One Wild and Precious Life

One Wild and Precious Life

Text:  Luke 12:49-56

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 8-14-2016)

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes cited one of the few restrictions on the First Amendment. He said, “You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.” I wonder what the good judge would have said about the words Jesus speaks in our text from Luke. Listen to the one shouting fire in the crowded theater:

⁴⁹ 'I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!

⁵⁰ There is a baptism I must still receive, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!

⁵¹ 'Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.

⁵² For from now on, a household of five will be divided: three against two and two against three;

⁵³ father opposed to son, son to father, mother to daughter, daughter to mother, mother-in-law to daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law to mother-in-law.'

⁵⁴ He said again to the crowds, 'When you see a cloud looming up in the west you say at once that rain is coming, and so it does.

          ⁵⁵ And when the wind is from the south you say it's going to be hot, and it is.

⁵⁶ Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the face of the earth and the sky. How is it you do not know how to interpret these times?

                    The Word of the Lord.

                    Thanks be to God.

True confession. I nearly punted when I read these words of Jesus. Living in a world as sharply divided as ours and living in a country specializing in political division, why listen to Jesus talk about causing even more division?

Surely, Jesus was having a bad day, got a little too worked up, and then said some things he wish he had not. Anyone who speaks in public knows the temptation to get carried away, so why not give Jesus a break, let his incendiary words be forgotten and sink into the growing netherworld of words that should never have been uttered? Actually, as a preacher, I find it strangely comforting to know that even Jesus could have a bad preaching day!

Before I decided to skip this text and find one more pleasing to the ear, I read it carefully in the Greek and it actually got worse. In Greek, the first two sentences begin with the words, FIRE and BAPTISM, as a point of emphasis. Most English translations loose this emphasis. Even worse, they soften the opening words of Jesus about the impending fire, “how I wish it were already kindled” when actually the Greek reads not nearly so pensively. The sentiment Jesus is describing is much more like the feeling just before having a root canal, without anesthesia. “How I wish this root canal were already over” just does not cut it.   

The preacher who is speaking in Luke today is not the sweet, baby Jesus being cuddled by Mary or the gentle shepherd that you can see in the obligatory all-white-shepherd picture hanging in almost every church building in America. It is not the Jesus who has been on the road too long, has not had enough sleep, who has heard the same stupid question from the crowd one too many times, and who is ready for someone to give him the proper respect.

The Jesus who is preaching is about to face something far worse than a root canal botched. He is heading to Jerusalem, where the chorus of “hosannas” will quickly turn to the angry cry of “crucify him.” This is the Jesus who will soon be nailed to his own killing tree in Golgotha.

The Jesus preaching in Luke 12 is the Jesus who is not asking for a minute of our time when we can spare it or a leftover dollar or two when we have some change in our pocket. This Jesus is not asking us to cast our vote for him, as he runs for emperor on a platform of family values. This Jesus has come to ask of us the most important, the most fundamental question of our lives.

In her amazing poem, A Summer Day, the poet Mary Oliver writes:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper? . . .

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

         

That is the question Jesus asks in today’s text. “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” He asks this question not just this one time, but he asks it with his entire life, with his in-your-face challenge to make following him more than a happy habit or a mindless obligation, but the well-thought-through, core direction of our lives.  

I am grateful to John’s brother, Alex Evans, for reminding me about an incident involving Clarence Jordan. Jordan was a Southern Baptist and a fine biblical scholar. He lived “in Georgia and started an interracial farming community in 1942 call Koinonia. It was there at Koinonia that Millard Fuller came for a retreat and formed the idea of Habitat for Humanity.

“Before Jordan’s community gave birth to Habitat, he was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Jordan would often preach as a guest in pulpits across the south, but after congregations heard his message of equality for all people of all colors, he was rarely invited back. On one occasion, he gave a sermon that called for the country to stop the practice of segregation. After the sermon, a lady came up to him and said, ‘My granddaddy was an officer in the Confederate army and would not believe a word that you said about race relations’. Clarence Jordan smiled sweetly and said, ‘Well ma’am, your choice is very clear then. You can follow your granddaddy, or you can follow Jesus’.” (see M. Felton & J. Proctor-Murphy, Living the Questions, p. 87).

          Jesus does not ask for our occasional attention or our polite applause as if he has given a perfectly fine performance that we can talk about on our way home and then move on with our lives. He asks for our entire lives, our bodies, our souls, our minds, our hearts. He wants to burn away with baptism fire anything that keeps us watching from the sidelines or sitting in the balcony, a safe distance away.

In her provocative piece about the power of the people of God, Annie Dillard argues that when Christians join in worship of the crucified and risen Jesus, they are like:  “ . . . children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT . . . It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return” (“Teaching a Stone to Talk”).

FIRE. Jesus wants to burn away all the excuses we cling to that keep us quiet when we should speak, lethargic when we should take action, tepid when we should burn with Gospel justice. Jesus has come to bring FIRE to the earth, but it is not scorched earth FIRE; it is FIRE that destroys the dross that we cannot do ourselves.  Elizabeth Peters writes, “One of my divinity school professors used to say wryly, ‘If we could save ourselves, then the crucifixion was a massive overreaction on God’s part’.” [Christian Century, August 3, 2016, p. 18].

          “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That is the question Jesus shouted out to two stinking fishers by the Galilean sea. That is the question Jesus shouted out to the rich young man who wanted to know how he could get best positioned to “inherit” eternal life. That is the question Jesus shouted out to Pilate just before he took a towel and washed his hands of the whole affair.

          “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” May that question burn in every last one of us, every day, with life-giving fire!

          AMEN