Isaiah 5:7,8; Luke 12: 55-59

Do we understand our times?

It has taken me longer than usual to distill something from the Bible passages that prescribed or our worship today.  In Isaiah you have the problem that it is hard to pin down the exact events in the history of Israel that cause him to say what he was saying.  In Luke we have three sections of text in rapid succession where Jesus speaks. First he warns his audience that the words of Jesus sometimes will result in temporary divisions.  Next he underlines that his audience may have a basic understandings of everyday natural events, but does not understand their times, then he calls into question the judgment of the people and financially he call to reconciliation.  I mentioned the four themes that I think emerge in our Bible readings from the lectionary today.  These are the unwise and unjust use of resources in Isaiah, the lack of understanding of our times, the lack of judgment and the unwillingness to reconcile. Now if we spent some time thinking about these four themes, and I have, we can figure out these themes are not outdated and irrelevant at all in our times.  Brian McLaren, a former pastor and leader of the emerging church movement in theology today talks about the three p’s, the three most important issues for the church today.  These are: planet, poverty and peace.  In other words: protecting the planet, reducing poverty and making peace among people.   The new world wide mission focus of the  Presbyterian Church USA is three-fold: first, evangelism, meaning spreading the Gospel,  two, poverty reduction and three, reconciliation.  So, friends, we can say that the text is on to something.

We have arrived at the third of our four Hawaiian Sundays this month, so I want to say something about how the Hawaiian context can help us here.   When you fly into the airport at Kaluhui on Maui you will most likely come in from the West on your way into the low land between the West Maui mountains and the Haleakala volcano. On your left you will be able to see about 34 (believe I counted them) giant wind turbines that weren’t there a few decades ago and you first reaction is: why did they put those up?  This is Hawaii, they should keep this place open free from eyesores made by humans.  But then you start thinking: where are they supposed to get their energy from: gasoline that has to be shipped in on tankers from refinery in California? A nuclear power plant?  A hundred thousand solar panels on an area so small that’s dependent on tourism. It isn’t so easy. There is a new show on tv called Hawaii Life and it shows people buying houses on the islands.  Prices of course are through the roof, but sometimes you see a couple and their kids purchase three acres on Kauai and you wonder how an islands that small can afford to be sold off in big chunks of land like that.  And then it strikes you that the State of Hawaii is having to make decisions about how to survive and live together that we do not have to make yet.  Suddenly the whole idea of the owner of vineyard that keeps adding land at the cost of the lives of others has a huge moral responsibility.  Jesus reminds us that we do not understand our times, that we do not understand that there are decisions we have to make that did not have to be made before.   Jesus goes on to talk about our relationship with people and how we show bad judgment and how we fail to reconcile.  This finds echoes in today’s Israel:  The Israeli government keeps issuing permits for houses on Palestinian owned land that go for a lot of money and the arid land is tiny.  In that region there is almost no room.  This brings us back the question of the vineyard (and let’s remember this is all very close to the pieces of land that Isaiah is referring to).  In addition there is constant bad judgment in that region and an absence of reconciliation.  Moreover, people do not understand their times.  Friends, this is really the sentence out of Jesus’ mouth that I keep coming back to: you do not understand the times.   “True,” He says, you have a pretty good understanding of nature. If there is a cloud rising in the West you know there is going to be rain and when you feel the south wind coming from the Sinai or from the Arabian Peninsula you know it will get very hot.  This is true of us, friends, we know more and more about nature and what it will do. We come closer and closer to understanding what life is made up of so that we can influence cells to our advantage.  But do we understand our times: do we know what global warming can really do if do not stop reducing our emissions? Do we understand what ignoring the poor can do to the fabric of an ever shrinking world?  We don’t, we get it as little as the people in Isaiah’s day or Jesus’ day did.  We do not understand our times. We do not understand ourselves half the time. So, friends, you may think :” I came here to be cheered up, and now you are telling me that people are always messing up. This is not what I need to hear. “ Ydou see, friends, what Jesus is calling us to and what Isaiah is calling us to is faith, faith in a God Who is greater than us; a God Who can help us rise above our selfishness and greed, our divisions, our bad judgments and our inability to understand.  Jesus reminds us that life is not about us personally, but about all of us together. Without that faith, we are not going to ever do the right consistently for very long. Thanks be to God!