20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Proper 15), Year C

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”
~Luke 12:49-50
 
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…
~Hebrews 12:1-2

The unsettled parts of our scriptures become a little more apparent when our own time is unsettled. Whether this is a comfort for us probably depends on our location—the space of faith we occupy, that is, within the homeland of the Christian community between despair and complacency.
 
The texts for this Sunday, as the quotes above suggest, occupy multiple spaces, the range of human experience. Jesus knew the stress that results when one tells the truth—the fire of truth that inflames reactionary false prophets in a world where the meaning of words has been degraded, in which truthful messengers are attacked (or fired) for doing their job. And our life together is degraded and profaned, drip by drip. These truth-telling tongues of fire inflame, they raise the temperature—as Jesus knew so well. We trust, in faith, they will ultimately forge and purify and restore, that truth will not return empty. We find this promise embedded within the great cloud of witnesses, the baptismal life of faithful ones—completed and still underway—that finally douse the fires of discontent, confusion, and duplicity.
 
We who know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, the coming of the seasons and the weather, do well to draw on these promises to interpret the present time.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7 † Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19 † Hebrews 11:29-12:2 † Luke 12:49-56
 
About the Art: Goya, Francisco, 1746-1828. Incendio, fuego de noche, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55585 [retrieved August 11, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Un_incendio_(Goya).jpg.

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