The Divider

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.19.07; Rev David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 12:49-56

What? What was that I just read? Was that Jesus talking?

We’ve got a pretty good picture of Jesus in our heads, one that for many of us was formed by Sunday after Sunday of Sunday School, in which we were surrounded by the typical stock posters of Jesus. You know the ones. There’s Jesus sitting on a mossy rock, his perfect white robes miraculously unstained by the dust and muck of first century Judea. His unthreateningly not-quite shoulder-length hair seems to have benefited from the use of conditioner and extensive styling by the same guy who does John Edwards. He’s smiling softly at a small crowd of carefully selected multiethnic children, who are all smiling back and showing him the kind of attention that nowadays kids reserve for videogames or movies their parents have forbidden them to see. Around them are an assortment of baby lambs and baby goats and small fuzzy chicks, and the air above his head is filled with light and the wings of fluttering butterflies.

This mental picture of Jesus is emblazoned across our minds, and has found it’s way onto countless paintings and collector’s plates by Thomas Kinkaide, Bible Scholar of Light. Jesus, meek and mild. Jesus, gentle and kind; Jesus, Lamb of God; Jesus, Prince of Peace.

That’s only part of the reason that today’s scripture lesson is so hard for us. It isn’t just troubling from that simplistic, childish perspective. As our faith matures, we trust that in Christ lies a path of peace. We yearn for the fulfillment of His Kingdom, in which the needs of the poor and the downtrodden will be fulfilled, and God will wipe the tears from every eye. We hope for the One in whom there is no Jew or Greek, man or woman, slave or free.

From that hope, it’s very difficult to even hear today’s passage. “I came to bring fire to the earth?” What was that? You came to what? What are you talking about? “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Division? Do we really need more division? If there’s one thing we human beings seem to be good enough at on our own, it’s factions and strife and conflict. Um, Jesus, we don’t really need God’s help for that, but…ahh…thanks for offering? How are we supposed to grasp this? What does this passage mean?

Division is already everywhere. There are the divisions that shatter and break our personal lives, as relationships and marriages and families crumble and fall apart. There are the divisions that tear apart our nation, as partisans from either side of the political spectrum charge about on their high horses trampling honest conversation underfoot, while bridges crumble and fall. Churches tear themselves apart, as factions shout out curses at one another as they storm away certain of their own rightness and righteousness. Do we really need more division?

It gets harder as we look out into the world, where the fires of conflict and hatred burn with even greater ferocity. How can we hear this passage as Good News in the face of the reality of our world?

This last week, as my family took it’s annual jaunt to Bethany, I did something new, something I hadn’t yet done. Every single year, it’s a time for relaxation, a time for kicking back, sure. It’s a time for eating colossal buckets of french fries as large as my head, with a triple scoop ice cream chaser, and hoping that the additional mass we bring back isn’t going to destroy the suspension of our van. But every year, it’s also a way of checking off the milestones that have come in the prior year. We’ve been going there since my oldest son was just a stirring in my wife’s belly, and every year, the kids are different. This year, unlike last year, six year old Elijah could go out into the surf and dive the waves himself. And this year, unlike last year, nine year old Sam got to sit and watch the news with his grandfather. It was always a family ritual when I was a kid, but I’ve scrupulously avoided exposing the boys to too much of the news of the world. I’ve maybe been too protective about it. OK, I have been too protective, but I can’t stand for his eyes to see what goes on in this world, for his ears to hear what we human beings do to each other. But he’s not a little boy any more, and at some point, you have to know.

So he sat nestled between his grandparents, and we all watched as this last weeks news from northern Iraq came in. We watched the aftermath of the series of bombings that tore through the Yazidi communities, with hundreds dead and several more hundreds injured. Familiar pictures, all. The women weeping and ritually striking themselves. The ruined homes, shattered and broken, their crumbling brown remains mingling with the omnipresent dust. The men wearing bandannas as they dig through rubble to shield them from the dust and the stench of death. Familiar to us...but a first for my son. It was particularly hard for me to watch him watching those other staple images, of children, bloodstained and either screaming or glazed-eyed in shock. All of this horror...for what? Because one sect hates another, declares they are The Other, and kills them because of that difference. In a world that knows such hatred, where stories like that happen every day in Iraq and Darfur and Afghanistan, how can we hear this passage in Luke as the Good News? Do we really need more division?

The answer lies in understanding the kind of separation that Jesus brings. It’s not the same as the self centeredness that tears at the heart of our society. It’s not the same as the divisions wrought by the demons of sectarian violence. We can’t read this passage without having heard the whole context of Luke’s Gospel. This can’t be taken as a soundbite. We have to see the whole picture. Zechariah proclaims in Luke 1:79 that Jesus is coming “..to guide our feet into the way of peace.” In Luke 2:14 the angels proclaim that Jesus brings peace on earth and goodwill to all peoples. Jesus commands his disciples to declare peace as a greeting in every house they enter (Luke 10:5). He’s the one who weeps over doomed Jerusalem, crying “If only you had recognized on this day the things that make for peace.” And after Jesus returns to his disciples, after the cross and the empty tomb, the first words he speaks are “Peace be with you.” Peace and the desire for peace are a vital part of who Christ is. Creating peace is the point and purpose of the Gospel.

But though peace is at the heart of the Gospel, proclaiming and living out that peace doesn’t always result in an absence of conflict. Even if you live your life according to the teachings of Christ, even if you are one of the peacemakers upon whom he declared God’s blessing, there will still be conflict.

It's not that Jesus is proclaiming himself to be yet another source of dissension, yet another firebrand eager to add his message to the throngs of competing worldviews that tear and snap at one another. The world, our world, already has plenty of powers and principalities that claw at each other for control.

Because of this, those who follow him...actually follow him, not just mouthing the words...do stand separate from the rest of the world. Where the world cries out for us to take what is rightfully ours, those who follow him instead give. Where the world insists that we should shove our way to the head of the table, those who follow him take on the form of a servant. Where the world declares that the other is the enemy, to be hated, to be despised, to be destroyed, those who truly follow Christ understand that Christ teaches that the other...be they the stranger or our enemy...is to be loved, to be respected, to be built up. There is a real distinction there, a division, a rift that runs through nations and churches and families.

Christ does bring that division, but it is the division that comes between those who have chosen to live according to God’s reconciling love and those who live according to the hatred that tears apart this world. So we hear this passage, and we cry: What? What was that I just read? Was that Jesus talking? Yes, it was. And he was saying that we should be separated from hatred, separated from bitterness and factions and those dark walls of the soul that try to strangle God’s love from our lives.

We do need more of that kind of division.