Wildpeace again

 

There is a plant called the Oxford Ragwort.  I’m not a botanist or a gardener; some of you may well know more about it than I do.

It is bright yellow, a distant relative of the Daisy.  It has nothing to do with Oxford.  It is native to the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna.  But Eighteenth Century plant collectors did bring samples back to the Botantical Gardens in, yes, Oxford.  From where it was said to have escaped.

I don’t think it ‘escaped’.  I think it did what any plant does.  It produced prodigious amount of seed.  Most of which landed where it was never going to grow.  But a few seeds found the cracks in the limestone walls of university buildings to be ideal places for it to do so.  So much grew that, yes, it came to be mistaken for a plant native to the city.

The next bit of the story is the best.  The railway came to Oxford.  And the beds of the railway tracks turned out to be the best things since the slopes of Etna, all the better when ash fell from trains.  Oxford Ragwort followed the railway across the country.

It was less than welcome in most rural areas.  To cattle, it is quite poisonous.  Farmers have come to spend a lot of time having it pulled up.

But elsewhere large quantities ended up growing at the end of railway lines, including around the docks at Hull.  And, after the Second World War, it came to love and colonise the bomb sites of the city.  Etna Ragwort.  Oxford Ragwort.  Railway Ragwort.  Hull Bomb Site Ragwort.

When I pray ‘Thy kingdom come on earth’, I’m not sure that I pray any longer for an ideal setting shaped just as God would want it to be.  I think I think about tips of green emerging out of rubble.

When I pray for those in whose lives some sort of bomb has gone off, I’m not sure I can pray that the pain and consequences will be magicked away.  But I think I can pray that new things will begin to seed and sprout.

And my recent prayers for the peace have been shaped by newly released U2 music which includes the use of a modern Hebrew poem which is weary with unremitting generations of conflict and ends up asking simply let wildpeace come like wildflower.

I say all this because among all the possible things to pick up from the scripture read at this service one strongly draws attention to itself as the most difficult – Jesus says I came not to bring peace but a sword, I came to bring hostility within families.

What can be going on?  A few chapters earlier Jesus had said Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God.  John’s Gospel even has him say My peace I give you.

It might be an example of a saying of Jesus for which we have lost the original context.   

The original context might be an expectation that when the Messiah comes there will be a new world of justice and peace.  Jesus is recognised as that Messiah.  So why have things not changed?   Perhaps because the expectation was also that the inauguration of the new age would be traumatic.  Elsewhere Jesus himself compares it to the pain of giving birth.  

It is worth looking at the context in which Matthew then sets the saying.

Jesus is sending his disciples out for the first time.  We had an earlier part of this chapter last week.  Say a word of peace to every house you enter.  If it takes seed there, all well and good.  But if it is not the right place for it, let it rebound onto you.

The implication is that there will be many places where peace does not find a home.

And when Jesus says I came not to bring peace but a sword, I came to bring hostility within families that second bit is actually a quotation from the prophet Micah.

Micah is one of the places where we find the lovely image of war being redundant as swords are are beaten into ploughshares. 

But three chapters after that it is Micah who is weary – God’s people are not open to this possibility and Micah can see that closest to him are often those we can be trusted least to be faithful interpreters and practitioners of the way God.

So it doesn’t feel as if Jesus has an actual preference for bringing conflict within families.  It feels more like a warning that praying for, seeking out, God’s new kingdom of peace is going to involve resistance and conflict.

Perhaps there is a hint of the modern idea of us living in ‘bubbles’.  To advocate a fresh understanding or a new path can feel like a  betrayal to those with whom we share our settled ideas and approaches, sometimes even to a relationship-breaking extent.

But the peace-greeting, cross-carrying, cup-of-water-sharing hints and examples around us are more subversive and surer guides than my habitual approach or the consensus of my family and society.

There is a verse in the letter to the Hebrews which says For the word of God is alive and active.  Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

As it happens, it is exactly the same word for sword there as in our passage for today.  To be active God’s word may need to cut deep into me, let alone into those I love and admire most around me.

Perhaps a Parable of Etna Ragwort is there even for peace-resistant people and places, like me, sometimes like those closest to me.

Plants native to the hills of Judea are exotic, attractive and collectable.  Brought all the way to England they seeded and spread in unexpected ways along our trade routes.  The way they grow and are used is sometimes damaging, and then needs weeding out.  But elsewhere they can colonises our most harmed and desolate places.  We are called to spot them and seek them, even to seed them and spread them, until they are mistaken to be native to our city.   

Come wildpeace like wild flower.  Be invasive in and around us, come what may.