There is a fundamental tension in the faithful life, and the lessons today really bring that up, and bring it out.

Start with the reading from Isaiah. that lovely imagery of love and abundance. Isaiah speaks of God as a lover, and sings for God a love song to creation: " My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines ..."

It's an image of love and abundance, an image of what God has given us, an image that *resonates* on this incredibly glorious August weekend in Washington ( this is *August* in Washington - what a surprise, what a total gift out of the blue to have a day like this!) Remember back in Genesis when God created the world and all that is in it, and pronounced it: Very good? That's what the image in Isaiah and this day in Washington speak to.

But the vineyard produces "wild grapes" Read "bitter grapes". Wild grapes are bitter. And suddenly God's wrath is upon us, God's frustrated rage at the mess God's people have made of the gift of life: "For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; God expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard the cries of distress."

God gives us love and abundant life - but God also has high hopes for us, and is often disappointed.

If you go back to last Sunday's gospel reading from Luke (which precedes today's reading), and combine the two, you get the same kind of progression - from comfort to demand. First, in Luke 12:32, Jesus gave us the assurance of God's gentle love, and the promise of care and protection ("Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom"). His words became stronger as he reminded us to be accountable. ("Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit. . . . You . . . must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming . . .) In the next verses, between that reading in Luke and today's, Jesus' s rhetoric grows progressively stronger, more intense, more demanding .. you can almost hear his voice rising, see his demeanor changing - this Jesus is no longer reaching out his arms in gentle love. This Jesus is raising his fists in a kind of passionate fury of frustration. "I haven't come to bring peace. I've come to bring FIRE?"

This is a Jesus we're not always used to seeing. We're more familiar with the gentle Jesus, the teaching and healing Jesus, the giving and self-giving Jesus. When Jesus asks, this morning, "Do you think I've come to bring peace to the earth?" the obvious response is yes, of course, I think you've come to bring peace .. "Peace on earth .. is what the angels sang about at Christmas .. I thought it was what you were all about." And it is. But the question is, what kind of peace?

Do you remember the familiar saying: "Peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace is the presence of justice."? I think that's what's drives Jesus bonkers.- when we don't get it - that the love of God, the gentle, creative, abundant, all-inclusive love of God is also the passion of God - God's fierce, furious, consuming passion for justice and righteousness.

In my parish in Massachusetts, I remember a young man in his 30s who simply had no conception of God's .. greatness. I don't remember exactly what this young man's words were, but he told me that for him God was kind of a cozy figure .maybe like Santa Claus ... kind .. forgiving. - but not more than that. His teachers had bent so far over backward to tell him about God's love and God's nearness, that somehow he had never gotten to hear about what Barack Obama calls our awesome God, the God of the universe, the God whose blinding radiance pierces our human blindness, the God whose rage for justice and goodness and kindness and mercy tears through the created order like a hurricane, ripping the roofs off, tearing apart the little complacent shelters we build, and forcing us - sometimes very much against our will - to see how things really are .. and what we have done .. and what we have left undone.

Christianity, faith in God through Christ Jesus, is not, primarily, about being nice. Not that there's anything wrong with niceness. Civility, simply behaving decently to one another, is the great healing oil that keeps communities together, that makes living together more bearable than it might otherwise be. But niceness can also be destructive. Sweeping significant controversy under the rug can allow evil to fester. Jesus asks for truth, and truth can be controversial. What *is* the right thing to do in any situation? The answer isn't always clear, and disagreement can be healthy, as people work things out together. And not talking about things, because there are subjects we don't want to bring up, can violate the righteousness of God. Child abuse, for instance, is a terrible subject. I have a dear friend who was abused by his brother as a child. When, as an adult, he tried to talk about the abuse with his family, their only response was silence. "Do we have to talk about things like that?" his mother asked. And so they didn't. And the family sin remained unconfessed, and unhealed. And God's world remained corrupt in that place, God's righteousness violated.

My friend was comforted by today's passage in Luke, whenever he wondered whether *he* should have kept silent, to protect that empty peace his family wanted to preserve.

God gives us the vineyard and God asks us to care for it, and we respond .. as well as we can .. and the vineyard -the world -goes on looking pretty bitter. What goes wrong? Why is the kingdom of heaven .. why is true peace .. so far away?

Someone gave me a copy of Bill Gates' commencement address at Harvard this year. He talks about how profound is the injustice in the world, and is pleading with the new graduates to address it. He says "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." One of his ideas is to develop what he calls a "more creative capitalism" - to "stretch the reach of market forces so that people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. . " Shocking idea? Interesting? Hopeful?.  

He goes on, and this is the part that jumped out at me and that I particularly wanted to share with you:

I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end - because people - just ... don't .. care.

I completely disagree [says Bill Gates]. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here . . . at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing - not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

"The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I read that sentence. It doesn't solve anything. It just helps me understand what it going on. Because I know how much I care and I know how much you care. And I've always wondered why, with so much caring in the world, is there still so so much injustice?

"Too much complexity" may not be the only answer. But it covers a lot of ground. And it still leaves us with the question, what do we do with our caring.? How do we respond to the God we love? How do we make God's love known in the world, when our efforts often seem so small, and the world is so large?  

Some of you have found good answers. You know what God is asking of you, and you find that you are able to do it. Bless you!

But if you're like me, you're always looking around the corner and asking questions about why and why not and how can I help that kid in Africa who is breaking my heart or reach that woman in the middle East being held captive or reach out to the boy in Baltimore whose father and uncles are in prison and he knows that's where he's headed too?

One of Bill Gates's suggestions is to become an expert . He says: "take on an issue - a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact.
For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find a way to cut through them."

What would be the issue you would take on?

If complexity is what gets in our way, maybe sometimes foolishness is another way to respond. So, one thought about living out your caring is, don't be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers, has a story about the time she tried to start a protest movement and wound up being the only one who showed up.

I put on a green T-shirt, made my sign, and went to stand under the shade trees downtown. It was slow at first. I held my sign and smiled.. . When my spirits flagged, I thought about how cheered I feel whenever I drive by someone standing up for peace or the environment. This is a plenty good reason to do things. Still, I felt like a fool - mute, ridiculous, and happy. . . Finally business picked up. People stared as they drove past, gave me a thumbs-up, a smile, a look of confusion, or a peace sign....

and she stays there for awhile, and then someone yells at her, and then she stays a little longer, and then she goes home. Her story is almost the opposite of Bill Gates's advice .. the expert and the fool .. both ways to live out your God-given caring. And there are many more.

We care together. That is one of the incredible joys and wonders of being part of this body we belong to, the church - A body with plenty of warts and some broken bones, but a body, neverless, that is truly capable of acting in the world. In a speech at the U.N., the new prime minister of England, Gordon Brown talked about global poverty and the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals. (which, as you know, are Goals the Episcopal Church has bought in to and urges us all to participate in). Brown said that after seven years "it is already clear that our pace is too slow; our direction too uncertain; our vision at risk. ... I want to summon into existence the greatest coalition of conscience in pursuit of the greatest of causes. . . ". He says h is talking to business and government. And then he says to "faith groups and NGOs-your moral outrage at avoidable poverty has led you to work for the greatest of causes, the highest of ideals, and become the leaders of the campaign to make poverty history. Imagine what more you can accomplish if the energy to oppose and expose, harnessed to the energy to propose and inspire, is given more support by the rest of us-businesses, citizens, and governments."

There is lots to say about living out your caring. At the top of the list is: do it. At the end: don't ever stop. Don't get discouraged, hang in there, keep on keeping on. You are part of something much larger than you are. It is God's world and God's work, and we are not alone.