Texts: Isaiah 65: 17-25; Luke 21: 5-19
Today is the thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary time, so called because it is one of those numbered Sundays that falls between the great feast of Pentecost and Advent. In two weeks we will celebrate the First Sunday in Advent, the liturgical equivalent of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. The term ordinary first meant numbered, that which you could count, separate from the special feast days of the church. Regular Sundays were those that were ordinary, that is, they fell into a regular pattern and the feast days began to be known as out of the ordinary, the origin of our word extraordinary.
“We do not live in ordinary times,” the politicians tell us, that is, we do not live in times that can be counted, thought of as regular. Those times, the extraordinary ones, are times in which prophets appear, such as the Third Isaiah, with his vision of peace; that time, an extraordinary one, was the one in which Jesus brought God’s presence to the world.
These times, we are told, are not ordinary because of the threats we face abroad from a Putin who thinks he’s Peter the Great and the challenges here on the home front from extremism and Christian nationalism.
Quite frankly, not to downplay any of the threats or challenges we face, I wonder if any time has ever been “ordinary,” ordered, countable, secure. As we move in our church calendar from ordinary time to a feast day -- Christ the King Sunday is the traditional feast day prior to the Season of Advent, not an ordinary time, I wonder: Have we not always been in an advent, a time of waiting and watching?
The time when I was born was not an ordinary time. We were in the midst of a great war. The times when perhaps some of you were born were not ordinary times: during a horrifying war in Europe or during the cold war when we were afraid of nuclear annihilation. When have our times ever been “ordinary,” in the way we use the word outside of the liturgical sense? I daresay that our times have always been challenging, even though they may not have seemed so.
Well, you may say, I remember a time of quiet, of peace, when times seemed ordinary. Nostalgia is like the fog in the early morning, obscuring reality so what we get is a splash of color on a warm fall morning. We like to remember a past when times were good, when we were happy - or at least not afraid. We like to remember our past loves with happy memories rather than the trials we had to face. We like to remember a world when life seemed less complicated, less hurried.
Although I do not think that the simpler time ever existed, I do believe that there was a time when life was less hurried. Certainly as I drive the Parkway or even just trying to cross a street in Newark, I am still amazed to see such speeding or the total disregard of pedestrians. I have usually associated “hurry” with New York, but the need to get there faster, cram more information into our minds more quickly, to rush to beat the other guy has really taken over our lives.
Take the cell phone, for instance. Granted it is a really great device, an instrument that has saved the lives of countless individuals -- so important that battered women’s shelters collect used ones to deprogram and give to women who face real life threatening situations -- but it is also a device that forces us into the instant, the thing that just can’t wait, a really obnoxious sense of “You’ve got to answer this now, and right now.”
I can’t tell you the number of times that I get a call on my cell from someone at my office about something that can really wait the one hour until I get there because when I’m in court or at someone’s hospital bed. I don’t have a file with me to answer the question that my staff is calling about. Yesterday I did a wedding -- no ordinary time, to be sure -- and wouldn’t you know it, the groom’s cell phone rang. I’m thinking, I am not going to stop the ceremony so he can answer his blasted phone!
No time is ordinary for us, measured or counted in a liturgical or regular sense because we are living in that time. This morning’s readings give us two greatly different views of a future time. Isaiah’s dream of peace, when the wolf will feed together with the lamb, is contrasted with Jesus’ prediction of strife when even family will betray family. How do we put these contrasting images together? How can we reconcile them, if at all?
Although we may not be able to reconcile them in any ordinary -- ouch, terrible pun -- sense of the word, we can see how they cast time out of the ordinary. Our faith and the way we live our lives in response to God’s call to faithfulness will pit us against others, perhaps not in our immediate family, but certainly within the larger family of our community.
In churches throughout America, changes in faith orientation have led pastors into terrible conflicts with their congregations, certainly a group of people the pastors had considered family. One minister I know may cause him to leave his ministry because of it.
Twenty years ago, this church faced conflict with the North Shore Association over its commitment to diversity. These statements in Luke’s Gospel, warning the community of the conflict that their faithfulness would engender, were certainly on point.
Isaiah’s vision of peace is one that needs closer examination. It says that the wolf will feed together with the lamb, not that we will all become lambs -- or wolves. The vision is one of diverse elements sharing life together in their diversity, of respecting each other even though they are different species.
The hope is, of course, that through the struggle of living faithfully, even though the family of humankind may rise up against one another, that we are able to develop even in our differences a measure of the vision of Isaiah. Whether that is possible I don’t know, but I do know that if we do not live faithfully, it will not be possible.
Let us pray: God who encompasses all humankind, we pray that we are able to live faithfully in these not so ordinary times so that we can fulfill the vision of peace given us through your Holy Word. In the name of him who came to show us how to live faithfully, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.