Luke
12:49-56
It’s a short, two-drawered, wooden
file cabinet that serves to hold an electric kettle and a thrown-together tea
service as much as it serves to hold hanging files and the papers that fill
them. The top of the two drawers honestly doesn’t hold much; spare hanging
files, boxes of black tea, new manila folders…the bottom drawer, however, is a
different story. In that drawer, in a neatly organized row of hanging files, is
every sermon I have ever written, divided by books of the Bible. While there
are mostly stapled pages of manuscripts (stapled and filed each Tuesday morning
after they’ve been preached the Sunday prior), there are also dozens of 5”x8”
notecards with typed, detailed notes, a few one-page printed note sheets, and a
handful of handwritten sermon notes.
It’s interesting to notice how those hundreds of sheets of paper have
been filed: the hanging folder marked “Torah: Genesis-Deuteronomy” has a
healthy number of sermons, yet not nearly as many as the file marked,
“Prophets.” The files on the Psalms and the History books of the Old Testament are
perhaps surprisingly thin. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, that a
Christian preacher’s sermon catalogue would be a bit heavy on the New
Testament, though I have to say it’s a bit thin towards the back and the file
labeled, “Revelation.” Without question, though, the thickest file in the
drawer—thicker than most of the other files put together—is the file that
contains all the printed manuscripts and notecards for the Gospel of Luke.
I could tell you I’ve preached more from Luke’s gospel because of the way
the texts fall in the Revised Common Lectionary (an ecumenical guide for
preaching through the year that I use to plan my sermons), but that’s not the
whole of it. I could tell you I preach more from Luke’s gospel because I have a
better grasp of Luke’s use of Greek, but that certainly isn’t true (I may have
some notion of Mark’s simpler, less-advanced Greek). No, the truth is, I preach
a lot from Luke, because of the four gospels I suppose I like Luke’s version of
Jesus the best. I mean, Luke’s telling is the one with all the parables, those
wonderful riddles Jesus uses to describe the Kingdom of God, stories that turn
all our ideas of righteousness, religion, and God on their heads, revealing
more about us in the process. Luke’s Jesus has all the grounded reality of
Mark’s Jesus, combined with his exemplification of women, children, and the
outcasts. Luke’s Jesus is always eating, and welcoming sinners to eat at the
table with him, dirty hands and all.
I suppose I’ve always liked Luke’s telling just a bit better, because
it’s the Jesus in Luke’s gospel that calls out the rich for their selfishness,
holding up wealth as one of the key contributors of injustice. I like Luke’s
Jesus because he doesn’t stand up on the mount to deliver a stirring sermon,
but down on the plane—the “level place”—to deliver his sermon, and there’s no
“spiritualizing” the beatitudes for Luke’s Jesus: it’s “blessed are the
poor…blessed are those who are hungry,” those who have nothing. I guess you
could say, Luke’s Jesus seems to be the more compassionate of the four gospels,
a Jesus who makes room at the table for everyone, who bids all to come into the
party, the one who welcomes back even the prodigal son.
Which is why I suppose this text in front of us seems so dissonant, and
for all the sermons in my file from Luke’s gospel, there isn’t so much as a
scrap of paper or an old, faded post-it note on this text.
""I
came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have
a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is
completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I
tell you, but rather division!” I don’t like those words, not
one bit. I don’t like them, because I don’t want them to be true. I don’t want
to believe that Jesus came to start trouble, that Jesus came to stir the pot,
to cause division, to set folks on edge and cause discomfort. I don’t like
that. I want to find a way to erase these words from Jesus, to wash them out of
my bible, to replace them with words that remind me that Jesus is (as we sing
in carols at Christmastime) the “Prince of Peace.” I want a better translation
of these words because they’re just too problematic for someone like me. You
see, I value peace in the world, peace in the community, peace in the home. I
think peace ought to be one of the highest aspirations of every follower of
Jesus, but then Jesus has to go and say something like this…I don’t like it!
One might think that Jesus would
clear things up with his following words, sort of explain away the whole “I
didn’t come to bring peace” talk, but no. Instead, Jesus says words that would
get him run out of most places, most communities where harmony is so highly
valued: “From now on five in one household will be divided,
three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against
son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against
mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against
mother-in-law." Surely these can’t be the words of Jesus,
right? After all, isn’t family the most sacred institution? Talk of family is
all over our Christian culture isn’t it? It’s in the commandments! “Honor your
father and mother.” But here’s Jesus saying “From now on
five in one household will be divided…father against son and son against
father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law
against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (In
Matthew’s telling, it’s even more stringent: “I’ve come to set a man
against his father, and a daughter against her mother…whoever loves their
parents (either of them) more than me isn’t worthy of me, and whoever loves
their kids (any of them) more than me isn’t worthy of me.”) What’s gotten into
Jesus?! I don’t like it.
I imagine right after Jesus said
all of these words, that he had more than one of the disciples pull him aside,
sit him down, and say something like, “Now Jesus, I know you get passionate
about this sort of stuff, but it’s not what we signed up for. Get back to
talking about being blessed, about happy things, healing folks, telling nice
stories, calling out the sins in others, and passing out food to a few thousand
folks. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. If you keep it up with all this
divisive stuff, folks will start trying to find a new messiah.”
I tell you, I just don’t like what
Jesus has to say here. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like it because I don’t
want to believe it. I don’t like it because it is contrary to so much of what I
believe and hold to be true about my faith. I don’t like it because it isn’t
what I want to hear. But you know the biggest reason I don’t like it? You want
to know what really makes me want to skip these words, to take a razor to these
onion skin pages and cut them out, or at least a dark, permanent marker to
cover them? What really troubles me most about these words from Jesus…is that
they are true, and I know they’re true, and I can’t do a thing to change them.
I know they’re true because I know
the rest of Jesus’ story. Most of you know it too. Jesus came teaching,
healing, feeding, welcoming—he didn’t come swinging a sword, or leading an
insurrection, yet they came, fully armed, with swords, and arrested him. Jesus
came speaking the same message that can be found at the heart of the Hebrew
Scriptures: “love God and love your neighbor as yourself,” yet the ones who
loved to quote scripture and claim its authority hated him. Jesus came speaking
about life, what it really means to be alive, about eternal life in the kingdom
of God, that was closer than they could imagine, yet they killed him.
It wasn’t that Jesus didn’t come intending to bring peace; rather, when
one comes preaching peace, preaching the kingdom of God, when one comes making
a way for peace, when one comes with a message of love and inclusion, you had
better believe swords will be drawn, because the message of the kingdom of God
isn’t one folks generally want to hear—not the whole message anyhow. It’s one
folks don’t want to hear because it calls us out on our inadequacies.
It’s one we don’t want to hear because it shines a light on our
shortcomings. It’s a message we don’t want to hear because it tells us
that others are just the same as us and we are just the same as them, no matter
how hard we work to tell ourselves we are better. We don’t like to hear these
kinds of words from Jesus because they betray our true motives in life and
religion; Jesus’ words tend to reveal the selfishness in people, folks who
value comfort over the hard work of equality, folks who value complacency over
conviction, people who are satisfied with their slice of the pie even if there
are so many others with empty plates.
Jesus didn’t come to bring peace, because peace doesn’t just happen. It
isn’t a magic word to be spoken or a victory to be won by whoever has the
biggest or most swords. Peace is the product of hard, faithful work that comes
through discomfort and a shaking of the status quo, and those things—if only
for a season—can produce discord, frustrations, and in the worst cases,
violence and terror. It’s because deep down, even those who preach peace only
really want it if they can get it their way, and the Jesus way is so often
counter to those ways.
Jesus says, "Do you think that I have
come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!... they
will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter
and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” Because if we truly seek to follow Christ, to do what he
calls us to do, to be who he calls us to be, it may set you against your father
as he clings to comfort of a rose-colored past. It may set you against your
mother as she longs for your future to be one of comfort and safety rather than
boldness and risk-taking in following Jesus. It may drive a deep wedge between
you and your family as they fail to understand why you’re so passionate about following
Jesus, about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, loving
your enemies, about seeing this world transformed for Christ. It may cause you
to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for as you give it away without
condition or question, as you strive to bring the kingdom on earth as it is in
heaven. It may cost you more than you have to spend, cause you pain and
anguish, cause you to lose friends and family, and it may even cost you your
very life. But do not be afraid. You wouldn’t be the first, because Jesus has
been there; he’s still there.
Jesus says, "I came to bring fire
to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with
which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you
think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather
division! I don’t like
it, but I know it’s true. I just pray for the strength to understand it and to
persevere. Amen.
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