This Gospel passage comes out with Jesus and both guns blazing...explosive and violent language. However, what do we do with it? There are kinds of indications from this passage from Jeremiah. One of the great Lukean scholars today keeps pointing out that Luke depicts Jesus as a prophet, and we see in the career of Jeremiah, particularly, what happens to prophets: they are always in trouble because they are always saying things that people do not want to hear. And then we can look at this passage that Alfredo read from the Letter to the Hebrews about being surrounded by this cloud of witnesses and Jesus being the pioneer of our faith. So I thought, as I read this some time ago, about our cloud of witnesses here on the wall. The good monks in California make all of these figures. And I would like to take one of the facts about these figures and see if this can provide an entr‚e to giving content to this violent language.

If you look at these things, one of the depressing things, as I sit here day after day and stare at all of these figures...most of them are religious: nuns, priests, or monks. If you look at all of the black, or black and white, or brown and white, or brown...why is that? The answer is that religious orders have a vested interest in having one of their own canonized and they have the money, resources, and political clout to pull it off, whereas lay-people do not because they do not have a constituency. My kids and I do not face much likelihood of being opposed by the forty-thousand Jesuits in the world, for example. But it is interesting to look at these same figures, the nuns particularly. When most of these congregations were founded, the habits of nuns were part of...they took on the costume of the people of their day...these weird-looking things with coifs, veils, and long dresses with scapular is kind of unusual. But they were just supposed to look like everybody else. In other words, they were following the law of the Didache which says that Christians are not supposed to be distinguished by their dress and they are just supposed to look like everybody else. But then of course they did not change and they now look (at least up to a few years ago) extraordinarily singular. So, if one was, for instance, to go to an airport and one was to see a little nun walking around in her little brown Carmelite habit, as I did over the holidays, you might think that this nun was weird. The reason for these nuns retaining their habits after the local costume shifted was, I think initially, a good one: namely, that "we are supposed to be a counter-instance to the way the world goes," that is, "we have a different set of criteria to judge things, we have a different agenda and we are going to express that in the way that we dress".

But then...like my sister was a nun for a long time... how did that play itself out historically? For example, for those of us who are old enough to remember nuns in habits, it became not an act of protest, as it was supposed to be, but an act of privilege - - "Oh Sister, here, take my seat," or "Oh Father, you were just a little bit over the speed limit and I am sure that you were simply in a hurry". This of course does not have anything to do with the Gospel or this violence that Jesus talks about! And what are we witnessing to? That is the issue.

You see, I think the thing that makes this problem fairly intense is the so-called postmodern phenomenon; which means that we have no great stories that everybody is going to take as their own, that is, that we have many centres of meaning and significance and they are all sort of flattened out. And I think that much is true of our world. For example, who speaks the great message that everybody in the world can hear today? We have too many messages. Maybe the International Monetary Fund, the Toronto Stock Exchange, or the World Bank does. I do not know, but they seem to come closer than anybody else does. But I mean for the rest of us...I mean I do not live in those verified...I am not even sure I know what the International Monetary Fund is, except that they seem to be creating big problems for a lot of people in the world. But where is my centre of gravity? Because there are multiple centres of gravity today in a way that is radically different than the world in which I grew up. I think that this is a real problem. So the point is: what are we supposed to see as fire and Jesus' baptism in the world today? Where is this violence? What are the opponents? Who is the enemy? What is the shape that I take to stand over against? I think that this is a huge problem today, it is for me personally. It is interesting to visit the Third World, for example, the Caribbean, where they do not have anything like our sense of these flattening out of centres where everybody's voice has as much claim to being heard as everybody else's voice. That is not true there, but it is certainly true here.

And then when you look at what the Church is doing today...my suspicion, as I read more and more...as I read a lot this summer from a whole variety of people, that is, theologians from all over, I see what is going on in the Church and I truly worry that we are reconstituting the Catholic ghetto. What is the Catholic ghetto? It is the Church that I grew up in, a Church that said that everybody who is not Catholic is going to go to hell. And more and more, it seems to me, we are talking and behaving that way, officially, in the Church. It is a spooky phenomenon. And therefore, are these the lines of demarcation? Is this the way the opposition is supposed to be drawn between us and the world? I do not think so.

So the question really becomes: if Jesus was to bring fire to the earth, what does that mean? What is going to be consumed? Because I think that in large part the Christian presence in the world, at least in our world in North America (this of course is not true everywhere in the world), is a fairly innocuous one. For instance, it is all right to throw your voice among other voices so that we listen to you and then we listen to these people and then we listen to these people over here. Take your place! We are polycentric, we have no metanarratives here. Everybody can do what they want. It is all fine. Well, I think a lot of us are really wondering what our narrative is and where we expect to find abrasion. The ghetto mentality simplifies things in that you are either in or you are out and the abrasion takes place at that boundary point of being in or being out. But for me, personally, in the quiet of the evening when the television finally goes off and I hear the crickets, I ask myself: "Trojcak, what do you really stand for? What fire has Jesus ignited in your life?". Maybe this is an idiosyncratic question but, as I look around at the world and the Church, I do not think so.

A friend of mine who was a classmate from St. Michael's was talking to me this week and he said, "Well, I have all kinds of problems with the Pope". But I think that one of the important things that he is getting at is that we live in a culture of death. So, maybe this is useful as a point...if he is right, and I have a feeling that he is...I mean if you look at the movies, if you look at the popular images that constitute our world today, are they benign? Are they life-giving? I do not think so, not many of them. We have the whole North American continent hanging on what Bill Clinton is going to say to the grand jury tomorrow. My God! There is such prurient concentration on his sexual activity. I think that is a culture of death when we have these vast, vast inequities in that society.

So, this is a postmodern sermon. I am just trying to lay out the question for myself. Where is the fire for me? Where are the lines drawn? Or have I even raised the question with any earnestness? Maybe that is as far as we can get when we hear these words from Luke and think about Jesus as the pioneer of our faith, as the wonderful metaphor - - the pioneer of our faith. Where is he leading us?