Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.26.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 22:34-46
There’s a reason there are so many lawyers in America. No, it has very little to do with the fact that many parents view it as the only acceptable alternative after you don’t manage to make it into medical school.
There are so many lawyers because there are just so many laws.
Let’s take the United States Code as an example. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but here’s what little I managed to pluck off the internet this last week. Every law passed by Congress gets plugged into one of 50 “Titles,” which logically sort American laws into different categories. Those titles are divided into subtitles, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into subchapters, which are divided into parts, which are divided into sections.
As a Presbyterian, I find that all strangely exciting.
For example, Title 26 has to do with revenue and taxation, so if you had this deep and burning desire to know when you have to file a special return, you could look to Title 26, Subtitle F, Chapter 61, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 6001, which tells you everything you need to know. Or is that Section 6002? I always muddle those two.
How many laws are there? Well, Title 26...which is one of the 50 Titles...is about 7,500 pages long. Fortunately, it’s a page turner. When you get to Title 26, Subtitle V, Chapter 37, Subchapter B, Part I, Sec. 7042, you’re just not going to believe the plot twist it serves up. Man. I was shaking my head after that one. Never saw it coming. It seriously sets you up for the sequel in Title 27. Don’t worry. I won’t ruin the ending.
The sheer volume of American law is truly dizzying. Hundreds of thousands of pages of code are simply more than any one human being...or even a roomful of human beings...can come to terms with.
I know they say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but you couldn’t be aware of the fullness of the laws that govern our country if you spent your entire lifetime studying them and every single neuron in your brain was dedicated to learning them, including the neurons that you currently use to figure out how to eat, breathe, and use most universal remotes. When regulations and requirements reach that level of complexity, it becomes harder and harder for us to know how we relate to them. It becomes harder for us to know how to apply them to our lives.
For the ancient Hebrews, the law was also a big deal, although it was considerably less complex. As the scholars of Torah figured it, there were 613 total laws. 248 of them were things you had to do, and 365 of them were things you were supposed to not do. Compared to the United States Code, this was a cakewalk.
Still, though, the complexities of Torah were such that they consumed the thoughts of those who took it seriously. In the time of Jesus, those folks were called the Pharisees, and today we hear about how one of them asks him a question. It’s a lawyer, but by “lawyer,” we need to understand that Matthew means someone who would be more like a bible scholar ...challenges Jesus to make a judgement call about the law. It’s an interesting question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?”
Jesus, of course, knows his stuff. He responds with a quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5...”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.” It’s a good answer, as that verse is the second part of the Shema, the holiest prayer of the Jewish people. So...that’s the commandment, right?
Jesus doesn’t stop there, though. Sure, he’s given the guy his “greatest commandment.” But he’s not finished with his response. While this is the first and greatest commandment in his book, he feels compelled to take it a step further. He makes sure to add in a second commandment, which he pulls from another book of the Torah...the book of Leviticus. From Leviticus 19:18, he says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Having presented his questioner with this reply, he makes it clear...both of these commandments seem to be part of one single law. When he declares that the two laws are similar, he’s not really setting one up as above the other. They are to be understood as somehow part of the same single unitary thing. It is on the combination of both of these that the entire law...meaning the law given to the Jewish people by God...finds its foundation.
Our lives are not simple things. We have to figure out how to make moral choices in countless different situations. How do we act in the workplace? How do we respond to those around us in school? How do we deal with our families, and our friends? How do we deal with that annoying neighbor who cranks his music up at 3 in the morning when we’ve got important things to do the next day?
If you’re living your life in accordance with the faith that Christ brought to us, the answer to that question does not lie in having memorized a whole slew of different laws, each one designed to deal with every single specialized circumstance. You don’t need to dig down to find exactly which chapter and subchapter and part and section speaks directly to where you find yourself at that very moment.
Those things are very useful for organizing a society, and for trying to make sure things go more-or-less smoothly as we human beings bump and jostle against one another in the world. But faith governs us very differently. Faith is not about nattering over each tiny detail. Faith is about purpose. Faith is about direction. Faith is the thing that gives life depth and meaning.
For that reason, followers of Jesus Christ have a single law that gives just that sense of purpose. It is a remarkably simple thing. It is a thing that most of us can grasp without having to spend our entire lives studying some highly complicated ethics. Yet if we look hard at how most Christians seem to live their lives, it is something that we seem to struggle to come to terms with. We’d almost rather lose ourselves in studying and legalistic dickering over tiny little details. We’d almost rather throw up our arms and declare that it’s just all too much for us to possibly understand.
When there are laws enough to fill a thousand books, it’s hard to grasp them all. But when there is just one law, it is harder for us still. How can we find a way to apply that law to everything we do? How is it even possible?
Christ wants all of us to spend the rest of our lives finding that out.
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
blowback
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.16.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 50: 4-9a; Philippians 2: 5-11
There are all kinds of joys that come from having children. Kids remind you of your own childhood, of the joys of discovering life anew, of the deep swirling wonder of imagination and the way the world itself seems to shimmer with possibility. It’s a delight.
But there are, shall we say, tradeoffs. I’ve been deeply into movies as an art form since I was in high school...films that use the medium not just to entertain, but to say something worth saying. I like films with deep and subtle social commentary, movies that force you to think about philosophy or politics or history. And, no, “Meet the Spartans” does not count as historical commentary.
When you’ve got two young boys, though, your opportunities for moviegoing are a little different. I enjoy jokes about bodily functions as much as the next guy, but for some reason movies that view burping and flatulence as their whole reason for being aren’t life-changing experiences. Every now and then, on those evenings when the haze of parental fatigue briefly lifts enough for my wife and I actually go out, we do see movies.
One that Rache and I managed to catch over the winter break was one called Charlie Wilson’s War. This was a film about a Texas congressman...played by Tom Hanks...who had a notoriously undistinguished career. He was best known for having a very well stocked bar in his office, and for the fact that his entire office staff was, as they say, hot with two “T”s. But then things changed. Rep. Wilson had hung around long enough to get onto congressional committees that controlled covert operations and military funding, right around the time that the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan. The Soviet Army had more or less rolled over the Afghans, and the small groups of local mujahideen fighters that remained were getting crushed by Soviet armor, air power, and heavily armored helicopter gunships.
So Congressman Wilson, after requests from the CIA, began to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars secret government funding to the Afghan tribesmen...along with new, man-portable surface-to-air missiles. The newly strengthened Afghans began to make inroads against Soviet power, and eventually forced them to withdraw, one of the many crises that eventually caused Soviet Communism to collapse. It was classic Cold War stuff..and it’s a great film, both accurate historically and well acted. Towards the end of the movie, though, the primary CIA operative working with Congressman Wilson (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives him a warning. If you only arm the Afghans, and don’t give them the education and resources they need to develop an open democracy, then there’s the real threat of blowback.
What is “blowback?” It’s a covert ops term, used within the American intelligence community to describe the unanticipated consequences of both covert actions and the use of military power. Like, for instance, when the United States and Great Britain overthrew the democratically elected but socialist government of Iran in the 1950s and replaced it with a monarch who was friendly to our oil interests. Unfortunately, that made Iranians more receptive to the message of radical Islam, which overthrew the Shah, and is now..surprise surprise...the greatest threat we face in the Middle East. That’s blowback. Or, for instance, when the Afghan mujahideen, abandoned by America once they’d served their purpose, become the fundamentalist, jihadist Taliban, and the Taliban become the primary base of support for Osama Bin Laden. That’s blowback. Whenever you use human power to accomplish what you want, you’re risking blowback. You can try to think your way around it, and to anticipate every possibility, but there’s always that one thing you didn’t expect.
Today is Palm/Passion Sunday, the day that we remember the “triumphal” procession of Christ into Jerusalem. We have our little bits of Palm Fronds. We put ‘em up in the air, and wave ‘em like we just don’t care. We have our celebration. Jesus is entering the city with celebrations and with power, just like a great king or a revered leader. With the celebrating throngs around him, it might seem to anyone watching like Jesus was using a classic power play, riding the passions of an enthusiastic mob to shore up his own power. Go Jesus! Yay Jesus! Throw the corrupt leadership out! Many of his disciples and those who shouted Hosanna by the Jerusalem Road surely thought that. This is it! This is when it all changes!
But Jesus saw further, saw through God’s eyes that this kind of power never stands. There is always, always, always blowback. Whenever you use human power to destroy or subvert, it might seem to work...at first. Throughout history, empire after empire has risen to power, crushing those around them with an iron fist, and playing other nations against one another. But all of those empires lie in ruins, as the false foundation of their power became the storm-driven sands that consumed them. Christ Jesus knew as he walked that road that it was taking him not to priestly power in the temple, or to the king’s throne in Jerusalem. Those who saw him as a threat to their power would react. There would be blowback, and it would take the form of a cross.
Christ also knew that the source of his power was not what people thought. He was not a king like other kings. What sort of king was he? We heard it affirmed today from both a prophet and an apostle. In the reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah that Pastor Mike shared with us today, we heard Isaiah tell us about the Suffering Servant. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed a vision of God’s true servant...of God’s messiah...that was nothing like the image of a mighty warrior. It was one who endured hardship, who faced opponents firmly but without malice, relying on God and God’s grace to see them through.
In the reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippians, we hear Paul’s proclamation of how Jesus viewed power. Again, the imagery is not of one who uses power to their own advantage. Christ is the servant, the one who empties himself of himself and turns over all control and direction to God.
It’s an entirely different approach than the one that relies on worldly power. It’s not power, but love. It’s not power, but a servant’s heart, one that values the spread of the Good News of God’s redemptive love more than life itself.
Think about your own lives, about the way that you live and work and play with those around you. When any of us try to use our power or personal authority to get what we want, when we place our our personal interests above those of other children of God, what tends to be the outcome? Sometimes it works...or seems to work. Sometimes we get what we want, defeating our “enemies” and rising to victory. There are very few cubicle farms in this world that don’t contain the whispers of office politics, as people strive and connive against one another to be the one to get that slightly larger cubicle. In the back rooms of automobile dealerships, salesmen struggle to be the guy up top of that weekly sales whiteboard...and if that means talking smack about another salesman in front of the manager, for some, that’s fine and dandy. By whatever means necessary, as Malcolm X used to say.
That’s the way of the flesh, the way of the world, and it contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. Acting in your own self-interest and not being guided by the love that Christ proclaimed will cause unanticipated and deeply destructive consequences. But if you don’t look out for number one, what’s going to happen? People are going to step all over you! You can’t do that!
But that is what Christ Jesus did. He gave himself up. He allowed himself to suffer. He allowed himself to die.
Strangely enough, there was blowback from that choice, which we would not anticipate, but which God knew would be the outcome of His covert operation.
We call it “salvation.”
03.16.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 50: 4-9a; Philippians 2: 5-11
There are all kinds of joys that come from having children. Kids remind you of your own childhood, of the joys of discovering life anew, of the deep swirling wonder of imagination and the way the world itself seems to shimmer with possibility. It’s a delight.
But there are, shall we say, tradeoffs. I’ve been deeply into movies as an art form since I was in high school...films that use the medium not just to entertain, but to say something worth saying. I like films with deep and subtle social commentary, movies that force you to think about philosophy or politics or history. And, no, “Meet the Spartans” does not count as historical commentary.
When you’ve got two young boys, though, your opportunities for moviegoing are a little different. I enjoy jokes about bodily functions as much as the next guy, but for some reason movies that view burping and flatulence as their whole reason for being aren’t life-changing experiences. Every now and then, on those evenings when the haze of parental fatigue briefly lifts enough for my wife and I actually go out, we do see movies.
One that Rache and I managed to catch over the winter break was one called Charlie Wilson’s War. This was a film about a Texas congressman...played by Tom Hanks...who had a notoriously undistinguished career. He was best known for having a very well stocked bar in his office, and for the fact that his entire office staff was, as they say, hot with two “T”s. But then things changed. Rep. Wilson had hung around long enough to get onto congressional committees that controlled covert operations and military funding, right around the time that the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan. The Soviet Army had more or less rolled over the Afghans, and the small groups of local mujahideen fighters that remained were getting crushed by Soviet armor, air power, and heavily armored helicopter gunships.
So Congressman Wilson, after requests from the CIA, began to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars secret government funding to the Afghan tribesmen...along with new, man-portable surface-to-air missiles. The newly strengthened Afghans began to make inroads against Soviet power, and eventually forced them to withdraw, one of the many crises that eventually caused Soviet Communism to collapse. It was classic Cold War stuff..and it’s a great film, both accurate historically and well acted. Towards the end of the movie, though, the primary CIA operative working with Congressman Wilson (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives him a warning. If you only arm the Afghans, and don’t give them the education and resources they need to develop an open democracy, then there’s the real threat of blowback.
What is “blowback?” It’s a covert ops term, used within the American intelligence community to describe the unanticipated consequences of both covert actions and the use of military power. Like, for instance, when the United States and Great Britain overthrew the democratically elected but socialist government of Iran in the 1950s and replaced it with a monarch who was friendly to our oil interests. Unfortunately, that made Iranians more receptive to the message of radical Islam, which overthrew the Shah, and is now..surprise surprise...the greatest threat we face in the Middle East. That’s blowback. Or, for instance, when the Afghan mujahideen, abandoned by America once they’d served their purpose, become the fundamentalist, jihadist Taliban, and the Taliban become the primary base of support for Osama Bin Laden. That’s blowback. Whenever you use human power to accomplish what you want, you’re risking blowback. You can try to think your way around it, and to anticipate every possibility, but there’s always that one thing you didn’t expect.
Today is Palm/Passion Sunday, the day that we remember the “triumphal” procession of Christ into Jerusalem. We have our little bits of Palm Fronds. We put ‘em up in the air, and wave ‘em like we just don’t care. We have our celebration. Jesus is entering the city with celebrations and with power, just like a great king or a revered leader. With the celebrating throngs around him, it might seem to anyone watching like Jesus was using a classic power play, riding the passions of an enthusiastic mob to shore up his own power. Go Jesus! Yay Jesus! Throw the corrupt leadership out! Many of his disciples and those who shouted Hosanna by the Jerusalem Road surely thought that. This is it! This is when it all changes!
But Jesus saw further, saw through God’s eyes that this kind of power never stands. There is always, always, always blowback. Whenever you use human power to destroy or subvert, it might seem to work...at first. Throughout history, empire after empire has risen to power, crushing those around them with an iron fist, and playing other nations against one another. But all of those empires lie in ruins, as the false foundation of their power became the storm-driven sands that consumed them. Christ Jesus knew as he walked that road that it was taking him not to priestly power in the temple, or to the king’s throne in Jerusalem. Those who saw him as a threat to their power would react. There would be blowback, and it would take the form of a cross.
Christ also knew that the source of his power was not what people thought. He was not a king like other kings. What sort of king was he? We heard it affirmed today from both a prophet and an apostle. In the reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah that Pastor Mike shared with us today, we heard Isaiah tell us about the Suffering Servant. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed a vision of God’s true servant...of God’s messiah...that was nothing like the image of a mighty warrior. It was one who endured hardship, who faced opponents firmly but without malice, relying on God and God’s grace to see them through.
In the reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippians, we hear Paul’s proclamation of how Jesus viewed power. Again, the imagery is not of one who uses power to their own advantage. Christ is the servant, the one who empties himself of himself and turns over all control and direction to God.
It’s an entirely different approach than the one that relies on worldly power. It’s not power, but love. It’s not power, but a servant’s heart, one that values the spread of the Good News of God’s redemptive love more than life itself.
Think about your own lives, about the way that you live and work and play with those around you. When any of us try to use our power or personal authority to get what we want, when we place our our personal interests above those of other children of God, what tends to be the outcome? Sometimes it works...or seems to work. Sometimes we get what we want, defeating our “enemies” and rising to victory. There are very few cubicle farms in this world that don’t contain the whispers of office politics, as people strive and connive against one another to be the one to get that slightly larger cubicle. In the back rooms of automobile dealerships, salesmen struggle to be the guy up top of that weekly sales whiteboard...and if that means talking smack about another salesman in front of the manager, for some, that’s fine and dandy. By whatever means necessary, as Malcolm X used to say.
That’s the way of the flesh, the way of the world, and it contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. Acting in your own self-interest and not being guided by the love that Christ proclaimed will cause unanticipated and deeply destructive consequences. But if you don’t look out for number one, what’s going to happen? People are going to step all over you! You can’t do that!
But that is what Christ Jesus did. He gave himself up. He allowed himself to suffer. He allowed himself to die.
Strangely enough, there was blowback from that choice, which we would not anticipate, but which God knew would be the outcome of His covert operation.
We call it “salvation.”
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Not Grasping It
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.16.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Reading: John 1:1-14
I know we’re all busy preparing for all of our holiday parties, and many of us are behind on our gift giving . We’re also stressed out at work as we move towards the end of the year, or stressed out at school as finals come crashing down on top of us, but there’s something I’m not sure many of us remember.
We’re moving towards a time in the Christian worship year when we celebrate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s easy to forget with all the twinkling lights and the stress that shimmers bright as sun-struck tinsel in our lives. But somewhere in the frenzy, there’s supposed to be a remembrance of the birth of a real live person, Yeshua ben Yoseph, Joshua son of Joseph.
So who was this person? Today, as we together have read and sung our way through the great story of Scripture, we’ve moved from those first stories of creation through the proclamations of the prophets, through to the Gospel’s telling of the story of Christ’s birth. But...just who is he? Who is this tiny little child, born to a humble family in the boondocks of an ancient empire?
People struggle with how to grasp Jesus, how to understand who he was and what he did. If you saw the movie Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you might remember a short scene in which Ricky Bobby, a talented but impossibly stupid driver on the NASCAR circuit, attempts to bless a family meal in the name of the Baby Jesus. This starts up a discussion at the table about how you can pray to...and think about..Jesus. Ricky, in his epic simplicity, preferred to pray in the name of the little baby Jesus, because not only was the little eight-pound six ounce Baby Jesus tiny and cuddly, but he was also simultaneously omnipotent. His best friend and sidekick, the equally daft NASCAR driver Cal Naughton, Jr., had other ideas about Jesus:
We all have different ways of grasping who Jesus is and what he meant to the world. Some of those ways are...more different than others.
At the end of today’s readings, though, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about who he was, something that goes well beyond the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night that tend to have the lock on our mental image of Jesus this holiday season.
John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Judea, which is where the Gospel of Mark begins. Not to the story of the beginning of his life, which is where the Gospels of Matthew and Luke open their story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself.
Jesus is there described not as a prophet or an infant or even as a future king. The first verse of John’s prologue lays it all out. You’ve heard it read in the English, but hear it in it’s original language, the Greek in which it was written:
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
He’s described as the Word, not just the kind of word you speak or write, but the logos, the creative power and living Word of God, God’s own self-expression, the power that made the universe and that sustains all things. When you go back to that prologue, to that first verse, it read a little differently in the language in which it was first written. If you read it literally, it proclaims: “And the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” The Word and God are woven up together, different yet the same.
In that simple but challenging opening is the sum of all of John’s story of Jesus. In Christ, in this basic act, in this tiny child, the One who created all things is entering into our world. Changing it. Changing us. For over 2000 years we have struggled to understand him. For two millenia we have found countless stumbling and sometimes silly ways of hiding who he was under the darkness of our own selfishness, our own cultural bias, our own hatreds.
But that truth, that world transforming truth, that truth will not be overcome, no matter how deep the darkness might seem.
12.16.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Reading: John 1:1-14
I know we’re all busy preparing for all of our holiday parties, and many of us are behind on our gift giving . We’re also stressed out at work as we move towards the end of the year, or stressed out at school as finals come crashing down on top of us, but there’s something I’m not sure many of us remember.
We’re moving towards a time in the Christian worship year when we celebrate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s easy to forget with all the twinkling lights and the stress that shimmers bright as sun-struck tinsel in our lives. But somewhere in the frenzy, there’s supposed to be a remembrance of the birth of a real live person, Yeshua ben Yoseph, Joshua son of Joseph.
So who was this person? Today, as we together have read and sung our way through the great story of Scripture, we’ve moved from those first stories of creation through the proclamations of the prophets, through to the Gospel’s telling of the story of Christ’s birth. But...just who is he? Who is this tiny little child, born to a humble family in the boondocks of an ancient empire?
People struggle with how to grasp Jesus, how to understand who he was and what he did. If you saw the movie Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you might remember a short scene in which Ricky Bobby, a talented but impossibly stupid driver on the NASCAR circuit, attempts to bless a family meal in the name of the Baby Jesus. This starts up a discussion at the table about how you can pray to...and think about..Jesus. Ricky, in his epic simplicity, preferred to pray in the name of the little baby Jesus, because not only was the little eight-pound six ounce Baby Jesus tiny and cuddly, but he was also simultaneously omnipotent. His best friend and sidekick, the equally daft NASCAR driver Cal Naughton, Jr., had other ideas about Jesus:
We all have different ways of grasping who Jesus is and what he meant to the world. Some of those ways are...more different than others.
At the end of today’s readings, though, there came that soaring and poetic excerpt from the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. That tells us something different about who he was, something that goes well beyond the images of mangers and donkeys and wise men and flocks by night that tend to have the lock on our mental image of Jesus this holiday season.
John’s story goes back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Judea, which is where the Gospel of Mark begins. Not to the story of the beginning of his life, which is where the Gospels of Matthew and Luke open their story. For his opening of the tale, John goes way back, back, back to the dawning of time and creation itself.
Jesus is there described not as a prophet or an infant or even as a future king. The first verse of John’s prologue lays it all out. You’ve heard it read in the English, but hear it in it’s original language, the Greek in which it was written:
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
He’s described as the Word, not just the kind of word you speak or write, but the logos, the creative power and living Word of God, God’s own self-expression, the power that made the universe and that sustains all things. When you go back to that prologue, to that first verse, it read a little differently in the language in which it was first written. If you read it literally, it proclaims: “And the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” The Word and God are woven up together, different yet the same.
In that simple but challenging opening is the sum of all of John’s story of Jesus. In Christ, in this basic act, in this tiny child, the One who created all things is entering into our world. Changing it. Changing us. For over 2000 years we have struggled to understand him. For two millenia we have found countless stumbling and sometimes silly ways of hiding who he was under the darkness of our own selfishness, our own cultural bias, our own hatreds.
But that truth, that world transforming truth, that truth will not be overcome, no matter how deep the darkness might seem.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Divider
Trinity Presbyterian Church of
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
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
So he sat nestled between his grandparents, and we all watched as this last weeks news from northern
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
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.
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