Being Divided

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.14.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 12:49-56

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’m a little sensitive to family stuff right now, to those strange bonds of time and flesh that weave us together with those who share our blood.

My trip to the beach over these few days only deepened that sense.  Every single year for the last twenty years, it’s been a time for relaxation, a time for kicking back, though the week seems shorter every time it comes.  Was that a whole week, or was that half an afternoon?

In 2016, it was again a chance to try new things on the beach, as hours of my time vanish in a meditation on the coalescence of order from chaos, as particulate sand and liquid water mingle into an ephemeral solidity.  

Or to put that in English, me make sandcastles.  This year, a collapsed first attempt at a tower just happened to look like a letter, which lead to carving more letters, which lead to me discovering that writing the word “Bethany” out of the sand is a family-picture magnet.

But this last week was the marker of the last summer before my son leaves the nest for school.  It was at the beach, 19 summers ago, that we announced to the gathered family that his life was forming inside my wife.   Now, our presence there was a sign of his imminent departure.

I’ve been watching those markers fall, one by one, as the year has passed and my son has grown closer and closer to moving on.  The last swim meet.  The last musical.  The last performance.

The final trip to Hershey Park tomorrow, last of the family road trips.  Each a transitional moment, marking what had for so long seemed beyond the far horizon.

Each of them once inhabited a place in the future, a far off signpost of that morning when I wake up and the house is discernably more empty, a bed incongruously made, a room peculiarly clean, the sofa downstairs unwarmed by a sleeping form.

And I grumble at the big picture of a culture that takes away our babies, at a society that just expects the young to be far from us just as they’ve blossomed into their adulthood.  For tens of thousands of years, they stuck around and helped us on the farm and squabbled and we wished they’d go someplace else.  Now?  Now we just miss ‘em, as if, as the saying goes about children, our heart now lives outside of our bodies and walks around in the world.  And though that sounds cute, there are moments where it feels more like I’m that hapless extra in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, watching as my beating heart is removed from my body and cast into the fire.

I yearn, in this moment, for a reassurance, for words of sustaining comfort.

But it goes deeper than that.  In times when we are parted, we hope for connection, a deeply unbreakable, love-wrought union between those who have become part of us and ourselves.  When we move away from friends who’ve become like blood, that’s what we hope.  When we return home to that emptier house, that’s what we yearn for.

And so I go to scripture this week, and I get..what?  Oh Lord, it’s that passage from Luke.

“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 your help for that, but…ahh…thanks for offering? How are we supposed to grasp this? What does this passage mean?

And it just keeps getting worse.  It’s not just that we can expect to encounter it in the world, Jesus says, but that he’s bringing it into our homes.  

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.

When his message hits, Jesus seems to be saying, I’m going to make sure that it’s not one of those fun family gatherings, but instead one of those “dear-God-when-will- this-dysfunctional-vacation-from-hell-finally-end” family gatherings.

None of us want this.  No-one yearns for that kind of brokenness.

How can we hear this passage as Good News?

That seems like the very last thing we need.

The answer lies in understanding both the context of the passage and the kind of separation that Jesus brings.

As a teaching that found purchase the context of the early church, it was remembered because the commitment to follow the Way did create a form of division.  There was some very real cost to following Jesus in that first generation of the church, as it required taking a significant risk, a break with either the standing practices and expectations of the Judaism of the time or the expectations of imperial Roman culture.  If you chose to follow Jesus of Nazareth, you were separating yourself from all of that.

We also can’t read this passage without having heard the whole context of Luke’s Gospel. This can’t be taken as a soundbite, as something that exists outside of relationship with the whole story.

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.

If you’ve ever tried to settle a dispute between two people who really, really want to fight with each other, you know that often doesn’t work out so well.  

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 world-views 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. 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 or that person we hate with the fierce bitter fire that comes from closeness...is to be loved, to be respected, to be built up.

There is a real distinction there, a division, a rift between one way of being and another.

Christ does bring that division.

So when 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 fear and bitterness and anxiety and those dark walls of the infolded soul that can strangle God’s love from our lives.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.