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Jeremiah 23.23-29, Psalm 82, Hebrews
11.29-12.2, Luke 12.49-56
“There may be trouble ahead,” says the old song, but in truth it’s not a question of “may be”.
We can bet on it that at some point in our lives there will be trouble.
Collectively or individually we are bound to hit hard times and challenges. They
might take the form of illness or loss, or they might be national or
international crises, like the looming challenge of climate change, which
threatens to make large parts of the world uninhabitable. No one is immune from
trouble. Most people, though – and I include myself in this – prefer to ignore
the problems until they hit us, by which time it is often too late to do
anything much about them.
If you’re a fan of the Hitchikers’ Guide to the
Galaxy, you might remember the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, who features
in it, a creature described as so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if you can’t
see it, it can’t see you. So all you need to do to protect yourself from it,
despite it being very ravenous, is to wrap a towel round your head. You can’t
see it, so it can’t see you. Problem solved.
The
Bugblatter Beast doesn’t exist outside the world of fiction – I hope - but its
way of thinking certainly does. We can all behave like this. Seeing and
acknowledging a problem makes it real to us, and we very often think that it is
better to turn a blind eye and hope it goes away by itself. That’s what the
prophet Jeremiah was complaining about in our first reading. He was called by
God to speak to the people of Jerusalem at a time when there was definitely trouble
ahead. The Babylonian army was advancing on the city, and it was obvious – if
you didn’t have your head wrapped in a towel – that things weren’t going to
turn out well.
But the
people of Jerusalem preferred not to think about that, and most of their
prophets were happy to reinforce their blindness. “I have dreamed, I have
dreamed!” they said – in the ancient world the gods were often thought to
speak through dreams. But their dreams, said Jeremiah, were no more than “the
deceit of their own heart”. It would all be fine, they said. God
would stop anything bad happening to them.
God called Jeremiah to break through this wall of
denial. His words would be “like fire…and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” . They would be just as vulnerable to the looming destruction as the
nations round about them, he said, and they’d better wake up and prepare
themselves for what was to come. You can imagine how well that went down. They
preferred the dreams that comforted to the reality that challenged them, just
as most of us would.
Jesus had an equally tough message to deliver to
his disciples. They saw his popularity with the crowds. They heard his wisdom.
They felt great when they were with him, as if they could do anything. Surely they
were on a one way trip to glory. Jesus’ opponents would fall like dominoes as
God swept him onto the throne of Israel! Then everything would be perfect. The
lion would lie down with the lamb, swords would be beaten into ploughshares and
best of all, they would get ringside seats for the whole thing.
The early Christian audience for which Luke wrote
his Gospel probably nurtured the same sort of hope of easy triumph. When
following Christ caused them to be
rejected by their families or put them at risk of persecution , they thought
they must be doing something wrong. Why wasn’t it all working out the way they
thought it should?
That’s why Luke reminds them of Jesus’ words. God was
in control, love would win in the end, but there wasn’t going to be a
shortcut to glory. The immediate future, which was the bit they would have to
deal with, would contain sadness, loss and conflict. It was inevitable if they
were challenging injustice. They just didn’t want to see that inevitable
reality.
And who can blame them? They were people like us.
One day we’ll look back and see with 20/20 vision the threats we are blind to
today, like the threat of climate
change, or the warping effects of inequality – things we could do something
about, but rarely take as seriously as we need to. Deep down we know they
matter, but most of the time we act as if they don’t. One day we, or the generations that come
after us, will ask how we could have missed their importance, why we didn’t act
sooner.
Jesus asks his disciples “why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” and we might ask ourselves the same question. But beating ourselves up
for not having our eyes open won’t do any good. Instead, we need to ask
ourselves what it is that makes us keep them closed. Why do we so often put off
dealing with things that really need our attention.
There are probably as many answers to that question
as there are people asking it. It may be that we are just plain lazy.
Acknowledging a problem means doing something about it, and that means work.
But my experience is that few people are really genuinely idle. In fact it can take as much, if not more,
work to avoid a problem than to fix it. We drink, eat or work to excess, we
engage in risky behaviours, we worry about things that don’t matter, all to distract
us from what we really need to do. The real problem isn’t laziness, it is fear.
We are afraid we won’t be smart enough
or brave enough to do the things we need to do, afraid that we’ll find we have
bitten off more than we can chew, afraid that we are in over our heads and
drowning, with no one to come to our aid.
But Jesus had said it would be like this, that life
would often feel as if it was a mess. His own life had ended in humiliation on
a cross – that is the baptism he talks about at the beginning of the passage.
He’s going to drown in the deep waters of death. But that wouldn’t be the end,
however final it appeared. And it wouldn’t be a sign that he had been abandoned
or that he had done wrong. God would be with him in the squalor of the cross,
and the darkness of death, and would bring him through it to new life, and if
God could be with him in these terrible places, he could be with anyone,
anywhere. “Who can hide in secret places so that I
cannot see them?” God had said to Jeremiah. “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”
What do we need in order to face up to the
challenges that confront us, the ones we work so hard to avoid seeing and
acknowledging? Just the same as Jesus needed. We need to know that God is with
us, that we are not alone, that we are held safely whether things
seem to be going well or disastrously, that we can’t fall out of God’s
hands, in life or in death. Knowing that gives us the courage to deal with
whatever comes our way, to look at what we are most afraid of square in the
face, secure in the knowledge that it cannot destroy what God has created and
redeemed in us.
Ultimately it’s a matter of trust, which is really
what the Bible means when it uses the word “faith”. To many people faith is
what you believe, intellectually, in your heads – that list of propositions we
find in the creed, but the original Greek word we translate as faith really
means trust, which is quite different. Trust is far more active, something you
do when you put your life into another’s hand. It’s the commitment couples make
here at the chancel steps when they marry each other. It’s what an adult child
does when they phone their parents in the middle of the night because they are
in trouble, knowing they’ll get the help they need. It’s what you do when you turn up on a
friend’s doorstep, maybe after years, knowing that they will be glad to see you,
and won’t mind you dropping in, even if the house is a mess and there’s nothing
to eat. That is trust, and it is a vital part of our emotional and spiritual
health.
Trust creates a safe space to grow and to change.
If we believe that someone loves us deeply and strongly enough, we can make
demands on them , try things out , get things wrong, take the risks we need to
take. We know that they will stick with us. But it’s a chicken and egg
situation. Often we need to take the risk in order to discover and develop the trust
in the first place.
It is just the same with God. Our trust in him
grows when we live our faith, when we practice forgiveness, when we are
generous rather than anxiously hoarding what we have, when we answer God’s call
to serve, when we love those who will never be able to repay that love, and let
ourselves be loved by them too, when we face the things in our lives which need
sorting out. All these things push us out into the deep waters with God, but
through them we learn that, as the Bible says, “underneath
are the everlasting arms” of God’s love. (Deuteronomy 33.27,
NIV translation)
I don’t know what your challenge is today – it may
be deeply personal, something that is unique to you, or it may be a common
challenge we must face together, but whatever it is, it is safe to open our
eyes and look at it, because we do so in the company of God, from whom nothing
is hidden, and whom nothing can defeat.
Amen
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