(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Interpreting the Time”, originally shared on August 13, 2025. It was the 372nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
How do we interpret the present time? It’s what Jesus expects of us, but
does the question itself imply that times have meaning? Or don’t they? Prepare
to have your mind blown!
Time is measured by a 12-hour
system or a 24-hour one, in digital or analog devices. Time might be
multi-dimensional as in three Quantum dimensions (or ”scales”) of time, or only
one.
Groucho Marx, the anarchist
comedian, once said, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana?”
Does time follow a straight line, or is it a series of cycles?
Can we live in anything but the
present, and then the present goes away forever? Or, if God is eternal, and
Christians live in the relationship with God for which human being were
created, do we not also live in a relationship with every Christian who has
ever lived or will ever live, in our common relationship with God?
Beyond time?
How do we interpret our time,
these times, but not let them define us?
There are many ways we can describe
time, and they are mostly mind-stretching, but that’s not what Jesus is asking
us to do in the Gospel reading that will be shared in the vast majority of
churches in the world this coming Sunday, Luke 12:49-56.
What Jesus is expecting us to
do is even more mind-blowing. Jesus is asking us to understand the meaning of
our time. To interpret it.
I will preach for Pastor David
Lin’s ordination this coming Saturday, and again at Trinity Faith Lutheran
Church in Monterey Park, where he serves, on Sunday as I do every third
Sunday of the month. In both cases, I will preach in English, but someone else
will interpret my sermon in Mandarin Chinese.
I have been studying Mandarin,
and my wife Rev. Sally Welch, has suggested, not seriously, that I preach in
Mandarin some time. I said that if I did that it would be a very short
sermon.
I need someone to interpret
what I say into a language that people present can understand.
That is also your work, and
mine, as disciples of Jesus Christ.
I preached at a church last
Sunday that had the hands of a clock installed over the face of Martin Luther
on the wall in the church office where I changed into my robe. I wondered if it
was placed there as a piece of kitsch, humorously, with tongue firmly planted
in cheek. Or if it was hung there seriously, as an act of piety.
It made me think about a story
about interpreting the time in which we live, possibly apocryphal, in which
Martin Luther was visited one day by a member of his congregation. Luther was
digging a hole in which to plant an apple tree. The man wanted to talk about
the end of history and the coming Final Judgment, and he spoke about his belief
that the events of their time (more than 500 years ago) lined up with the
prophecies for the last days found in the Bible. And didn’t Luther agree that
they were living in the last days.
“Dr. Luther”, the man asked,
“what would you do if you know that the Last Judgement was coming tomorrow?”
Luther barely hesitated and
replied, “I’d plant my apple tree”.
We are to be prepared for the
Second Coming of Christ, the one where he Judges all the people of all time,
the one where a new heaven and a new earth will come, but we
exist only in the present. Today, our work is to do what God has called,
equipped and sent us to do until there is, literally, no tomorrow.
Jesus was getting closer and closer to
Jerusalem, in today’s Gospel reading from Luke, where he would give his life
for the sake of the world, and then three days later take it back again and
rise from the dead, and he knew that his followers didn’t have a clue about
what it all meant.
As he traveled, more and more people were
following him, until a crowd of thousands was trailing along with his 12
disciples.
But rather than encouraging the crowd, as
most people with lots of followers would do, Jesus threw a wet blanket on their
excitement.
That’s the kind of preparation that Jesus is
doing, starting with Luke 12:49,
49 “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already
kindled!
We know a lot about fire in
Southern California. We used to have a fire season here, but now it’s pretty
much fire season all year-round. We see them. We smell them. We’ve cleaned ash
off our cars and everything that’s around our homes. We have experienced
disastrous fires in Alta Dena and the Palisades this year.
But fire wears two faces. Brush
fires are destructive, but they’re also necessary for our ecology. There are
plants here that need the temperature of fire to open their seed pods. Taller
shrubs must go to allow for the sun to reach new growth, and fire spreads by
proximity to anything that will burn.
Not too long after we had moved
from serving in Compton, California to serve in San Dimas, California, from an
urban to a suburban area, I was at our annual synod assembly. I was talking
with some people about the differences between ministering in the city and in
the suburbs. I said that if a person hears a helicopter in the city their first
thought is, “Where’s the crime?” but when one hears a helicopter in the suburbs
their first thought is, “Where’s the fire?”
Like the two faces of fire, the
cross will mean the destruction of Jesus, but it will also mean new life for
all who abide in him. All that the authorities will intend for Jesus is death,
but His death will open the way to new and eternal life.
The holy fire that gave
birth to the Christian Church came on the Day of Pentecost, as in Acts 2:1-4,
2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one
place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the
rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a
tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with
the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them
ability.
Fire has real power on real
things. The Bible says that God’s word is like fire, as God says in Jeremiah
23:29,
29 Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a
rock in pieces?
Fire, like God’s word, is
transformational. Holy fire, like the Holy Spirt given to birth the Church on
the Day of Pentecost, is transformational, Many of us think that Christianity
is just about transferring information. It is not. It is about life
transformation!
Jesus is longing for the
massive change that He knows is coming like a brush fire. He continues his
longing in Luke 12:50,
50 I have a baptism with which to be
baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!
What is coming? A baptism. A
transformational act of God’s power. It will mean the destruction of the old
Adam in us and the gift to us of life and salvation in Jesus Christ.
A baptism is, in part,
an entry rite. It brings transformation from one thing to another. Jesus is
about to give his life and take it back again for the sake of all who believe
and are baptized into his death. A massive change is coming. But first, Jesus
will have to die. And his love for us is such that he longs to carry out that
sacrifice.
I imagine that if anybody in
that crowd was connecting the dots right then, it might be occurring to them
that, uh, if people treat the Messiah, the Son of God in such a way, how will
they treat those of us who believe in Him?
It might be occurring to them
that this is not the road to the success that his followers were coming along
for. But Jesus continues in verse 51,
51 Do you think that I have come to
bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!
Now I imagine that the
crowd might be slowing down a step as these events were happening.
The people who first read these
words in Luke, however, knew exactly what he was talking about. They were
living it.
The gospels, such as Luke,
weren’t written down until the original eyewitnesses were starting to die out.
Some scholars think that some of the writers were remembering most clearly the
things that the early Christians were experiencing at that time.
Christians were originally seen
as being Jews who believed that the Messiah had come in Jesus Christ. As their
numbers grew, however, they became more of a threat to the status quo. They
began to be seen not as a small branch of Judaism but as the root of something
new and different. They were being expelled from their synagogues and even from
their families.
They were also being seen as a
threat to the Roman Empire occupying Israel. The Romans couldn’t care less
about what their subjects believed, as long as they believed that everybody
else’s beliefs were just as valid as theirs. That kept the peace within their
conquered territories, making it unnecessary to pull troops back from the front
lines to maintain order. And, after a while, the Romans required everyone to
believe that the Roman emperor was also a god in order to create unity of
belief among its empire’s diversity.
Both Jews and Christians
believed in only one God. One. And that created a problem for the empire that
needed to be dealt with.
Christians were seen as a
bigger problem than the Jews, however. The Romans had a great reverence for
their ancestors. Christians were seen as being disloyal to the religion of
their ancestors, who were Jewish, and so were more despised and more persecuted.
Lines were being drawn, and
Christians were being forced to choose family and empire over their faith in
Jesus Christ or face the consequences. And they did. They died rather than
abandon the blessing of the truth in Jesus Christ.
Some in our culture live by the
motto, “Family First.” This was not the life lived by the early Christians.
They were persecuted rather than live by that motto. In fact, that life of the
early Christians, is the norm for Christians all over the world even
today.
Jesus spells out what being his
follower is going to mean in verses 52-53,
52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and
two against three; 53 they will
be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter
and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
If you grew up in or now live
in a home in which everyone was a practicing Christian, you are blessed.
If you have never had to turn
away from family or friends and travel a different path because they were
pulling you away from Jesus, you are blessed.
The road that Jesus and his
disciples and the thousands of followers with them were on was leading to a
dividing line. That line was going to be marked by the cross.
But our desire to make Jesus
serve us, to contribute to our worldly success, and to conform to our view of
the world can make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to follow
Jesus.
Are the thousands following
Jesus here in this text so blinded by what they expect will be a triumphant
Jesus entering Jerusalem, leading a mass revolt against the Romans, and making
Israel great again as an independent country in which they, His early
followers, would be given positions of power in His new regime and lives of
affluence as rewards for their loyalty, that they cannot see where all this is
leading for Jesus?
Jesus marvels at their
blindness to what is coming. He continues with the language of division, now
pointing out the people’s division from the plans and purposes of God, in verses
54-56,
54 He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west,
you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be
scorching heat’; and it happens. 56 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?
Why? Why it that hypocrisy? Maybe it has something to do with the line
from Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” when the Holy Spirit blows
wherever it wills, whether we see it or not.
But are we any different? Do we not expect Jesus to make us healthy, and
wealthy, and successful? Do we not also seek to get along, to conform to
people’s wishes, to “pick our battles” so as to maintain family and friendship harmony
in matters of religion?
Why do we wonder what God is doing in our present time?
I read a story a while ago about a Native American man who was visiting
his long-time city dwelling friend in New York. They were walking along the
streets of Manhattan when he suddenly stopped and stood still.
“What’s wrong?” said the friend.
“Nothing,” said the Native American. “Listen.”
“I don’t hear anything,” said the friend.
The Native American walked over to a tree planted in a ceramic pot and
motioned for his friend to come closer. He lifted a branch and there, they both
heard the sound of the cricket.
Once he could see it, the friend heard it clearly. “How did you hear
that?” the friend asked.
“Watch,” the Native American said, and he reached into his pocket and
threw a few coins on the sidewalk.
People all around them stopped and looked for the money.
The
Native American said, “We hear the things for which we listen.”
What do we look for? Do we look for God?
What do we hear? Do we listen for God?
Seeing is not only believing. Believing gives us the eyes to see.
What defines us? Is it the living relationship with the one true
living God that was won for us at the cross, or is it something more
connected to this world?
St. Paul threw away his status in the eyes of the world to be a
persecuted follower of Jesus. His story in the Book of Acts after the Day of
Pentecost makes Indiana Jones pale by comparison, and all Paul sought was to
magnify Jesus.
Let us
follow Jesus not for the world’s approval, but in order to be separated from
it.
Let us
spend our lives on a path with the suffering Christ, who gives us a life that
is brand new and forever, through his love for us, on the cross.
We can
know the meaning of current events. Our holy connection to God alone is
what leads us to see the big picture and correctly interpret the time.
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