Interpreting the times

Sermon for Pentecost X, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: Luke 12:49-56

This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t sound like Jesus as he appears in other passages we’ve read, and this isn’t the first time we have run across this change in tone. This is the challenge of reading all four Gospels all the way through, where we are confronted with Jesus not being as consistent as we want him to be. He is human like us, yet divine like God, and it is this mystery of being both that we wrestle with as we encounter the human and the divine. It can be disorienting where we want the predictable consistency of the Jesus we want to see. The reading starts with Jesus saying he is bringing fire and division, and compared to the gentle love expressed in the Beatitudes, that makes it even more challenging. My first thought on hearing of fire and division is to think of our present political and cultural times, but I’m not going to go into that. That fire and division if for a separate conversation.  Instead, what keeps running through my mind is at the end of the reading where Jesus says, “why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Why can’t we interpret the present time? What are we missing?

There is a generational aspect of the division Jesus speaks of, happening between father and son, mother and daughter, and mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Sons-in-law are left out because traditionally, the bride went to live with her husband’s family after they were married. It would seem that generational friction is not limited to modern times. I am sure my grandparents were aghast at the rock-and-roll music that my parents may have listened to in the late 1950s. I’m sure my parents were not happy with the sexual liberation of the 1970s that I grew up in. My generation struggles with the broadening and blurring of gender identity of my children’s generation. These are just a few of the points of friction between generations, points on a line that become the signs of our times. They are signs that we struggle to interpret because we are caught up in the details of the differences or fail to understand what they mean. We don’t like change, and we think that our generation has it all figured out and those other generations have it wrong. In the end, it is still parents against children and children against parents.

Even the most resilient of us have to deal with change in one form or another. Whether it’s culture or faith, there are themes of uniformity, conformity, and orthodoxy that we rely on to define ourselves. There is an undeniable sense of safety and security when all three become the rules of life and faith. So how do we know when we stray from God’s will when there is variation, disagreement, and rootless faith? Change is stressful for those who derive a sense of safety and predictability from their environment or their faith. Couples, families, and communities have their stability disrupted by change, and that makes everyone uncomfortable. Maintaining the status quo is important to maintaining order, so we have to ask what do we do when the usual, the normal is unsustainable, or unjust, or just doesn’t work anymore. This is what Jesus was referring to when he says he was bringing strife and when he was challenging the religious authorities. The Son of God was overturning what made people comfortable with their beliefs, beliefs held at the expense of others. Strife comes from using conformity to battle the discomfort of not being in control. It comes from attempting to bring back the familiar status quo.

Despite our desire for our lives and communities to stay the same, we are experiencing a push for change, but that push is not in one direction. There are many pushes for change based on what people have experienced themselves and what they see is wrong or dysfunctional. The issue is that we don’t all agree on what the problem or solution is, so the push ends up going in all directions. We want our individual freedom to fix problems the way we see fit, but that comes at the cost of remaining a community. It comes with the risk of abandoning the body of Christ. The sign of our times we miss is that we see strife as the problem and that is our interpretation of the earth and the sky. The interpretation of the times that Jesus mentions begins with us asking what makes us anxious and upset and why, and continues with naming what we feel is being lost. It also has to include an honest look at who, exactly, is being hurt without change, and who is saying they are hurt with change. Interpreting our times is not saying how we want our community to be, nor is it saying what we think is going on. It is identifying what is happening to whom, and when, and by whom, and how we all are affected as a community.

The signs of the times Jesus addressed was in part sacrificing the love for one’s neighbor to the interpretation of rules and laws that kept the status quo in place. The needs of the poor were ignored, the meek were shut out, and the sick and disabled were cast off as sinners, all to keep life orderly and safe. Today, we address the needs of the poor, include the meek, and show compassion to the sick and disabled, but we ignore, cast off, and judge situations that threaten the safety and security of our individuality. We are losing sight of being a community in the pursuit of individual desires and what we hold individually as right and wrong. 

That is not to say that among a random group of people that no one will agree with someone else about anything. There is agreement on a number of problems we are facing and how we might address them. But it almost feels like we are afraid to agree with each other. We are afraid that we will lose in some way, that “they” will win, that all will fall into ruin if we lose. That is the myth of the individual, and if it were true that there can be only one right person or group, I imagine it would get lonely at the top pretty quickly. Being always right comes at the cost of connections and relationships, and leads to stagnation. Change and calls for change can and do challenge us in constructive ways, but always being in the right often leads to stagnation. The strife that Jesus mentions is a reminder that we are connected in ways that may need to be mended. Strife is a reminder that our needs as a community have changed, and we are being called as a community, as the body of Christ, to respond. It is a reminder that just because we have always done it that way does not mean that we should keep doing it that way. Jesus is calling us to open our eyes and clear away what prevents us from interpreting the signs of our times. The question for us is what signs will we see when we clear things away, and what are those things that prevent us from interpreting them?