Today I reflect on the challenging truths of the gospel and its call to confront division and injustice. Drawing on Jeremiah’s story, I highlight the courage needed to speak truth, even when it is unpopular. I address current suffering in places like Gaza and Ukraine, urging listeners to act with compassion and justice. I encourage the church to move beyond comfort, embrace God’s transforming love, and become agents of change. Listeners are invited to pray for courage, disrupt complacency, and share God’s love to bring hope and healing to a divided world.

It’s almost like the the gospel today is an anti-gospel. You know the good news to announce that there’s going to be division, that there’s going to be fights and and arguments between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. I mean that’s kind of presumed isn’t it, that that’s just going to to kind of happen in any given situation. We know that within relationships, there’s always going to be these sources of tensions. It’s one of the great tropes of our lives and also of so much TV and movie drama. And we get to see that in in real life. It’s not just something that’s abstract and something that happens to other people. We’ve all had those experiences where a young couple come and announce that they’re going to get married, and they’re so delighted and filled with joy that this is all unfolding. And yet, because he is of a particular religion or faith and and the parents are like: “no, this cannot happen.”

00:01:06 We can’t have our daughter marrying a person that is not one of us. You know, we love being one of us. And we know those kinds of moments of disruption in our lives. And sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re just awful. I mean, we don’t have to look far in our looking at our news. To hear those stories of moments of great hope and expectancy and then to see it all kind of just shattered when our leaders don’t come through with what we have been hoping and longing for. Jeremiah certainly knew this. Jeremiah was simply trying to wake the people up. He knew that unless they turned, unless they began to address the deep troubles that were happening within their community, they had turned away from the Lord. They had been unfaithful to the covenant, and Jeremiah could see it very clearly written that this was only going to go in one direction, he said. Look, there’s still this hope. There’s still this possibility.

00:02:16 If you turn away from your sins, if you embrace this way of conversion, that you will be able to be freed from the worst of the suffering. And instead, what does the poor guy, what is he faced with? He’s thrown down into this well. There’s no water as such: it’s just this muddy mess. And just as he sinks further into the mud and just imagining what his future is going to be, there’s no food, no life, no energy. And it’s only there’s someone has pity on him, and someone comes and intervenes and rescues him again, not because he was. It was proclaiming anything other than the truth, the truth that he could see. And it doesn’t make us popular when we announce something that seems to go against the grain. When we announce something of what God is wanting to do in this situation. You know, we see that in all the protests that we witness around the world, as this group of this community, we just say, look, we need to take account of this.

00:03:22 We can’t turn a blind eye to the suffering in Gaza. We can’t continue to allow the people of Ukraine to to suffer in all of their situations. We have to make a stand. We have to do something that brings relief to the situation and stops people that are full of arrogance and pride from continuing to to perpetrate this untold disaster and untold suffering within our world. And Jesus wants us to realize that we need to have this fire within our bellies. You know, he had this passion. He had this zeal. Yes. He was the Prince of Peace. Yes. Like the Holy Spirit, he was there sometimes to bring comfort to those who are afflicted. But as we pray in that great Pentecost prayer, there are times when he also has to afflict the comfortable. I mean, how many of us grow comfortable in our lives, how often we just settle for what we know and the situation that we face and we just think, okay, that’ll do, that’ll be enough. We don’t have to do anything extraordinary, anything beyond all that.

00:04:27 And yet God is always inviting us into the space of more, the space where we’re able to experience this transforming power of his love that calls us into life, that calls us ultimately into freedom. This is our call, and this is what we need to embrace, to recognize that God is wanting to really allow us to experience that freedom and that freedom that comes in his truth, will bring his challenges and will call us into a place and a space where we won’t necessarily be popular, where we will announce something that will cause divisions. But we shouldn’t cause divisions just for the sake of it. its divisions for the sake of truth. Its division for the sake of love. Its division for the sake of justice. That as long as we stand on those noble paths, as long as we are able to recognize this deep inner reality that we can cling to and desperately claim as our truth and our reality, that that is when we can begin to let that fire in our belly start to find its proper place within allies, and to stir us into action, to stir us into those places where we can bring change, where we can announce this gospel of salvation and freedom.

00:05:48 Let’s really pray to see in our world what are the situations that we need to address today, and find the courage to really disrupt those places where complacency has led to situations that are just awful and just continue to bring about injustice and suffering. Let’s bring about instead, this fire that encourages us and calls us into the freedom and shares that with those around us.