Sermon
Text – Luke 12: 49-56
I had a conversation earlier this week about the different
versions of Jesus. I was explaining a little bit about our church and how
central Jesus is to us – and how many of us find ourselves trying to follow a
Jesus who looks a little different that the Jesus you might find in other
churches. A lot of us around here tend to focus more on what Jesus taught and
did than who he was. We don’t often have debates about whether Jesus was fully
human, fully divine, or some mixture of the two. My guess is there are people
here who believe all of those things and that doesn’t seem to bother us much.
We talk a lot about the world Jesus lived in – when we’re
feeling fancy, we call it the “historical context” – and we don’t usually
assume Jesus was talking directly to us. We figure he was talking to the people
around him – to their specific context, culture, hopes, dreams, and fears.
And I rarely hear people around here spending a lot of
time talking about the power of Jesus’s blood to save us from our sins. Savior?
Yes, absolutely. But not usually in some sort of cosmic quid-pro-quo deal with
God. I know we have people here who believe in Jesus’s physical death and resurrection,
others who believe in a more metaphorical resurrection and everything in
between.
Do you see where I’m going here? There are a lot of
Jesuses out there to follow. I certainly don’t pretend to know which one is the
“real Jesus” – nor does that bother me too much. I think people are a lot more
complicated than that. Even with people we know intimately, we surely recognize
there is more than one version of a person. The private self, the public self,
the one who shows up during hard times, the one who surprises you in a fit of
giddy joy, the versions of ourselves we tuck away for a future occasion, the
selves we bury deep and hope to never see again.
I’m more intrigued than bothered by the ambiguity of
different Jesuses existing out there. After all, our gospels certainly present
different versions of Jesus. Mark’s Jesus is always in a hurry, never mincing
words. Luke’s Jesus has an intense focus on the poor and neglected of the
world. Matthew’s version is a big shot, commanding principalities and ruling
the world from on high. John’s Jesus is ethereal, mysterious, cosmic. We
probably all have our favorite gospel and a lot of that has to do with the
version of Jesus presented to us by the authors.
I usually love Luke’s Jesus, but the Jesus we get in
today’s passage is pretty hard to stomach. As I watched Cairo burning in aerial
footage and saw the death toll continue to mount in that country, it was really
difficult to open up my Bible, seeking a word of comfort only to hear that
Jesus has not come to bring peace but division. I look around the world and I
don’t see a big need for division. I think we’ve got that pretty well covered,
right? Why can’t Jesus bring what we really need – peace? I mean, didn’t we
just hear a few weeks ago that if you ask, it will be given to you? Didn’t we
just hear that God would never give a child a snake when she asks for a fish to
eat? Or a scorpion when the child asks for an egg? All day long, we cry out for
peace – peace! – and then we get Jesus promising division?
Not cool, Jesus. Not cool.
It would be easy to dismiss this text. You’re a pretty
open-minded group and I could probably say something like, “You know, we don’t
know if Jesus even said this. It’s not consistent with the other views of Jesus
presented in scripture, so it’s probably not something he really said. Let’s
not worry about it.”
The problem with that, of course, is that it isn’t true.
This version of Jesus does exist other places in the Bible. Jesus who is
cranky, tired, stressed out, short-tempered, angry, downright rude. Jesus who
tears apart families – telling people to forget about their familial
responsibilities, drop everything, and follow him. Jesus who curses and shouts
at those who see things differently than him. If Jesus were faculty at IU, he
would not be getting an award from the Commission on Multicultural
Understanding anytime soon if they happened to overhear how he called that
Syrophoenician woman a dog.
Jesus is sometimes hard to stomach.
Of course, sometimes he’s just lovely and wonderful. The
type of guy you’d love to have over for dinner. Sometimes he is kind, generous,
calm, engaging, plenty open to change and diversity. And you have to always
give him props for being a fantastic storyteller.
He is the Son of God. He is the way many of us have come
to know God most deeply and intimately. He is the way-shower, truth-teller,
light-bringer, standard-bearer, pain-reliever, life-maker. He is our savior.
But that doesn’t mean he’s easy to live with 100% of the
time.
When Jesus says he has come to bring division, I think we
have to listen. I think it’s taking the easy way out to ignore it or write it
off. Because this is not the only place we see him as a difficult personality.
Jesus is divisive. He just is. Always has been. Always will be. People who have
been following him have been fighting about what that means for millennia now.
Christians have fought with each other and with non-Christians about what it
means to follow Jesus. He has brought division. He has divided father against
son, mother against daughter, and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law. It is
what it is. Jesus is divisive.
As I was wrestling with this passage this week, stumbling
around, trying to find some good news within it, I found it really helpful when
I realized that Jesus is being descriptive in this passage, not prescriptive.
By that, I meant that he is not saying, “This is what I wish the world looked
like.” He’s saying, “This is how things are.” I doubt that Jesus was super
excited about being a person who was chosen to bring fire to the earth. He’s
not saying, “I have always wanted to be the one who divided the earth and I am
so pleased to be a peace-destroyer.” He’s just saying, “You know what? I cause
a lot of conflict. I do. Look around? Can’t you see it?”
And when I started thinking about it this way – in a
matter-of-fact, it-is-what-it-is kind of way. I found myself calming down a
bit. I let go of my defensiveness – “No, you’re wrong! The Jesus I worship IS
peaceful! He DOES bring about peace on the earth!” – and just sat for a few
days with the reality that Jesus is difficult. Always has been. Always will be.
And then I started thinking about the other people in my
life who have been incredibly difficult to be around. I will protect the
innocent and won’t name any names, but I know we all have these people, right?
The teacher who drove you crazy because his expectations were too high and you
never thought you could reach them? The parent who forced you to try things
that you weren’t interested in? The supervisor who charged you to work on a
project that was way outside of your comfort zone? The young child or teenager
who shares your home and knows how to push all your buttons – simultaneously?
Those people are challenging to be around. But if we stick
around them long enough – usually because we have no escape route – we often
discover another side to them. The teacher whose expectations are too high
pulls us aside after class to say, “I know I’m hard on you sometimes, but it’s only
because I think you’ve got real potential.” The parent who signs us up for
soccer bites his tongue when we discover we really enjoy spending time with our
friends out on the field. The supervisor who pushes us to try a new area at
work that we thought we didn’t care about smiles at us and opens up opportunity
after opportunity, until one day we look back and discover we’ve found a whole
new professional world that excites us. Our children – God love them and their
button-pushing ways – send us through the refiner’s fire time and time again.
And we emerge as a new person – often a much wiser, kinder, more resilient
person than we were before.
The best relationships in my life have been the ones where
I have been challenged and loved at the same time. People who love me without
making any demands on me are okay, I guess, but they don’t hold the same place
in my heart as those more difficult relationships. A life without challenge is
hardly worth living and I guess Jesus knew this. As difficult as Jesus is to be
around in this passage, he is standing there, reminding us that there is much
to be learned from engaging in challenging relationships.
Please hear me loud and clear – I am not glorifying
dysfunctional relationships. If you are in an abusive relationship with a
person who does not value you or respect you, that is not what I am talking
about. I am talking about relationships that balance love, mutual respect, and
kindness with a healthy dose of challenge. Every time I officiate a marriage,
the blessing I give at the end includes these words “Challenge one another that
you might grow.” Growth can only happen when the challenge comes in the context
of a mutually respectful and loving relationship. Abusive relationships are not
the kind of challenging relationship I am talking about here and if you are in
one, I hope you know you can talk to Jack or me about it.
When you can find a relationship that is both challenging and supportive, you don’t want to let it
go. Taking the risk and truly opening ourselves to the multifaceted reality of
Jesus allows us to be in a relationship with him that challenges and supports
us. Jesus is not a sticky-sweet, perfect, always giving out hugs kind of guy.
He is often kind, loving, gentle, and open. And he certainly love us all, not
just the little children of the world. But he also has challenging things to
say. He opens up a way of living that can be exceedingly difficult. And exceedingly rewarding.
You know, when this church was built back in 1957, the
people who built it chose those pews you are sitting on because they wanted
them to be uncomfortable. They could have selected pews with nice cushions, but
they did not. They believed that being in church should make you a little bit
uncomfortable. I can’t say that I disagree with them.
Following Jesus should make us all a big uncomfortable. If
we aren’t uncomfortable, at least from time to time, we’re probably not
following him closely enough. If we don’t find him to be difficult to be
around, we may not be paying enough attention. I kind of wish he wasn’t this
way, but he just is. Always has been. Always will be.
And yet – with all of his challenges – I keep coming back
to him. Why follow this guy who is so relentless? Who causes conflicts? Who
makes my life more difficult?
I follow Jesus because I have experienced salvation
through him. Through the ongoing presence of Christ in the world, I have
experienced liberation. Christ – that ongoing eternal essence of this difficult
man from Nazareth – is a liberating event.[1]
One that cannot be stopped.
When I
have traveled through times of difficulty and have felt my body and soul lifted
up to a new reality that I hadn’t imagined possible, Christ has been the event
that made that experience possible. When I speak to people who have broken out
of the bondage of addiction or a relationship filled with violence, they have
found a way to that freedom through Christ. When I have witnessed people who
have been able to move beyond the imprisonment of a terrible medical diagnosis,
it has been the Christ event that allowed them to break free – either with body
or spirit. When I have seen social movements that have found the energy and
resolve to move mountains, it was because Christ journeyed alongside them. In
those places where we have been saved, are saved, and will be saved, Christ is
the event that saves us.
Christ
is a liberating event. Always has been. Always will be.
Jesus
didn’t come because he wanted to
bring division. He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. He came
that we might be saved. Two thousand years after he walked the streets of
Jerusalem, he is still causing division. And he is still saving us.
Thanks
be to God.
