Sermon of August 15, 2004 Rev. Mark Trotter

2111 Camino del Rio South, San Diego, California 92108 619-297-4366 Fax (619) 297-2933 www.fumcsd.org Sermon of August 15, 2004 Rev. Mark Trotter DISCERNING THE TIMES Luke 12:49-56 First of all let me say how good it is to be here and to see all of you. Jean and I continue to be enriched in our memory of twenty-four wonderful years in this church. We are also delighted that you have found it possible to complete the master plan for this church with the construction of the chapel and choir room. I want you to know how honored Jean and I are that the chapel will bear the Trotter name, another sign of your thoughtfulness and extraordinary generosity to us over the years. I know how hard Russ Stai has worked on the capital funds campaign for the new building, and of the exceptionally generous gift from the Wilson family that served as the catalyst for the campaign. Many others have responded with their advance gifts to enable the groundbreaking to take place next Sunday. I am also pleased that you selected Neil Larson to be the architect. Neil has watched over these buildings in numerous capacities for years, including Chairman of the Trustees. I have seen his proposal for the new building, and it is beautiful, and superior to other proposals that have been offered for that site over the forty years the church has been in Mission Valley. Now you are engaged in another capital campaign. I can remember the many campaigns we undertook while I was one of your pastors. We used to say they were like planes stacked up waiting to land at Lindbergh Field. Every three years, right on schedule, we would have another campaign. And in each one I was impressed with the generosity of this church, and your serious intent to build a great church here at this most strategic location. There is a correlation between commitment and stewardship, and your understanding of that made being your pastor a special experience. Thank you. We will look forward to next Sunday and the groundbreaking. Finally, let me express my thanks to Jim Standiford, our senior minister. I say our because Jean is still a member here, and I am still a member of the Charge Conference of this church. I, like you, am delighted he is here. I see him frequently at Rotary, and he has become a good friend. And I am glad he is taking a vacation. Preachers need vacations. But when I looked at the lectionary and the texts for this Sunday, I wished he had taken his vacation some other week. Now you know why preachers take vacations in August. It is not only the dog days of summer, and often as hot as Brawley in here, but August is also fumcsd.org/sermons/sr081504.html 1/5

when the lectionary gets to what are called the hard sayings of Jesus the ones we are sure are meant for other people. But there they are, and if we are going to be serious about being disciples of Jesus we have to come to terms with them. So let s turn to the gospel lesson. This is a Jesus we are unfamiliar with. When we think of Jesus, we think of the Good Shepherd, or the teacher of forgiveness, the teacher of reconciliation, or the Prince of Peace. This text is in the twelfth chapter of Luke. In the first two chapters is the famous birth narrative, the Nativity, in which angels sing, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace Luke is saying that Jesus fulfills Isaiah s prophecy that the Messiah will bring peace to the nations. He is the Prince of Peace. But here he is at the twelfth chapter saying, I have come not to bring peace, but division. Those of you who know me can see why I have trouble with this text. I am your typical nice guy. I don t like controversy. Unity has been a theme of my preaching, and I have worked in the denomination to promote dialogue between feuding factions in the church, trying to make the name United Methodist something more than an oxymoron. And I believe strongly that Jesus came as a reconciler. He told us not to judge other people. He told us to love our enemies. He told us he had come to establish a kingdom where the differences that separate us in the world will no longer matter. Paul, in his letters, picked that up and told the Corinthians, you are to model the unity of the Kingdom so the world will see a more excellent way of living in the world with our differences. He said to the Ephesians, Christ has knocked down the dividing walls of hostility. And to the Galatians, There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. So why does Jesus say now that he has come not to bring peace but division. There is obviously a contradiction here. I have been accused of contradicting myself in sermons. There was one guy in particular who would take careful notes on my sermons. I could see him out there. And I was indeed impressed this must be good stuff if he s taking so many notes. Then one day I figured out what he was doing. He was outlining the sermons so he could point out to me where what I said this week contradicted what I had said three weeks ago. I told him, Buddy, I don t write this stuff, I just preach it. So what we have is two Jesuses in the gospels: One the pacifier, the other the divider. One the teacher of love, the other the bringer of fire. And you can pinpoint where this happens. It happens at Caesarea Philippi. That is where he announced that he was leaving Galilee and going to Jerusalem. In Galilee he is the teacher. In Galilee he says, "Let the little children come unto me In Galilee he heals the sick, forgives the sinners. In Galilee he is the Jesus we like, the one we believe in, the Good Shepherd who gathers the lost lambs and carries them home in his bosom. The other Jesus, the Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, is a stranger to us. This is the Jesus who says, I have come not to bring peace, but division. How do you explain this? Read the story carefully, all the way through, and you can see there is tension building even in Galilee. The people are waiting for the Messiah to come and initiate a Kingdom that would be exclusively for them. Everyone else would be turned away. In other words, they were like some Christians today who believe that those who will be saved will be like them, and everyone else damned. Jesus preached a different Kingdom. He turned their expectation on its head and said, The first will be last and the last first. He said there are no guarantees. Even the enemies of the nation, those they despised, may get into the Kingdom, as well as the scorned, the ignored, the outcasts in their own nation. The only requirement is to see what time it is. The time of waiting is over. The Kingdom is here. It has come in the person of Jesus. And those who want to be in that number when the saints go marching in should turn around repent and start living by the rules of the Kingdom now. fumcsd.org/sermons/sr081504.html 2/5

And the best description of what that would look like is the Sermon on the Mount. There is an abbreviated version in Luke, but the unabridged version is in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5 through 7. It begins with the Beatitudes, which are like an Executive Summary. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will be in the Kingdom. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be in the Kingdom. Blessed are the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, for they will be in the Kingdom. And those who are persecuted for righteousness which means for standing up for what is right and paying the price. Those are the ones who will sit at banquet with the Messiah when he comes in glory. I read a quote from Kurt Vonnegut that might illustrate how all this was heard in Jesus time. He said, Instead of posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses to demonstrate that we are a Christian nation, why not post the Sermon on the Mount? That is what Jesus was asking his society to do. It is what he is asking us to do. Not just following the Ten Commandments, though that s a start. And for some it may be a stretch. But Jesus said, You have heard it said, but now I say to you That is, he went beyond the Ten Commandments. Jesus raised the bar for Christians. If you call yourself a Christian, if you see yourself as a part of the Kingdom of God, then start living by the ethic of the Kingdom. That is what he preached, and the crowds, even in Galilee, did not understand. They were looking for something else. They were looking for miracles. The disciples didn t understand either. They thought they were already in by virtue of being chosen. They thought all this teaching was for others. The fact is the only group that understood what he was saying was the authorities, the representatives of power, who shadowed him throughout his ministry in Galilee. They are there mingling with the crowds, taking notes, trying to document a prosecutable crime. They are also there to destroy his credibility, to ruin him, by suggesting when he performs some spectacular feat, You know that he can do that because he is in league with the devil. They do that because they know who he really is, and that if people followed him, really followed him, things would be different around here. So he comes to Caesarea Philippi, and announces he is going to Jerusalem to defeat those who were plotting to thwart the Kingdom. At Caesarea Philippi he outlines his strategy. The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised. On the Cross and in the Resurrection he will demonstrate the power of God. The time of waiting is over. The time of decision is here. The Kingdom is before you. You have heard his teachings, and seen its power in the Cross and Resurrection. Now you must decide. We must decide. So he concludes this passage saying, When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, It s going to rain, and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, It s going to be a scorcher, and it happens. You hypocrites. You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? The present time is the time of judgment, a time of choosing which side you will stand on. When you ask Americans, how do you interpret the present time? they will say, A time to defend ourselves against terrorism. Both Democrats and Republicans agree on this. There is little difference between the candidates on terrorism. They both say the answer is to defend ourselves with armaments and aggressively pursue terrorists militarily wherever they are in the world. That may be necessary, but it is not enough. There is another way to interpret the present time. David Brooks commented on the 9/11 Commission report by writing, We are not fighting an axis of evil. We are fighting an ideology. And we should have learned by now that you don t defeat an ideology with violence. You multiply it with violence. You defeat an ideology that has a distorted vision of the world with the truth. If that truth is that the West the so-called Christian West, is moral, tolerant and generous, then you defeat the ideology by fumcsd.org/sermons/sr081504.html 3/5

cleaning up the immorality, eliminating the bigotry, and being generous. When the Americans we were in Pakistan back in the 80 s arming the Pakistanis and the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, we gave them arms, and a promise of schools for their children. When the Russians left Afghanistan, we left Pakistan, and left the arms there as well as the promise of schools. Now Al Qaeda is there building schools and feeding the children when they come to the schools. The schools are called madrassas. There are literally thousands of them in Pakistan, and thousands more all across the Muslim world, especially where there are the poor, indoctrinating young boys with their vision of the world, their ideology. What if you were to interpret it as a religious crisis, a time of judgment, a time to live the ethic of the Kingdom, not just talk it? The fact is there is enough talent and wealth among the rich nations to ease the burden of the poor in this world. We know it, and they know it. And as long as they know it and we ignore it, the resentment will build, the hatred will mount, and will be sublimated into what we call terrorism. At a meeting of the World Bank in Washington last April, Colin Powell said that HIV/AIDS is the greatest single threat to the planet. He said it is a greater threat than weapons of mass destruction. I heard Steven Lewis, the UN Special Envoy to the African AIDS crisis say there are 14 million children in Africa orphaned by AIDS. By 2010 there will be 25 million AIDS orphans in Africa. He talked about visiting a classroom of ten-year-olds in Zimbabwe. The teacher asked the children to write on a piece of paper what bothers them most. She collected the papers and read them. On eight out of ten papers appeared the word death. These are ten-year-olds! The teacher asked, What do you do in the face of death? The children answered, Pray. Lewis asked the teacher what all that meant. She said, Mr. Lewis, if you went to funerals at lunchtime, and you went to funerals after school, and you went to funerals on the weekend you would understand. We now hear that the pandemic is spreading to China, India, Russia, and the Caribbean. The fact is something can be done. Back in the 80 s Rotary International decided to do something about polio. So they set out, rather naively, saying that they were fixing to eliminate polio from the face of the earth by 2000. Rotary is all over the world, including the Third World, so Rotary clubs set up clinics and started in. By 1988 they were joined by WHO, UNESCO, and the CDC, and the immunization began in earnest. Today 99% of the world is polio free. All that remains are a few countries in Africa where war, and the collapse of infrastructure, have prevented access. The goal is now to declare the world polio free by next year. That will happen because a small minority in this world saw terrible suffering going on for generations, and decided to stop it. Imagine if the richest country in the history of the world, or at least a Christian minority in that country, were to see poverty and HIV/AIDS as a religious crisis, a time of judgment, a line drawn, so we must choose which side we will be on. Something would be done. You remember Rwanda, the genocide of nearly a million people. That was during the 90 s and we did nothing. We were busy accumulating wealth in the nineties. Tony Lake, President Clinton s National Security Adviser, was asked recently why the United States didn t make the Rwandan mass killings a priority. He said, The phones weren t ringing on Rwanda. Politicians don t interpret the present time and do heroic things. They interpret the polls and do the popular thing. If the real problems in the world are to be solved, it will happen because there are those who know how to interpret the present time. When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, It s going to rain. And so it happens. fumcsd.org/sermons/sr081504.html 4/5

And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, There will be scorching heat. And it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? Order this sermon on compact disk Send your comments via e-mail to Dr. Jim Standiford. Send e-mail to the church staff. NEWS * SERMON * MUSIC * KIDS * YOUTH * COUNSELING * MAIL * HOME fumcsd.org/sermons/sr081504.html 5/5