I remember the first time that I saw this view of Chicago. Erica and I had been dating for a while and I was going out to meet her parents. I had been to the city once or twice before, but had flown in from a different direction, in different weather, with a different view. But on this November afternoon the air was clear and crisp and the sun was shining. The city was beautiful, a masterpiece of urban architecture, a modernist dream plopped down on the shore of azure lake. Chicago refers to itself as "a city in a garden," and no where is it more obvious that from this vantage point. The city seems more green than anything else. Immense public parks stretch out along the lake shore while smaller, neighborhood areas dot the cityscape. But there are other colors, too. In the heart of the city are skyscrapers of almost every hue: stately greys, modern, crystalline blues, obsidian black and at least one very very red building seems to make things pop! The city is like a painting and from here the scale is just about perfect. You can see enough to give you the sense size, but the individual people on the street are just too small.

I also have another image of Chicago in my mind. It is another November day. The air is clear and bitingly-cold, the sun is shining and I am on my was to see Erica. But I am wading thorough the sea of bodies on the sidewalks of Michigan Avenue. The Christmas rush is on and the tourist and business people of the city are passively fighting for dominance on the wide sidewalks. Cars honk, busses roar and the third ambulance in as many minutes screams down the street. I am constantly jostled as people hurry by. A panhandler stops me at the same spot on the same street as he has stopped me every week for the past year - "Hey man, can I ask you a question?" This city is a zoo, I think. A modernist nightmare reclaimed from a swamp. I notice an airplane flying north over the lake on its way to O'Hare airport.

It is amazing how a simple change in your point of view can make a drastic change in your outlook on life. Throughout our lives we are taught to try and take in as many different points of view as we can before making up our mind. But it is surprising how infrequently we do just that. Our teachers admonish us to look to books and journals to find the intellectual and historical arc of a problem before jumping right in to solve it. Our parents encourage us to look at both sides of a situation before rendering our decision. Our friends plead with us to see it their way before totally shutting them out.

Yet, most of the time we press forward based upon our own point of view. Usually out of sense of urgency or efficiency, but sometimes out of a sense of pride or hubris. We even go so far as to assume that we know another's point of view without asking or experiencing it for ourselves. Most of the time we figure they agree with us. Much of the time we are wrong.

Such is the case in today's gospel lesson where Jesus, very abruptly, corrects his followers with respect to their point of view on his ministry. "Do you think that I come to bring peace on Earth?" Jesus asks. "No," he answers, "but rather division." I know you didn't ask, Oh, ye who think you're pretty smart because you can predict the weather. But I'll tell you anyway - you've been wrong about me all along.

I think this is a pretty important corrective for we in the contemporary church to hear. While we have generally given up our practice of predicting the weather, we still are want to go about making pronouncements about any of a number of things in the world. But how often do we, either individually or as a group, try to challenge ourselves by collecting different points of view on a subject. In particular, how often do we go about trying to find out God's understanding of a subject before we go about saying "The church teaches such-and-so" all the while implying that God is onboard too?

[Pause] We're all guilty. So how do we do it better?

It is perhaps easier than you might think to go about finding out how God sees the world, and today's scripture lesson gives us a couple of simple ways to get it done.

First, the prophet Jeremiah reminds us that God, though infinite in majesty and power is never very far away. So it stands to reason that when we want to know what God thinks about something we could simply ask. Prayer some might call this. Or, if that is a word that makes you uncomfortable you could take a more passive approach and simply hold your verdict and wait for the Lord to give you his word - the prophet seems to think that this might even be a better way. God doesn't seem to be afraid to make his opinion known, we only need to be willing to seriously wait for it.

The other model for seeking God's view on the world comes in the book of Hebrews, where the author is speaking to a group of Early Christians about why the life of faith is not as fun as they originally thought it would be. "Endure trials for the sake of discipline," he says. "God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?"

Now, I think that this first verse "Endure trials for the sake of discipline" is too often read as "Endure trials for the sake of punishment." But I don't think that is at all correct. The things we endure are not meant to punish us for the bad things we have done or left undone. A God of infinite mercy would not do such a thing. But the word used here, which I think is right on point, is discipline.

Now, discipline is a pedagogical tool. It is a systematic approach usually involving repetition that is meant to condition the student into a framework of action and to build both strength and stamina. Discipline is the foundation of scholarship and military training, of the martial arts, of ballet, juggling, classical music and even football. Discipline is used to form the student into a copy of the teacher and then propel the student to new realms of creativity. The author of Hebrews is telling us that the hardships of the Christian life (and, to my mind, the joys too) are meant to discipline us, to mold us and form us into the image of our teacher, Jesus who is the "pioneer and perfecter" of our faith.

And the more we become like God in Christ, then the more we begin to see the world as God does. By being exposed over and over to the joyful and painful realities of the world, we are changed into the image of God that we were originally created to be. We are not bound to simply ask our close-but-ultimately-external God for the divine view of the world or to wait on his proclamations, the more we submit to the discipline of Christ, the more we are able to see the world from his (and therefore God's) point of view.

I had an old Methodist Preacher tell me once that it is a horrible and marvelous presumption for anyone to stand up in front of the world and say "this is the word of the Lord. For who is like the Lord? And who would dare to speak for him?" But the more I think about it, the more I think that it is possible. Difficult, but possible. All we need to do is submit ourselves to the discipline of Christ, follow in the path that he has trod and daily become more like him. Then God's eyes will be our eyes, and God's heart will be our heart, and God's words will be our words as we stand before the world saying, "this is the teaching of the Church! And this is the word of the Lord!"

Amen.