Signs of the Times

What shall we make of Jesus’ words:  I came to bring fire to the earth . . . to bring . . . division!  From now on  . . . households will be divided . . .  father against son . . . mother against daughter . . . You hypocrites, why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

The theme song of my generation was The times, they are a-changin’ –  written by the folkie Bob Dylan.    We marched for peace, we changed the styles of clothes and hair and food.  Many parents raged against these things, and many families were divided as my generation refused to consider Vietnam a just war.   Because of this division, because of our insistent refusal to conform, compulsory conscription into the military came to an end.  Because of our division, a Presidency failed, and an appalling chapter of corruption was exposed and dealt with publicly.  But the scope of the changes that were coming was far beyond our imagining.

An explosion of technology, immigration, wars, migration, has altered the landscape of human communication.  The movement of people to cities, here and all over the world, has so increased urban populations that scholars are writing about the end of nations as the shapers of our world, which is now dominated by mega-cities.  By 2060, general estimates are that 65% of the US population will live in cities.  When I was born, the US was a nation of small towns.  The small town era, around the world, is ending.

Some think Jesus, in this week’s reading, is talking about the end of the world.  Some think he is speaking of the downfall of his own nation, Israel, which happened in 69, not too long after he died.  And some think Jesus was speaking of his own death.   But perhaps we look at his words with too small a focus, perhaps we need to acknowledge the ways in which Division, which is painful, causes hurt, and brings sorrow, has midwived the birth of God’s justice into this world.

Could apartheid have ended in South Africa, or slavery in America, or segregation and a century of Jim Crow, without division?  And what about the divisive struggles over science, that cost many their jobs, if not their lives, as the Church refused ideas about planets and stars, about evolution, the intelligence of women, justice for the poor, respect for same gender love? Voting was unheard of in the old order.  Then it was unheard of for women, and after that, still kept from people of color.

Phyllis Tickle, a journalist who convinced Newsweek to cover religion as part of the news, has written  a theory of world history that argues for a 500 year cycle of vast social changes, changes that set out a new world order and divide the times.  She has named the religious 500 year cycles as:  the Great Transformation (Jesus);  the Great Decline and Fall (Rome – about 500);  the Great Schism (1054 split between the Eastern and Western churches and their worlds);  the Great Reformation (16^th c. Protestantism, and with it, the age of nations, multiple empires, science), and our own time, which she calls The Great Emergence.

Even as we wail about the decline of the Church, about changes in family structure and human attitudes toward sexuality and the body, what may be emerging in all the upheavals is a multi-faithed world in which people live multi-faceted lives, freed from conformity to one prescribed set of relations, and freed for relationships and work which are variable, can change as they mature, and will allow in each life a tapestry of experiences unknown to prior generations.

Mary Oliver, a poet of faith and experience, writes it this way:

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail;

It is the only vessel in the world that can hold,

in a mix of power and sweetness,  words, song, gesture, passion,

ideas, ingenuity, devotion,

merriment, vanity, and virtue.

One of the religious divisions of our time is about the right of people to explore the myriad possibilities of their curiosity, their sweetness, passion, gestures, their vanity and virtues.  In the past, the church has opposed ideas about holiness, in the present it opposes practices of love.  Perhaps in the future the church will come to have more trust in the divisions Jesus says he himself is bringing into this world, and the fire he said he wishes were already burning.

Jesus, in his lifetime, pointed to many new human possibilities:  he generously included sexually sinful people in his love and in his life;  he embraced the mentally ill;  he encouraged non-conformity for the human heart.

Division, as we have learned from science, can expand life, can expand Eden, creating new hybrids in plants, fruits, people, the elements themselves.

America, the hybrid nation created by division from Britain in particular and from many nations in offshoots, may be able to embrace the new possibility in the coming divisions.

But will the church?  What shoots may next grow from the split atom of faith?  It remains to be seen.   But we know from our experience as transplanted people, and from the wisdom of Jesus, that love takes root in the fertile ground of unknown possibilities and Great Adventures, and brings forth generations who dreams their own dreams.   Sometimes those Great Adventures are undertaken in fires that burn the cultures of the world, and sometimes in family divisions, like the love of the father for the prodigal son.  All of this, the dreams and the fire, are the promise of Pentecost, the greening of the Church, and the hope of the world.

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Poem:  from Mary Oliver’s Evidence

Illustrations

1.  Our Community.  Artists, Gannick and Taylor.  Nashville YMCA Mural, 2007. Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

2.  Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Glenna Goodacre,  1993, National Mall, DC. Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

3.  Could Silence Protect Us?      2007,  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

4.  Potlatch Gas – 1974  Failed Gas Station in Olympia WA. Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

5.  Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka with Their Children, a YouTube image.

6.  Lesbian Couple with Their Child.  This image appears on YouTube.