meaning is flooded with the new. The River Tiber is closed in by the old city in Rome. Buildings have collapsed and new ones are built within the walls of the existing web of meaning. Society’s anxiety for certainty increases. That is how Hitler made it to Power in the 1930's. An educated mass of Germans elected a megalomaniac because they were certain no more.
Today the international networks enabled by the technological revolution are like the River Tiber in Rome. These networks have flooded the American web of meaning and the anxiety for certainty has risen to unprecedented levels. All of our values we have cherished and we inherited from our ancestors are up for grabs. Think of gay marriage: who could have ever thought of it? Or who could have thought, in Jane Austen’s England of the 18th century, that women, commenting after listening to a boring sermon, would have discussed that Hilary Clinton was running for President? A Hilary? President? Running?

In times like these we have to be careful as we choose the maps that will help us navigate the flooded city. All markings are under water and people have no time to explain. We all have become tourists in our own city.

It is easy to use the Bible as a map. It is text, which facilitates our going back to it to check and re-check. I use the Bible here as text, as a cultural artifact in its own right, or you may choose the Word of God and do not mean the text, but the living presence of the Word, the Logos, the Christ to guide us. We may choose to use a map or to use a person.

The same way a map is less than a city, the text of the Bible is less than the person of Christ. A map is a proportional representation of the buildings and streets, while a guide, although more expensive, knows the meaning of each one of them, which trattoria cooks the best carbonara, where Claire of Assisi stayed until her death. A text gives the assurance and respectability of the printed matter; a person requires, on the other hand, the development of a bond of trust.

I am not surprised that the Lahaye novels about the rapture were popular because that is what people is looking for. But our task, my task, is to do what I think is right, even when it is not popular.
Not everything new is good, but not everything new is bad either. The world has transcended those childish dichotomies. I hope it requires new approaches to old questions. In Jane Austen’s novel the role of women as an oppressed and excluded segment of society guarantees “the peace.” But it was more like a peace of the cemeteries, a peace of death, done at the expense of human beings endowed with everything the Creator has given for the well being of the community, just like men.

For England of the 18th century Hilary would be like gay marriage is for us, a novel and dangerous idea that further threatens our web of meaning, our old city. And yes, we may see buildings fall, and a foundational shake may go through our collective spines. The questions is whether the change is life affirming or not.

I know it is difficult to discern even that, especially today for us, since change is the byword of our society. Just like the article in Time magazine, “I Want Latin,” that was written by the Japanese-Irish lapsed Catholic, we may need the soothing whispers of an ancient (only 17th century) language you do not understand to deal with the feeling of being a boat without rudder in the midst of the storm.

I was thinking last night as I agonized (I always do) over my sermon this morning. I am supposed to say something meaningful in 15 minutes about the end of the world, and I came to realize that simply it was an impossible task. At least for me. I will tell you, though, that between me and an otherwise meaningless world stands the person of Jesus, which the text talks about but which the text cannot comprehend fully.

Yes, the world looks in terrible shape. But it has before, you know. Still, I know that always our disaster is the greatest because it is ours.

Jesus in the passage today talks not about bringing peace like the world knows. He talks about bringing peace that is beyond our understanding, a different kind of peace, one that takes the shape of a sword and cuts the bonds that kept people enslaved in the name of cohesion, of meaning, and clarity of understanding. Jesus’ peace is one that furthers, like a wild fire, the displacement of values and commotion of our accepted truths, but it is one that is necessary for the sake of the life-affirming values of the Gospel.

In middle class America, we are very used to a God who must be nice. I was told once in St Leonard’s Church in Toronto to always smile, like I was in a perpetual visit to the dentist. It shows that God who is nice has to have ministers with well-pressed suits who wear a perpetual smile. I heard once in meeting a priest who literally said, “I chose to preach that sermon angrily the week before.” I do not program my feelings that way but I have news for you: God is not nice. Today’s passage does not fit that image of the God sitting in our lap like a Labrador, but one who is roaring like an angry lion.

Our freedom of choice can bring permanent disaster to the world, since we are the only species on the planet capable of killing all life-sustaining systems and we are working at it in earnest. Global warming is just the last one to enter our common awareness. What use is to have atomic bomb shelters, if there is not going to be life worth living? God is angry at how we have abused the bounty he has given us: this world, our own personal lives, the lives of others we have damaged and hurt unnecessarily.

God cannot be nice, because nice is the antithesis of love. God is loving, but not harmless. Nice is deceptive, but Love is real. Nice has invaded our understanding of Love so much that we have to give Love surnames, like Tough Love. God is loving, which also means God is passionate about us, and because he is passionate he sent his Son to die for us a cruel and bloody death on the cross. A “nice” God would not bring Himself to offer his most precious possession, a part of his very own Self, to nasty suffering, pain and death.

We are bringing the end-times on ourselves, on our children and our children’s children, and He is not happy about it. He is not happy about the silences in families that perpetuate the oppression of its members in the name of peace and stability, the peace that covers up and perpetuates abuse. He has not come to bring that kind of peace, a cemetery peace. He has not come to bring that kind of certainty. He did not leave us a book, but He lived a life. He told us not to fear the confusion of the city, for in the midst of havoc you have me as your personal guide. He has come more like a sword to liberate and to challenge and to shake and to consume what is worthless in his fire.

No, God is not nice, God loves you.